Carlitos

Is going to be a doctor

Carlitos is almost eleven. He shares a house of metal sheeting and bamboo with a dirt floor with his parents and four sisters. The house is just behind a horse barn on a large coffee farm just outside of Antigua. Neither of Carlitos’ parents had the opportunity to go to school though he reports that his mother is able to read. His father is the head of maintenance for the farm and his older brother recently married and moved to an apartment with his new wife. Carlitos’ mother makes tortillas, on a wood fire, for a nearby restaurant and also cooks meals for the men who work in the barn with the horses.

The home and Carlitos and his family

Carlitos’ parents have seen that all of their children attended school, even university. The first time I met Carlitos was during the pandemic. He was eight and, since his school was closed, he had a part time job tending two baby goats that had been born on the farm. He had attended only the first grade in person due to the pandemic. Second and third grade were about envelopes received weekly from his teachers and questions answered by WhatsApp.

Carlitos the goatherd

I found Carlitos to not only be good as a goatherd but also to be very sociable and clearly highly intelligent. I asked him about his school and how his education would proceed. He told me the process and added proudly, “I am going to be a doctor.” With some persuasion the owner of the farm agreed to sponsor Carlitos for the private school located at the southern end of the farm. I found this little boy pretty intriguing and decided to offer some support that would help him to integrate into the new school. As it would be several months before school started I bought him a Chromebook and taught him how to use it including email, as the school would be using email for communications, and how to use Duolingo as he was very intent on learning English. And YouTube for Kids as he wanted to be able to watch English language videos. And the Khan Academy for math. Carlitos only had to wander through the barn to a farm to table restaurant and he could log on to the internet using the restaurant’s signal.

Determined to learn.

Carlitos was thrilled with his new school which he found to be quite different from his previous government public school with envelopes and WhatsApp. He had English classes, science classes, math classes and more. He upgraded his life’s dream to becoming “the kind of doctor who does operations.” He wasn’t sure of the Spanish word for surgeon, cirujano. His mom walked him through the farm to the gate of the school every day and met him at the end of the day. For his tenth birthday the family gave him a bicycle so that he could ride to and from school.

I asked Carlitos if he wanted to join the swimming lessons at my house and he eagerly accepted having never been in the water before. It turned out that he had also never been in a car before and spent his first several rides opening and closing the windows and sunroof and reclining his seat. Once accustomed to those amenities he turned to the music possibilities and his favorite music was that of a Cuban group known as “Buena Fe.” We listened to Buena Fe endlessly to and from his swimming lessons. During his second swimming lesson Carlitos told me “today I am not afraid.” During his third lesson he followed the other boys in jumping off the bridge over the pool. Swimming. Check.

A quick study in the pool.

And then there was chess which he took to immediately and recently he placed third in his age group in a city-wide chess tournament. And now, along with the chess instructor, he is teaching his pal, Beyker, how to play.

Chess class

Last December I invited Carlitos to join my extended American and Guatemalan families at the beach. He was very excited as he had never seen the ocean which is ony a two hour drive from Antigua. He told anyone who would listen that he was going to the beach in December.

Carlitos seeing the Pacific Ocean for the first time.

A few days ago I met with Carlitos’ teachers for a mid-year progress report. As expected he is doing extremely well and is a polite, well behaved student. As is often the case in Guatemala he is reluctant to read. There is very little culture of reading in Guatemala. Books are very expensive and not readily available. Public libraries, where they exist, have very limited offerings often only available by asking the librarian. And if mom and dad don’t read a child does not learn the value of reading from his parents. It is a hard cycle to break but I promised his English teacher that I would get Carlitos some books and the teacher would then assign him some reading at home. Which he will do because he is a good boy and so eager to learn.

The future surgeon.

For the school science fair Carlitos and his team built a car that runs on water. Carlitos’ mom came to take a video of his presentation. Having gained a certain amount of fluency in English Carlitos told me, proudly, that his family frequently asks him how to say this and that in English.

Private medical school in Guatemala currently costs twelve hundred dollars a month which represents a lot of tortillas for Carlitos’ family. The most successful doctors in Guatemala often come from wealthy families and have learned their trade in the United States or Europe. One can only hope that along the way someone will recognize Carlitos’ potential and find a way to help him realize his dream.