Meet Aarón Miguel Guarcas Alonzo, an 11-year-old fifth grader from the Los Tzoc Community in Chiché. His words capture something remarkable: a child who understands, perhaps better than most adults, the connection between education and opportunity.
Aarón’s days are full. He cares for his younger siblings—feeding two-year-old Génesis, carrying her on his back, and tutoring seven-year-old Daniel in math. Three afternoons a week, he works with his aunt baking and selling bread, earning 25 quetzales per day. On weekends, he helps his parents sell atol at the market, arriving at 6:30 AM even when he’d rather sleep in.
With his earnings, Aarón bought something most of us take for granted: his first bed. Before that, he slept on wooden boards. He also purchased a wardrobe to replace the cardboard box where he kept his clothes. When he gets paid, he feels joy not just in what he can buy for himself, but in the cookies, juices, and ice cream he can share with his little siblings.
Aarón loves school. He studies with his friends Edy and Liceo, plays soccer, and spins on the merry-go-round until they’re all laughing. Math is his favorite subject—not just because he’s good at it, but because it helps him sell without making mistakes when giving change.
Through School to Work (STW), Aarón’s community now has something it never had before: a playground with his favorite colors, yellow and blue. The books STW provided opened new worlds to him. His favorite, “More than 100 Riddles,” taught him about kangaroos and how they carry their babies in pouches—facts he might never have learned otherwise.
Aarón’s parents, Marina and Samuel, didn’t finish school. As children, they were put to work instead. Marina grew up without a father, working in a tortilla shop. Samuel went to the capital with his father, suffering the separation from his mother and home. They can barely read and write. “Of course we would have liked to study and finish school,” they share, “but we couldn’t. That’s why we want our children to go to school and not suffer like us.”
They beam with pride when talking about the day Aarón bought his bed and wardrobe. “His face shone with happiness,” they remember.
Aarón’s story reminds us why we do this work. In communities across Guatemala, there are countless children like him—motivated, intelligent, full of dreams—who simply lack access to basic educational resources. No libraries. No playgrounds. No safe spaces to learn and grow.
Aarón wants to be a firefighter when he grows up, to rescue people and help those in trouble. He already knows that staying in school is the path to graduating and earning more money. Even when he sees his friends playing soccer while he’s working, he keeps going. He understands what’s at stake.
The difference between Aarón’s future and his parents’ past isn’t talent or work ethic. It’s opportunity. It’s having a classroom, books, a playground, and teachers who believe in him. It’s the presence of programs that recognize potential and provide the tools to unlock it.
Every child deserves what Aarón is fighting so hard to achieve: a quality education, a safe place to learn, and the resources to dream bigger than their circumstances.
Your support helps us build classrooms, provide books and educational materials, create playgrounds where children can be children, and ensure that students like Aarón don’t have to choose between working and learning—they can do both, with dignity.
Will you help us reach more students like Aarón? Make a donation today and invest in the potential of children who are already investing everything they have in themselves.