Photo: Boy with notebook, Ccotatóclla

Written Thursday, July 22
What impact can our small project have at the school? In a ten-day period, class has been cancelled for the kindergarten 3 days so that the kindergarten teacher could attend two trainings and a festival. The 3rd-4th grade teacher has been out sick seven days, with no sub to be found, so Martin and I each spent a day teaching her class. The 1st-2nd grade teacher took two days off (for training and festival.) The director, who teaches the 5th-6th grade class, was only out one day (for the festival) but frankly her instruction left the most to be desired; she tends to write potentially helpful things on the board with no explanation or integration; the kids’ homework makes no sense and gets nothing but a rubber stamp.
This high level of instability leads to choppy instruction, and our project was already going to be very short-term even if we had had ten complete days to realize it with the help of fully engaged teachers.
Still, we have piloted our first hands-on, Quechua language curriculum kit, and I think we have accomplished a couple of important things for teachers and kids.
The most important thing is, I persuaded the youngest teacher to leave the teacher’s compound and have supper with the family that is hosting me. The teacher and my comadre chatted in Quechua for hours about everything from school to personal life. Afterwards she told me she realized that making connections with the townsfolk could really transform her work. Too often, teachers who come in from the outside stick to themselves and see the parents as adversaries. The most successful native language instructor in the area has shown that when teachers cultivate alliances with community members, everyone benefits.
We took the youngest teacher out walking in the mountains and shared many meals together. I videotaped a model class with Martin leading activities, and then videotaped the youngest teacher so she could critique her own work, which she watched with great interest.
The second most important thing is, we spent four intensive days in two of the classrooms, engaging kids in outdoor experiences which they then wrote and read about in Quechua, in a variety of modes (lists of things found, words to describe the feeling and smell of the things when hidden from sight; numbers, dimensions and dates, stories made up by groups and individuals on the spot.) One day was simply spent listening to kids read aloud from their journals and from books in their native language. I showed the kids a video of kids from the next town over reading aloud from books (where native language education is thriving) wearing their traditional clothing as they do for the three days per week when instruction is in Quechua. The kids in Ccotatóclla were dying to show that they, too, can read in Quechua, and they were dying to get their hands on books in their native language, which they borrowed, read cover-to-cover and returned. Martin and I brought along a dozen books for them, but more importantly we told the youngest teacher how she can get more from the Ministry of Education.
Tomorrow is the closing celebration of our project and we have invited children to come with their parents, dressed in traditional clothing, to read from their journals and books and celebrate our project together, and to be photographed and videotaped.

Photo: Alejandro Galiano, Martin Castillo, Ramiro Zúñiga

On Wednsday, right in the middle of our final week of the project, the 1st-2nd grade teacher (Margarita) was told she needed to attend a day-long training at a school in the nearby town of Kucya. She invited me to come along.
Martin had taken Margarita and me to a mountaintop Monday and pointed out which direction we would need to hike in order to reach Kucya. She and I started out just after dawn, made our way through the fields, orienting ourselves toward a house used for radio transmission on one of the mountain tops. We knew we were supposed to go to the north of that mountain and down around the south side of another mountain to get to Kucya. We weren’t on any trail for parts of the trek but gradually found our way down to Kucya and confirmed with schoolchildren hiking up the pass that we were heading in the right direction.
The hike itself was pure joy for me as several of my friends have told me many stories of wandering through these Andes as itinerant teachers. I always wanted to do it, and we did it!
The day was also a tremendous boost for my morale. I was included in a group of about 15 novice rural teachers as we watched a local master of native language instruction work in a first grade class for a full day. There were periods of time for questions and answers, reflection, debate, but mostly we just watched this master with his class.
The school is in an especially arid place and has no electricity. I recognized the master teacher (Alejandro Galiano) as someone I had met three years ago as part of a Quechua-language curriculum design group. The really dedicated, hardcore teachers all tend to know each other and support each other in various groups and associations. Alejandro invited the novice teachers to join these groups; he made it clear that there is no closed circle and that new energy is needed.
The first outstanding things about this teacher is, he speaks Quechua in class, insists on wearing traditional dress, carries a bag of coca with him everywhere, offers alcohol to the mountain gods for their protection, sleeps in the country folks’ homes and knows them all as friends and allies. Even the most cynical townspeople around the region speak of him with great respect.
The second outstanding thing about him is, he works day and night on every lesson he teaches, and clearly adores the kids. He does not raise his voice or humiliate children or adults. Young people in Kucya have begun to flock to him and his colleagues, begging to learn to read and write in Quechua, because they recognize that what they speak is in mixture of Quechua and Spanish. Elders in town are honored as guests and sages in his classes and are engaged in recuperating their language and culture for the next generation. Alejandro has teamed up with a quena player (reed flute player) and there is frequent music and dance in his class.
All schools in the Andes seem to start with Catholic prayers and recitations of national creeds; Alejandro’s class includes a morning ritual of holding up three coca leaves and asking the local mountain gods and Pacha Mama (Mother Earth) for assistance in being good people and good students.
Alejandro has been teaching for eight years; he pursues 80% of his instruction in Quechua and 20% in Spanish. His students have done well on national tests and have gone onto excel in professional and university settings. For this reason he has been identified by the Ministry of Education as a master teacher and now is charged with visiting schools in his region to improve native language instruction.
A humorous note…one of Alejandro’s practices has been to engage local artesans in teaching their specialties to children, and he wanted the kids and their families to sell their products to tourists passing by in order to raise funds for the school. Since the community is extremely arid and poor with no tourist attractions to speak of, he and some friends looked closely at ancient ch’ullpas (funerary towers) in the neighboring town of Ninamarca and decided to build some replicas themselves of local materials. They built the ch’ullpas in a matter of several evenings on a hillside and began selling their weavings and crafts projects to tourists passing through.
The National Institute of Culture (INC) was horrified; the ch’ullpas came out so authentic-looking that Alejandro and friends were first accused of having stolen them and rebuilt them on a different site. They were called to a series of meetings to defend themselves and were ultimately instructed to destroy the ch’ullpa replicas or face jail time. Meanwhile, the Marriott Hotel chain is apparently destroying actual Inca structures in the center of Cusco in order to build a monster tourist trap – no trouble from the INC there.
I took some nice photos of Alejandro’s ch’ullpas…every time they are told to destroy them, they call out the press and nothing seems to happen.
Alejandro wanted to see for himself what was going on at the school in Ccotatóclla, so we invited him to attend our project’s closing ceremony on Friday.

Ch’ullpa replicas built by Kucya townsfolk to attract tourists

Children dig hole for trash

Written Tuesday, July 20

When I first proposed a natural science project to the teachers at Ccotatóclla, I had some very specific hopes for what the children would be learning. I proposed that each small group lay out a square in the schoolyard, to be marked with stones and wool yarn (easily found here) so that they could develop hypotheses about what lives there, observe everything they found within the square closely, take notes on it in their own language, later to be discussed as a group and connected orally and in writing with local wisdom, and hopefully reinforce and move the local wisdom forward in real time. That is the heart of the scientific method, which we also discussed explicitly in their own language .
I didn’t conceive of this as an outsider’s gift or a case of enlightenment coming to those in the dark. I was thinking of it as a celebration of local knowledge and life. As I presented the idea to various indigenous curriculum designers, each had their own take on the project – the artist, Jaime, for example, thought we should ask local sages about wild animals and domesticated animals – he noted that too often if an animal is wild we see it as a nuisance and do not perceive its role in the spiritual order of things, something that an elder would be more aware of.
When I presented the idea to the local schoolteachers, I cringed when one of them said she would like to add a school cleanup day to these ‘pure’ science and indigenous spiritual activities. When this teacher heard talk of the schoolyard she connected it with her impression of the local people’s ignorance about personal hygiene and waste disposal. She asked me to buy trash cans for the school. She proposed that we make home visits to local farms and instruct people on how to improve their lives. This nearly missionary attitude was exactly what I wanted to avoid. I believe that the most able and alert of the farmers are better qualified than outsiders to consider in what ways their activities are connected to their health.
Nevertheless, there are ways in which local farmers are unprepared to deal with the encroaching industrial world. Pesticides arrive in metal canisters labeled only in Chinese. Things that people buy are increasingly wrapped in plastic bags and containers, which get thrown on the ground just as their organic waste has been dealt with for millenia. There is no public recycling program in Peru’s cities, let alone in the countryside.
I asked my co-worker Martin to address the teachers on the issue of respecting local knowledge and keeping an indigenous Andean perspective rather than adopting a ‘save Mother Earth from the locals’ attitude, or as my friend Hipólito put it, an ‘all Indians are dirty and need to be taught cleanliness’ attitude.
We set Monday as cleanup day and most of the children arrived with plastic bags, rakes and picks. We labeled half of the trash cans ‘plastic’ and half ‘non-plastic’ waste with the idea that we would bury plastics separately. Maybe someday it could be recycled. The rest of the waste would break down. Some of the bigger kids dug two huge holes with Martin in the back, and the rest of us fanned out, picked up trash and dumped it next to the holes. One of the teachers decided to burn piles of eucalyptus leaves in the area where most of the children go to the bathroom. The school has no working outhouses for the children, a political issue which the teachers blame on the parents and the parents blame alternatively on the teachers or on townspeople who have no children.
At the end of the schoolyard is a house where parents take turns preparing hot cereals and soups for school breakfast and lunch. We found lots of tin cans dumped behind this cooking house (right next to the kindergarten. The rest was mostly plastic wrappers and bags, with occasional papers. It took all day, and we had a potato roast at the end, insisting that kids wash their hands with soap. Although some of the kids insisted on tattling if others seemed to be slacking, most kids gave it their all.
Afterwards the teachers and Martin and I had a long lunch, and then Martin took two of us up to a mountaintop to muse about the ancestors and the voices of mountains and trees.

Just so you know, here is the bathroom situation in the city and countryside of Cusco.
in the city, you can often find houses with running water and toilets, although toilet seats are not so common.
The Regional Department of Education does not have a bathroom with toilets; it has a room with stalls with holes in the floor. That is in the center of the city.
In the countryside, most houses have outhouses, and even farms now have outhouses, which people don’t bother with when urinating, I am told. I have never seen anyone but myself enter the outhouse at the farm I am staying at.
The school has running water for the teachers and an outhouse with holes in the floor. The children have two non-functioning outhouses and so when we went out in the schoolyard for our experiment, we had to avoid areas with extensive human waste.
Ta da.

I did lose my teacher friends in the crowds in Paucartambo, around midnight. I was feeling a little nauseous, so I left the crowd and went to sit on a step just a block away. Two hours later, I could not find my friends.
I wandered the streets but found no rooms available in hostels or hotels. Took a cup of tea in a cafe, and asked the people if they knew where I could find a room. No rooms, they said. I noticed their mattress rolled up on the floor, explained I had lost my group and wondered if they could rent me a piece of their blanket. ‘There are too many of us’ they said. Finally, as I put my head down on the table one of them said, they thought they knew where I could lie down for the night. They led me to their father’s house and took me up to a room where I lay on a mattress on the floor for the night, complete with coat, hat and shoes because of the cold.
In the morning, a young woman in the next room greeted me and said, ‘I didn’t even hear you come in!’
She didn’t even want to charge me for staying the night, but asked me lots of questions about my work. She just finished a degree in education and wanted to know how to start a non-profit organization. I told her I thought the best way was to work in one and see how it works.
I did find my friends again eventually in the plaza, but lost them in the afternoon and made my way back to Cusco alone on a bus.
It was nice to sleep in a bed with sheets at Mary Carmen’s house, and she even gave me a hot water bottle for my sore muscles.

Thursday was the entrada of the festival of the Virgin Little Mother Carmen in Paucartambo. Since this is a festival attended by thousands of tourists and described on the web, I will limit my experiences to brief observations and religious musings.
Paucartambo is a little town on the banks of a big river running through the high mountains. There is a bridge over the river, built in the colonial era.
Groups of men, groups of women, and some mixed groups dress in elaborate costumes representing and making fun of the Spaniards, African slaves, indigenous people and a handful of other characters. They have bands with traditional and modern brass instruments, songs with two part harmonies, and complex dances which they parade through the streets in costume (and later again in street clothes, without masks.)
Thursday night they all parade to the Catholic church to present their songs and dances to the Virgin which sits in the church; a lovely white-skinned porcelain doll dressed in what looks like a wedding dress and surrounded by flowers and other dolls. Nested in the walls of the church are other white-skinned statues representing various saints and religious figures, many of whom seemed to me to exude a pathos I could not help linking to the homesickness of the Spanish priests who brought them there.
While we were outside watching the dances (til all hours of the morning) I asked one of the teachers about the Maranatha movement, an evangelical protestant group which had taken hold in the town of Ccotatocclla. From discussions with my compadres and their families, the chief difference with Catholicism was the prohibition of alcohol. Several people had commented to me, including a bus driver, that since the early 1990’s, fighting among the men and binge drinking had ceased and things had really gotten more prosperous and organized. However, the teacher I mentioned this to said that she had taught in the town since before the Maranatha arrived, and that they had also banned religious festivals such as the one in Paucartambo, which the townspeople used to celebrate. She said the people were told to destroy their idols and burn their costumes.
As we paraded on Friday around the town following the Virgin, I could not help remembering how my Bolivian host grandmother had told me of her sense of disillusionment with Catholicism, and her sense of liberation upon embracing Protestantism, all linked to her experience of being one of the chosen townswomen who had the responsibility of preparing the local Virgin for the annual parade. She was hoping the Virgin would be beautiful, made of beautiful and precious materials, and miraculous, but was greatly disappointed to find that the doll was actually only stuffed with straw. For her, Protestantism was a way to break with the false hopes of venerating that doll and embrace something deeper, more spiritual and hopefully more true.
On the other hand, I have friends who practice Andean religion, worshipping local mountain gods and finding liberation and a sense of identity and self-esteem in reclaiming the beliefs of their ancestors.
On still another hand (and I am running out of hands)I have a friend who once practiced that Andean religion and found it frightening. She found release from the fearful aspects of the local beliefs and warnings and curses, in a kind of enlightened Catholicism which respects her indigenous culture and language but has moved away from its religion.
So, much as in a Unitarian church, I see that what is one person’s liberation and release, is another person’s bondage and superstition.

Photo: Girl with notebook, Ccotatóclla

The first week of the curriculum project was a mixed bag, as can be expected. On our third day of implementation, I went to each classroom excited to work with the kids on describing things by putting their hands in the mystery box.
There were no teachers in the classroom, although the kids were there and eager to get to work. The youngest and most energetic teacher came by to ask me to teach class in her absence since the 2nd-3rd grade teacher was desperately ill and needed her attention.
I worked in her class for an hour and managed to get the kids to write words in Quechua about the five senses and illustrate them. We did not get as far as the mystery box. Many o f the kids asked me questions in Quechua I could not answer.
I moved on to the 4th and 5th grade class and we had a lively discussion about the five senses; we then had kids put their hands in the box and describe in Quechua what they could sense with their hands. All the descriptive words went on the board along with my instructions to write a paragraph describing the living things we had discovered in the schoolyard and described via the mystery box.
The kids dutifully copied down the words and the assignment, but not a single one wrote a paragraph. I asked if they knew what a paragraph was. No one answered.
I went on to the 2nd and 3rd grade class and again was greeted with great enthusiasm; the kids loved the mystery box game. Yet again, no one wrote any descriptive sentences at the end of the game.
None of the teachers taught their classes that day.
The sick teacher recovered and returned to Cusco with her baby. The other two teachers cancelled class for the next day due to a festival they wanted to attend. We got on a bus together and rode to a town two hours away for this special religious festival.
So much for our first week of the curriculum project.
Kids in rural schools are often ready to work, while their teachers are not. It is easy to blame the teachers, but is anyone actually paying attention to them or their professional and personal needs?
Sometimes this situation reminds me of educational settings I know intimately in the US.

Photo: Tupac Amaru being drawn and quartered on schoolhouse wall, symbol of indigenous resistance and survival, Ccotatóclla

Written Wednesday, July 14
This was the first week of trying out the curriculum kit idea in an Andean school. Monday night the teachers and I met with about thirty parents from the community (without the benefit of translation to Quechua from my partner Martin, who arrived half an hour after the meeting due to a landslide on the road.) I presented a slide show to emphasize the following ideas:
• Quechua language and culture is endangered; less and less children are learning it and more are abandoning it as they move from country to city
• Teachers in Cusco are working together to improve curriculum materials for the teaching of Quechua in the classroom and I am here to support them as well as learn about their language
• Teachers in Boston met 100 years ago to improve materials for teaching natural sciences and created the Boston Children’s Museum, which lends learning kits to schools
Then I showed slides of selected curriculum kits that the Boston Children’s Museum lends out, including their most popular one, produced hand in hand with the Wampanoag people of Massachusetts.
We talked about creating a kit for this town that would involve kids in hands-on learning in Quechua and asked parents to help by providing wool yarn, lending tools for a school clean-up day, supporting kids’ homework by telling them stories, riddles and songs in Quechua about local plant and animal life, and showing up on the last day in traditional dress to see their kids’ presentations and be videotaped sharing their folklore and local knowledge.
Parents were shy at first, then enthusiastic and agreed to participate.
This week’s activities centered on taking all of the kids outside in groups to mark a meter square somewhere in the schoolyard with yarn and then write down observations of everything in the square. We talked in Quechua about the scientific method and antecedents in their culture for systematic observation of living things. Kids located and identified all kinds of things in the schoolyard, ranging from sheep and horse dung, beetles, medicinal plants, weeds, flowers, pieces of paper and plastic, spiders, buried rags, tufts of animal hair…In a couple of classes kids learned to measure the perimeter of a square and rectangle. All of the classes read aloud from their journals and listened to their teachers read stories and recipes related to the local plant and animal life in Quechua.
Tomorrow we will have a mystery box in which we put objects they have located outside one by one into a box with a hole in it. One kid must put a hand inside the box and describe what they think is in there; the descriptive words will go on the whiteboard and then the whole class will write descriptive sentences or paragraphs about living things in their schoolyard.

Written July 9
It is very exciting here in the countryside today is my fourth day here and I am typing from the school office. My compadres have been very open and friendly with me and have made it clear that they want me to be comfortable and to feel like we are family. Later this afternoon I will meet with the teachers and propose a day-by-day schedule for our curriculum project to start next week. We will call a parent meeting for Monday night.
Yesterday Elena showed me her loom which is set up in the back yard and she is weaving a big heavy wool blanket from her own sheep’s wool which she dyed, spun and set up on the loom. The pattern is wide colored stripes, with large flowers and spiders. As she was weaving, I was sewing pockets on the apron I made for her. So we were just sitting there working in the morning sun and people started coming by to say hello and chat. One man was there for a long time, a man with a radio; it wasn’t until he left that I was formally introduced and I realized that he is the community president (umalliq.) I hadn’t met him last year because he was away; and Martin hadn’t met him this year because he was off campaigning for political office in the district. This morning they announced on the radio that he is an official candidate.
A few women passed through the yard in the morning on their way down to fields, I guess. Some stopped to chat.
The days have been so packed with new information that I am having trouble remembering conversations and who said what.
This morning Ignacio asked if I could start teaching English at the school and I said no, not during the day, it would supplant my main project, but I would be happy to give English lessons in the afternoon to anyone interested. He was really excited about that and said we should make it a kind of English-Quechua exchange. There is clearly a big interest in learning English here.
Yesterday with Elena and Ignacio we continued to talk about everything from household economics to birth control. They wanted to know what method we used (Ignacio translated ‘vasectomy’ in Quechua as cutting off a man’s balls, which we all chuckled about, although I was able to clarify…) Elena told me that she doesn’t want to have any more kids and her method is to “take care of herself” using the rhythm method, which she described.
I asked Elena what they do about personal hygiene and she said she puts sanitary napkins under a pile of hay and burns them, or throws them down the outhouse, which they put ashes in. She said her 10 year old daughter doesn’t know about menstruation yet and she won’t tell her until she gets her period. Tradition is to wait and tell a girl once her period starts. She says there is no reproductive education at school. She told me she has really painful periods with pain in her lower back and occasional pain in her ovaries (she thought she might have an infection in her ovary) I told her I have the same pain.
She wanted to know if North-American women feel pain during childbirth and I said yes, although some women have pain killers in the hospital. She had both of her births at home with no medical help but did have the help of her mother-in-law, with whom she gets along really well. Many women in the countryside give birth without medical help of any kind. She did have a baby girl who died or was born dead, a nice fat baby and I didn’t understand the reason for the death. She wants to have a boy but thinks it will never happen, and she won’t try again until her youngest, Yeny, is eight.
It was interesting, later during the course of the day I found out that Ignacio and Elena plan to move to Cusco in December so Sudit can go to secondary school there. Their fondest dream is for her to become a professional; perhaps a nurse; so she can maintain them in their old age. I asked about the farm and they said that she would not be able to sustain them on the farm. Everything is changing, they said, and you can’t make a living on the farm. There are increasing droughts and discussions of global warming on the radio. However, Ignacio says he prefers living in the country over the city and he says it is more relaxed.
They asked me about the Twin Towers (World Trade Center) and they were curious about how tall the buildings were, how many floors they had and what their destruction was all about. I gave a brief blow by blow account of the four planes that flew from Boston that day and explained it was a terrorist attack. Ignacio was surprised that the people who carried it out died in the attack and he wanted to know if the attack paralyzed the American economy or what it actually accomplished; I explained it was symbolic of hurting America’s economic power and also by hitting the Pentagon, the power to instigate wars. Ignacio said “your country has the most powerful military in the world, which makes you the most powerful” and I tried to explain the source of the US power; that the continent was colonized late by Europeans overflowing from their own lands and they found lots of land and resources in North America; and that people still come there for economic opportunity. He also wanted to know what the war in Iraq was all about and I explained it was a battle for control of the oil in the region, which US scientists initially discovered and then the locals wanted power over. It Is interesting to have these conversations where we can barely understand each other and we are speaking in enormous, sweeping over-simplifications and generalizations. Sometimes I wonder if the conversations are useful but in the course of the day and night it seems we are establishing something of a shared world view. They are explaining their world and their economics to me as well.
I feel they are sharing a lot of personal information about their family economics as well, and not just grilling me for my own. For example, I asked Elena if she goes to pasture her animals and she hung her head; first she said yes and then she said “I have no animals, only one sow.” It turns out that in order to buy the car a few years ago they sold all of their livestock. Then, the car failed as an investment because it was always needing repair and there was not enough income to cover the repairs, so Ignacio had to go in debt to a friend to pay for repairs, and now the car doesn’t even work. He says that his goal currently is to fix the car up and sell it. I asked if he would buy livestock again and he said it is expensive; a calf costs 500 soles; sheep are also expensive. They can’t tend animals in the city of Cusco. They had bought land there years ago and Ignacio built a home there for Sudit to have. They want to purchase land for each girl so each can have her own land and house. They want their girls to have a good education. Once the girls are through school they want to move back to their farm here in Ccotatócclla.
We talked a lot about the godparent relationship with them and with other people who stopped by. I explained that in my tradition I received godparents at baptism in my infancy. They were chosen by my parents. They didn’t have a financial relationship with me but rather a spiritual one and mostly just gave me a Bible and/or things to read, cards and gifts on my first communion etc.
Here, when I cut Yeny’s hair and gave her $20, they invested the money in a small sheep for Yeny (a hair growing animal to make up for her lost hair.) and they will sell the sheep at some point and keep investing the money on her behalf. Everyone wants to know if I will pay for Yeny’s education and bring her to live as my daughter in the states. I said I was doubtful about that but I will support her education in any ways I can.
The girls and I went out for a walk yesterday afternoon. We found some slate by the side of the road and Sudit showed me how she uses it to write people’s names. She also picked eucalyptus and another roadside plant to make tea, which we had this morning.
The telephone is run as a business from someone’s home down the road and doesn’t accept my phone card. A 10 minute call cost 13 soles (a little more than $4 US.) Ignacio’s cellphone can’t make outgoing calls unless he charges it in Cusco. The nearest other phone is in Huancarani, an hour away by bus.
There have been a lot of traffic accidents lately and I want to minimize travel on that road. Accidents due to vehicles losing their brakes, landslides and reckless driving.
My health has been good, even my stomach. I caught a cold that was going around the first hotel I stayed at but it already cleared up. Both my hosts have a virus with snot, headache and fever; so far I don’t have it.

Written July 7 and 8
I am suddenly back in Cusco for a day to attend education workshops with Martin.
An interesting moment in history has arrived: the Peruvian Ministry of Education has committed itself legally if not economically for the next seven years, to develop decentralized and native language education for all citizens (with support from UNICEF and the Canadian government.)
A small group of university educated indigenous leaders has been promoting the revitalization and respect of Andean religious, artistic and agricultural wisdom in schools. The prejudices and forces operating against this are palpable, and the official acknowledgement of this type of revitalization activity is quite unusual and seems fragile. I feel proud to be working closely with the indigenous educators who are moving so effectively within the various power structures to maintain a voice in their people’s education.
Here are some of the rituals that these teachers would like to have recognized and not stigmatized, but rather practiced at schools:
One ritual is the sharing of three coca leaves which one holds a special way and presents to a friend or blows over directly in four directions to the mountain gods. Then you chew the coca leaves and hold them in a pouch in your cheek while working.
It is typical to pour some of anything you are drinking on the ground for mother Earth as an offering.
Another ritual is the wathiya, the creation of an earth dome made of mud bricks left over from potato cultivation. Orient the door toward the wind so it will blow on the fire. Put sticks, leftover corn husks or any dried organic matter in there and light it on fire. Let it burn for about a half hour until the bricks are blackened and super hot. Throw in a lot of small potatoes and they sizzle loudly; quickly collapse the dome over the potatoes and break them up so no steam can escape. They can cook in 10-30 minutes. Then you uncover the pile and fish them out with your bare hands, peel and eat. Martin and I had a wathiya the first day in Ccotatoclla with my compadres, and the second day, another with the teachers.
When starting meals and conversations with strangers, people establish indigenous cultural/spiritual solidarity by telling ghost stories or stories of supernatural events as if they were recently and authentically experienced by the teller. I asked Martin if he takes the stories literally and he said no, they are metaphors, but the way people tell them, it would be hard for an outsider to discern that.
The hard life of the rural teacher
Many rural teachers are women with infants or toddlers in tow. One of our friend, Lourdes, had premature twins in December, and one of her twins is sickly. She keeps the sickly one with her in the classroom while she leaves the other healthier one with her mother in Cusco. The babies were in an incubator for two months. Yesterday the baby ruptured an eardrum during class, so the mother was anxious to leave for Cusco at the end of the schoolday at 1:30 pm. She had to wait for a 4:30 bus.
She, Martin and I set out on foot with our backpacks, bags and she with her baby on her back. We walked about twenty minutes down the hill to the bus, only to find several buses had passed by earlier. The only chance of getting to the city that night was to hop on the back of a potato truck and ride to the nearest big town to catch another bus. Martin and I jumped on to the bus only to find that the driver would not let our friend ride with her baby in the cab. She ended up having to hike back up to the school and stay the night, to take the next ride at dawn so her baby could see the doctor in the afternoon. She was back at work the next day… but explained to me she is on the verge of taking an unpaid leave because she can’t find a sub to take her place.
Imagine being a rural teacher: in addition to teaching class, you must also bring food for the week and cook your own meals, often while caring for your own infant. Sometimes food preparation involves getting water, although there is running water and an outhouse at this school behind the teacher’s quarters, which has a room with bed, electricity and gas burner for each teacher.
After the workshops in Cusco I headed back to the countryside without Martin.
Yesterday I got up at 4 am, bathed in a basin at Martin and Mary Carmen’s in Cusco, then Martin took me out to a taxi and I was at the San Jerónimo bus station by 5 am. I looked around for my friend, teacher Lourdes, who helped us last year with this research. She wasn’t there so I finally got on the bus that was going to the school at Mik’a (a half hour walk from Ccotatóclla) and I saved her a seat. Luckily she did make it and we had to ride separately but we got off at Mik’a and walked together up to the school. Her baby was crying on her back so halfway up we stopped outside a farm and she nursed her baby. A farm woman came out and asked if the baby was OK and she explained that the baby has an ear infection and had slept through her usual nighttime feeding, so had woken up too cranky to calm down.
Lourdes told me as we walked that it might be better for us to work at a different school because she is hoping to take a leave of absence at any moment and there are no arrangements for a sub; her two fellow teachers will have to be looking in on her class as well. The teacher who is the director of the school is only director because of seniority (she has tenure in a different district) and really hopes to retire by December. And the third teacher is just here on a yearly contract and it is her first year of teaching, although she is clearly the one with the most energy (and she herself is sick with an infection at the moment.)
I began to really doubt if it makes sense to work here at this school with so many internal obstacles among the teachers. They also clearly have a very weak relationship with the community, which was different last year when Lourdes was director.
On the other hand I have potential for a strong relationship with the community by living in one of the leaders’ homes and people have been stopping by to get to know me casually, morning and evening. The only alternative I see is to work at the school down the hill, which is much bigger. We shall see.