Imanalla manta Jahuapamba! (Hello from Jahuapamba!)
For reference, Jahuapamba is pronounced sort of like Cawabunga (Hawabamba). 
It is a tiny indigenous town just north of Otavalo (2 ½ hours north of Quito), and the site of our second Fe y Alegría school visit. While, like Cuenca, it’s at high elevation – about 9,000 feet surrounded by 16,000 foot mountains – pretty much everything else about Jahuapamba seems a world apart.
Our walk through “town” is 
along a dusty road flanked by cornfields and interspersed with cinder block houses with unfinished or tin roofs. A multitude of young kids play barefoot in the street, and stray dogs wake up to bark half-heartedly as we pass. A few bodegas line the road as well, their barred windows looking in on a few shelves of bottled water, soda, chips, and sometimes eggs.
Nearly everyone we pass is indigenous Kichwa, with darker skin than most Ecuadorians. This region, despite its poverty, has been more successful that most in maintaining its indigenous traditions alongside modernization. Kichwa is still the primary language; most kids learn Spanish at school, and many older people speak little Spanish. The men and boys wear their black hair long and gathered behind their heads and often beneath a round dark bowler hat, along with white cotton pants, white sandals, and sometimes a poncho if it’s cold. 
In turn women and girls wear black sandals, long blue or black wrapped skirts cinched with woven belts, and flowing white blouses stitched with delicate embroidery beneath ponytails wrapped in fabric and multiple strands of golden beads around their necks. The combinations for both men and women are striking, and quite beautiful.
The school itself is perched about two thirds of the way up a hill with views of a valley and small towns below, and beyond that Mt. Cotocachi at 16,200 feet, which after storms is peaked with snow. A stone wall and chain link fence form a large rectangle around the school. Inside, multiple classroom buildings with tin roofs and concrete floors form an L around a hillside of unkempt grasses, a small playground, and a soccer field of dirt and weeds. 
Below the classrooms lies another field and a cafeteria where all students and teachers receive free breakfast and lunch, prepared each day by different mothers and grandmothers, who often cook with babies strapped to their backs.
We live near the top of the schoolyard in a small and very leaky apartment
(more about that in the next post). We don’t have a kitchen so we head down each morning to the school’s cafeteria to boil water for coffee before school starts at 8:00. Each day begins with all 140 students lined up by grades 1st through 6th for morning prayer, the national anthem, and often a chat from one of the teachers about being respectful and well-behaved. 
Afterwards, the kids go to class – every grade has all its subjects (except English and catechism) taught by the same teacher, and grades 1/2 and 4/5 are each taught by one teacher handling both grades at once in the same classroom. In total this brings the number of teachers at the school to five, one of whom is the school’s Director in addition to her third grade duties.
The school day runs 8:00 to 1:00 and there are no breaks for the teachers besides recess. Because of this, it has been a constant challenge to talk to any of the teachers at length (most also study or work second jobs in the afternoon), and so we’ve fit in conversations with teachers before school and during the half-hour recreo. 
Unlike in Cuenca where we were able to pick the brains of a large team of administrative staff who did not teach regular classes, the experience in Jahuapamba is much more about sneaking in the snippets of conversation and Q&A with teachers when we can, but then about sitting back, observing both inside classrooms and out, and spending more time getting to know the kids themselves.
Our first few days at the school were marked by smiles from a distance but shyness and running away when we asked the kids any questions. In particular, we found it hard to talk to the youngest kids – we’d later learn that many students enter school speaking Kichwa but little Spanish, and don’t become fluent until around third grade. After a few days, however, the kids warmed up to us. Jen was adopted by a group of third grade girls who seemed endlessly fascinated by her blond hair, 
Matt took to playing soccer with the fifth grade boys, and we both served as an endless resource for Spanish-English translations (“How do you say ‘motorcycle’?”).
Talking with the kids during recreo and lunch, we learned that many of them work at home both before and after the school day, watching siblings, cooking, caring for livestock, and helping out with the family business (most commonly weaving – the entire Otavalo region is famous for its markets and indigenous handicrafts). 
Most of the kids’ older siblings had stopped going to school after 6th grade to go to work, and the girls in particular marry very young. However, most 5th and 6th graders we talked to said that they wanted to continue in school and their parents planned for them to do so. This matched what the teachers told us too – that over the last decade more and more families saw their neighbors’ kids go to high school or even university, and year by year they stretched enough to offer the same opportunities to their own kids as well.
Still, encouraging the families to get involved in and value their children’s education (particularly for girls) remains a daily struggle for the teachers and the school. While the last 5 to 10 years have brought change to the region, this town and its families remain rooted more firmly in (and dependent on) their businesses than in the opportunity of education. Spanish is rarely spoken at home, most parents have only a primary school education at best, and many grandparents – and some parents – do not know how to read or write. For instance, during a meeting one day with the Director, our conversation was interrupted with visits from mothers and grandmothers who had come to pay their students’ monthly tuition (at this school $1.50 per month, which about two thirds of students pay while the remainder receive scholarships). Some signed their receipt, but several used an ink pad to give a finger print instead. We realized that these women were likely illiterate.
When considering the difference between the generations – grandparents who do not know how to sign their names, parents who attended school through third grade, and now a generation of children who attend high school with increasing regularity – some days it is easy to sit back and be satisfied with the exponential increase in access to education over the last 
decades. In Jahuapamba, Fe y Alegría is indeed providing an education for kids who otherwise may not have had the opportunity to go to school. At the same time, however, we have witnessed very uneven classroom instruction and kids who seem to be a year or two behind their urban Fe y Alegría peers – let alone kids in U.S. schools. While we realize the importance and differences of context, we are still constantly torn in our reflections about what “success” means in Jahuapamba. In part, this school succeeds because it provides access to education, and for some the opportunity to continue on to high school. But does it provide the quality education that Fe y Alegría seeks? Our gut reaction: not yet. The school faces significant obstacles such as a lack of basic resources, local poverty, quality of instruction, and cultural resistance to education. Still, Jahuapamba has come a long way since its founding in the early 90s, and is slowly but steadily making its way.
To see more photos from Jahuapamba (and Cuenca! and our visit to nearby Laguna Quicocha!), visit: http://picasaweb.google.com/jvorse
