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This month, Bryan Metzhua intended to begin the seventh year.
Instead, he would wake up every day at dawn, put on a pair of broken jeans and painted boots, and start the steep walk into his father’s field.
The 12-year-old soft-voiced boy spent his days leaning to the ground pounding the weeds with a machete, avoiding drying his sweat off his forehead.
The COVID-19 pandemic has replaced the lives of young people around the world, but has affected those living in poor communities.
With so many families in financial difficulty, young people have a very important source of work, leading to fears that even when schools reopen, many academics will never return.
Policymakers are involved in a lost generation and a reversal of some of the long-term achievements in educational achievement that have reduced birth rates, higher economic performance and improved public aptitude around the world.
Here, in the highest mountains of southern Mexico, a lack of generation makes distance education virtually and an economic recession is forcing many young people to join the workforce.
When the federal government announced this month that it would cancel face-to-face schooling indefinitely across the country, it unveiled a program to broadcast school education on television and radio, saying online courses were not an option because about 40% of families do not have an Internet connection.
However, 8% of families, nearly 3 million families, have television, according to the National Institute of Statistics and Geography, and many also have radios.
This includes the perspective of Metzhua, a concrete layout in the appearance of a two-lane winding road in Zomajapa, a predominantly indigenous city of six hundred other people in the state of Veracruz.
There is no cellular registration in the domain and a fragmented policy through Internet service providers.
When the new school year began on Monday, Bryan and most of his classmates had no way to connect, so many followed their parents to work.
Prior to the pandemic, Mexico had made progress in reducing child labour and sending more academics to school.
In 2017, 8% of Mexicans aged five to 17 were of legal age in economic activity, compared to 13% in the previous decade, according to the National Institute of Statistics and Geography.
At the same time, the number of other people over the age of 25 to 34 who have completed high school has increased from 35% in 2008 to 50% in 2018.
Teachers and youth advocates now complain that the government is ignoring the plight of the country’s most vulnerable other young people as they seek to involve the virus and rebuild the economy, which fell by 19% in the last quarter of this year to it. it was in 2019. .
“They are concerned that they are prioritizing this,” said Malcom Aquiles, a policy advocate for World Vision, a Christian humanitarian organization that works with children in Veracruz.
“In the short term, we will have a poorer and poorer generation of children. Later, this will have serious consequences for the nation. “
Bryan’s father, José Metzhua, 53, said he would prefer his son to spend the next few months in history (his favorite subject) or math (he hates).
But Bryan’s help at the family’s banana, orange and coffee plantations allowed his father to save $7 a day that he generally spent on outdoor paintings, great credit given that virus-like restrictions hampered the family’s ability to sell their products nearby. Peoples.
“It’s troubling,” said José Metzhua, a former elected network official, wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat, “you may not be able to examine how you should. But what can we do?”
He and his wife did everything they could for school at Bryan’s house after he ended up in the field, asking him to sit down with an e-book or practice writing (“You have to respect commas and dots,” his father advises). But Bryan misses his classmates and his favorite teacher, Doris. “She made us laugh,” she says.
Their parents say they are embarrassed by their own lack of education: they either left school when they were young for their families and have difficulty reading and writing.
Children from families whose parents speak one of the dozens of indigenous languages in Mexico are at greater disadvantage.
Guadalupe Altamirano González, 34, and her husband, Eustaquio Jiménez, 44, are about 1. 7 million Mexicans who speak a variant of Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs.
The couple has no radio, no television, no running water, in their two bedroom wooden space in El Porvenir, one hour from Zomajapa.
Her two daughters, Alondra and Fetima, were invited to watch TV classes at a friend’s house, but Gonzalez fears she may not be able to answer the questions her 12-year-old daughters bring home because she hasn’t been to school. and he doesn’t speak much Spanish.
“It’s the same as with a teacher,” she said one recent afternoon as a litter of newborn chicks sw turned around her feet.
When face-to-face school was canceled in the spring, shy, slender twins began accompanying their parents to paint in nearby coffee plantations, who say they will continue to do so on days when they don’t see categories on television with their friend. .
The couple’s two eldest sons dropped out of school years ago to start making money.
The children, now 16 and 17, struggled to be informed in Spanish and that making money was more vital than studying, their father said.
“They were looking for elegant shoes,” he said.
Bryan’s circle of relatives hopes that once the pandemic is over, he resumes the catechasias in the user and even one day he will go to college.
“It’s hope, ” said his father. But the thing is, it’s hard. “
For now, his father intends to give him another kind of agricultural education, which Bryan and his brothers will one day inherit.
Every day teaches them something new: the life cycle of an Arábica coffee or how to plant the marigolds that will adorn the altar of the Day of the Dead family.
On a recent hot morning, his father stopped at how to whiten the brush without the machete getting stuck in the ground. Bryan stood there watching, his chest rising.
“Are you tired, Bryan? One of his brothers.
“No, ” replied the boy, squatting to get back to work.
Cecilia Sanchez of times Mexico City contributed to the report.