The school has been coming to San José del Boquerón for roughly three decades. Its Solidarity Learning in Service programme is thirty-four years old, older than any pupil now enrolled in it. But the building is new: the first adobe house went up only last year. Vice-principal Cecilia Barrio and coordinator Sebastián Nicoli run the trips, with architect Carolina Tobar of the AtelierM studio on site to make sure the walls hold.
Among the students this year were Sofía Audisio, Bautista Álvarez Passaro, Lucía Oroquieta and Juan Ignacio Muñoz. They did not arrive with expertise. The technique that keeps an adobe wall from dissolving in the rain — a coat of linseed oil, worked in by hand — came from a local elder who had done it all his life and stood with them until they had it right.
The municipality is enormous and nearly empty: about sixty kilometres by sixty, its people scattered across roughly ninety-six hamlets. San José del Boquerón itself counts 1,399 inhabitants. Families live from the forest, from goats and cattle, from beekeeping, from leather and weaving. The land they live on is contested; buyers press in from the edges, and a campesino organisation formed two decades ago to hold the line.
The houses go to named people. Enzo and María received one, with their son Santino, who is eleven. Enzo's father, Domingo, works the olive harvest. In the town, Mary Quadri, eighty years old, has taught for more than fifty years — long enough to have taught the parents of the children the students meet.
No ministry pays for this. The money comes from solidarity dinners and collections passed around the school community in Boulogne, a thousand kilometres and an entire economy away from the Salado.
Two houses stand. Twenty-three communities remain.