San Miguel Tilquiapan is a tiny village in the state of Oaxaca. You can get there by car, but four-wheel drive is recommended. If it's raining, I would wait until the next day even with a four-wheel drive! The dirt road is one lane and has precarious shoulders.

Perhaps this explains why the children in this town had not had milk in over six months. Perhaps the government supplies could not reach them. Or, perhaps there are just too many villages as poor as San Miguel Tilquiapan. In fact, there are many towns that are even worse off -- if you can imagine it.

This woman, drenched in a down pour, is returning from the market. There isn't a market in SMT, so she must have walked from the neighboring town of Ocotlan which is several miles away.

She is now walking past the front of the school. View the school.

 

 

Escuela Especial para Niños Migrantes

The Secretaria de Educacion Publica has recently begun to implement a new educational program for migrant working children. All of the children in San Miguel Tilquiapan are, as most of their parents, migrant workers. The migrant education program allows them to pick up their education wherever they may have left off in order to work.
This is the exterior of the two-room school. Built by the villagers, it is constructed of stone masonry and has a tin roof.

Here you see the corner of the school (left hand side of the first picture). Notice the man in the background leading his burro home after a long day's work in the fields.

Enter the school.

 

 

The children here are Zapoteco and for most of them Spanish is their second language. Classes are conducted in both Spanish and Zapoteco. It wasn't clear how much each language was used in this particular school, but, as in the United States, bilingual education in Mexico is typically transitional in practice and purpose.

All of the older children in this school are migrant workers. Some of them have worked in the U.S. and nearly all of them have relatives working in the U.S. at any given point in time. These children explained that tomatoes are their least favorite crop to work because they weigh so much.

"Faces at the bottom of the well?"

 
 

Are these faces good enough reasons to travel a thousand miles to seek a better life?
Is it a good enough reason to do it "illegally"? Wouldn't you?

"Ningun ser humano es inlegal."