School moves up a gear?
Wellsprings and El Tular School 2014
When we first encountered the people of El Tular, and sort of fell in love with them, the school was really quite small, perhaps 200 children, and education stopped at the age of 12. One or two boys with “rich” parents managed to walk over the hills for 90 minutes each way to the neighbouring town where there was a high school. But for the majority of boys, learning ended at 11+. For girls it often ended much sooner, if it ever started, and for all the children in the remote hamlet called “Los Pintines” (so named because almost everyone there was called Pintin) school was often ruled out for want of shoes to manage the steep rough unmade 2km trek. The two or three teachers walked three miles each way from the nearest bus, and there was no vehicular access for the last mile and a half, even if they were lucky enough to get a lift.In any case the survival agriculture of maize and beans, required a quite different education, and gathering wood for the stove, grinding maize and washing people and pots and clothes in the river were skills absorbed through the pores of countless women and girls.
But that is not to say that School was not taken seriously. Already education was beginning to be seen as a road to a better future. So our first tiny steps were about making provision for shoes, and basic uniforms (handed down white shirts and brown shorts or skirts) encouraging people to think that school was important for girls as well as boys, (a task still not quite completed unfortunately, but we stick at it), encouraging teachers with some modern teaching aids, (you should have seen the kids with the “parachute” we took them), and helping them to lobby the council into increasing the leaving age.Uniforms are worth a mention. It is an issue that has followed us down through the years. It seems to us an unnecessary luxury amid such poverty, but we have had to learn from their stubbornness about it. All the schools of the rich in San Salvador have uniforms. They are symbolic of that other world which we are determined to occupy one day. That is why they are an essential part in educating our future generation.
Uniforms too played an important part in the next development. The local government agreed that the school could extend the age of education if they could provide evidence of the community’s desire for it. So in the quaint Salvadoran way of doing these things we found ourselves paying a young unemployed teacher a pittance for a couple of terms, to teach 12 and 13 year-olds maths and Spanish, until the Council decided that the need was there and put them on the books. And school life extended to 16 years of age.
But that meant more uniforms and there was nobody to hand them down. By that time we were also trying to help people into starting micro-businesses, and there were a couple of young men with treadle sewing machines. The traditional way of families acquiring clothes was to buy some cloth in the nearest town and give it to the tailor to make up. So a loan from us made it possible for the young tailors to buy uniform cloth in bulk, saving the families the expense of going to town, and provide the uniforms much more cheaply.By this time one or two of the boys who walked to the high school were doing very well, and we had discovered a wonderful friend among the Jesuit teachers at the esteemed University of Central America in San Salvador. He had started a scheme for enabling some people from peasant communities to attend that seat of learning. With his co-operation and Gama’s academic ability we were able to enrol him onto that course and keep him there with a scholarship until he graduated with honours in maths and economics. And several have followed him in different universities graduating at different levels. Two more in commercial subjects, two in nursing, and the most recent started teaching in El Tular School this January with a degree in education.
In the meantime of course, students who were learning in “our” school up to 16 have been keen to go on to A levels in schools in the nearby villages and town, and many have done so. Sadly that has not normally led to paid employment. Youth unemployment, particularly among subsistence agricultural communities is much worse in El Salvador than anywhere in Europe. But it has meant that a whole new outlook on life and higher aspirations have been brought into the community. The young people meet regularly and organise sports and social activities and participate in the Community Association, political party and various development activities. And just lately there have been signs of using the new thinking processes they have learned to improving daily life in the community. All the time until recently there has been a reluctance among them to go in for courses with any kind of agricultural flavour. All this education was seen as an alternative world, an escape from the daily grind of peasant life. But now, and with television here and there, there is a consciousness that being educated reaches beyond just seeking employment, it means engaging with a world community.
The latest thing in El Tular now is that the Government has given the school permission to teach up to the Baccalaureate, which is great news especially for the young women. So far families have usually been reluctant to let the girls go out of the community without chaperonage, and now they can continue learning up to 18 without that hindrance. We are being asked if we can cover the wages of a teacher which could be as much as $500 monthly! It really is another world, but these are still our sisters and brothers.