PROBIGUA founder, Rigoberto Zamora Charuc came from Yepocapa, Chimaltenango a small town located high on Volcán Fuego in Guatemala where only coffee beans grow in the dense jungle foliage.  One of seven children, Rigoberto expected to follow in his father’s footsteps picking coffee beans and cutting sugar cane.  A life of hard manual labor was the certain future for a poor Mayan boy without an education. 

But then fate intervened as fate is known to do.  Rigo received a scholarship from an anonymous American donor to attend school at the San José Seminary in Sololá in the late 1970s.  In the seminary, Rigo was exposed to many new thoughts and attitudes.  When he left San José to attend university, two ideas left with him.  The first was that access to education is a basic human right.  The second was that the American “can-do” spirit (as demonstrated by the U.S. priests in his seminary) can accomplish so much.

So in 1992, Rigo took this can-do spirit and the love of learning and returned home to create the first library in Yepocapa in his parents’ living room with a handful of books.  From this tiny library, he created PROBIGUA to help the children of Guatemala as he had been helped, by establishing libraries in rural villages where there once were few—or no—books.  “I received everything [because I had the opportunity of an education].  I had to give it back to the people.” Rigo explains. 

Rigo is motivated to create a nationwide network of libraries because he believes the educational system in Guatemala is deficient. “Children are taught to read and write in school but not to analyze.” Rigo says, “Children need to be able to learn what other people are doing, what other people are thinking in the world around them. Reading a variety of books helps them explore and analyze different cultures, ideas and ways of thinking.” 

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