As students across Canada and the United States go deeper into their studies this fall, we are taking a moment to reflect on the importance of education.
An essential part of the work MCC supports in Latin America and the Caribbean is education. Not only do we support a number of education initiatives across the region, we are also constantly learning. Our teachers are the organizations, churches and communities we partner with, who daily educate us on how to live and work well in the region. Here are five of the lessons that MCC workers have learnt:
Blanca Munguia, director of Transformemos Honduras with some young Honduran Mennonite during our Manos a la Tierra, 2016. Anna Vogt.
We have learnt from our partner, Transformemos Honduras, that it is possible to work for a better education system as a whole at a structural level and to use data from the community level to create change, through advocacy at the highest political level. Transformemos Honduras organizes success social audits in public schools with hundreds of volunteers to make sure that there are a minimum of 200 school days per year in Honduras and that time is used effectively in the classroom to comply with national curriculum.
-Ilona Pagononi and Mattieu Dobler Paganoni, MCC Honduras Reps
José Antonio and Rosa. Bonnie Klassen.
While visiting a farmer in Cuba just a couple of days after Hurricane Irma, he told me about the pain of watching the winds knock his fruit trees, akin to children for him, to the ground and flatten crops. Clean-up will be a monumental task, but he adamantly told his sons that they weren’t going to give up. He immediately made a plan. Fruit knocked off the trees was becoming preserves and the wood was turning into furniture. He has about a dozen rows of red roses that he grows as a source of income, all of which were knocked down. He painstakingly uprighted each of them and gently patted the soil around them. His approach has been a lesson to me in persistence, but also in the importance of taking time to be care-full.
-Bonnie Klassen, Area Director for South America and Mexico
Damaris is our current YAMENer from Colombia working with PPyJ
We have learnt from our Honduran Mennonite Church partner, Proyecto Paz y Justica (PPyJ), that peace education can be fostered and transmitted in a unique way, from student to student, when older students who are trained on topics such as conflict transformation, values, human rights, and self-esteem, have the opportunity to share their knowledge with younger students.
-Ilona Paganoni & Matthieu Dobler Paganoni, MCC Honduras Reps
Julie Aeschliman.
MCC partners with Libraries Jehova Jireh to provide textbooks, chapter books, and other educational materials to students and teachers in four Anabaptist related schools in Nicaragua. Upon visiting libraries and talking to students, I’ve learned to never underestimate the value of holding a book in your hands and discovering the excitement of new knowledge. I’ve observed the ray of light in a child’s eye when they tell about a story they read and the books they’ve discovered in their school library.
– Julie Aeschliman, Education Coordinator MCC Nicaragua
Anna Vogt.
In conversation with rural farmers on the Caribbean coast of Colombia, through MCC partner Sembrandopaz, I have seen the importance of development processes to support reconciliation between communities impacted by violence. The lack of education, health care, decent roads and markets to sell crops all impact people’s ability to rebuild, but also provide a space to come together in advocacy and for their rights.
-Anna Vogt, LACA advocacy analyst.
We are grateful to all of our teachers: the partners and people in Latin America and the Caribbean who do the daily work of helping to educate us in what it means to build a better future, together.