Totonicapán, Guatemala, Aug 18, 2021 / 15:05 pm
María Quiró lives with her three sons and four daughters in Totonicapán, in the Western Highlands of Guatemala. Her husband migrated to the U.S. a few years ago to find employment, and she has been without work for more than a year because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Without a steady income, Quiró quickly ran out of money and was not able to feed her children.
“People monopolized all the grain, and the corn and beans ran out, the prices rose, and every day it was more challenging,” Quiró said. “My children asked me for bread, and I had nothing to give them.”
In a normal year, Quiró’s children would eat a meal at school as part of Catholic Relief Services’ (CRS) Learning for Life Project, supplied in part by the United States Department of Agriculture’s McGovern-Dole International Food for Education and Child Nutrition Program.
The McGovern-Dole Program provides U.S. agricultural commodities, such as rice, corn, and beans, to support school feeding projects around the world. Many families in the Totonicapán department depend on government-supported school feeding programs, which provide a complete meal for every child each day of the week.