During the last few weeks in Guatemala I have worked with several different groups of people, some of them practising teachers, though as yet with no teaching qualifications, and in three cases with young people in secondary schools. Apart from the urban centres, most places in Guatemala are unable to provide secondary schools, and government programmes so far only guarantee a certain number of years of primary education. Many rural communities which do have secondary schools have to set them up themselves. Often the teachers receive no salary and work as volunteers, because they believe so strongly in the importance of what they are doing for the future of their students. It is not hard to imagine that for many young people it is extremely frustrating to reach a certain level of learning and then be able to go no further, to be able to read but have nothing to read, and to have to revert in the end to being farmers like their parents, who often had no education at all and knew no different.

Everyone I have ever spoken to in Guatemala agrees that education is one of the most important weapons in the fight against poverty and under-development. To take part in the modern, industrial world, young people need an up-to-date knowledge of science, maths, technology and IT. In Guatemala, this is a long way from reality, and one of the problems is that in country areas the few ambitious and gifted young people who manage somehow to achieve a more advanced education leave their communities for the towns. Many too are leaving Guatemala altogether, and migrating, often illegally, to Mexico or the United States. Most send money home to their families, so that in this way the country does benefit, but in terms of development it leaves things much as they were.

It is worth noting the contrast even between the two neighbouring countries of Mexico and Guatemala. Crossing into Mexico is like entering a different world: good roads, better electricity and water supplies, mobile phones and consumer goods. I asked if I would be able change some Guatemalan money into Mexican pesos inside Mexico. The Guatemalan official laughed and said: "They won’t even look at our money. It’s worthless!"

The three schools where I worked, just for a couple of days in each one, were very different in character, but in their own ways they were all trying to answer the same challenging question: How do we build a bridge for these young people from their world and culture into the modern, developed world of commerce, industry and technology? And how do we do it without cutting their roots in the culture to which they were born and without causing a haemorrhage of talent to the urban areas or to the US? In short, what is the most appropriate ‘next step’?

La Quetzal is a community I have known since it was first founded in the northern Guatemalan rainforest ten years ago. It was then a new settlement for refugees who fled to Mexico during the civil war and returned under the protection of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) in 1995, during the last year of the war, when much of the armed conflict had in fact come to an end. The settlers had spent over ten years in exile, most of them living in refugee camps in southern Mexico. There they received a lot of attention from international organisations, including education in basic skills and training in management, the use of communication technology such as telephone and fax, as well as general office administration. Women’s groups and youth groups were formed, community committees spent a lot of time planning and negotiating, with the UNHCR and the governments of Mexico and Guatemala, for a collective, organised and protected return to their country.

When the first settlers arrived and started to build La Quetzal in a clearing in the rainforest, the conditions were atrocious. There was no accessible road and the people were isolated and afraid. But they have often said in the years that followed that the education and training they received in Mexico were vital to their survival and their ability to solve problems and resolve conflicts during the first, impossibly hard two years until the road was finally constructed. And it is not surprising that as soon as possible afterwards they built themselves a small secondary school.

Until now, Guatemalan government policy has focused its attention on providing universal primary education in the country, so there has been little or no official support for secondary school initiatives. To begin with some of the new secondary schools managed to survive as ‘annexes’ of urban secondary schools, and so received some money for books and teachers’ salaries. This was declared unlawful two years ago and so these schools have been thrown back on their own resources again. But they are hanging on, because however fundamentally important primary education may be, it has to lead somewhere, or it will result in disaffection or desertion.

But in Quetzal as elsewhere the same problem is repeated, though higher up the age-group. Now there are young people finishing secondary school, but with no ‘next step’, except for a few fortunate ones who get hold of money to move away to the town. A good number of La Quetzal’s former leaders and most experienced teachers have left the community, though, on the bright side, there are several gifted younger people, previously secondary school students, now with management and accountancy skills, who are taking up posts of responsibility. They are involved with community management, the marketing of products, transport arrangements and so forth.

There is disillusion amongst the teachers. With no government support for secondary schooling, parents now have to make a monthly payment for their children's continued education, which limits the number of students able to attend. Teachers are having to do a double shift, teaching primary school in the morning and secondary (without pay) in the afternoon.

There is a ray of light in the fact that permanent posts will be available to primary teachers soon - but only five for the whole of the community, which already has a primary school population of 300 children. And, it must be added, now in July none of the staff have received any salary at all since January. No doubt they will receive their back pay in due course, but meanwhile? They owe money to the shops, and, being busy at school all day, have no time to grow their own food, sometimes having to pay (or owe) someone for doing their agricultural work for them.

La Democracia has a different history from La Quetzal. It has existed for some 20 years, and was also first formed by people fleeing the violence of the civil war. But because they did not leave the country and did not officially become 'refugees', but are classed as 'internally displaced people' (IDP), they never received the attention, the education and indeed the privileges which refugees did.

While La Quetzal has an outward-looking, international flavour to it, La Democracia is poorer, more retiring, less demanding, though the quality of the welcome I received when I arrived was extremely moving. My visit was in fact the fulfilment of a year-old promise. My colleagues and I had dropped by for just a couple of hours the year before and said that we would certainly return for a longer visit one day. They had not forgotten.

The community has fought for its tiny secondary school, just over 25 students divided into three grades, and it is now recognised by the government as an independent, community-based institution. The students are shy, somewhat tongue-tied when asked to comment or report on their work, but enthusiastic and adept at the practical, investigative activities which I was doing with them. And when my colleague, Mario the puppeteer, started to rehearse with them for an open-air variety show-type performance scheduled for our second evening, all their inhibitions left them and the whole community turned out to watch, even though part of it was drenched by a heavy rain-storm.

La Democracia is being supported by teachers from a neighbouring community of returned refugees, called Entre Ríos. Entre Ríos is one of the strongest and most enterprising of the communities which I know and has a thriving secondary school with well over 100 students. All of this has been achieved by enlightened and sure-footed management and a self-sufficient approach to the country's challenges. (No thanks, one has to say, to the Guatemalan government.) And many of Entre Ríos's young people, whom I knew in secondary school five years ago, have now completed week-end study courses at a college in the regional capital and practise a variety of professional skills - including teaching - in their own local area.

One of Entre Ríos's policies has always been to share its human and material resources with other communities. In the case of La Democracia, it has 'lent' them two teachers, who have guided them both in terms of management and of curriculum development. The patience and long-suffering of La Democracia combined with the skills of Entre Ríos is bearing fruit, and, as far as I know, no-one has as yet emigrated to the United States.

The last place I visited this year was a school called La Casa de la Esperanza (the House of Hope) in a small town in northern Guatemala called Poptún. It started life three years ago by the initiative of a priest called Padre Salvador. He raised the funds to start a secondary school for indigenous Mayan young people from remote communities where both education and development were minimal. The students travel to school and stay there for a fortnight at a time, alternating with a fortnight in their community. The idea is that school should not alienate the students from their culture, but that the alternation should bring about a cross-fertilisation between the two.

Practically all the students are from the (Mayan) Kekchí ethnic group and most of the staff are also indigenous people. They work extremely hard, starting lessons at 7 am continuing, with breaks, till 6 pm, and then with homework time in the evening. Their presence at the school also requires great commitment by the parents. They each have to pay a sum of money (the equivalent of £10) every month as well as provide a sack of maize and a sack of dried beans for their food. The students have to be well dressed and be responsible for personal hygiene and washing their own clothes. Growing vegetables and breeding animals and fish is also part of the school programme.

The curriculum contains extra elements apart from the traditional school subjects: Mayan history, language and culture. The school believes that their education should be inter-cultural and not just be conducted in Spanish.

Because of the heavy - economic and academic - demands of the school, quite a few students drop out, also because some get married, since the cultural tradition is to start families early. Even so, the commitment to study and education is evident throughout. The standard of reading and writing is high. The students speak Spanish articulately and without shyness. They have no qualms about moving backwards and forwards between Kekchí and Spanish, explaining things, helping each other and moving naturally into the appropriate language when wanting to converse with me.

The Casa de la Esperanza is an experiment, though fortunately not the only one of its kind. Its purpose is to bring a high standard of secondary education at least to some poor people in remote communities, but not in such a way that it alienates them from their culture and background. The idea is that education should feed back and enrich their families and communities, and not be something which creates two kinds of people, those who have and those who have not been so 'privileged'.

But to do this it has to be an 'appropriate' education, an education which understands the 'next step'. You cannot move from remote Kekchí community to elaborately equipped urban schools with their computers and laboratories in one leap, any more than you can leap from subsistence farming with machete and hoe to mechanised agro-industry. Each step, each new technique, each new resource, must feed back, at its own appropriate speed, into the community and language concerned. And this is how the Casa de la Esperanza aims to work.

In a small way, I witnessed how certain new (Spanish) words I had introduced began to ring through when students talked Kekchí to each other, how the ideas began to 'embed' in another language. I also watched a student explain to another young woman in Kekchí how levers work, using a set of scales made from rolled-up newspaper and string. Suddenly she understood, and smiled, and I saw the understanding in her face.

Whether such small experiments will impact on the education system of a whole country or whether in time, as so often happens, the new will arrive like a bulldozer, leaving destruction in its path, remains to be seen, as mega-projects such as the Central American Free Trade Agreement and the infamous Plan Puebla-Panamá grind into action. But here and there sparks are being struck and the House of Hope may help to light up the future.

[Cancún, 16 August 2005]