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
