Internship Diary by Mariella Isabel Arredondo, IU Bloomington Student

Friday, May 13, 2005
Bloomington, Indiana

Peru's indigenous population are the most marginalized members of society and their language and culture are looked down upon by many of the mainstream. I believe this is due to its past as a colony. Peru now has a rich language and culture legislation that aims at reversing the racism and discrimination that reigns the country against the indigenous population. I am very interested in linguistic human rights and thus DINEBI is the perfect place for me to start contributing and learning. They are in charge of elaborating and implementing bilingual intercultural education throughout the national public school system.

I wrote an e-mail to the director of DINEBI, Señor Modesto Galvez, introducing myself and offering my services as an intern. I included my curriculum vitae and he wrote me right away telling me that they would be interested in me working with them for the summer. I think it was meant to be.

I will be working in the place where policy gets elaborated and implemented. This internship will show me the inner workings of the system and how national policy gets transmitted to the local level and furthermore, how it gets appropriated by the people who the policy affects.

I hope to learn what educators, students, parents, and government officials confront when trying to implement a policy that aims at eradicating racism and making the education system equitable for all.

My goal is to work for myself as a bilingual-intercultural education consultant. I'd offer my services to different governments or international agencies that are attempting to implement bilingual-intercultural education programs in their schools. I'd like to contribute to society in the most needed way, so I will be open to see where the wayra [wind] takes me.

Monday, June 13, 2005
Lima, Peru

My first impression of the National Directional Office on Bilingual and Intercultural Education (DINEBI) within the Ministry of Education is that it is a very pleasant place to work. There are about 30 employees in that area (bilingual and intercultural education) and the people who work there come from different places in Peru ( Arequipa, Cusco, Iquitos, Apurimac, Lima, etc.).

It's a very diverse, bright, young crowd that makes up the team at DINEBI. Everyone works most of the time in a team. Within DINEBI there are different areas such as interculturality, pedagogy and languages, evaluation, and monitoring. My first day there, congress requested from the Minister of Education a 50-minute address on Peru’s newest bilingual and intercultural education policy, and so I was able to witness DINEBI producing the required document. It was really neat watching the team doing collaborative work. That was very exciting.

I will also have the opportunity to travel to different areas in Peru to visit bilingual intercultural rural schools during my internship at DINEBI. My first assignment within DINEBI is to create a grammatical guide for Spanish as a second language teachers.

Thursday, June 23, 2005
Lima, Peru

My days at DINEBI are long but exciting. I am involved in a variety of interesting projects. Even though I am officially an intern, I feel more like a consultant due to the important responsibilities that are assigned to me. 

Every day, I am being challenged and I am thriving on that challenge. I feel very honored to be here and to be contributing somehow to constructing a more diverse and equitable education for Peru’s children.

Currently, I am working on an intercultural campaign in collaboration with UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization). We are designing a contest open to teachers and educational institutions from all over Peru to present innovative, ongoing intercultural projects. I am also revising didactic materials for the instruction of Spanish as a second language and a variety of proposals for a change in the national curriculum. The goal is to implement an intercultural curriculum.

The people I work with are very committed to culture and languages and making laws to ensure equity and the eradication of racism. During the second week in July, I will be traveling to two different departments in Peru to monitor and evaluate rural bilingual schools. At which time, I hope to get some real answers from the people who are being affected by the language and culture educational laws elaborated on at DINEBI. I am learning to explore in more depth the vital connection between language and culture and this is a very beautiful thing.

Cultural Note:
Last Friday, the Ministry of Education held a huge event—Father’s Day. It was really nice to see how committed the government is to its employees and to family. At DINEBI, all the women gave the fathers a gift (for Mother's Day they tell me that the event was even bigger). In the afternoon, all the father-employees of the ministry were invited to a reception where they received gifts from the government and got to feel special for being fathers. It was a huge national holiday celebrated officially on Sunday.

Friday, July 22, 2005
Lima, Peru

My days working at DINEBI are almost coming to an end–against my will of course. I have yet to figure out how to make time go by slower. Until I figure that out, I am just enjoying each moment as much as I am consciously able.

I have spent the past few weeks visiting rural schools and meeting with regional as well as local education authorities in different provinces of Apurimac, which is one of the 24 departments that make up Peru. It is located in the southern central Peruvian Andean Mountains. The department is composed of seven provinces, three of which we visited on this trip. There are many districts within each province and furthermore, many indigenous communities within these districts. The department of Apurimac is 75 percent rural. All of the schools we visited are very hard to reach due to poor road infrastructure. For the most part, we were traveling at an altitude between 4,000 and 5,000 meters above sea level. Most of the population is bilingual with Quechua being the dominant language.

Economically, the schools and communities we visited would be considered very poor by Western standards (no running water, one teacher per 50 plus students, lack of teaching materials, multi-grade classrooms, etc.). However, if measured by another set of standards, we would see how rich they are.

Apart from living an existence of deep connection to the earth, the way the Andinos live has much sentiment; a lot of feeling. For example, people gather around to share a song together, to share the sentiment of what the song brings. Whenever my colleagues and I would arrive in a classroom, the customary greeting was for all children to stand up and in unison greet the visitors. Then they would sit down and one student would usually come to the front of the classroom and offer to sing us a song. In one particular first through third multi-grade classroom, while the children sang, a boy and a girl danced inside a circle made by all children. It was really beautiful. Most of the children sang us songs in Quechua. The sentiment by which these groups of people live is even ingrained in their language. Quechua carries a lot of tenderness in its grammatical structure, it seems. Now, I am understanding a lot more of what is being said in Quechua.

In Apurimac everything seems so alive to me. The air is pure, the water sings, and it can be drunk straight from the streams. Wild colorful flowers abound, especially the yellow retamo. Being there made me happy. People still wear traditional clothing that they themselves weave into intricate patterns of vivid colors. Within the Quechua, one is poor if one has no family, not if one has no money. The connection with the earth is vital and sacred for the people of the communities that we visited, and it is this love for the earth that seems to bring happiness to their hearts and meaning to their lives. I don’t want to romanticize their existence, but being in their company, in the company of the children, once again has touched a very deep part of my heart.

I have learned and am still learning much about the meaning of life in the land of the Apus (the spirits of the mountains). One of the most important aspects of Andean life is their ritual practices that for the most part involve the coca leaf. The coca leaf has been a part of the lives of the Andinos for the past 4,000 years. It is a special plant that has always been revered by them.

Through the leaf or koka quintucha as it is called tenderly, millions of people connect with the pachamama, or mother earth on a daily basis. The coca leaf is the mediator between humans and mother earth. The practice of using the coca leaf for ritual has survived even through religious persecution during colonial times and has been maintained thanks to the deep mysticism of the paq´os or priests and of the farming families. The coca leaf is also used in all sorts of products such as soap, desserts, meals, etc.

Reaching some of the schools in Apurimac was very hard and took us all day. To reach Apurimac, first we flew from Lima to the city of Cusco and from Cusco we took a four-hour bus ride to Abancay, the capital city of Apurimac.

Our first day in Abancay, we departed the city at 4 a.m. and did not get back until 8 p.m. We were on the road for more than 12 hours; the entire time we were traveling in a pick-up truck on dirt roads, zigzagging through the mountains and with precipices guarding our passage.  

The most isolated area we visited was the community of San Juan in the province of Antabamba. When we finally reached the community, we learned that it has only been the second time that the community had seen a car enter their community.  All the kids were so happy to see us and to receive their educational materials.

In another instance, we arrived at a school in the province of Cotabambas and found the whole community gathered there. The parents were arguing with the school principal regarding the bilingual curriculum in place. It was odd for me to learn that even though most of the children’s Spanish was very limited, most of the parents were opposed to a bilingual curriculum. One of the local authorities who was accompanying us that day tried to talk with the parents regarding the benefits of learning first in the mother tongue and then in the second language, but that didn’t seem to work too well. The parents were still in opposition. They want their children to be completely fluent in Spanish as fast as possible and believed that the bilingual curriculum would delay their second language acquisition. I then proceeded to address the entire community in English. All I spoke to them was English and they just stared at me. When I was done, the local authority explained to them in Quechua that just as they had not understood what I was saying to them in English, in the beginning their children do not understand what the teacher explains to them in Spanish. This little exercise seemed to have helped reach a consensus in favor of bilingual education in that particular setting.

During this trip, I was mainly working alongside a colleague from Emergencia Educativa (educational emergency). We were there delivering educational materials and monitoring and evaluating regional and local educational agencies and their respective schools. A bit of background information on this state of emergency:  In 2003, Peru declared its education system in a state of emergency and 2,008 schools were selected nationally to serve as pilot schools. By the year 2006, these pilot schools are expected to show great improvement in providing quality education. The schools chosen were selected based on the economic status of the locality of which they are a part. It was interesting to see the governmental hierarchy that exists in Peru and the way that power gets passed down. Coming from the Ministry of Education holds a lot of weight nationally. This shows me how even though Peru is attempting to decentralize its government, Lima still is the boss.

There is a lot of room though in legislation (especially as it relates to bilingual and intercultural education) to allow initiatives to come from the bottom. It is a matter of time and innovation and for people to realize that they can make changes that will affect their immediate community and for the authorities to continue dialoguing with the people who are affected by policy in order to work together. I have met many people who are truly committed to the social welfare of all peoples and this brings hope into the horizon.

 Back in Lima, I have been working on examining different curricular proposals and making suggestions on how to incorporate the intercultural component into the national curriculum. I was very glad to learn that changes and suggestions I had made will be published nationwide in one of the most respected newspapers of the country.

Tuesday, July 26, 2005
Lima, Peru

Yesterday I had the pleasure to personally meet Peru President, Alejandro Toledo, and First Lady Eliane Karp as well as many other prominent political figures. I was invited to the Presidential Palace for the opening of a new exhibit on China minorities’ culture (“Joyas de China: Exposicion de la cultura de las minorias de China”). This collaborative event between Peru and China began with an amazing show presented by Chinese artists (dancers, singers, musicians, etc.), and culminated with a reception at the museum Estacion Cultural Desamparados where I had the opportunity to drink pisco sour and eat fancy Chinese appetizers.

That is all, folks. Thanks for reading and letting me share this amazing experience with you all.