Dear Madrinas and Padrinos

Thank you. As in any good Guatemalan letter, we should start out wishing you health and success in your daily labors. Also, we’d like to apologize in case you have had other communication from us. We have had our letters bounced back to us once by the Guatemalan mail (which took months, there is no postal service to our return address) and we’re not sure they ever got through. If you could write us an email to jquinn@cs.oberlin.edu with your name, we will be able to make an email list, and send you a few updates a year. To help you recognise our mail, we will always include BASICO LA TRINIDAD in the subject).

Our first school year is over here at the Básico, and we’ve learned a lot. Almost all of us started out as more or less beginners. There were the teachers. I, an “Estadounidense”, taught English (a required subject in Guatemala) and Science. The town Agricultural Promoters taught Industrial (really Agricultural) Arts in the school garden plot (and we refused to segregate the girls into Home Ec, although such segregation is still part of the Guatemalan system). Rogelia, my Guatemalan/Mexican wife, started the year teaching Math and Social Studies, but had to pass those classes off to Amilcar, a teacher from the next town over, when our baby was ready to be born. Christi, a Guatemalan who has been doing solidarity work with the town since before the return, when they were still refugees in Mexico, taught Spanish. And Enendy, a new teacher from this town itself, had the kids working hard in PE and playing hard on their borrowed guitars in Music. This team started work without a single textbook (we have a few now), with only odd bits of teaching experience, and with no familiarity with the Guatemalan system – but we are proud of the results.

As to administration, there was none. The principal got sick before the year started, and though he still helped us out by signing papers when necessary, he never made it to the school.

There were the students. 7th grade was rough, until the teachers started to tap the leadership potential of the “troublemakers”, and the students started to learn to replace the corporal discipline they’d learned in elementary school with self-discipline. The 8th graders were the most experienced of all of us, the only members of the community with any experience in a Guatemalan middle school. All that they needed to do was build bridges between those students from our returned-refugee town and the neighboring towns, and they were a strong team.

I’ll mention a few moments, good and bad, during the year: there were the dances and papi-soccer (5-person teams, played on the basketball court) tournaments that the students organized as fund-raisers, where we finally put motor-mouth Rudy to good use as an announcer and MC; the sadness when pressuring one student to improve led him to drop out; the delicious radishes we harvested from the school garden plot; the endless sojourns from office to office in the county seat to deal with the paperwork of getting the school approved; the happy groups of students who visited our house when we returned with our new baby; the pride of hearing our students play the guitar and sing in the town’s 4-day anniversary party; the joy of seeing one student who had struggled all year in English blossom with individual attention and earn a 92 on her last test; the fun of leading an after-school-year student delegation to see another returnee community with an impressive student organization.

The government approval is big news. Less than 1/3 of schools are approved each time they try, and many schools go for years operating unofficially. For us, it means that the diplomas for our first graduates this year will be legal, but the money it brings is only enough to lower our tuition for non-scholarship students by 20%, from Q50 (about $4) to Q40 (about $3.20) per month. Your continued support would be welcome.

There are three basic ways to support us this year. To be a padrino or madrina for one student for one year is now just a $120 donation. We are also fixing up a beaten-down old building as a library and computer center; we’d welcome contributions to our construction budget, which totals about $800. And you can help us buy monitors for donated computers (the monitors don’t travel as well, so we buy them here) for $50 each. However you support us this year, it will also help us look for longer-term solution to the funding problem; we are actively forging a network of similar schools (community-run middle schools in communities displaced by the war), and our students are planning a student association that could eventually give scholarships with its own money.

Sincerely,

Jameson "Chema" Quinn

Instituto de Educacion Básica por Cooperativa

Colonia 15 de Octubre La Trinidad