Deluge of Dropouts Dims Honduran Recovery Hopes

It was a sure sign of trouble when Wilmer Pineda’s sixth-grade teacher frantically knocked on his door at twilight. He just didn’t know how much trouble.

The Las Flores and San Juan rivers that met a block from his house were rising rapidly, the teacher reported. His family had to flee.

That night last October, tropical storm Mitch washed away Wilmer’s home, his school and his future.

Hundreds of thousands of Central Americans face similar losses from the storm, which killed 9,000 people.

Still, the loss of educational opportunities for children like 15-year-old Wilmer may turn out to be the most serious long-term legacy of all, authorities warn.

In Honduras, the country hit hardest by the storm, future carpenters, electricians, secretaries and business managers are leaving school or in danger of quitting.

A deluge of dropouts--whether grade school or college--jeopardizes an ambitious government plan to industrialize and develop this poor country, where the average person has only a fourth-grade education.

Authorities estimate that because of Mitch, at least 10% of Honduras’ 1.8 million schoolchildren will be absent during the semester that began recently.

The missing students are young people like Wilmer, who wanted to learn how to make furniture. Instead, he must haul sand for a $1 a day to supplement his father’s erratic earnings as a brick mason.

“We had planned to send him to vocational school to learn a trade, but we cannot after this,” said Wilmer’s mother, Ramona Diaz, gesturing toward the sandy ravine where 70 houses, including theirs, used to be.

The story is repeated throughout the cities and countryside of Honduras.

Some May Start but Not Finish Year

Like Wilmer’s mother, the Nava family, ranchers in the eastern province of Olancho, are telling their children they cannot go to school this year.

Other families, like the Pinedas’ neighbors, the Madariagas, decided that their children could start classes as long as they also picked coffee to pay for their school supplies.

Some storm victims are depending on promised donations of book bags, pencils and notebooks. Authorities warn that there is a serious risk that children who start the year so precariously may not finish.

Education Minister Jose Ramon Calix has been forced to turn his attention from long-range reform aimed at attracting industry and providing much-needed jobs, to cobbling together a viable education system this semester and persuading storm victims to keep their children in school.

The storm wiped out 500 schools, soaked 5 million grade-school textbooks and flooded the Education Ministry building, destroying records and the computer system.

In the capital, Tegucigalpa, dormitories that housed 4,000 students from hamlets too small to have high schools were washed away.

Classes were suspended for the last month of the 1998 term because schools that survived the deluge became homeless shelters. Although school officially was to start in February across the country, many schools could not begin classes until this month in order to give officials time to relocate the homeless.

In towns like San Juancito, where schools were destroyed, civic leaders found temporary classrooms in the offices of community organizations. The Education Ministry has offered to pay for rebuilding the nine-classroom school in this mountain town about an hour’s drive from Tegucigalpa. Calix estimated that the total cost of repairing damage to Honduras’ educational system will reach $50 million.

Just as important as the buildings is the damage to the household budgets of poor families like the Pinedas.

Such families struggle to keep their children in school uniforms, notebooks, pencils and erasers in the best of times.

Their children typically work part-time as soon as they are big enough to hold a hoe in the country or a box of chewing gum in town.

When times get tough--and they are tough now--parents pull children out of school to minimize expenses and increase income, as Wilmer’s mother did three years ago.

That time, he lost two years of school. Now that he has finished grade school, he is not likely to go back. Even though the vocational school is free, his parents would have to buy his materials and do without his wages.

Under those circumstances, many parents see an education beyond primary school as a luxury.

Diaz, who has five children younger than Wilmer, said: “I just hope that God will help me get them through sixth grade.”

Calix has been fighting that mentality since he was appointed education minister last June.

About 85% of grade school-age children attend classes, but just 35% go on to junior high school. And only half of those finish the equivalent of ninth grade.

“They end up with no middle school education and no trade,” Calix said.

Before Mitch, he had planned to persuade poor families to keep sending their children to school by beefing up vocational education programs that would allow them to eventually earn higher wages.

Now he is concentrating on short-term incentives to get young storm victims back to class.

The World Food Program is sponsoring a school lunch program for 200,000 children, and the U.S. Agency for International Development distributed book bags of school supplies to 150,000 students.

Long-Term Hopes Placed on Education

Nevertheless, Calix insists that he has not lost sight of the long-term goal of creating an education system that will allow Honduras to transform itself from a farming country into a globally competitive industrial nation, a key campaign promise of President Carlos Flores.

“Education is the only way to develop our country,” Calix said. “We want an educational system that prepares the labor force that private industry requires. . . . Mitch has made the situation worse, but it also has awakened us to the urgency of the need for better education.”

Francisco Nava already was sold on the value of education for his seven children, but even he is hard-pressed now to provide it.

Embarrassed About His Poor Education

Nava built a successful ranch with 120 dairy cows and 115 beef cattle in the eastern province of Olancho. Still, he was always a little embarrassed about his sixth-grade education.

“What a person wants most is to see his children become professionals,” the 57-year-old rancher said, seated at the carved wooden table of the imposing brick ranchhouse that was covered by flood waters for five days.

Three of his children have finished business school. Two dropped out.

“In the country, some of us can study and . . .someone has to stay home and work,” explained Nava’s 22-year-old daughter, Neti. This year, the two youngest daughters were going to be the first in the family to go to college. Then Mitch struck.

Most of the cattle survived on the ranch’s hilltops, but the flood waters carried away the best pasture. Dairy cows are not giving milk, and beef cattle are not getting fat. Even if they were, the only road to the ranch is impassable, so the Navas cannot get their milk, butter, cheese or beef to market.

That means no money for tuition, room and board--and left 18-year-old Brenda, valedictorian of her high school class, at home, sobbing quietly over her lost chance to study international marketing.

Children Up Early to Pick Coffee

The issues seem much more basic for the Madariaga children here in the former mining town of San Juancito.

Every morning of their school vacation, solemn Luis Alberto, 12, and frail, big-eyed Albania, 10, were up at 6 a.m. to pick coffee.

Between them, they earned about $3 a day, money their 29-year-old mother, Edith Rodriguez, said she was setting aside for school supplies: a $4.25 book bag, $3.50 notebooks, rulers, erasers and dictionaries.

The children came home for lunch at noon and then spent the afternoon digging ditches in a community food-for-work program.

The program was intended for unemployed storm victims, but most of the brigade members here were children under 15, swinging pick axes and shoveling dirt to lay water pipes.

They are the children of the working poor, coffee pickers and sugar cane cutters.

Luis Madariaga, the children’s father, earns about $57 a month--barely enough to cover groceries for a family that also includes two younger children.

Now they have lost their house, must pay $7 a month in rent and replace the meager goods they lost in the flood.

The children’s labor in the food-for-work program saves them about $14 a week in grocery money.

Poverty, compounded by the storm, is extracting a heavy price on educational opportunities for the Madariaga youngsters.

Albania was already struggling and at age 10, now seems doomed by Mitch.

She spent two years in first grade, and then failed second-grade math and Spanish. Because of the chaos Mitch caused, her teacher offered to promote her if she could pass a test.

“She really hasn’t studied,” said Rodriguez as the children ran in from the twilight rain, eagerly grabbing tortillas left over from lunch. “She just doesn’t do well in school.”