Good News: Guatemala teacher pedals his classroom to students amid COVID-19 pandemic

Due to the coronavirus-enforced lockdown, schools and colleges across the world have been shut down for a while. But a Guatemala teacher, in a heart-warming gesture, has been pedalling his classroom to students, showing how education can still be delivered in remote areas. When the pandemic closed Guatemala's schools earlier this year, teacher Gerardo Ixcoy decided to take the school to children.

He invested his savings in a second-hand adult tricycle and turned it into a mobile classroom. To protect his students from virus transmission, the teacher equipped the mobile classroom with plastic sheets. He also used a whiteboard and a small solar panel that powers an audio player which he used for some of his lessons. The 27-year-old teacher pedalled everyday through the cornfields of Santa Cruz del Quiche to help his sixth-grade students.

This unique idea struck his mind when Ixcoy realised that there were challenges to remote education in this farming community in Guatemala's western highlands. "I tried to get the kids their worksheets, sending instructions via WhatsApp, but they didn't respond," Ixcoy said. Ixcoy, who tries to visit each of his students twice a week, added that the parents told him they didn’t have enough money to buy date packages for their phones and couldn’t help their children with studies.

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School on wheels

The teacher said that the phones they have at home are very basic and don’t have apps that allow you to take virtual classes. The classes not only serve as a way to educate the children, but also break up the monotony of home quarantine. An excited eleven-year-old student named Oscar Rojas, dressed up in a black button-down shirt paired with navy blue trousers, eagerly waited for his teacher to arrive.

"Teacher Lalito only comes for a little while to teach me, but I learn a lot,” Rojas said. In the afternoon, the 27-year-old teacher travels back home to beat the curfew and later walks to a land with his family to grow corn as another source of income. Just imagine the joy of all these children, who get to study even during lockdown. It is the kindness of people like Ixcoy that make us believe in the good.

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(Image credit: AP) (With inputs from AP)