Estamos Cumpliendo!

Thanks for all your donations and encouragement! I`ve finally been able to start going out to the schools and working with the environmental ed books that took so long to print. These pictures are from a few days ago when I went to a few communities outside of Puyo. The kids are 7-8 years old, could read and write a little, and were very polite. They were in a small town if a few hundred, and taking into account the surrounding farms, the elementary school held about 75 kids, allowing the classes to be reasonable grouped by age. In the smaller communities, an entire elementary school will be clumped together in a class no larger than 20. Many of these communities are separated by only a 10-20 km, but the remote jungle makes travel difficult. Sometimes the teachers arrive at dawn and leave the same day on the only cars that come to the village, other times they stay for the week and go home on the weekends. All in all, the teachers are often coming from outside of the communities, making community relations occasionally strained. I´m starting to think that more than anything, the books will be most useful as a literacy tool. Of course the schools have a few basic textbooks to read, but I`m hoping that this is going to give them new materials to practice on, and the books for the younger kids are especially designed to be brief on text, while mixing with drawing and fun activities. I can`t say that its not sad to see a nine year old struggling to write the name of their community. The best that this book can do is give them a chance to learn basics of reading and writing, while doing it in a context of the natural world that surrounds them. The last picture here is of the teacher walking across the stream to get from the road to the school. This school was named sacha runa, which in local Kichwa means jungle man or jungle person. The town was named lan yacu, yacu means river, and lan is a tree known as sangre de drago, whose sap is used as medical treatment for healing scars, among other ailments.

And if you are looking for a vacation this summer, I can always use help carrying the boxes for the longer jungle hikes that are coming up!