For those in poorer countries, basic formal education is paramount, says the author, drawing on her experience at the charity she set up in rural Paraguay after leaving The Tablet 20 years ago

When I left my job on The Tablet nearly 20 years ago and went to live in Paraguay, I did not go to teach, but to learn, fired by the “option for the poor” theology. But I soon got swallowed up in teaching, partly because everyone wants to learn English, believing (probably rightly) that that is the best way to advance in the world, and partly because the charity that evolved out of my time in Paraguay is devoted to education. And so I began a new stage in my life, learning from teaching.

I called the charity that I founded the Santa Maria Education Fund, because it operates in the small rural town of Santa María de Fe, Misiones, and it is registered as a charity in the UK. It has developed four main project areas: scholarships to university for the brightest students from poor homes; a free technical institute for a wider spread of students who have completed their secondary education; an English course that enables our pupils to pass Cambridge Assessment examinations; and music classes to help young people rediscover the great musical heritage of our town when it was a Jesuit-Guaraní mission in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, instead of the remote backwater it became after the expulsion of the Jesuits.