POLITICS 365:
Mexico’s Top Math Student Lives in a Trash Dump
1 day ago | Also Featured in National National News Policy Spotlight
By Sara Inés Calderón
Eleven year-old Paloma Noyola Martínez is the top math student in Mexico, according to the national Enlace test, and the kicker is that she lives in a community of people who survive from scavenging a dump in Matamoros, Tamaulipas.
Incidentally, she placed third overall in Spanish. Paloma attends a school with other children whose families depend on the dump, which is located across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, Texas.
“I’m happy and very proud and I’m going to continue to study,” she told local media, adding that her family and friends pleaded with her to “continue to keep trying her hardest.”
Paloma’s mother, Guadalupe Martínez, asked the state secretary of education to help her continue to send her daughter to school, since she is a widow and cannot afford to send her daughter to middle school. None of Paloma’s eight siblings were ever able tofinish middle school because they couldn’t afford it, but her mother said the girl always studied hard — even after her father’s death six months ago.
The school principal has arranged to give Paloma a laptop — it has always been herdream, she said. But, he noted it would be difficult to use it, since sometimes there’s not even power available for her to be able to turn it on.
This post originally appeared in Más Wired.
