Dictionary definitions

Hi everyone –

With every coming week I'm feeling more accustomed to life in Toreras. During the first few months the high days were very high and the low days quite low. Now the peaks and valleys have begun to moderate. No more are the days when I question why those sadists at Peace Corps El Salvador put me here, of all places, as are those when an encouraging conversation with a community member leads me to conclude, naively, that the task of reversing Toreras' inexorable decline is a straightforward undertaking. The reality has set in that Toreras will be my home for the next twenty months, and while I'm unequipped to reverse the trajectories of its demographic and migratory circumstances, there are areas in which I can add value that I must exploit to my greatest ability.

Women's empowerment, broadly speaking, is the area where I have identified the greatest promise. Last Saturday, I convened the first of a series of meetings to form a women's association in Toreras. I was quite pleased with the turnout—about twenty-four women—and the level of participation the attendees delivered. In the meeting I briefly introduced the concept of a women's association, then led the women in a couple of exercises asking them to identify skills they would like to develop as part of the group. The women enthusiastically generated a diverse list of skills, such as leadership, how to make different foods (cake, pizza, and candies, specifically), and English.

A scene from my first women's group meeting

For the time being, my plan is to allow the group to coalesce around fun and accessible (remember, most of these women have little formal education) educational activities based on the skills the women expressed that they'd like to learn. I'll be able to facilitate some of the sessions myself (with the help of recipes taken from the internet, to be sure), and I'm hoping to co-facilitate some sessions with women from the community who already have a skill that the other women want to learn. I also hope to pull in support from organizations operating in El Salvador that specialize in providing trainings to groups of women (there are several).

Eventually, once the group has developed a loyal membership that feels a genuine affinity for the group, I hope to start to steer it toward devising a mission statement, adopting by-laws, and forming an executive board. From there, I would provide the training and support necessary to shift the group from being a PCV-led operation to a fully community-led organization. The idea is to have the group fully empowered to survive and thrive by the time I leave Toreras in the late summer of 2015. We'll see how it goes. I'm fully expecting obstacles and challenges to emerge, but for now we're off to a promising start.

On a less optimistic note, the situation at the little K-6 school in my community is abysmal. As I explained in my previous post, the Ministry of Education (MOE) relocated one of its two teachers, leaving only one behind. The remaining teacher has to attend at least one MOE meeting a week (usually on Mondays), and almost always skips work on Fridays in order to travel back to her hometown for the weekends (no, this is not legal). As such, class will usually be cancelled at least two days a week for the indefinite future.

Furthermore, the instruction the children receive leaves much to be desired. It consists almost entirely of students copying definitions from the whiteboard into their notebooks. There are no class discussions or activities to bring the words to life and develop cognitive skills such as critical thinking. In a particularly grim example of this tendency, the other day I arrived at the school mid-day to find the students copying down the definition of “dictionary”. This, in a school that doesn't have a single dictionary for the students to utilize. A person more removed from the situation than myself could probably have a field day with the image of children copying the dictionary definition of “dictionary” in a school without dictionaries, but its affect on me was to add to my indignation.

Last week I pressed the teacher to hold a meeting with parents to explain the situation thoroughly and give the parents an opportunity to opine. I figured that even though a meeting wouldn't ameliorate the situation, it would at least provide an opportunity to press concerned parents to organize around the common goal of rectifying the educational injustices their children were suffering.

Sadly, only six parents attended the meeting, and I quickly registered that of all the people in the room, I was the most upset about the dismal state of education in Toreras. The parents, apparently accustomed to years of neglectful teachers and an unresponsive educational bureaucracy, seemed resigned to the situation as it stood. The lack of jobs in the area is another factor that leeches urgency out of the school's predicament. When there are no jobs to compete for, why bother with school?, goes the thinking for at least some students and parents. It is hard to blame them for this mentality.

I don't intend to give up on the school issue altogether—the low parent turnout could well have been a fluke—but the meeting left me cognizant of the reality that if I am to motivate parents to be strong advocates for their children's educations, I am going to have to convince them of the severity of the present situation (as well as the feasibility of parent pressure carrying any potential to improve it, which even I am unsure of). Given how vastly different my frame of reference is from theirs (my elementary school had a freaking kiln, for God's sakes!), this task may be beyond my reach.

I'll leave it there. Feel free to email me directly with any questions.