MIXCO, Guatemala (RNS) — As you arrive at the public school in Terra Nueva, a neighborhood in this city connected by bridges to Guatemala City, the high-pitched babble coming from the other side of the school wall, if you close your eyes, could be coming from happy, excited children anywhere.
But Terra Nueva is a tough area. Potholed roads make journeys difficult. Shops on the main thoroughfares are rundown. Many families have endured poverty and disruption since the time of the nation’s civil war, which lasted nearly four decades and led many rural families to move to the metropolitan area’s relative safety. But the cities have a high level of crime, much of it linked to gangs.
Many children in the Guatemala City metropolitan area leave school at 14; in rural areas it can be as young as eight. For those who do attend, there’s often a shortage of teaching materials, including textbooks and modern reading devices. In Mixco, 650 pupils share just 12 computers.
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In response to these challenges, Mixco school administrators have introduced a program created by the Bible Society in the United Kingdom, called Open the Book, that dramatizes Bible stories, with students singing and dancing along as a way of learning both reading and the Bible.
As the Open the Book actors arrived for one of their bimonthly visits last fall, the classroom full of students in red uniforms, from kindergarten to middle school age, burst into applause. The tale that unfolded, “Free at Last,” was based on the Exodus story of the Israelites fleeing Egypt, with the parting of the Red Sea ingeniously but simply depicted with a large blue cloth decorated with fish that then closed over the Egyptians as they pursued the Israelites.
Some of the students were drafted into the telling of the story, with impromptu costumes, including crowns and headdresses, made from paper and towels.
After the dramatization came a reflection and a prayer. “I liked that God had freed me,” said Justin, 11, who played an Israelite. “Bible stories help me to be smarter and to learn about God.”
The 220-year-old Bible Society, part of a movement founded by British evangelical Christians, is part of the worldwide United Bible Societies, which includes the American Bible Society and the Bible Society of Guatemala. The Guatemalan group, which has 50 staff members, relies on 1,000 volunteers to help take its programs into schools.
Cesar Sanchez, the Open the Book project manager, began as a volunteer. “I met them through the work they do with vulnerable children and communities, and that’s what attracted me to the work they do,” he said. “I’ve seen it make a difference.”
The Guatemala City slum of El Mezquital is perched on the rim of several ravines in the south of the city, where some 4,000 families from the countryside settled in the 1980s. With the help of UNESCO and the Catholic Church, housing and schools were built and water brought in. The national government, with World Bank funds, is connecting El Mezquital to the electric and sewer systems and putting in a main road, but it remains one of the most deprived parts of Guatemala City.
The El Mezquital Public School used to be a correctional facility, and its past seems to haunt it: The older children recall a gang shootout that killed a woman at the school’s gates. The staff have tried to soften its edges with plenty of pictures and lots of plants. “The gangs try to get young boys to join,” said Annalise Palma of the Bible Society of Guatemala. Because they know children won’t be sent to jail, the gangs give them cell phones and teach them how to extort money by phone.
Children attend an Open the Book program in an El Mezquital public school in Guatemala City in Nov. 2023. (RNS photo/Catherine Pepinster)
“Parents won’t let their children out at night because it is too dangerous; even if it’s a church service they don’t go,” said Palma.
Evelyn Divas, 47, head teacher at El Mezquital’s public school, was hesitant about bringing Bible studies into the school — for one thing, she said, she was the only practicing Christian teacher in the school. “I was worried they’d all think I was there just to impose my beliefs on them,” she said. “At first everyone was hesitant of the project, and it’s hard for people to warm up to it.”
Now, she says, people have accepted it, and the children enjoy it.
