Today I took a bus up the mountain 20 minutes to a school I will be working at every Friday. This school has 165 students and no specialized teachers. That means grade teachers teach English, Physical Education, Art, Family Development all sorts of things that they are not trained to teach. I met the director of this school a while back during a parade to show support for organic agriculture and conservation and after talking I asked if he would like any assistance with anything at his school. I don’t work on Fridays, I told him, so if you need anything, I’d be willing to take the bus up and help out. We decided that for now I was going to take over the English program for them, teachers would stay in class and practice their English skills with the students. Today was my first day. New students, new names, new games and what I expected to be the same apathetic approach to education. What I found today instead was a bunch of really well behaved and interested students. The mix at the school is very strange. The majority of the students are indigenous students, mostly Ngabe, and the Latinos that do live in this community and go to the school are the upper class families that own all of the coffee farms, the indigenous kids are the children of the workers that work on these farms. In my community there is a big difference between indigenous and latino. The kids tend to not mix, indigenous kids will keep to themselves and at times are even left out of classroom activities because they cannot keep up with the Spanish and have been left behind long ago. In the new community that isn’t the case, as much. When there are twenty students and only twenty students in the 5th grade, kids tend to be a little more flexible with their relationships and it made me smile to see this cultural interchange that the students didn’t even realize they were participating in.
Every Friday I will be heading up the mountain to teach 4th, 5th and 6th grade students, about sixty kids in total. Today we played games in class, we spoke more in one day than I’m sure they spoke in the last years of English class, and the best part of all, was that at the end of the day, every teacher in the school thanked me for coming. This has never happened to me in the community I live and work in daily. One of the funny things about development is that we channel our resources to some of the same communities year in and year out, we say things like sustainability and we talk about long term projects and I understand all that, but sometimes the places that have the constant support and money rolling in take all of the work for granted. I enjoy my community, but it is a lot different, from a volunteers perspective, being in a place where there have been different agencies from different countries for years, to going to a place that has never seen a gringo before except to buy land and build their giant farm and ignore the local citizens. I’m not trying to say Peace Corps or other agencies should focus on small community development or to forget about long term projects, but I am trying to showcase the really difficult part about development – we try to go to “forgotten” places (for lack of a better word) or maybe we go to places that we consider to have lacking resources but a high potential, but when we are there, working, we forget or leave behind or ignore places nearby that have just as many needs but not as high of a potential yield for project results. It isn’t easy, and I guess after all this rambling I want to make it clear that I’m lucky to have found another new opportunity, and that I wish volunteers like myself can take advantage of the beauty of really small, close knit communities and for maybe a few days during the week we can forget about all the frameworks and goals and the sustainability jargon and focus on what is really important – the relationships we make.
For today, it seems everything is in its right place. I sit on my back porch and can barely see 30 feet as a cloud has seemed to stop right over my little pueblo, so I suppose I’ll let you all go, make my tea, open my book and let the soft mist fall all over me until the morning comes.
xo
panamá, wisconsin 