Kusi Quyllur Update

July 2010

Dear Friends:

There are five hours before my flight departs from Lima to the United States. Now with electricity again after several weeks in the mountains of Q’eros, I’m going to use this time to tackle the intimidating task of communicating all that has happened with our collective work since I last wrote.



Below is a glimpse of the terrain I will cover, for those of you who like to leapfrog:

A. The Busy Person’s Brief

B. Current Goals

C. Back Story: How we arrived where we are

D. The Story Since March

E. Next Steps

F. I.E. Kusi Quyllur Expenditures to Date

A. The Busy Person’s Brief

Kusi Quyllur (koo-sy coy-lur) Education Institute is located in the Communities of Q’eros, a remote indigenous Quechua community in the mountains above Cusco, Peru. The hacienda that controlled Q’eros’ land denied the communities education until 1958 when the Q’eros pursued legal routes to freedom. This action subsequently precipitated Peru’s land reforms of the 1960s. Although the Peruvian government eventually established a school in Q’eros, it was placed in a ceremonial village where nobody lived (think of Machu Picchu on a smaller scale) and children therefore had to walk up to seven and a half miles from their homes to attend classes. Compounding the problem, government teachers often neglected their duties, leaving the schools and the children abandoned. In response to these failures many families have recently moved from Q’eros to nearby cities to educate their children. As a result, the community is slowly fracturing.

In 2008, the Q’ero community of Quchamuqu (spelled many ways, and previously in our material “Ccochamocco”) decided to take control of the situation by building its own education center. With the generous financial support of more than thirty people from around the world, the parents of Quchamuqu completed the construction of the school building of Kusi Quyllur Education Institute in February 2010.

Kusi Quyllur has been full of students, teachers, and parents since March 8, 2010. Classes started with 16 girls and 14 boys, but enrollment has since increased to include 19 girls and 23 boys between the ages of 5 and 15. There are two classrooms and two teachers, who instruct students in Spanish, Quechua, Mathematics, Science, Technology, and Community Knowledge. The school is managed by a committee of dedicated parents that is in regular communication with the community government and the two teachers. Beyond Q’eros, Kusi Quyllur is forming many alliances with government offices and local and international NGOs. In addition to its continued relationships with I.E. Kusi Kawsay in Pisac, Willka T’ika in Urubamba, and Asociación ANDES in Cusco, Kusi Quyllur has recently made meaningful connections with Pukllasunchis (Cusco), QESPINA (Cusco), Q’ente Textile Revitalization Society (Canada/Cusco) and the regional office of the Ministry of Education in Cusco.

“In the future I don’t want to see us as we are now; I want much to change as a result of this school.”

Martin, school committee member

B. Current Goals

• To work with the Peruvian Ministry of Education to receive recognition and accreditation as a bilingual school with certified teachers from Q’eros;

• To begin adult literacy classes in Quechua and Spanish on Saturdays for the generation of parents and young adults in Q’eros who could not access education when they were children;

• To collaborate with community elders and technology experts to simultaneously create a curriculum based in local knowledge and a digital registry of the community’s medicinal, astrological, agricultural, and artistic knowledge ($1500);

• To work with Q’ente Textile Revitalization Society and university volunteers to create a community museum where tourists will be able to learn about local history and knowledge and also purchase locally-produced textiles; museum proceeds and textile sales will support Kusi Quyllur ($1000);

• To build a third classroom for the youngest students, ages 4-6 ($1000);

• To replace the current pit toilets with three ecological bathrooms ($350)

• To hire a third teacher to accommodate the growing student body, as well as guarantee salaries for our current teachers in 2011 ($12,000);

• To install a solar panel that will power two laptop computers and allow for the expansion of the technology program ($4000).

If you are interested in supporting any of these goals, you can make a tax-deductible donation at www.pachamamaspath.org/support.php (please make sure to specify that you would like to donate to Q’eros). Also, please consider donating your gently-used laptop, digital voice recorder or video camera…or simply printing the attached PDF and placing it wherever it will encounter interested people. Finally, check out the new Kusi Quyllur website, created in collaboration with members of the school board.

Urpichallay sonqo!

(Thank you)

C. Back Story: How we arrived where we are (Skip this if you’ve been with us from the start)

Sr. Fredy Flores Machacca, current director of Kusi Quyllur Education Institute and instructor of Quechua and local knowledge, grew up in Quchamuqu and then left it for several years to receive education at Fey y Alegria and institutions in Cusco. He was subsequently elected by local leaders to learn computer and video technology skills for the benefit of the community. With this purpose he arrived at Asociación ANDES, an indigenous-directed NGO in Cusco, Peru, at the same time that Mana Studios (a.k.a. Monte and I) arrived at the ANDES office to volunteer our time and knowledge. For the following eight months we worked with Fredy to present video workshops in Q’eros and film statements community members wanted to share with international audiences.

It was during this filming in the community that we first learned of Quchamuqu’s intention to build a school for its children. As person after person explained, the 7.5 mile walk to the nearest school was too far for the small children to travel, and out of question for most of the girls. Without education, they argued, the community would never be able to provide for itself or improve the limited income of its residents. Furthermore, many families were permanently leaving the community to educate their children in the city, slowly draining the Communities of Q’eros of their most committed parents and most promising children. The communities had been petitioning the government to build a school for several years but their meetings were consistently cancelled and their documents lost; would we bring their ideas to international audiences? Monte and I said we would try and created a 30 minute documentary film and website, www.qeros.net, to spread the word about the communities’ concerns.

Over the next year we stayed in touch with Fredy via Skpe and email to continue the video work. One day a photo arrived of Fredy in the doorway of a building: tired of waiting for the government to respond to their requests, the parents of Quchamuqu had decided to construct a school themselves.

In the following weeks, more photos arrived, along with a short video that Fredy made.

Having met the parents of Quchamuqu, I was not surprised by their commitment but I was impressed by what they were accomplishing with one wheelbarrow and their bare hands. I also realized they were going to need some help: in a community where children were consistently undernourished, there wouldn’t be money to buy things like desks and doors. With the generous support of many of you—including a benefit concert by Xavier Sayer in Lima–these financial challenges were slowly overcome, window by window and desk by desk. As the money arrived, fathers from the community carried planks of wood, windows, doors, chairs and desks on their backs from the towns below the mountains, a trek that includes a 14,000-foot pass.

In addition to the fiscal sponsorship and teacher training provided by the Peruvian-based NGO Pachamama’s Path, the NGOs Kenosis Spirit Keepers and Willka T’ika also provided critical fundraising and on-the-ground support. Finally, in December 2009, the school was granted a combined $8000 by the foundations First Peoples Worldwide and the New England Biolabs Foundation. These generous grants breathed life into Kusi Quyllur, guaranteeing that the community would be able to pay the salaries of two teachers for the 2010 school year.

D. The Story Since March

Nuts and Bolts

Since March the community has continued to add to the school complex, first with the construction of a school kitchen where parents on a rotating schedule prepare a daily lunch for their children. This lunch program was started after the teachers realized that many of their students were unable to concentrate due to hunger. As a result, Kusi Quyllur is now participating in a government program that provides the school with rice, beans, and powdered milk and is supplementing this food with potatoes children bring from home and vegetables grown in a newly-constructed school greenhouse. The materials for this greenhouse were donated by Hannah Rae Proust, a Junior at Bates College who worked with Kusi Quyllur in fulfillment of an SIT independent research project in April 2010; seeds were donated by the Peruvian NGO QESPINA.

Attached to this kitchen is a large room where the teacher from the city lives three weeks per a month, furnished with a bed donated by Willka T’ika—the first bed in Quchamuqu! Another first for the community are the two bathrooms which fathers constructed soon after the school opened. The bathrooms are currently simple pits but conversations are underway with Rotary Club Peru about the possibility of substituting these for more ecological bathrooms.

So those are the nuts and bolts. But it is one thing to build a school and quite another to provide an education.

The Difference

When I first began to talk to people about I.E. Kusi Quyllur, I was surprised to receive a lot of warnings and little encouragement. While the American public might be charmed by books about building schools in remote mountain areas, international development experts and local Cusqueñans alike have seen the end of this story too many times: a well-meaning, foreign NGO arrives in a remote, impoverished area with money and promises. Within a year, a school building is constructed, children, teachers, and supplies arrive and the NGO claims victory. The next year the school is handed over to the government, at which point students receive a sub-standard education based on a curriculum decided by distant policymakers unfamiliar with local realities, and sometimes even local languages. In the case of schools in the Communities of Q’eros, this process of turnover has also been accompanied by serious problems with teacher attendance and declining parental investment.

To address these challenges I worked for several months with a group of graduate students at the Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Graduate School of Education to consider how the school could succeed while remaining under the management of the community. Melissa Romaine, a Masters degree candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, was an especially valuable resource during the 2010 spring semester, dedicating her coursework to preparing information on best practices in indigenous bilingual education in Latin America. Based on the information that Melissa gathered and my own research about indigenous education with the Harvard Native American Program, Kusi Quyllur stood out for one simple and critical reason: it was conceived of and created by the same community that it would serve. The challenge therefore was to provide outside resources and support without diminishing the community’s ownership of the school.

“What happened to us won’t happen to our children…Right now we can’t read but our children will be able to read well and speak fluently…With education, life is good. No one can take from you what you learn in school.” Sebastian, community leader

E. Next Steps

Perhaps the most daunting—and exciting—aspect of the process ahead is to seek official recognition for Kusi Quyllur from the Peruvian Ministry of Education. This step is necessary in order for its graduates to continue on to further schooling and is also important if Kusi Quyllur wants to benefit from government funding in the future. In a meeting in June, the community voted that this recognition was critical but with two conditions:

• That the community retains control over the selection and management of teachers;

• That the school will teach a curriculum that goes beyond the state curriculum to include Quechua and the local knowledge of the community.

In short, based on the community’s negative experiences with the Hatun Q’eros school, which has been operating for over fifty years and where teachers are frequently absent and children consistently fail to learn, the community of Quchamuqu wanted a private school.

“The school in Hatun Q’eros has been open for fifty years but we don’t have any professionals in our community. The teachers thought that because Q’eros was far away they didn’t need to teach us well.” Alejandro, father of three children

I was both thrilled and frightened by the result of this vote: I agreed with the community that the school would suffer if the teachers weren’t held accountable to the local community government–and also agreed that a community curriculum was central to the success of Kusi Quyllur. What concerned me was that private schools are entirely dependent on outside funds and therefore less sustainable than government schools, and also that private schools create a system of education that is parallel to the public system; while they may provide a better education, they let the government off the hook and don’t improve the larger education system.

In the month since the community vote, a promising solution has surfaced: during conversations with the Ministry of Education I learned that it may be possible to arrange for these conditions to be met and for Kusi Quyllur to receive government funding as a bilingual school. This is an exciting possibility in that it would legitimize a new model of community-based education within the Peruvian education system and also offer sustainable support for I.E. Kusi Quyllur.

“If we have our own teachers, our traditions won’t die.” Modesto, father and school committee member

Based on multiple community discussions, Kusi Quyllur’s present strategy is grounded by three anchors:

1) Identity: The Communities of Q’eros are known throughout the Andes for their strong culture and deep knowledge. They are proud of this and committed to passing this knowledge onto their children. In Kusi Quyllur’s curriculum, local knowledge and language are given equal weight to conventional subjects and Spanish. Unlike the conventional curriculum in Peru, this dual-curriculum values and honors Andean culture.

2) Accountability: In order to combat tendencies toward teacher absences and underperformance, teachers and school administrators need to be accountable to local community governments rather than distant administrators. Because local parents and indigenous leaders manage Kusi Quyllur, teacher performance is constantly monitored and extended teacher absences, often a serious problem in nearby schools, are avoided.

3) Responsibility: For a community-based school to succeed, parents must be invested and the community must be committed to sustaining the school for the long-term. In addition to providing the labor for the construction of the school buildings, Kusi Quyllur’s parents participate in monthly school committee meetings, work in a school greenhouse, and contribute to the preparation of school lunches on a rotating basis.

Finally, I.E. Kusi Quyllur has a new website—www.kusiquyllur.org—that was created in collaboration with three members of the school board. Please visit it for more information and lots of photos. If you would like to help spread the word about Kusi Quyllur, you can 1) post the website on your online territory; 2) print the attached PDF and distribute in cafes, universities, libraries, offices, and anywhere else you think interested people will encounter it. Lastly, I am including documentation of expenditures to date for your reference, below.

A million thanks for all that you have given and continue to give. Please be in touch with thoughts and suggestions!

1. F. I.E. Kusi Quyullur Expenditures to Date

Date	Amount (USD)	Purpose	Category
12/15/08	500	School roof	construction
12/20/08	325	School construction	construction
1/10/09	400	School construction	construction
1/20/09	368	School construction	construction
12/10/09	500	school construction	construction
1/30/10	500	chairs and desks	supplies
2/5/10	260	transportation costs 2009	transportation
3/2/10	321	Teacher 1 salary March	salary
3/29/10	429	Teacher 2 salary March	salary
3/17/10	15	AmEx-BCP charges	fees
5/5/10	745	Teachers 1 and 2 Salaries April	salary
3/30/10	75	School board meetings in Paucartambo	transportation
3/30/10	10	MoneyGram fees	fees
3/31/10	35	bank transfer fees	fees
3/18/10	1.76	notebook for accounts	supplies
3/19/10	1.76	plastic sleeves	supplies
3/17/10	3.4	photocopies	supplies
3/16/10	43.92	basic classroom supplies	supplies
3/17/10	6.65	posters for classrooms	supplies
3/17/10	141.61	student notebooks	supplies
5/6/10	52	camera repairs	supplies
5/30/10	760	Teachers 1 and 2 Salaries May	salary
5/6/10	6.428571429	posters for classroom	supplies
6/25/10	30.34	website domain	publicity
6/30/10	744	Teachers 1 and 2 Salaries June	salary
7/17/10	16.72597865	photocopies	supplies
7/17/10	12.45551601	Quechua dictionary for classroom	supplies

On Jul 24 in Peru tagged by kate