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Most people in Guatemala make a living from farming. They grow food for their families to eat and anything left over is sold at local markets.

Thousands of families crowd into the tin-roofed shacks that serve as homes in this sprawling shantytown outside of Villa Nueva, a town about an hour's drive from Guatemala City. No family has running water and few enjoy electricity. For young people, whose job prospects are grim, the future seems as barren as the arid landscape around them. Many of them succumb to a life of drugs and despair, joining gangs either voluntarily as a way to boost their self-esteem and sense of belonging or because they are forced to. 

Try to imagine a world without books. Imagine if the only pictures you see are on road signs and buses. Imagine if your teachers never read you books, but told you things to memorize exactly the way it was presented. Hard to imagine, isn't it?

In 2001, drought and the fall of world coffee prices exacerbated the already extreme poverty that afflicted rural Guatemalan families. A hunger crisis struck, forcing the Chortí Mayan women in Jocotán at times to have to decide between food and medicine. Should she pay $3 to transport their sick children to the clinic - or use that money for food? The US$5 a month women earned from the sale of palm frond mats in the local market could not even cover their basic needs, much less medicine to help their sick or starving children.

Some assume that rural indigenous populations are not ready for information technology, that they are not interested in it, and that, in any case, there is not enough basic infrastructure to extend technology from urban to rural areas.

“Don” Felician Castellanos, a subsistence farmer in Guatemala, believes it is a miracle that he survived the massacres and disappearances caused by the violent civil war that hit his region. Although he never went to school, don Feliciano knew he wanted to read and write. He taught himself to read at the age of twenty-three using an adult literacy primer.

To get to Aguacatán, Guatemala from the capital, one must travel 305 kilometres. This municipality is made up of 49 rural communities. Seven of these – Chex, Chichoche, Tucuná, Aguacatán Canton, Patzalam, Agua Blanca and Río Blanco – are home to 550 families (3600 inhabitants) that organized themselves for a water project.

Barrel Chiquito, Guatemala, is a small community that covers four square kilometres. It belongs to the village of La Barranca, part of the municipality of San Cristóbal Chucho in the department of San Marcos. It is a small town with 29 houses and 250 people.