By Anthony Barich
National Reporter
A 27 year old Canberra woman is starting a scholarship for students in the slums of Paraguay to trigger a larger-scale effort to alleviate the severe poverty in the South American country.
Elizabeth Doherty, communications officer for the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference, worked as a Catholic missionary for two years teaching English, art and music in the slums of Paraguay’s capital city Asuncion in 2008-09.
While there, she befriended Mario Palacios Estigarribia, 21, who grew up in Banado Sur, one of Asuncion’s poorest neighbourhoods, in a family of eight children and was educated by the organisation Fe y Alegria, an organisation which provides education all over Latin America to children from the poorest families.
The scholarship will start with proceeds for Mario to study journalism at Asuncion’s best university Nuestra Senora de la Asuncion, also known as La Catolica, so he can raise awareness of injustice in a country where corruption is widespread.
Smuggling, organised crime and money laundering are rife in the country and, with few mineral resources, Paraguay depends heavily on agriculture.
Sixty per cent of its 6.3 million people live in poverty and it has the most unequal distribution of land in the region.
In the mid-1990s, nearly half of Paraguay’s farmers did not own land, according to the World Bank.
Later in that decade, less than 10 per cent of the population owned and controlled more than 75 per cent of the nation’s land, leaving much of the large rural population landless and subsisting in extreme poverty.
Today, thousands of hopefuls from all over Paraguay come each year to sit exams in the hope that they may get a government sponsored job.
In his last attempt, Mario just missed out.
“Mario is intelligent, motivated and the only thing stopping him from studying is money,” Miss Doberty said.
“Mario lives in community with a number of friends, and they have a small sign-making business which gives them enough money for food and clothing, but not much else.”
To pay for a four-year degree at La Catolica in Communications/Journalism will cost $6,000.
“This is prohibitively expensive for most Paraguayans, but for many Australians, it is a small cost, especially when split between many people,” Miss Doherty said. She has started www.movinghearts.org.au to sell craftworks, cards and media at a low cost. Funds raised from the sale of these items will go directly toward poverty alleviation and educational development programmes in Paraguay. People can also provide funds for Mario’s scholarship without buying goods.
“People in Paraguay often don’t get the education they deserve just because they come from a poor area,” Miss Doherty told The Record.
Before working in Paraguay in 2008-09, Miss Doherty taught migrant English in Western Sydney.
A CD she produced to fundraise for the project, called Con Corazon Abierto, will be launched in Yarralumla, ACT on 26 March by social commentator Melinda Tankard Reist.