ELENA CARBALLO

Elizabeth Pridgeon

Ms. Elena Carballo is one of the few people who have managed to provide educational support for Belizean youth without being a school teacher.  Ms Elena is an educator, but not in the orthodox sense: she has spent almost two decades based at the Sandy Hunter library in Orange Walk, encouraging children to read, tutoring children with various classroom subjects, and assisting students with homework and school projects.  And her role extends far beyond the work of teaching children: she is also a regular fundraiser and book-seeker, a leader of staff who is prepared to help people of all ages and needs, and a charitable member of the Orangewalkeño community.

Born and raised in Orange Walk, Ms Elena was the eighth child born to a family of nine children.  Luckily, her parents’ financial situation was more stable by the time she was growing up, and she was able to receive the privilege of extended education: from Chapel Primary School she graduated to Muffles High School, from where she sought Sixth Form education at the Technical College in Belize City.  Years later, Ms Elena also received a HNC degree in Librarianship from the University of Edinburgh in the UK, which was taught as a distance-learning course, with annual visits from the professors and course providers.

From an early age, she enjoyed reading, especially mystery novels and crime fiction, but she never dreamt of becoming a librarian until much later in her adult life.  Ms Elena, in fact, never had any driving ambition to have a full-time career, as she was fully occupied with raising her own family.  However, in 1993 she was approached by the library authorities and asked if she would consider applying for the post of Senior Librarian at the Sandy Hunter library.  Much to Ms Elena’s surprised delight, her application was successful and she was installed as the town’s Librarian with immediate effect.  She remembers her first day at the library, looking around her and thinking that she could make wonders happen in the library.  This is no small feat – while most people would have cowered at the condition of the library and the status of its services, Ms Elena wholeheartedly embraced the challenge ahead of her.

Shortly after her posting, Ms Elena realised that to transform the library into a truly public service, she would need to access endless book providers to extend the library’s provisions: when she arrived, just one bookshelf housed all the library’s books, and now every wall and shelf is crammed with fact and fiction, literature and learning.  She learnt of the CODE book-bank in Belmopan, which sold books in bulk for around fifty cents a piece, and so she began a vigorous fundraising campaign in order to acquire sufficient financial backing to begin stocking the Sandy Hunter library for future generations.  Many people supported Ms Elena’s enthusiastic initiative to improve the library’s supplies, and people donated money, transportation or other services to assist her, resulting in multiple trips to Belmopan to choose up to 600 books at a time to bring back to provide for Orangewalkaños.

Slowly but surely, Ms Elena began to stock the library with school text books, history journals, children’s fiction and much more.  And as the local population began to realise how the Sandy Hunter library was changing beyond recognition, so more and more people visited the premises to use the facilities for themselves.  It was this increased interaction with the public that made Ms Elena realise that extra educational programs were needed by a vast proportion of school-attenders in order to fully realise their potential for the future.  And so began Ms Elena’s most ambitious and successful project to date: summer programs.  Ms Elena gathered the support of local Peace Corps volunteers and, in 1993, opened the library doors to teach school aged children a range of classes to compliment their school curriculums.  Several years later, Ms Elena acquired the support of certain local teachers to help create ‘themes’ for structured summer programs which continue to this day.  Themes have included ethnic heritage (dealing with folklore and customs), national pride (dealing with natural resources of Belize), species appreciation (teaching how to recognise national flora and fauna) and this year, the theme was global warming (aimed at instilling in pupils an appreciation for the natural environment and an understanding of the collective responsibility towards protecting our ecosystem).

In 2003, ten years after the initiation of the project, Ms Elena ventured into dramatic plays, seeking the professional support of Gabriel Garcia, a local choreographer.  And now the library is host to some form of project or program on an almost weekly basis: there are tap dancing lessons for young children, ballroom dancing classes for adults, arts and crafts sessions, remedial classes, homework helpers, storytime sessions…the list seems endless.

Ms Elena has transformed the library service of Orange Walk into one of the most impressive services in the country, and she has done it almost single-handedly.  She considers the greatest pleasure of her job to be reaching out and helping various children who struggle with reading and communication skills; one of her most memorable occasions was witnessing a formerly-illiterate child get enthralled in a book to the extent of wanting to tell her all about it.  People need only look at the children’s enthusiasm and enjoyment to appreciate the extent to which Ms Elena has transformed those children’s lives and filled their futures with potential.

Ms Elena is a marvellous example of someone who is truly and aptly suited to her profession.  And having been a working mother for so much of her family’s childhood, she appreciates that she was able to tend to her children’s homework needs while in the workplace, because they could sit and entertain themselves with a book after school.  So it seems Ms Elena’s time is always put to constructive use, and still somehow she manages to find time as a Red Cross volunteer, and during times of crises she is one of the first to rally provisions and support for victimised communities, delivering food packages and basic supplies to those hardest hit.

While Ms Elena has no immediate plans for the future, it seems that she aspires to eventually taking early retirement and being able to establish a facility for the town’s youth whereby school children could arrive for breakfast before school, and could then return to the house after school in order to receive help with homework and peer support.  Ms Elena believes that only through charitable giving such as this will those most in need of educational support – who are also usually those least able to pay for private tutoring – will in actual fact be given the opportunities otherwise unavailable to them.

Ms Elena is a remarkable member of the Orange Walk community, and yet she humbly passes on credit to people who have supported her along the way: Ms Joy Ysaguirre, of the National Library Service, the community of Orange Walk as a whole for allowing the library to become an integrated part of society, and last but not least to her family for supporting and enabling her to become what she is today: a remarkable nation builder of northern Belize.

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