Tazones (CEFFA placement)

CEFFA, COMMUNITY PROFILE

CEFFA in Boca de Tazones, Atacames, Esmeraldas is an experiential and intercultural initiative for rural youth from afroecuadorian, chachi, and montubio origen between 12 and 21 years old, who for various reasons have not completed basic education according to Ecuador's system. CEFFA was established in 2001 and is recognized by the state as a private "high school" that provides the equivalent of the last three years of baic education (or the first three of six years of "high school) adapted to the realities of rural life.
In addition the basic education classes such as mathematics, language arts, social studies, and natural science, CEFFA also incorporates agricultural education and production, micro-enterprise ventures, leadership formation, and cultural "revalorization".

In 2004 CEFFA established a highly productive farm producing various vegetables, fruits, fine cacao of low aroma, and medicinal and culinary plants all under ecological agricultural practices. The teachers accompany the students in the execution of such practices and combine their work with artistic and educational activities directed at recovering ancestral and traditional knowledge. The parents of the students also collaborate with the school on these activities.

The school needs technical and financial support in the start up of commercializing the medicinal plant project as a source of funding. This support extends much further in that it promotes sustainable development for local communities.

I wish i hadn't let so much time pass by without writing, that way I'd know where to better pick up where I left off, and how. It's a little difficult to figure out how to best organize the next few entries, but I'm gonna do my best. I'll start with describing my main activities during my time at the school, and then in later posts provide a few stories from people i interviewed and my own observations/experiences. I'll also be talking about my other travels/activities in Esmeraldas, both related and not related to my fieldwork.

The cool thing about this education center is that its informal setup provides the opportunity (and necessity, really) to take on multiple roles. There is no stark hierarchical teacher-student relationship. We are all friends and "compañeros" first, and instructors/cooks/interns/students/what have you after. But each role is flexible and assumed by different people at different times. So this meant that my initial position as a student researcher unfolded into so many different things: i was a kitchen helper, english teacher, director´s assistant, friend, "madrina" (godmother, as my coordinator´s daughter would call me), and most often just another student, although with a much heavier curriculum because i was not only sitting in on the students´ classes, but also trying my best to learn their way of life and how to connect with the world around me, at times a very challenging and humiliating endeavor.

My goal throughout this entire experience was to relish in the "hands-on learning" style and learn as much as possible. I was also determined to make sure everyone knew how willing I was to participate in any activity and offer my few skills whenever a fitting situation arose. The students were surprised at my enthusiasm, and didn´t really understand why I felt the need to complete the same strenuous chorse they did. I guess the simple reason is that they were inviting me into their lives and enriching my knowledge, and there was no reason why I shouldn´t reciprocate through pitching in and bringing my gifts to the table, too.

The day at CEFFA started at 6 am, the sun barely rising, at the sound of my coordinator Maria Dolores shouting "levantarse! (wake up!)". I was always so impressed by how energetically she would get up at such an early hour, and it was always so consistent. The students have daily morning chores they are supposed to complete, involving weeding with machetes and watering in the plant gardens, feeding the pigs, sweeping the classroom and cleaning the dormitories, helping out Tía Susana in the kitchen, and pumping up water from the river to fill the various extremely large tanks positioned at various sites throughout the school and farm. For the first two sessions I almost always went to the gardens to help the students machete, though admittedly for the first week it was mostly them teaching me how to properly use the machete, which was an incredibly difficult task. In those early days the sections i cleared were always poorly and half-assedly done, and my peers would have to come by and finish up the job for me, which undoubtedly took up more of time than they were used to spending on their chores. My arms and wrists hurt, along with my pride since the students would always let out a few laughs at my horrible technique. In the end I learned to laugh about it too (it really was horrible at the beginning), and as with anything it started to feel easier and more natural as I got used to it. By the end of my time there i was able to clear reasonably large sections of the gardens, and the students really appreciated my determination and willingness to help them out. When I was engaging in participatory research activities I used this time in the mornings to help Tía Susana prepare breakfast and harvest the medicinal plants for the morning batch of tea, asking her as many questions as possible about different remedies and what changes have occurred in "ancestral medicine". As with all the people I talked with about the subject, I was overly-cautious in the beginning because I did not want to come off as an imposing researcher who just wants to extract information from these individuals for my own benefit. That insecurity coupled with the impression I got from Tía Susana that she assumed I did not know how to do kitchen work (as a wealthy Gringa, you know) made me afraid to approach her at first. But later on I forced myself to get over these ideas and one day I marched into the kitchen behind Nicole, one of the students (age 12) and said "Tía, I´m gonna help you in the kitchen," to which she replied, "Well it's about time, mi hija!" I´ll write more about her in a later entry, but Tía Susana became one of my closest friend at CEFFA and it was always so difficult to say goodbye to her.

The rest of the morning was spent in Agronomy class, which was divided between taking notes in the classroom and hands-on learning in the gardens. From the very beginning Fereneck, the agronomy instructor, expected me to participate in all activities related to the class, since it was material I never learned about in my school. I was very glad he expected that out of me as it really forced me to make an effort to understand it all. Some of the things I had previously learned on the organic farm in Vilcabamba two years ago, but I had forgotten a lot during the time when I hadn´t continued to farm. The lessons almost always tied in with various jobs that Fereneck had to complete on the farm as his duties as the Crop-Production Manager. We made organic compost piles, harvested a bunch of cacao to sell in the towns, planted medicinal plants in the nurseries, repaired the roof of the cacao nursery, etc. I even had to take the students´ final exam, which consisted of grafting small branches onto 10 cacao saplings. The grade was determined by how many branches successfully melded into the sapling´s trunk. When I went back to visit after my placement had ended I had learned that only 3 of mine actually stuck successfully. Yikes.

After lunch and long breaks used for playing soccer, swimming and bracelet making, I´d teach English, which was sometimes the most difficult hour and a half of the day. I wasn´t very good at clearly explaining grammatical rules to the students in Spanish, and often what I tried to teach was way too complicated for beginners. My US accent confused them and they found the spelling extremely difficult. I also didn´t really know any good fun activities to aid in my teachings, which left them with very little enthusiasm for English. There were a few occasional funny classes, but I left CEFFA not very confident that the majority of my lessons would not stick.

During algebra class I would use that time to talk with my coordinator, Tía Susana, or journal. Sometimes my coordinator and I would go into the gardens to do more work on the medicinal plants. Once the students finished classes we´d have some free time for bathing in the river or I´d interview some of the students about medicinal plant practices. During all of this quality time spent with the people around me I made very memorable friendships, and I felt very welcome and accepted in the CEFFA community.

When I wasn´t at CEFFA, I was living in Esmeraldas and traveling to other communities. In addition to helping out at the CEFFA office in Esmeraldas, I also helped out at the cultural diversity center, sponsored by UNESCO and run by the municipality. During my stay they hosted the slavery exhibit "Lest We Forget", consisting of many illustrations and information on the transatlantic slave trade. Most of the paintings was accompanied by English text, and my job was to translate the text as well as serve as a tour guide answering any questions. It was great because last year at McGill I took an art history class called the Visual Culture of Slavery, in which i learned about almost all the paintings that appeared in the exhibit and was able to provide a lot of background information on it. Below are some pictures of the event.

Unfortunately i don´t have any photos of this, but my dad and Judi came to visit halfway through my placement which was really awesome. I took them to some nice beaches in the province and also dragged them out to CEFFA. i made them cross the river by foot and try cacao. They met Tía´s husband who gave us some delicious bananas recently cut from the tree.

I also went traveling to Las Peñas, located in the north of the province and one of the widest beaches in South America. Unlike many of the beaches on the central coast and further south in Esmeraldas, Las Peñas (cliffs) is not as busy with tourists and still has a lot of its local flavor. It also has a ton of sea shells and these small water snakes called Agua Mala that sting you if you step on them, and you inevitably will.

Part of my fieldwork involved visiting families of past and present CEFFA students to interview them about their health practices, especially those who might practice ancestral medicine. Because my coordinator was often very busy and i couldn´t go without her, in the end I only visited two communities but still got a lot of information and even more adventure. Here is an excerpt from a journal entry on my first community visit to Piedra Fina, just south of the city of Esmeraldas:

"The bus let us off at this huge dangerous curve in the highway, which we had to cross in order to reach the small, winding dirt road to the community of Piedra Fina. We didn´t see any moto taxis that occasionally pass down the road, so we started walking. A pickup truck eventually came by and we hitched a ride with them. That probably saved us about 25 minutes of walking. We had to get out of the truck because they were turning down an even smaller dirt road. So we continued trekking along, sharing lots of laughs and searching for obos, which are the fruits that look like miniature mangoes. Maria Dolores (my coordinator) and pretty much everyone else on the coast likes the green, unripened ones, whereas I only like the ripe ones, which are hard to find because the birds always get to them first. We walked until a guy on a motorcycle stopped and chatted with us. He knew Maria Dolores somehow. Afterwards he offered us a ride on the motorbike. The three of us piled on. I was in the very back, and freaking out. Motorcycles have always scared me a bit, and this time with the rocky winding road, no helmit, and pretty much no seat, I was convinced I would fall off. Although I was screaming practically the whole way, we arrived in one piece, having saved almost an hour of walking time.

We were supposed to talk with the father of Elveristo, 18, a very quiet guy from CEFFA who I´m told knows a lot about medicinal plants. However, everyone was out working on their land. So we stopped in to one of the houses of a former student, Karen, who graduated from CEFFA last year. She is in highschool now and wants to study accounting. She seemed like a very smart and mature girl. She lived in a small wooden house on stilts, with the platform divided into the public and private space,shut off by sheets hanging from the tin roof. There was a huge water tank with a faucet at the bottom, shelves with a TV, speakers and a DVD player. The kitchen was a small camping-sized stove and the plates were convenient stored on what was also a drying rack. eight people lived in that house, which seems a bit crazy. But i really liekd the way it was set up and how they smartly made use of the space. My coordinator suggested that I talk with Karen and her mom, since Elberisto´s dad hadn´t shown up. I felt a little awkward when asking formal interview questions, mainly because I didn´t know them. Dolores took my awkwardness to mean I was scared or shy, which made me feel embarrassed. I did manage to get a good amount of info, despite my discomfort. The mother told me she does not know much about medicinal plants, but her husband (who was out working) did. She said she thinks they grow one or two medicinal plants just outside the house, such as Ruda, Dulca Mara, and a few others. She said she used ruda a lot for little sicknesses, like stomach pains and menstrual cramps. We suddenly switched topics and started talking about various social issues, like how women have to choose between school and "love" and often they fall in "love" with their first boyfriend and then they get pregnant and the father of their child would get too jealous if they went away to school every day, thinking that she´s really just going there to meet secret lovers. She told me that jealous husbands have killed their wives because they (often wrongly) think they are cheating on them. That's why it's best to keep their wives at home, they reason. I should say here that these are definitely extreme cases, but divisions along gender lines are very common in this region. That is another reason why CEFFA`s work is so great, since both girls and boys are expected to complete the same jobs."