11

 / The long road to justice

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about the fate that could befall her 18 year-old daughter, 
who had just obtained her teaching diploma and had left 
home for the first time, in such a far flung place. 

During the journey, she was seized by panic and tears rolled 
down her plump face as she grabbed onto the seat for dear 
life, terrified by the thought of falling to the ground every 
time that the tractor fell into a huge pothole.  

“Don Lalo, here’s the teacher”, announced Gamaliel when 
he arrived at the preacher’s house. “I’m glad you came. 
I thought they would never send us a teacher”, replied 
Estanislao Galicia, known in the village as Don Lalo, who took 
the girl’s suitcase and led her to a spare room in his house 
that  his wife, Doña Fina, had prepared for her.

Dos Erres now had a teacher but no school, a problem 
that wasn’t too hard to solve. The following day, Don Lalo 
summoned his neighbors and began to divide them into 
small groups. While some chopped wood, others went to 
fetch the aluminum sheets for the roof and in less than five 
days they had built a rudimentary hall with a soil floor and 
logs for the pupils to sit on. The following Monday, thirty 
children of different ages eagerly arrived at seven o’clock in 
the morning to receive their first lesson. 

These children had never sat in a classroom, some had to 
walk for an hour to get there and there was a single teacher 
for all of them, despite their different ages. But they were 
hard-working and by end of the year, most of them had 
learnt to read and write.