First in her family to graduate

Elsa Toco Mamani is 16 years old and studies 11th grade at Alonso de Ibáñez School in Sacaca Municipality. It´s only one more year left to finish school and her parents Martín Toco, 41 and Lorenza Mamani, 40 are very excited because their daughter will be the first person in their family and one of the few in the community to graduate from high school. Considering that Elsa is one of the 192 female students out of 420, her parents feel fortunate to see her daughter at school.

A radiant sun rises in the blue sky while school classes start. It´s almost 8:30 in the morning and students, wearing uniforms of white smocks and red sweaters, walk fast to school along the unpaved streets of Sacaca. Many of them come from neighboring communities, they walk about 2 hours, one way, to get to school; Elsa, is one of these children, she comes from her community Janco Janco.

An arduous journey to get to school

Elsa made a great effort during her first years of school. Every day, she left home at 6 a.m. taking her books and lunch with her. After walking 2 hours on stony paths into the hills, she arrived tired to school. In the first years there was no school breakfast and she had to wait until noon to eat what her mother prepared for her early in the morning. The classes finished at 3:30 in the afternoon, and there was the time to walk another 2 hours back home.

“I remember that I used to walk with the children from my town. We were always laughing and playing but we never separated from each other, because sometimes it was dangerous and when it went dark we felt scared. The days [when] I was able to come home early, I used to do my homework in the courtyard. My mom gave me food but first I had to finish my homework because when it got dark, I had to use the lighter but its light was too low and it gave me headaches,” Elsa recalls. Like Janco Janco, many communities don’t have electricity nor the schools and children need to multiply their efforts to study. 

At present, Elsa lives in Sacaca with her parents, her 10-year-old sister Francisca and the youngest sister of one month old. Now, she has electricity at home and needs to walk only some blocks to get to school. She is an active teenager and seems younger than her age because of her short height. Once in a while, she visits the only radio in town to greet her friends and participates in some radio programs. 

Poverty and the right of girls to education

In many poor families, children are deprived of education due to the lack of money. Elsa´s family lives of potato, oca, barley and bean production which provides food for them. However, sometimes they need to sell part of the production to buy clothes, notebooks or other kind of food. “It is only enough for eating. If my daughter still wants to study, there won’t be enough. I want her to study but she doesn’t have many opportunities [to do it]”, says with concern Elsa´s father, Martin.

“We wanted to take her out of school, like other [parents] in our community did; we know that among the families, the sons are the only who study. Besides, we didn’t have [the] money and it was dangerous for her to walk so far away, but my daughter didn’t want to drop out of school and she started to cry,” adds her mother Lorenza.

Girls have the right to study

Elsa was sponsored by World Vision and started to receive benefits and trainings as part of the sponsorship program. Something that motivated her to continue studying was the school materials she received every year. She was 10 years old and felt happy to learn about children´s rights too. She remembers that she wanted to be a teacher and teach every girl about the importance to study. 

“That is something we learned in the ADP courses. I wanted to learn more and more and not remain grazing sheep and cooking without learning. If I wouldn’t have learned from the ADP, I’m sure I wouldn’t be at school now. Now I want to study medicine, but I don’t know if I can,” she says with uncertainty , she knows how hard is to study a university career and more for an indigenous woman with a poverty background. However, she knows that finishing high school is a big achievement. 

Elsa’s family supports her and her sponsor does it too. He writes her periodically and sometimes she receives a special gift. “Receiving these letters and pictures from my sponsor and [read] what he says to me motivates me a lot. That’s why I want to keep on studying but sometimes there is no money in the field and my dad is sick, he can’t work as he used to. Next year I will graduate and I want to keep on studying,” Elsa says with hope, while she carries her newborn little sister.

The reality of children in Sacaca

The latest data from the Ministry of Education shows that in the Municipality of Sacaca, there are 785 students in the last grades of high school, 428 are girls and many of them drop out of school. This reality is more common in remote areas. Despite these numbers, the situation has improved in relation with previous years. At present, many parents are aware that attending 3rd or 4th grade of elementary school to learn how to write and read is not enough.