Next Steps!

We are happy to announce that we have initiated a new wave of recruitment for English teachers as we are planning to send volunteers to the town in late February. Rachel Wickland and Katherine Ferry – last year’s English volunteers and current partners in the project– will be traveling to Ziquítaro next week. In addition to visiting their host family and former students they will be making preparations for the next set of volunteers. Stay posted for entries and pictures about their trip as well as updates regarding the recruitment process.

The spring semester in Ziquítaro. has come to an end as both Rachel Wickland and Katherine Ferry have wrapped up their classes and returned to California. The semester was a success as both volunteers accomplished tremendous progress with their classes despite setbacks such as union strikes and unexpected school closures. Both Katherine and Rachel will be collaborating with us in the next stages of the project.

Currently we are accepting volunteer applications for the Fall 09 semester. We are also in conversation with an established non-profit with whom we may partner (technically called a fiscal sponsorship) and in turn gain tax deductible status for our donations.

The next few months will be filled with meetings to improve the structure of our budding organization as well as fundraising to support or next volunteers. Please stay posted to hear about the non-profit status as well as who the next volunteers will be.

Thanks for the support!

Rachel Miers and Michel Estefan

Rachel Wickland's Final Entry

This will be my final blog sent from Ziquítaro. I am sad to leave, but as Pina has so sagely advised me, “Everything has a beginning, and everything must come to its end.”

In the week remaining, everything is winding down. Katherine left to go back home to the US on Sunday, so things have been very quiet for me. We had a great send off for her on Saturday with a potluck picnic lunch down at the Ojo de Agua. I plan to give final exams this week, but of course, as always there has been a hitch. As I’m sure our readers are aware, there is an epidemic of influenza in Mexico. There have been over 100 recorded deaths at this point. The most heavily hit areas are the State of Mexico, the Distrito Federal area, and San Luis Potosi. We have heard of no cases of either illness or death here in Michoacán. At this point the federal government has mandated the suspension of public and private school instruction on all levels until May 6th as a preventative method. This means, that I have to give the exam outside of school and plan a place, time, etc. for about 35 students. It also complicates the issue of how I am going to give my students their final grades. Well, a little planning and patience ought to do the trick.

To close, I would just like to say a MIL GRACIAS to everyone who has been helping us with the project here in Ziquítaro and the United States. We couldn’t do it without you.

Take a Student to Work Day

by Katherine Ferry

Semana Santa vacation is here and Rachel and I are enjoying the time to recuperate and prepare for our final weeks in the public schools, while continuing to give extracurricular classes in the church. In the week leading up to vacation, I was very excited to finally get to work on a project with my students I had been brainstorming for months: “Take a student to work day”.

My goal for the project was to provide my junior high students with perspective on their future employment options, and to show them the alternatives to immigration (potentially, professional jobs in their home country) that continuing their studies will allow them to pursue. I arranged for the students to observe and interview people at work. The students got to choose which profession to investigate, and most of them chose kindergarten teachers, primary teachers or doctors. So far, I have accompanied 6 groups of seventh and eighth graders to Ziquítaro’s Primaria and Kinder to observe teachers with their classes for an hour and then conduct an interview. A similar activity at Ziquítaro’s tiny medical clinic is scheduled for next week. While this exercise mainly took place in Spanish, it is still very relevant to our work here as we are not just English teachers but also cultural ambassadors and promoters of furthering one’s education.

I prepared my students by having them interview me in class to practice taking notes on a conversation. (In their regular classes, they rarely have assignments beyond silently answering questions in their textbook.) I played the part of a person who wanders wildly off topic when asked a simple question and cautioned my students they must be careful to note only the important comments, and not try to record each word. The day of the observation/interview, I provided the students with a handout with interview questions and a space to take notes on what they observed. The students’ assignment is to write an essay about what the learned at the job, including their personal opinions: Is this a job they would like to have some day? If not, how would they like their job to be different? In addition, they will present their investigation to the class with a short introduction in English, as we are also studying job vocabulary and descriptions.

While I will not know my students responses to the project until I read their essays, I was personally very impressed by some of the comments the teachers made in their interviews and the topics they covered in their classes. In the kindergarten, Claudia, who teaches the 5-year-olds, gave a talk about the importance of personal hygiene, such as washing your hands before you eat. Maria Estella, the third-grade teacher, gave a detailed lesson about food safety and assigned her students to speak to their parents about how to prepare foods properly. (Ziquítaro is part of the developing world and I am very pleased that the teachers are imparting practical knowledge to the children.) Cesar, a fourth grade teacher, when asked his favorite part of his job, said he enjoyed helping the students become good citizens. I thought: What a wonderful goal and a wonderful way to express it.

And on to the benefits: we kicked off Semana Santa by accompanying the third-year students and teachers of the Telesecundaria on their graduation trip to the beach at Ixtapa, in the neighboring state of Guerrero. While I am sure Rachel will have more to say about the trip as she is the teacher to this group, for me it was also a very sweet experience. There we were with a pack of teenagers who, mostly, had never seen the ocean and squealed at the little waves coming towards them. When I noticed one boy taking pictures of the sea birds with the same kind of film camera I had in elementary school, I almost cried thinking that these kids will probably carry this memory of the beach as one of the happiest of their lives.

My goal for my last three weeks as an English teacher in Ziquítaro is to give my students (who, at this point are very dear to me, even the impossible ones) all the hope for the future and confidence in their abilities as I can and to convince them to continue studying as long as possible.

Expectations and results

By Katherine Ferry

As the end of March rushes at us, Rachel and I are stirred by the reality that only a few weeks of English classes remain (two weeks of April will be consumed by Easter vacation), and feel the anxiety surrounding the inevitable questions of: Have our students learned enough? Will they be prepared if their next step in life is leaving for the United States?

I have tried to have a constructive response to these questions. I have thought a lot about what we can expect from our work in Ziquítaro, and the absolute necessity of being realistic about the progress we can achieve. One of the essential bits of guidance I would like to impart to our future volunteer English teachers is that, in an educational and cultural system so drastically unlike our American version, with what we consider hopelessly irresponsible practices being the norm, we must do our best to adapt in order to reach our goals. We must remember: Our job here is to give English classes. While we wish we could reform the unfortunate quality of the schools (make sure classes take place every day, teachers remain in their classrooms at all times, and so forth), attempting a sweeping reform is not what we came here for and may be inappropriate. We do our best to remove the impediments which keep us from executing our classes well, and will be satisfied with the effects of our doing so.

Previous blog entries have already revealed that the work here can be exasperating. We can’t reach all the students. Repeated attempts to transform a student with behavior problems who refuses to study may fail. There will be some disinterested parents, careless teachers, and school days missed because the teachers have to go to a barbeque. But I know (I know!) that I reached some of them, and some of them will have the basic English skills they will need if they journey North.

Recently Rachel and I had a very encouraging conversation with an elementary school teacher who is delighted with her job. She glowed when she showed us some assignments of her top students as she repeated, “See? I taught them all this!”. She pointed out students she’d taught since they entered the Primaria, saying how proud she was that she was the teacher who taught them to read. I thought of this as I gave my students their second oral exam. I’ll demonstrate with the example of a particular student named Miguel. When I first arrived, he mixed with the most difficult of his classmates and his behavior was lamentable, his work below average. This semester he has transformed himself, staying after class to make sure his assignments are perfect, showing up for study sessions, and ignoring his loud friends during English class. He flew through his oral exam, comfortably answering questions and easily scoring the points necessary to earn an English Champ award. Miguel has put in the effort, and I am the one who taught him these basics. Now that is a result I can be proud of.

The Cost of High School By Rachel Wickland

The nearest high school to Ziquítaro, is a private school in the CEC y TEM system in Penjamillo (a town about 15minutes away by bus). CEC y TEM stands for Colegio de Estudios Cientificos y Technologicos de Estado de Michoacán. Unlike a high school in The United States, you must enter under a specific area of study (much like college). The four areas of study offered at the PLANTEL 01 Penjamillo school are Technician in Analysis and Technology of Food, Technician in Internal Combustion, Technician in Administration, and Technician in Information. The school also offers extracurricular activities, one of which includes a regional champion women’s basketball team.

Now let’s consider the cost of going to high school for someone living in Ziquítaro. We will already assume that there is a cost related to the students attending high school because it limits their availability to work for an income. Then, we consider the charge for the entrance exam you must take upon entering the system, which costs $100MEX. An entering student must also buy uniforms ($300MEX), pay a registration fee for the year ($200MEX), daily transportation (to and from Penjamillo at $7MEX each way), and any food they will eat while at school if they do not bring it from home (usually $20MEX). Variables that add to the cost of school are: homework and projects that require the use of the Internet($10MEX/hour), extracurricular activities that require the student to travel, school supplies, etc. So then, we break down the cost of the first year of high school as follows:

Entrance Exam $100MEX
Yearly Registration $200MEX
Uniforms $300MEX
Transportation $2520MEX ($14MEX x 180 day scholastic year)
_______________________________________________
TOTAL $3120MEX*/ year ($222.86USD^)
$260MEX/ month ($18.57USD)

*This figure does not consider the cost of variables and assumes the student brings food from home.
*This figure was derived using the current 14-1 exchange rate.

Through the educational section of the program, Oportunidades, that you have no doubt read about in past blogs, support for a student in the first year of high school is $610MEX for young men, and $700MEX for young women. This easily covers the tuition and all other associated fees of the high school, with extra to spare. For a family not involved in Oportunidades, however, the cost can be daunting. The other day, I casually asked around for the average monthly income of an average family living in Ziquítaro, and the median answer I received was between $2000MEX and $3000MEX per month.

There is still much to be investigated in this area of Ziquítaro, because it seems apparent that with any funding from Opportunidades the cost of high school would be easy to cover, and virtually all barriers to continuing one’s education resolved. However, we also have to consider the culturally charged issues of keeping the woman in the home, the idea that a “real man” works, the fear of entering the unknown, lack of confidence in their ability to perform in the high school, and the fact that many people from Ziquítaro have a skewed self-awareness as a group of “country-bumpkins” if you will.

For these and so many more reasons, I pound into my students every day that yes, THEY CAN DO IT! Yes, YOU ARE INTELLIGENT! Yes, YOU CAN FOLLOW YOUR DREAMS! I truly hope that Katherine and I can be examples of success for our students and that our examples will spark the desire within them to continue their education, even in the face of the challenges presented above.

Update from Rachel Wickland

The Mexican landscape impressed upon me the need to write this blog. This past weekend, Katherine and I took a road trip to the Sierra Chincua Monarch Butterfly Reserve on a weekend trip (I will get to this fantastic experience a bit later). On the ten-hour bus ride, the towns we past by were strikingly similar to that of our own familiar Ziquitaro. The abandoned houses, the dilapidated schools, the echoes of United States popular culture (I was particularly fond of an Interstate 5 sign hung in a window)…you could have very easily mistaken one town for the other. So in that ten-hour stretch, I began to think: Just how many other towns out there are like Ziquirato? The thought was daunting. How many other schools are providing an education to children of bi-national circumstances? How many other families are broken apart from immigration? How many other pueblitos have shrunk in population due to the absence of working-age men?

Whether or not we agree with the current policies and administration surrounding immigration, we cannot turn a blind eye to the challenges it presents. Immigration has become the untouchable subject in politics, not only because of the complexities it presents in terms of campaigning and elections (i.e. winning the “Latino vote”), but because of the Catch-22 that the United States has found itself in with respect to Mexican immigrants. A great film called, “A Day Without A Mexican,” illustrates the dependence of the United States on immigrant (specifically Mexican) labor. The driving point of the film emerges provoking the idea of: What would my day be like without the Mexican labor force? Imagine if you will: no farm workers, no housemaids, no day laborers, no caretakers—no fast food!! Risking sounding completely impersonal, I propose just for a moment we conceptualize Mexican immigrant labor as a commodity, an economic sector that supplies Mexico with a huge chunk of its GDP (in remittances) and provides the United States with a cheap labor force that pays into the tax purse, yet receives no social benefit from those taxes (not to mention the ease of exploitation using documentation as a threat). From this perspective, it is a pretty sweet deal. So in the eyes of the United States and Mexican governments, what would be the motivation to change such a system? Lest I remind you we are looking at the commodity of Mexican labor: Mexico producing an unskilled, uneducated source of inexpensive labor and selling it for remittances, and the United States benefiting economically from the purchase of a convenient, exploitable labor source for which they are not socially obligated or responsible.

But then...where is the origin of such a mutually beneficial system? Ziquitaro. Zinaparo. Numaran. And all of the countless other pueblitos we passed by in our bus trip to see the butterflies. The reality is that the Mexican immigrant labor force is not a commodity to be bought and sold. It is a group made up of people that I have the privilege of sharing my life with in our little town. The future of this group resides within the intelligent young minds that I joyfully teach English to on a daily basis. But what about the students and families that want to break out of the cycle of being under educated and having to heed to the pull of the Mexican immigrant labor force in the US? What is the recourse for the people who live in a community with a system of poor education and families living in poverty? In fact, it is the opinion of many mothers in our community that the school system is so poor that sometimes they question if they would rather keep their children at home. With all the hope in the world, this is what our organization is trying to change. Let me just quote directly from our mission statement: “First Step aims to help town members lead more successful lives in both Mexico and the US through enhancing their access to education as well as bolstering its relative importance in their lives. Ultimately our organization has bilateral aims: to instill a sense of hope and future in towns where immigration has become virtually the only economic option while simultaneously helping forge stronger communities in the US by educating its future members.” We are challenging our students to make themselves more than a commodity in the face of stereotypes, and every day, they impress their beautiful, unique humanness on me.

Now for the butterflies: Katherine and I had such an amazing experience at the Sierra Chincua Monarch Butterfly Reserve in the Zitaquaro area of Michoacan. It was truly unlike anything I had seen before in my life. As we hiked down to the hibernation site of the monarchs, millions of butterflies flitted around in the air. It was as if it was snowing, but the snowflakes were somehow alive. The green trees seemed brown because of the overwhelming number of butterflies crowded on them. To say the least, it was the greatest natural wonder I have ever witnessed. (Other than the birth of my precious niece Katelyn.) Interestingly enough, the monarchs migrate from the Great Lakes area of the US and Canada, then hibernate in areas of Mexico, and will eventually lay their eggs in and around Texas. Imagine all that wing flapping!! I never considered the Monarch butterfly to be an international migrant!