A Country School in Paraguay

Last week I posted a story about my adventures in rural Paraguay. Although we gather numerous stories from once-in-a-lifetime adventures, I’ll not attempt to put them all in writing for this spot. I must share with you, though, what I was able to see of a rural Paraguayan school.

One of the Peace Corps volunteers in my daughter’s rural community is named Greg. Greg lives in a school in the campo. He has a small two room apartment, a kitchen the size of a closet and a bathroom with no toilet. His cook stove works on bottle gas and when we visited, he had been out of gas for a week. He was cooking on a brick oven in an attached shed.

One of the basic rules of Peace Corps assignment is that the volunteers are provided with a sufficient living allowance to live at the same standard as their community. They are provided health care support at the American standard but they cannot afford to live at an “American standard” when it comes to housing, food and transportation.

So, Greg lives in his little place and one of his assignments is to help the school in any way he can. He found their meager supplies were in disarray and stored in broken, unsecured cabinets, so he built storage cabinets for the school.
He found there were limited ancient texts and virtually no library books, so he started a campaign to raise money and seek donations of books. I delivered to him 55children’s books in Spanish that my wife and I bought from one of the companies that does book fairs in the schools.

It was summer in Paraguay, but school was scheduled to start this week. Cow’s grazed through the yard. A little boy and an old man, came to get them around noon to take them to shade and water. Greg told me that by tradition, during the first week of school, the students and the teachers clean and paint.

Greg took me into the director’s office (principal’s office) to show me the cabinets he built and the beginnings of the library he was putting together. I noticed a hand made poster on the wall. The poster was labeled “Caracteristicas del Director”. Listed on this colorful poster, which was obviously the product of a group activity at some workshop, I read that the director is: Lider, Profesional, Responsable, Orientador, Democratico, Conciliador, Respetuoso and Cortes.

It was clear that, although this school is located far down a red dirt road in poverty filled rural Paraguay, that someone had invested in staff development for the director to make him a better director. It just goes to show you, no matter where you go, people do want to get better. No matter how poor, they don’t want to be poor for ever. No matter how limited the resources of the school, the director had a vision to become a better director. And even if it means, we all help to clean the school, the beginning of school is an exciting time no matter where you live.

In fact, as a special event prior to the opening of school, the director invited Greg to his house to eat pigs head. Gee, I’m sorry I missed that.