Four teachers agreed to work without pay until things got settled. Families who sometimes cannot afford to eat every day put together hard-earned pesos for the tar paper and lumber. What we really lack is materials. We have no materials, no resources at all. Hovels squat on dirt lots.
Trash blows across open fields.
Many unpaved streets become troughs of muddy ooze when it rains, dust bowls when it doesn't. A few bedraggled trees offer little relief from the dull sea of concrete and dust. But many can remember worse. They came from places with rarely enough to eat, where more babies died than lived, where an education meant learning to spell a name and count to 10. In Chalco Valley, people are not so much desperate as determined.