Educate 400 adults in rural Mexico

After living a six-week long summer in San Martín Esperillas we began our yearly evaluation of the project. We deliberated about what we accomplished with the community, the results and the lessons learned, along with the educational processes that took place. After these sessions we concluded that 2014 was our last year of work with this community. This means that we are now perusing through communities in Mexico for the place where ¡Alfabetiza! 2015 will take place. As part of the permanent evolution of our program, we are also beginning to select and train the new team that will coordinate this next episode.

We would like to share the following statement from one of the adults that worked with ¡Alfabetiza! in San Martín:

Country People
By Baldomero F.

There are things a person does out of curiosity or occurrence, or for knowledge but the point is you do them without thought, I am one of them, me and my insanities, my occurrences there are things I did and they made me go many years back in time, those are things I can’t forget and that I never will because they were very special people in my life, even though for many they might have stopped existing, but for me they still exist.

For example all of the teachers that came to this community we will remember forever, they gave us motivation for a lot of things.

The story of my life to give my family a better life because they had what I didn’t have as a child, my steps took me to cross the border y and I accomplished crossing it, my objective was to have the resources to give them a home and I was able to achieve it, for now I live with my family, when I was away I spent my time thinking in them, thinking all the time, cheering myself up and being able to return and be with them, now I see a lot of people that don’t know the city and they come to ask how we could go so far when they don’t know the city, how few I learned and walked, they ask and I like to chat with them, yes, I like sharing, my adventures and my experiences, but in the end, it is a happy ending for my family, for now I feel very good with myself because all of the people who come to talk about a story or information for me and for everyone else they are important and they are welcome, they seem important to me, I am not important nor the best but I feel good and thanks to the group of teachers that came to my community and thanks to my teacher Sofía, I hope that the rest of the teachers were received the same way as us because they are important for my family.

Thank you teacher Sofía and the group of teacher companions for giving us a bit of your time and attention, we will wait for you every year.

The adult literacy campaign ¡Alfabetiza! finished its second year of work in San Martín Esperillas. It has been a successful project in which we have worked for 6 weeks alongside 131 adults in regular classes and with 34 children in a 15 session workshop.

While talking about the project, volunteers emphasize on the objective of sharing knowledge; the process of learning while teaching.

“What we constantly say is: I come to teach and learn, and we encourage the community to take it to heart, they did. They told us: hold the yoke, take the corn. It’s been a great challenge for all of us. My student Inés makes a lot of fun of me because I don´t know how to make tortillas, she says: “Yes, teacher, you know how to read but you can´t get married”. This is something that gives new value and shows other perspectives on everyday life”. (Laura, 20 years old)

“You realize you don’t just live in your small world, but that, at the same time, there are other realities out there that you take part in. You can’t sit down and stay with your arms crossed”. (Diana, 18 years old)

Trying to invite the people of San Martín to speak up and express their knowledge, experiences or issues in different ways, we also carried out a community photography project in which they documented their daily life by taking photographs with a camera we gave them. We also printed the first issue of a community newspaper: Tsjo Kjin (“Wildflower” in their mother tongue, nguigua). This newspaper was edited by a local editorial board and it compiled texts by our students sharing the most significant stories from their community.

Besides giving classes and documentary activities, there was an embroidery workshop, responding to our diagnosis, which showed the need of enabling collective spaces for women in San Martín. 18 women attended, ranging a wide span of ages. Each of them shared their own techniques with the rest working with collective material. At the end, they interchanged their products.

Finally, we began working with the young women of San Martín, debating different ways of thinking themselves as a collective while observing their community, with the intention of forming a group of young men and women who want to improve their environment considering their own context.

The group of volunteers initiated the process of internal evaluation of the project on Saturday, August 16^th. Next year’s work (2015) will also be defined in the process. Soon we will post testimonies of our students in San Martin for you.

Statistics:

• Number of adult students   •   131
• Workshop for children attendants   •   34
• Number of groups   •   56
• Number of volunteer teachers   •   29
• Average students per teacher   •   5.24