AND NOW, AN EXAMPLE FROM THE POOREST OF THE POOR

By Juan Montoya
It takes her a half-hour to walk from her rural colonia Servando Canales home across the bridge Las Vacas to her dilapidated school which was built next to a landfill outside of Matamoros.
Her father died recently and now her older sister helps her to stay in school.
And yet, the fifth grader named Paloma Marlene Noyola Bueno has elicited interest from throughout Mexico and beyond because as it turns out, her score in mathematics of 921 is the highest achieved by any fifth grader in the entire country of Mexico.
Recently, a crew from the Arab-language network Al Jazeera featured her on a report from her school – Jose Urbina Lopez – and interviewed her outside the ramshackle classrooms.
Her home has no running water and just recently electricity was introduced to her community. The 11-year-old is the top math student in Mexico, according to the national Enlace test, and the wonder of it is that the school serves a community of people who survive by scavenging the nearby landfill.
None other than Sara Ines Calderon, a former Herald reporter, featured her in an article for an online publication.
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 now a widow and cannot afford to send her daughter to middle school.
Sara Ines reported that none of Paloma’s eight siblings were ever able to finish 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.
In fact, there is something about this humble school that somehow creates an environment for math learning since four other students also scored in the 900s in her class.
Enlace found that there were zero errors in her test, and that all of the answers had been completed. The city and state government have been dazzled by the attention their poverty-stricken colonia school has garnered and have belatedly hastened to provide her with a laptop computer which she can use when the lights are running.