Teaching and Learning in the Chaco

Last week I had the privilege of accompanying the third year FEISA students on a trip to various communities in the remote and inhospitable Chaco region of Paraguay. The purpose of this yearly outing is to give the students who are about to graduate the opportunity to see different kinds of educational projects being run in indigenous and Mennonite communities. Most of them only have experience of city life, so it can be very valuable indeed to show them the reality of life in indigenous areas as well as the very different way the Mennonites organise their communities.

We left Asunción on Tuesday at 6am on a bus which promised a working toilet, tv and dvd player. There was much disappointment when it was discovered that neither the toilet, the tv nor the dvd player worked properly. And that was before we'd even left the city! Later that morning, we arrived at a community boarding school called Pai Puku, where 500 children live and learn from February to November every year. They are the sons and daughters of parents who have to leave their homes to find work and this gives them an education they would not otherwise have access to. The school is run by the Catholic Church and funded, in part, from Belgium, where the founding priest came from. (He was named Pai Puku by the locals - Pai meaning priest and Puku meaning tall in Guaraní) It is an amazing place, in a remote area, with little access to anything. The children are involved in all the cleaning, washing, ironing, bread-making, gardening, carpentry that make sure the community runs smoothly. They are amazingly self-sufficient and independent. The girls and boys are taught life-skills along with regular lessons, so that when it comes time for them to leave they have at least some of the tools they need in order to make a go of life. I was very inspired!

Girls at the laundry sinks in Pai Puku.

Later that afternoon, we arrived at an indigenous community a long way from the tarmac'd road, called Dos Palmas, or Two Palms (though there wasn't even one palm to be seen!) This is one of the communities FEISA is helping this year through the pre-school training programme the college runs. We arrived at 3pm and it was 38º in the shade. Some of the students had been designated the task of painting murals on the pre-school classroom walls and the rest had organised games for the children outside. In the heat. I went between the two groups, taking photos, for a time. The children and their mothers thoroughly enjoyed the games and the painters were doing a really great job, though it was quite painstaking at times. After a while I really couldn't handle the heat outside any longer and stayed inside with the painters. I inevitably got roped in to help and am proud to say that the butterfly on the wall was painted by lil' old me! It was horribly hot and also extremely dusty, due to the severe drought that the Chaco experiences every year during the cooler (and drier) months between April and October.

Kids at Dos Palmas playing games.

Me and my butterfly!

Three hours after we arrived, much hotter and quite exhausted, we left Dos Palmas to head further north to a Mennonite town called Loma Plata. This is a community with a population of about 5,000, very efficiently run by people whose ancestry comes from Germany, via Canada, for the most part. They speak German and often English, but many don't speak Spanish at all. On Tuesday night we stayed with friends and family of one of our students who comes from the town. They looked after us very well and I enjoyed meeting new people I could talk to in English!

The following morning we visited an indigenous school which is part of a Mennonite-run project to train indigenous mothers to teach pre-school aged children. The project provides the resources and the training, but the community has to provide a committed teacher and food for the children, which is cooked over an open fire every morning. The children are taught in their own language (in this case Enxet) and we watched as they sang songs, recited poems, played games, practised the alphabet and did an art activity which involved glue! The wonderful thing about seeing this school was the obvious love the teacher and her helper exhibited towards the children and their joy in what they do, which was transmitted to the children and all who were watching that day.

Indigenous teacher and kids, marking attendance, using a wonderfully creative system!

We then went to the resource centre for this project and one of the co-ordinators explained to our students how the project is run and some of the difficulties they encounter. This was also very inspiring for me. It is just great to see people who are relatively well-off taking an interest in improving the opportunities of those near them who don't have the same access to resources and training. Glory be to God!

Indigenous kids brushing their teeth after eating.

After a good lunch in Loma Plata we went to visit a nursery school, run by the local council for the town's residents. It was now 42º in the shade! We were very excited to see one of FEISA's 2007 graduates working there and obviously enjoying it. The education system in the Mennonite community was much more like the kind of thing our girls are used to in schools in Asunción than the indigenous communities; it was easy to see the similarities there. After that we had the privilege of visiting an education centre for adults with learning disabilities. We saw the men doing woodwork and the women doing embroidery, all of which things were for a purpose, not just to keep the folk occupied. There was a little shop where you could buy the finished products and we later saw some items from there for sale in the town bookshop. Once again I was very inspired by the work going on there. I worked for two years with mentally handicapped adults in the UK and none of them did anything approaching as productive as these people were doing. I don't know how representative my experience was of what goes on with this sector of society in the UK, but having seen these Mennonite folk with disabilities actually working with their hands and producing something at the end of it, I feel it's a shame there isn't more of that at home. It gives them a purpose to their lives that they don't have if all they do is activities such as art, crafts, games, swimming etc. We were created to work and surely people with learning disabilities have that same innate need.

After a visit to the library and bookshop in Loma Plata, we started for home. On our way back south towards Asunción the countryside was noticeably greener than it had been the previous day. There had been torrential rain in Asunción that morning, we'd heard, and the lower part of the Chaco had obviously benefited too.

It was very encouraging to hear what the students had gained from the experience. They all said they had been impacted by the different things they saw. Some were affected by the school at Pai Puku. Others were touched by the joy on the faces of the children at Dos Palmas when they were playing games. One girl said she was very impressed with the way the Mennonites took care of the less-fortunate people in their community. It was certainly a memorable experience for everyone, including me.

Some of the students having fun on the journey home.

I arrived back in my flat at 10pm on the Wednesday. Extremely tired, hot and in desperate need of a shower!

© Fiona L Cooper 2008

Friendship

Here is a tribute to three beautiful women who have blessed me with their friendship over the past three years and who are all heading in new directions very soon. Alyssa, Kelly and Stacy, this is for you:

Friendship is the warmth of a long hug.

Friendship is long conversations about God and life.

Friendship is praying together.

Friendship is the challenge of a new way of understanding the Bible.

Friendship is supporting each other even when you don't understand each other.

Friendship is a phone call just to see how you're doing.

Friendship is the knowledge that someone's on your side.

Friendship is shared laughter.

Friendship is shared tears.

Friendship is delighting in each other's gifts.

Friendship is being quick to forgive and slow to take offence.

Friendship is shared meals.

Friendship is deep conversations that change your perspective on life.

Friendship is shared silence.

Friendship is the beauty of a smile on a familiar face.

Friendship is knowing what the other person is thinking before they've said anything.

Friendship is always being amazed at just how beautiful/intelligent/godly/selfless the other person is.

Friendship is walking the path of life together.

Friendship is joy, grace and love in human form.

Friendship is the best thing about this life.



Thank you Alyssa
Thank you Kelly
Thank you Stacy

for showing me what friendship can be. I love you and will miss you enormously.

© Fiona L Cooper 2008

Beautiful Buenos Aires

I got back yesterday at about 9am from a crazy weekend in the capital of Argentina with a group of SIM-Paraguay friends. Three of the group are energetic types who had decided to run the BA marathon, which took place on Sunday. The rest of us went to give them encouragement, and to see a different part of the continent while we were at it.

The weekend was crazy for many, many reasons, the first being that we took an overnight bus both ways, leaving Asunción on Friday afternoon and returning the same way on Tuesday morning. It's definitely an economical way of doing it, but exhausting too!

We stayed in a fab hotel in a lovely part of the city, near a park and surrounded by beautiful old buildings. The people were so friendly and helpful and the hotel itself was full of character. The city reminded me so much of Spain. The architecture, the cafés, the atmosphere in general... it is SO different from Asunción. It made me realise just how poor Paraguay is in comparison with its neighbour.

The five of us who weren't running spent the marathon day trying to catch up with those who were running! The four of us who hadn't accompanied the runners missed the start, due to the fact that we hadn't realised just how far away it was, added to the fact that all the surrounding roads were closed, of course. Oops. Then we had to find the friend who had gone with the runners, but by the time we found how to get to the meeting point we'd arranged, the meeting point had been removed!!! (we had said we'd see her at Km 1, but of course all the runners had already passed the marker so it had been taken down!) By the time we found our friend (who was walking with a crutch because of a recent knee replacement) we all needed a bit of a rest, so we sat down in the café area of a service station nearby. Oh, and it was raining. And we had the care of one of the runners' 11 month-old. So in between keeping the baby dry and fed and amused and changed, and dealing with the fact that we'd missed seeing the race begin, things were quite tense at times!

At this point, we were in the middle of nowhere on the outskirts of BA and wanted to get to the centre of town to watch the race go by. We weren't quite sure how we were going to do that, but in the end we realised we didn't have time to get to the mid-way point where we had hoped to cheer them on. There was much discussion about what to do instead. You can imagine, five women, all with a different idea! We finally decided that it would be best if we just went to the end of the race, but then there was the issue of how to get there. The marathon didn't do any kind of loop, it was pretty much from one end of the city to the other, neither of which parts were on our tourist map. So it was interesting, to put it mildly, five foreigners (including one on a crutch) and a baby, making our way across this vast and totally unknown city. We managed to navegate buses, underground metro and taxis to finally arrive in the area where the race would end, but then it turned out that we had to walk nearly three miles, along the route of the marathon, before arriving at the finish line! By the time we made it, the sun had come out and was blazing down on the spectators, and we were knackered! Our friend with the crutch had to stop before the end because she was struggling so much, though that meant that the runners had someone to cheer them on before they finished. We didn't have to wait too long at the finish line before our running friends turned up, and there was much jubilation at their arrival - we were all very proud of them for the immense amount of effort and determination which had got them there. In the end it was definitely worth all the hassle to see them arrive and share in their joy.



So we managed to see parts of the city tourists wouldn't normally get to experience and it was certainly an adventure! Particularly for those who come from rural parts of the US, where there is no public transport to speak of. Each new mode of transport was a challenge, in its own way!

On the way back, we split into two groups - the three runners and our friend with the crutch went all the way back in a taxi, while the rest of us decided we'd save a bit of money and go by train and underground. Only we were prevented from using the underground because of an accident so we had to get a bus - much more scary because it's not nearly as easy to know when you need to get off! Still, we made it, thanks be to God, without any problem. By the time we got back to the hotel, we were probably almost as exhausted as the marathon runners were!

I was desperate for a shower after all that, but decided to put it off and take advantage of the late afternoon sun and go take some photos in the nearby park:


I really enjoyed just spending some time on my own; taking photos, wandering aimlessly in the beauty of the greenery and then sitting for a while, just watching people going by.

One huge difference between Asunción and Buenos Aires is that I did not feel at all as though I 'stuck out' - there were people of all kinds of shapes, sizes and skin tone, so I really felt as though I blended in as much as any of them. In Paraguay, I'm often very aware of how different I look than the average Paraguayan, and that can be quite an uncomfortable feeling. I also found that I felt much more 'at home' in the sense that I knew much more what was expected of me - the culture seemed to be much more familiar to me than the Paraguayan one. I don't know whether this was because of its resemblance to Spain or just because it's a very big city and perhaps all big cities have certain things in common...

All in all, I adored being there and hope to go back some day. If you want to see more photos, go to my Picasa album:

Buenos Aires October 08

© Fiona L Cooper 2008

The Shack, a follow-up story

I read this novel by William P. Young a couple of months ago and was blown away by the freshness of a new vision of God and Christianity that I found there. I know it has caused A LOT of controversy, but I loved it. I won't go as far as saying everyone should read it: If you don't want to, that's fine. However, please don't criticise the book unless you've actually read it. There's nothing worse than folk who form opinions based on other people's opinions, rather than looking out the facts for themselves.

I found the author's website today and on it was this conversation, between God (a female named Papa) and himself, titled "The Beauty of Ambiguity" which I loved too:

I am back in the warmth of the cabin, watching through the window as early spring rains drench the surrounding landscape, low hanging clouds darkening the day. A late snow is coming, but not quite yet. Even though the fire crackles and snaps as it eats through its main course, I still snuggle deeper into the heaviness of the quilt that Papa left for me. She is soon back with a cup of tea, something that smells of wood and mint and a hint of jasmine. I grin. She knows me best, and whatever it is that she is handing me, I trust.

“Rough week, eh?” she asks, as if she doesn’t already know.

I take a sip. It’s very hot, just the way I like it, and the flavor is perfect for the dreary day and for my mood. I swallow the warmth and can feel it fall inside and reach fingers of comfort into even the hidden places.

“Yeah,” I respond.

“Want to talk about it?” she coaxes, sitting down with her own cup of something that I can smell is at least part coffee.

“Nope…and yes.” I don’t really know where to start and she’s patient. I love just being with Papa, knowing that he knows, even before I say anything and yet respectful as she waits. I still don’t know where to start and finally she helps me with a little verbal push.

“The book seems to be doing well?” I look up and she is grinning. Papa is talking about The Shack, the little fiction story that I wrote for my children.

“Not because of anything I’m doing,” I grunt. “It’s doing it all on its own.”

“Nothing or no one does anything on its own, not even me.” The statement makes me smile and I am comforted in the knowledge that Jesus and Sarayu are also present though unseen. Her observation is one of those invitations to go deeper, but I decline and go another direction.

read the rest

© Fiona L Cooper 2008

warm the cockles of your heart

with a story about... ice!

You know how on a hot summer's day there's nothing better than an iced drink? Well here in Paraguay, there are lots of hot days. One of the ways Paraguayans keep cool is by drinking an ice-cold "tea" made with a native herb. The drink is called terere (pronounced teyreyrey, sort of!) and is drunk by first filling a wooden beaker with the herb, pouring iced water from a thermos flask onto the herb and then drinking through a metal straw. It's extremely refreshing, it's usually shared with friends and it contains some kind of stimulant so keeps you awake during the drowsy heat.

It's important to have access to ice so that there's a ready supply of ice-cold water for the terere. Today on the news was a short item about a 10 year old girl who has been selling the ice to go in the thermos flasks. In Paraguay, the biggest sector of the economy is driven by informal trade, most of which happens on the street. So this girl has her cool-box full of cylinders of ice for sale, under a tree.

However, there's a huge difference between her and most street-sellers in that she doesn't actually stay there to take the money and hand out the ice. There's a little notice stuck on the tree, saying that each cylinder of ice is 500 Guaranies (about 6p) and there's a padlocked tin with a hole in the lid to put your money in. She started this as an experiment because she felt that people were more honest than they are often given credit for. So she decided to see how honest her fellow Paraguayans really are. How many people would take the ice without paying?

Well, it turns out that, much to the amazement of the reporter, everyone has been extremely honest in paying for what they take. In a world of cynicism and distrust, it's really wonderful to hear that there really are plenty of honest people out there.



© Fiona L Cooper 2008

Teacher Training

Did you know that for every time you say something critical to a child, you need to say six positive things to counteract the bad feeling caused by that one negative comment? I found it very useful when I was told that during my own teacher training and I tried to put it into practice, though I must admit to never making it to that ratio. When you think about it, though, even as adults we feel criticism very strongly but quickly forget the praise we're given. It's a very helpful idea to bear in mind when you're teaching because it forces you to make the effort to say positive things, when it's not the most natural thing to do. And that can make teaching a more rewarding experience, because you are focusing on the positive things more, so you feel better about your work.

Perhaps it's a principle we should put into practice in our everyday lives. I know I tend to focus on the negative in every situation and, although I perhaps don't do a lot of verbal criticising of people, neither do I say a lot that's positive. In fact, this week, as I've visited students on teaching practice to assess them, I know I haven't followed my own advice. Oh, sure I've said positive things about their lessons - I always start with the positive - but then I move on to the "areas for improvement" and tend to linger there, giving advice about how they could improve etc. I fear there was one girl who was a bit disheartened at the end of our feedback time. So next time, I'm going to try to end on a positive note.

I have loved watching the students teach; for the most part they have done very well. It's been a particular joy to see those who I also observed last year, and how they've progressed. I find it very fulfilling to have such a direct impact on their training. I remember the teaching practice parts of my training as being the times when I learnt most about teaching. It's particularly useful when you get feedback about how you're doing so that you can improve, even in the next lesson.

So I hope that my own efforts (in sometimes stumbling Spanish) will have an overall positive effect on the students I observe. I would love for them to learn something from me which they can then put into practice and so can see for themselves how much they are improving.

(photo: 3rd year student Marisa on teaching practice)

© Fiona L Cooper 2008