Schools on the Coast! – A Post Long Overdue
After two months in Quito interviewing members of Fe y Alegría’s national office, Jen and I were getting stir crazy, and it became increasingly clear that we needed to see some schools. Fe y Alegría Ecuador subdivides its work into four semi-autonomous regions, and as we’d already spent time in Quito and in the Sierra (two of the regions), we arranged three-day visits to the offices of Regional Sur and Regional Manabí-Esmeraldas, with a few days in between for a trip to the beach. First up was Guayaquil – Ecuador’s largest city, and the center of Regional Sur.
We landed in Guayaquil after a short flight from Quito, and were at once engulfed in waves of noise and heat. Guidebooks put Guayaquil’s population at around 2 million. Taxi drivers told us 6-7, and compared to Quito’s narrow streets and empty nights, Guayaquil is a place apart. It’s the tropical sprawl you see in photographs – concrete peaked doorways, peeling paint and seated, shirtless men with cigarettes, dominoes, and cold beer. Outside our barred and open window, a six-lane thoroughfare shrieked with buses until 2:00AM, then started up at 5:00. More true here than anywhere else in Ecuador, cars exist as an excuse to honk your horn.
As for schools, we visited four Fe y Alegría “centers” – the first two in somewhat impoverished barrios that seem to have ticked up in recent years. There was a saying at these schools that Fe y Alegría educates “los ricos de los pobres” – the rich amongst the poor. The other two schools do reach the poor amongst the poor; a more detailed look at one visit illustrates the challenges, accomplishments, and contradictions of Fe y Alegría’s work.
We visited “Centro Tio Paco” a sunbaked morning with one of Fe y Alegría’s regional coordinators. The cab cost $7 – a huge sum in Ecuador, and a way of saying this school was located far, far from Guayaquil’s center. As we drove north through traffic the buildings changed from gritty, low rise offices to one story cement homes with corrugated tin roots, to a mix of ramshackle bamboo, wood, and stone boxes, some propped on stilts, others crumbled to one side with their walls spilling into the streets. The taxi turned up a hill onto one street, driving slow enough through dirt and potholes for us to see a crowded weekday market with rainbows of vegetables and large, shiny fish lined up on boards in the sun. The taxi driver reached into the backseat and locked each door. We watched the crowd. They watched us. Gradually the market thinned and the dust from the road increased. It rose from the road in an opaque haze, and seemed to coat each house with a sheen of pale brown. We turned left or right on same-seeming streets, past barefoot kids at 9:00AM, and crossed small streams where water, trash and waste had caked in mounds of clay under the 90 degree sun. The phrase “poverty trap” kept marching through my head – Guayaquil center had lightly shocked our U.S. senses, but this was another world away entire, a proverbial forgotten slum.
Entrance to Centro Tio Paco
Finally we reached the school itself, where Fe y Alegría’s red, heart shaped logo on a high concrete wall made a rare sign of color along the street. Inside the walls, the school was built at the base of a hill, such that a scattering of small homes could peer into the rectangular courtyard and classrooms for the 400-odd primary and middle school students. Like other Fe y Alegrías we visited, murals and paintings decorated many of the walls, yet the paint here was not so new. There were no basketball hoops in the concrete yard, and half the yard was unpaved with chickens scratching between ruts and large stones.
Tio Paco schoolyard
The principal gave us a brief tour of the school. Each classroom around the courtyard had a chest-high concrete wall topped by vertical bars supporting a slanted metal roof. Two rooms stood out. The first was a technology room filled with 20-something new computers, which the principal called “a miracle…in this neighborhood.” Second, the school had a large, peaked-roof multipurpose room with a stage and shiny tile floors, big enough for around 200 people. As we walked out, the principal explained this space was used for school and community gatherings. The week before a mother had asked the principal if she could use the room for a weekend birthday party. “Of course,” the principal told us he replied, “this is not my space, it belongs to you.”
We continued to chat as we walked through the few remaining buildings. We learned that the school’s main challenges where electricity and potable water, and that the principal rarely, if ever, visited classrooms to observe a teacher’s work. The teachers were well trained, the principal told us; there was no reason to breathe down their necks, and besides, it could be offensive to watch and critique a teacher’s classroom. At this point the principal paused, and said that we should really end the interview so we could get to the party.
Jen and I hadn’t heard of any party, but we walked with the principal back to the main courtyard where a few chairs had been set up next to a boombox blasting at full capacity. We were told a Spanish psychologist had volunteered at the school for three months (a sorely needed contribution given high rates of violence, abuse, etc in the neighborhood, and the fact that all of Fe y Alegría’s 12 schools in the area share the same psychologist) and the school was throwing her a party to say goodbye. 
Jen and I sat with the psychologist and a few teachers as each grade of students filed in to sit on the ground around the courtyard. One by one, representatives from each grade presented some sort of gift, speech, skit, or thanks. Third graders sang a wobbling song about opening their hearts; a kindergartner spoke very slowly and very loudly while holding a microphone half the size of her head; and sixth graders performed a Spanish-language version of Little Red Riding Hood that didn’t make much sense, but looked like a lot of fun.
Suddenly, we heard a loud yell, and a group of older students wearing eclectic green and red costumes and wielding a variety of noisemakers burst into the square and started dancing while throwing confetti in the air.
blowing fire - definitely not a sanctioned activity in U.S. schools
Gradually kids from other grades joined in, someone cranked up the music, and Jen and I were accosted by an army of second graders with outstretched hands until we had no choice but to dance as well. We ran or skipped around the courtyard with all the kids and some teachers, two or three eighth graders were blowing fire, a facepaint war broke out, and everything in general was beautiful pandemonium.
Eventually, it all faded. Some kids picked up confetti, and everyone went back to class. How much work got done in the next hour we can only guess.
We share this story not just because it was a fun party. Over the last few weeks of classroom visits and interviews, Jen and I have felt at times overwhelmed by the depth of the problems inside and abutting Fe y Alegría’s schools. Beyond their contexts of poverty, we’ve particularly been troubled by a lack of evaluation, of quality control, or of a culture of continuous improvement that we think is so essential to providing any excellent education. These gaps in measurement – combined with gaps in pedagogical expertise, management and funding – have left us, as consultants, asking, “Where do we start?” and have made it difficult to see how Fe y Alegría can efficiently improve their own programming.
Yet at the same time, the kids we talked to at this party and at the seven other schools we visited were without exception excited about their math or ethics class, they were eager to tell us how much they liked their school, and they generally seemed happy and proud to be in school. Many of the walls we saw were explosions of color, murals and student art, and most principals reported waiting lists for enrollment. In short – accountability, evaluation, standards – these all may be lacking – but it’s no small feat to make your school a place where kids want to spend their time.
These thoughts do not conclusions make, but they do tell us there’s something in Fe y Alegría’s identity/fabric/makeup/whatever that, despite the aforementioned ills, has made them able to survive and even grow over 44 years in Ecuador. We will spend the next five months largely visiting schools, so we should have ample time to refine our understanding of Fe y Alegría’s identity as way to mitigate the many challenges their schools face.
nice beach in Puerto Lopez
But for now, happy holidays to all. We also visited schools in Manta and beaches in Puerto Lopez on this trip, but don’t have space in this post…you can see pictures from those trips here and here. Stay tuned for our next post – it’ll be much more pictorial…and about climbing mountains!
