(Written on Wednesday, Nov 13 but just posting it today.)
With just ten days left until I return to Nuevo Cuscatlan for PST-II (a second round of training ending December 14), a rhythm hasn't particularly set in for me in Toreras, and I don't think it will for a while. Some days are full of activities—house visits, community meetings, social gatherings, and time spent at the school—while others are mostly devoid of structure. For instance, today Crisanto and I were supposed to meet at 9am with some officials who work for INSAFORP, a Salvadoran GO that offers free vocational training. It's now past noon and they haven't yet shown up at the house. There's still a chance they'll come—Salvadorans are admittedly not a punctual people—but tardando over three hours is uncharacteristic even in this culture. If they indeed don't come, I won't have anything on my agenda until 4pm, when I'll head down to the cancha to play soccer with some local guys (I am abysmal at soccer but they guys are painstakingly polite about it). In many Peace Corps sites I'd be able to fill these gaps in my day by heading to communal spaces—a comedor (informal restaurant), a church courtyard, or any other centrally-located place where people gather at all hours—to strike up conversations with locals and score some confianza points, but in my site no such spaces exist. This is largely a function of the geographical sparsity of Toreras' population, though I can't help but wonder if a centrally-located communal space did exist, if people would gather there in an if you build it, they will come fashion.
Contributing to the quietness in Toreras at the moment is that school is out for the year as of last week. The Salvadoran school year ends in early November and begins in early January, which is pretty logical if you ask me. At this point, there's some uncertainty about the fate of the Toreras' little school. I guess this as as good a segue as any to provide a brief overview of education in my site:
Toreras has a three-classroom, pabularia-through-sixth-grade school located centrally enough that few children need to walk more than an hour to arrive (this is a feat in my site). Currently it has 43 registered students (though only 20-25 regularly attend class) and two teachers. One teacher handles parbularia (essentially pre-K) through second grade, while the other (who doubles as the school director) teaches third through sixth grades (yes, this means the third and sixth grades, for example, are taught concurrently in the same classroom). The school day lasts from 8am to noon, though it sometimes doesn't start on time, as children consistently arrive late. Also, class is often cancelled, because the teachers consistently have mandatory Ministry of Education (MINED) meetings or trainings to attend. When only one of the teachers has a MINED commitment on a particular day, the other takes in that teacher's students and teaches all the kids at once. However, when both have commitments, they simply cancel school, as substitute teachers are non-existent in rural El Salvador. This happens far too often. In fact, since I've arrived in Toreras, school has been cancelled at least once every week, usually more. One week, class was cancelled three out of the five days. The cancellations contribute to the school's horrendous attendance rate, as students are regularly unsure whether they have class on any given morning, and the teachers have no way of efficiently communicating this information to the families.
Public schools in El Salvador have miniscule budgets, so aside from desks, chairs, whiteboards, whiteboard markers, and aging MINED-issued textbooks, the Toreras school has little in the way of instructional materials. Teachers often improvise classroom activities with discarded newspapers, which, with a little creativity, can make surprisingly compelling classroom tools.
The uncertainly about the future stems from the fact that next year, the number of registered students at Toreras will drop to 38, the result of which is likely to be the axing of one teaching position. The one teacher (at this point it is unclear whether this person will be one of the current teachers or someone new altogether) will likely teach the younger half of students in the morning (8am-12pm) and the older kids in the afternoon (1pm-5pm). It's unclear whether this situation is any better or worse than the status quo. If, like this year, the one teacher has regular MINED commitments during the week, we can expect school to be cancelled even more than it was this year, as the teacher won't have a colleague to take over his or her students on these days. However, perhaps splitting the little kids and the older kids between the morning and the afternoon will help students focus and lead to better learning. On the other hand, asking the older students to walk to school at the hottest hour of the day has the potential to depress attendance even further. I could go on and on this handing and other handing, so we'll just have to wait and see how well the new system works, assuming MINED puts it in place. In any event, low school attendance is one issue I'm eager to try to address in my site. It won't be easy, due to the attitudes of many parents (and grandparents, in the case of those children whose parents have immigrated to the U.S.) and the ever-onerous geography of the community, but it's clearly one of the community's gravest deficiencies. I'll blog about it in more detail once I have studied it further.
If you're wondering, beyond sixth grade, students from Toreras have the option of going to schools in nearby Carpintero or Lajitas for seventh through ninth grades (they'll generally go to whichever school is closer to their house). Almost all students who bother to finish sixth grade continue on to complete ninth as well. For the equivalent of high school (called bachillerato, which includes tenth through twelfth grades), students from Toreras essentially only have the option of studying a distancia, a program that involves attending class on Saturdays only, as the only Monday-through-Friday bachillerato program in the municipality is located in downtown Polorós, requiring a $1 bus ride each way to come and go. While some families can afford $10 a week to transport their teenager to class (though many cannot), few students or families can reconcile the time commitment. To come and go, a Torereño would have to leave the house every morning around 4:45am to board the 5:30am bus in the neighboring village in order to arrive at school by the time class starts at 7am. After class lets out at 4pm (the bachillerato school day is substantially longer than that of ninth grade and below), he or she would have to take the 5:15pm bus back toward Toreras, arriving home at approximately 7pm (the exact time would depend on the distance between the student's house and the bus stop). A 4:45am to 7pm school day is a tough sell to families that are tight-knit and often depend on their teenagers for domestic (females) and agricultural (males) labor. Thus, the Saturday-only program is the only palatable way for Torereños to complete their secondary educations, though still many call it quits after ninth grade.
So there's the education situation in my site, in a nutshell. The above description doesn't channel this sentiment whatsoever, but despite the challenges, the school in Toreras is a very happy place. The children that show up are generally gleeful and get along with each other (they're practically all cousins, if not siblings, after all), and the two teachers care about their learning.
That's enough about education, for now. In the coming days, I'll be continuing with confianza-building by going to a couple of rezos (events honoring people who have recently passed away), a soccer tournament, and the annual fair in Lajitas, which people in Toreras seem to be looking forward to. On Monday I went swimming in the nearby river with some of the local kids, which was a lot of fun. And last week I was seated at the mesa de honor (table of honor) at two separate graduations, which I found amusing as someone who just turned 22. I even got to hand out some of the diplomas.
With just ten days left until I return to Nuevo Cuscatlan for PST-II (a second round of training ending December 14), a rhythm hasn't particularly set in for me in Toreras, and I don't think it will for a while. Some days are full of activities—house visits, community meetings, social gatherings, and time spent at the school—while others are mostly devoid of structure. For instance, today Crisanto and I were supposed to meet at 9am with some officials who work for INSAFORP, a Salvadoran GO that offers free vocational training. It's now past noon and they haven't yet shown up at the house. There's still a chance they'll come—Salvadorans are admittedly not a punctual people—but tardando over three hours is uncharacteristic even in this culture. If they indeed don't come, I won't have anything on my agenda until 4pm, when I'll head down to the cancha to play soccer with some local guys (I am abysmal at soccer but they guys are painstakingly polite about it). In many Peace Corps sites I'd be able to fill these gaps in my day by heading to communal spaces—a comedor (informal restaurant), a church courtyard, or any other centrally-located place where people gather at all hours—to strike up conversations with locals and score some confianza points, but in my site no such spaces exist. This is largely a function of the geographical sparsity of Toreras' population, though I can't help but wonder if a centrally-located communal space did exist, if people would gather there in an if you build it, they will come fashion.
Contributing to the quietness in Toreras at the moment is that school is out for the year as of last week. The Salvadoran school year ends in early November and begins in early January, which is pretty logical if you ask me. At this point, there's some uncertainty about the fate of the Toreras' little school. I guess this as as good a segue as any to provide a brief overview of education in my site:
Toreras has a three-classroom, pabularia-through-sixth-grade school located centrally enough that few children need to walk more than an hour to arrive (this is a feat in my site). Currently it has 43 registered students (though only 20-25 regularly attend class) and two teachers. One teacher handles parbularia (essentially pre-K) through second grade, while the other (who doubles as the school director) teaches third through sixth grades (yes, this means the third and sixth grades, for example, are taught concurrently in the same classroom). The school day lasts from 8am to noon, though it sometimes doesn't start on time, as children consistently arrive late. Also, class is often cancelled, because the teachers consistently have mandatory Ministry of Education (MINED) meetings or trainings to attend. When only one of the teachers has a MINED commitment on a particular day, the other takes in that teacher's students and teaches all the kids at once. However, when both have commitments, they simply cancel school, as substitute teachers are non-existent in rural El Salvador. This happens far too often. In fact, since I've arrived in Toreras, school has been cancelled at least once every week, usually more. One week, class was cancelled three out of the five days. The cancellations contribute to the school's horrendous attendance rate, as students are regularly unsure whether they have class on any given morning, and the teachers have no way of efficiently communicating this information to the families.
Public schools in El Salvador have miniscule budgets, so aside from desks, chairs, whiteboards, whiteboard markers, and aging MINED-issued textbooks, the Toreras school has little in the way of instructional materials. Teachers often improvise classroom activities with discarded newspapers, which, with a little creativity, can make surprisingly compelling classroom tools.
The uncertainly about the future stems from the fact that next year, the number of registered students at Toreras will drop to 38, the result of which is likely to be the axing of one teaching position. The one teacher (at this point it is unclear whether this person will be one of the current teachers or someone new altogether) will likely teach the younger half of students in the morning (8am-12pm) and the older kids in the afternoon (1pm-5pm). It's unclear whether this situation is any better or worse than the status quo. If, like this year, the one teacher has regular MINED commitments during the week, we can expect school to be cancelled even more than it was this year, as the teacher won't have a colleague to take over his or her students on these days. However, perhaps splitting the little kids and the older kids between the morning and the afternoon will help students focus and lead to better learning. On the other hand, asking the older students to walk to school at the hottest hour of the day has the potential to depress attendance even further. I could go on and on this handing and other handing, so we'll just have to wait and see how well the new system works, assuming MINED puts it in place. In any event, low school attendance is one issue I'm eager to try to address in my site. It won't be easy, due to the attitudes of many parents (and grandparents, in the case of those children whose parents have immigrated to the U.S.) and the ever-onerous geography of the community, but it's clearly one of the community's gravest deficiencies. I'll blog about it in more detail once I have studied it further.
If you're wondering, beyond sixth grade, students from Toreras have the option of going to schools in nearby Carpintero or Lajitas for seventh through ninth grades (they'll generally go to whichever school is closer to their house). Almost all students who bother to finish sixth grade continue on to complete ninth as well. For the equivalent of high school (called bachillerato, which includes tenth through twelfth grades), students from Toreras essentially only have the option of studying a distancia, a program that involves attending class on Saturdays only, as the only Monday-through-Friday bachillerato program in the municipality is located in downtown Polorós, requiring a $1 bus ride each way to come and go. While some families can afford $10 a week to transport their teenager to class (though many cannot), few students or families can reconcile the time commitment. To come and go, a Torereño would have to leave the house every morning around 4:45am to board the 5:30am bus in the neighboring village in order to arrive at school by the time class starts at 7am. After class lets out at 4pm (the bachillerato school day is substantially longer than that of ninth grade and below), he or she would have to take the 5:15pm bus back toward Toreras, arriving home at approximately 7pm (the exact time would depend on the distance between the student's house and the bus stop). A 4:45am to 7pm school day is a tough sell to families that are tight-knit and often depend on their teenagers for domestic (females) and agricultural (males) labor. Thus, the Saturday-only program is the only palatable way for Torereños to complete their secondary educations, though still many call it quits after ninth grade.
So there's the education situation in my site, in a nutshell. The above description doesn't channel this sentiment whatsoever, but despite the challenges, the school in Toreras is a very happy place. The children that show up are generally gleeful and get along with each other (they're practically all cousins, if not siblings, after all), and the two teachers care about their learning.
That's enough about education, for now. In the coming days, I'll be continuing with confianza-building by going to a couple of rezos (events honoring people who have recently passed away), a soccer tournament, and the annual fair in Lajitas, which people in Toreras seem to be looking forward to. On Monday I went swimming in the nearby river with some of the local kids, which was a lot of fun. And last week I was seated at the mesa de honor (table of honor) at two separate graduations, which I found amusing as someone who just turned 22. I even got to hand out some of the diplomas.
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