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The real discovery
SUCRE, Venezuela. —Land! The outline of the Macuro Mountains in the Venezuelan state of Sucre began to be visible from the prow, amid the violent sea that honors its name: Boca de Dragon or Dragon Mouth.
The impressive landscape interrupts conversations on board, until someone warns that 508 years earlier that same fury pushed Christopher Columbus’ caravels to the shore, forcing the Spaniards to make their first incursion in the Americas.
The Cuban internationalists have come to Macuro - baptized by Columbus as “the land of grace”- to give fresh impetus to education.
Rescued from oblivion
While talking about social programs is old news in the rest of Venezuela’s territory, in remote fishing communities like this one, with some 2,000 inhabitants, the fight against illiteracy or the first doctor’s consultations under the Barrio Adentro community health care program are quite an event.
On the small islands surrounding the coastline of the state of Sucre, east of Caracas, there are still approximately 1,500 people who don’t know how to read and write. The number is insignificant in proportion to the 79,000 in the state who finished the Cuban Yo Sí Puedo (Yes I Can) literacy teaching method, but the idea is not to leave anybody behind. Thus, the teaching missions, with Cuban collaborators along them, take to the sea.
“Our fishing communities have always been treated with contempt. If you went to an institution, they slammed the door in your face. At clinics, they didn’t want to see us because they said we smelled like fish,” recalls Sonia Rivero. “They never worried about building schools for us. Children became adults, established their families, and never learned.”
Habit made your children’s education unimportant. “My father didn’t go to school. He was more interested in having me work, so I left school,” said 22-year old Ambrosio Ozuna, who has taken up the challenge of starting all over again.
He has already joined Mission Ribas the program for adults to complete junior high and high schools. Other men and women with similar life stories are also going returning to classrooms.
They used to cheat us
The impact of the government’s social programs stands out in every aspect of life. “They used to cheat us with the weight when we sold selling our sardines. They also cheated us when it came to signing the receipts. But now we have joined in cooperatives, we are studying, and they can’t cheat us anymore,” said Damilis Mata, from El Congrio, a community of 300 fishermen and women at the Araya peninsula.
There are another 54 villages like El Congrio in the area. To visit them can be like trying to get to the end of a labyrinth. The goal is to find the very last inhabitant.
That’s how they found Carmen Pineda, a 52 year-old woman that dreams about writing her name. “I’m embarrassed to sign with my fingerprint,” she deeply regrets.
However, the concern of taking education to every corner responds to deeper needs. In seven weeks —once she has finished the last lesson of Yo Sí Puedo, Carmen will be able to read, for example, the constitutional reform that is now capturing the nation’s interest and that includes, among its propositions, the right of fishermen and women to social security.
From one island to the next, the experience is repeated. And in this way until they reach Macuro, where, five centuries ago, the rough sea forced Columbus to disembark. It was one of his many accidents, but history records it as the arrival of the conquerors to American solid ground.
With their pants rolled up and their notebooks and methodological guides inside a plastic bag to protect them, the Venezuelan and Cuban educators jump out of the boats, and throw themselves into the water.
Shortly after, in improvised classrooms, the real discovery begins.
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A group of Cuban and Venezuelan educators in Sucre |
Photos by Alberto Borrego Avila.
Thanks to Walter Lippman for locating this article from from Granma.