Vanessa and the Children in the Slums of Colombia
Chapter 39 - 5 Years in Colombia - How I Reeducated Myself on the Streets of Laughter
Meeting the principals and head teachers was very rewarding, as we could hear fascinating stories about their dedicated work with the children. Often at small chairs as work tables and sometimes in the principal's own room, I gradually got to learn much more than I could have imagined. In addition to my questions, I heard insightful stories about how the schools had been founded and what challenges the principals and teachers faced. One principal, who greeted us with a wonderful smile, told us how her work had begun as a teacher and mother of residents in the area. With a sense of great responsibility for their children's education and safety, a passion to found a better school had grown stronger and stronger. She had managed to renovate her home to make a couple of rooms available for teaching a couple of preschool classes. With strong enthusiasm and passion, she had worked hard to achieve recognition by the state and gradually managed to receive more classes. Over time, she had managed to buy the houses next door and was able to expand the school space from a couple of rooms and a preschool class to a school with dozens of classes up to grade six.
I came to hear similar stories many times. It was fantastically inspiring to hear about the success stories I now witnessed on the spot. These principals and school owners had started from scratch and fought hard to grow and achieve state recognition in order to offer legitimate education to the local children. It wasn't just the education itself that was important. The grades from a recognized school were needed to be able to have opportunities after primary school, in public schools or private schools, towards job opportunities and, in cases where someone dared to dream that far, even at university.
Government grants were given to the institutions that could prove that they met the criteria to be able to offer study places. Many principals struggled to achieve these. Others knew better. As I soon learned, this promised contribution could indeed be questioned.
An interesting feature, which we had not thought of at all from an academic perspective, was the school lunch. On one visit, we came across a cooking lady sitting with only a small table in front of her, right next to the entrance to a small kitchen. The kitchen barely held a refrigerator and a few drawers, and the small kitchen table that had been placed outside was impressively small. It barely held a bell pepper, an onion, a salad bowl and a small cutting board, on which the aunt was fully chopping onions when we arrived. With a big smile she chopped away, while we photographed the occasion. A separate room dedicated for the school lunch was not really existing in this size of schools. Another school had an almost full-sized dining table in a corner that stood as a serving table. The children happily queued to get their portion of food served. Other schools had more normal-sized canteens to varying degrees and of varying quality. The variations were countless, but the remarkable thing was that basically all the schools we visited actively fought to be able to offer some form of school lunch. Snacks could also be offered in many cases and sometimes even breakfast could be offered.
"Let's take this way instead," Gerardo suddenly said with a firm voice.
Something lurked further ahead again. I told Patrik to follow silently. His Spanish skills were limited and he had not realized that danger awaited. We had ended up at the edge of a neighborhood where we were walking along a river. When we got to the other side, Gerardo said that a group of gang members were watching us further down the road. We could still see them from across the river and luckily, there was no direct crossing from where they were. I don't know if it was reassuring or worrying to know that Gerardo had seen them. Knowing that thieving youths with no further life plans were lurking here and there was definitely not reassuring, but Gerardo's presence and ability to spot them in time to avoid them definitely was. We caught a taxi quickly and were able to get out of Aguablanca after another successful day.
We had started researching a new area in Comuna 13, Gerardo's neighborhood. Before the school visits in this new area, we’d had to say goodbye to Dora and welcome a new main escort. Dora had selected Gerardo for us. He was a young and charming psychologist and street educator, as well as a former gang member. He had well impregnated experiences from the dark life of the streets, which had made him street smart like few. At the same time, he was well known in the area and respected by most. His mocking sense of humor was also constantly on top. As with Dora, we quickly came to regard him as a close friend and hero in our fieldwork. His friendly charm and proactive manner opened many doors without us having to introduce ourselves much at all. He helped plan the routes to the schools we had mapped out without any need for explanation. He knew his area and was even able to guide us to some schools that we didn't have correct addresses for.
One day, we were to visit a school in a very special area. The area was called La Florida and the school went by the name Voluntad de Dios. The entrance to the area was almost like taken out of a scene from the Wild West, where an unpaved road, which stretched between broken buildings, ended abruptly in a large open field. The road led to desolate sandy land, where not a single building could be seen. The area could have been an abandoned bus parking lot. Groups of youths decorated the view. We continued behind Gerardo along one edge of the area. He greeted the young people warmly, asked how they were doing and if they had been to school recently. An older teenage girl said no, and Gerardo took a few minutes to ask her why and encouraged her to put in the effort.
Instead of buildings, the area was populated with simple, self-made wooden shack houses that were the result of the internal refugees, who were forced from their homes in the countryside and ended up in the outskirts of the big cities. Aguablanca was by and large already an old invasion settlement area, or District, as it was called, the District of Aguablanca. It was divided into three major neighborhoods, among the largest in Cali, and had previously been an uninhabited area. La Florida was one of the last invasions, and as such, one of the worst. We followed Gerardo along a small road that resembled a maze of wooden shack houses that looked like huts for children, and although they were not that much bigger, several of them were inhabited by whole families of sometimes up to ten people.
The road sloped downwards and the more downward it sloped the higher the wooden pillars the houses were built on. Gerardo told us that the wooden pillars were to protect the wooden shack houses from the heavy rains that flooded in masses and created great havoc every time it rained for more than two days straight. Pollution from lack of sewage and garbage collection made these periods unbearable. The only thing you could do was try to protect yourself from overfloods. After two weeks into the fieldwork, this was the worst we had seen so far in terms of infrastructure. At the same time, the children's constant smiles when we looked into the classrooms were among the most beautiful things we saw during the entire fieldwork.
Two small brothers were on their way to school with backpacks on their backs. The older one was no more than 4 years old and the younger one maybe 2. The older one had found a bottle which he happily held up playfully when we photographed him. A group of sisters looked out from a wooden shack house, posing with big smiles after we asked if we could take a picture. Shortly after, they jumped out and took two little brothers with them for a group photo. Gerardo took the picture, so we got to pose with the kids. The background shows how the wooden shack houses are built upon wooden pillars approximately a meter and a half above the ground to protect the houses from floods.
One particularly ambitious girl ran back in and combed her hair and dressed up, after our request for a photo. She brought a little brother along for a couple of photos. For the second photo, Patrik lifted the boy up in his arms, while the ambitious girl stayed at the front for a new pose with a big smile. The background shows a mess of different colored tin roofs in various rusted conditions and with plastic and wooden planks as rain protection. It was a terrible sight, but at the same time very warm. Despite the sights, the rumors and actually being one of the most dangerous areas in Colombia, there was no general misery in Aguablanca, a place full of happy people. This filled the physically tragic images with a beauty that can only be experienced on site.
We arrived at the school Voluntad de Dios, the only school in the area. A priest opened the door. Gerardo introduced us to Father Rigoberto, who immediately brightened up the visit. We were spontaneously given a tour past the classrooms, first welcomed to enter a class in grade 6. Rigoberto asked us to introduce ourselves and say a few words. I said good morning from the door and entered the classroom. As in all the classes we had visited, the children politely greeted back in chorus.
Then we got to see the second floor of the school. It was newly built and the classrooms were not yet in use. The beginning of a third floor served as a rest and play area for the children. It had no roof and Rigoberto did not know when they would be able to finish building the floor. I continued the dialogue with Rigoberto in more detail in his office, while Patrik and Gerardo continued with the observations.
Father Rigoberto enthusiastically shared the history of the school, how they had first started the project thanks to a donation from two Dutch foundations, Fundación Hogar and Salvar los niños de Colombia. Before the start of the brick building, the struggle for a functioning school had been enormously difficult. It had been Rigoberto's dream as a priest in the area to build a proper school for the area's children. He had previously been forced to go back and forth between his permanent workplace and La Florida, due to the lack of a place to safely store school supplies. Now the situation had changed. Additional funds were needed to finish building the school, but it was in very fine condition, a palace compared to the rest of the area. I was shown pictures of the development of the construction, from the empty forlorn field to a school that gradually grew into a stately two-story building of freshly painted red brick. The Dutch foundations’ donations had been enough to create the school. Despite a stable start, a new problem had arisen regarding teacher salaries. After achieving the Ministry of Education's recognition to run education legitimately, funding from the state's subvention program had been promised. At the time of our visit, the promised subsidy was three months late, which had created major problems among the teaching staff. Most teachers stayed as long as they could and looked for extra work outside the area. Their devotion was admirable.
When I came out of the almost two-hour long meeting with Rigoberto, I saw Patrik and Gerardo talking to a little girl, who was sitting on the stairs to the second floor. I greeted her and asked if I could get a picture with her. She didn't smile unlike all other children I had made eye contact with. I thanked her for the picture and said goodbye. Before long we were out in the field again with Gerardo after another successful school visit.
The little girl had been left alone on the stairs when the doors to the ground floor classrooms had been closed and the lessons for the older students had begun. The two foreigners, my colleague Patrik and myself, had been a funny element in her everyday life. She had asked Gerardo if Patrik was sick, because he was talking so strangely. Patrik did not speak Spanish, which seemed to be a new experience for her. Gerardo said afterwards that she had sat hungry and waited for her mother. She had not been able to pay for the school lunch of 100 pesos and her mother was delayed in picking her up. When I heard her story, the photo of the two of us together became so significant that it traveled with me to the other side of the Atlantic as my favorite picture in my presentations of the fieldwork in Aguablanca.
Of all the amazing children, whose laughter had filled me with immense joy and a sense of having discovered an amazing country with amazing people, this girl in the school in La Florida was the only one who hadn't smiled. She had a nice and kind expression on her face when we saw her, and that had also stuck in our picture. But she had never smiled. Although we were told that she had been sitting hungry, waiting for her mother, there was no expression of sorrow on her part. Her gaze had been filled with a seriousness and a kind of maturity as of someone who knows what she wants. A kind of humble self-assurance. A year and a half later, I would see her again. This time, I would see her smile, and learn that her name was Vanessa.
The above is an excerpt from the upcoming book “5 Years in Colombia - How I Reeducated Myself on the Streets of Laughter”. It’s the first book in a 15-year memoir trilogy, highlighting the educational adventures from the author's final years as a disillusioned top student to becoming a young professional with a purpose far beyond what he could have imagined. For more information, please reach out to the author directly.
The above chapter is additionally the beginning of the upcoming spin-off novel “Vanessa and the Fight for an Education - about the Children in the Slums of Colombia”, based on the author’s true experiences behind the scenes, and on the true stories heard, read and researched around the children in the slums of Colombia.
Author: Joni AlWindi
Published by: Joni AlWindi
Audio intro: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/5yearsincolombia
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