A surprise gift offers big possibilities for a poor Mexican school — and leads to another surprise
The directors of el Colegio Patria have trouble believing their good luck and knuckle down to planning what to do with it.
The concrete courtyard of el Colegio Patria, the reverberant heart of life at the school, serves as a stage, a basketball court, a lunchroom, a traffic thoroughfare, an auditorium, a playground, a shipping and receiving area, a dance floor and, on occasion, a banquet hall. It’s flanked to the north by the tiendita (the school’s kitchen and lunchroom) and the classrooms of Grades 7, 8 & 9, and to the south by the classrooms of Grades 1 to 6. On the east side of the courtyard, a few steps lead to a smaller concrete yard, the playground for the preschool. On the west, a large gate opens onto the main highway from Puerto Vallarta to Tepic.
Zoning does not exist in the town of Las Varas, which creates problems for the school in the form of some very unsuitable neighbours. At the moment, there is an auto body shop sandwiched between the preschool and secondary classrooms, and a mechanic next to the primary school. Between the traffic noise, the grinding of auto body parts and the noise of the children, the acoustic level inside the school is deafening. Literally deafening. Lety, the school director who spends all of the school day behind the counter of the tiendita, has lost the hearing in her left ear.
A large tree between the courtyard and the north side of the school provides some welcome shade. The tree was planted many years ago by Armida and Lety’s father and it humanizes the space. Armida and Lety, the founders and directors of el Colegio Patria, started with a single room and have gradually expanded the school to accommodate 11 grades.
The school has grown around the tree like an accretion. The tree has been cemented in and built around and hemmed in, but it continues to thrive and to shelter all the of the school’s activity. Kids climb it, theatricals and dance performances unfold under its canopy, basketballs get lost in its leaves, lights and ornaments hang from it at Christmas, piñatas sway from its branches at fiestas, and moonlight filters through its leaves during the evening ceremonies of graduation and Christmas concerts.
The tree produces very large pods. It’s an unusual species for Mexico, and nobody can identify it, though Armida and Lety wish someone would.
My friend Betty and I had been volunteering at the school, and to thank us, Armida and Lety invited our families to a barbecue over the Christmas break. The fiesta took place in the school’s courtyard, not only the centre of the school but also the centre of Armida and Lety’s universe. The BBQ, a couple of metal sheets welded together with a grate on top, had fragrant orange wood burning in its barrel. Armida and Lety had lined folding tables end to end down the centre of the courtyard, covered them with white and bright blue tablecloths, and rented blue chairs to match.
We arrived at the school to the aromas of carne asada (grilled beef) smoking on the grill and of handmade corn tortillas baking on a comal (a round metal disk used to cook over an open fire). I was happy to see a pot of Lety’s refried beans warming at the fire’s edge. The long green ends of sweet onions charring beside the carne asada were shrivelling to a crispy, flavourful black.
“Bienvenido,” said Armida, inviting us in. “Welcome.” She introduced us to friends and to members of the family we hadn’t met. Lety waved us into the Grade 3 classroom where a couple of coolers held beer (for our benefit, Armida and Lety don’t drink) and soft drinks.
We lined up at the BBQ to load our plates with food, stopped at the table beside it to scoop from bowls of guacamole, red and green salsas, and sliced nopales (a tender green cactus), and sat down to eat. Armida and Lety’s friends didn’t speak much English, and our families didn’t speak much Spanish, but flavourful food and a warm starry night took care of that.
First-time visitors to the school are always surprised by its organization, especially given the ramshackle nature of the town. Colegio Patria’s classrooms appear rudimentary at first glance, but even a brief tour reveals Lety and Armida’s accomplishments. After dinner, Don, Betty’s husband, leaned back in his plastic chair, like a king after a feast, and announced that he had something to say. Ruben Darío Mondragon, one of the fathers of the school, acted as a rough translator.
“We wish to thank you for the meal,” Don said. “Armida and Lety, I am very impressed with what you have done here at your school. What are your goals? What would you like to do next?”
Armida and Lety were flummoxed, and they looked confused.
“What would you like to do at the school?” Don clarified through Ruben Darío. “What improvements would you like to make?”
“Everything!” Armida laughed, throwing her arms wide.
Then Don said something that astonished us all — he offered to help the school financially. When he named the sum, which would only have mildly impressed school fundraisers in Canada, the ladies fell back in their chairs. They reached for one another, and for Doña Yuya, their mother and the third partner of their team. They gasped, with tears in their eyes. It was the first time I’d truly witnessed the expressions ‘bug-eyed’ and ‘slack-jawed’.
The following day, Armida and Lety confessed to me that they had lain awake all night worrying, wondering, dreaming, pinching themselves. “No,” they said. “This cannot be true.” I assured them it was. “But what will we do? What should come first? What would be best?”
That was when the second astonishing thing happened: Mexicans agreed to plan.
“If you teach them anything,” a Mexican friend said to me when she first heard I was volunteering at a local school, “teach them how to plan. Your culture is ‘just in case’. Ours is ‘just in time’.”
A few nights later, Armida and Lety and I met around a table in their spartan home. My husband David, who has some experience in these things, had helped me prepare a basic framework to build a strategic plan. For Armida and Lety, to run a school is to do what needs to be done. As simple as that. A strategic plan was a strangely novel idea.
Armida and Lety’s method of management had been the same since they first opened the school in 1999 in this very house. They’d started then with 10 students; now they had 11 classrooms (preschool to Grade 9), a computer lab (although it barely qualified as a room, let alone a computer lab) and 140 students.
The mission statement came easily to them — to offer a quality education to the children of Las Varas. They’d always had a clear focus on the vision, but strategic goals, a hard look at their strengths and weaknesses, an operational plan — that was all news to them. When I asked about the challenges of their business, they laughed, not at the question of challenges — those were many and obvious — but at the idea that their mission was a business.
I could never have predicted what I learned at that ‘directors’ meeting’. As we sat on hard chairs around a small table, I discovered that tuition did not cover costs; that many of the parents could not pay even the meagre tuition charged; that el Colegio Patria’s teachers earned less than their state-paid colleagues and that Armida and Lety could not afford to offer them social security; that the town regularly ran out of water for two weeks at the end of the dry season, leaving the school with no sanitation for 140 students during the heat of May.
“You must raise tuition,” I said, stunned by these circumstances, “and all the parents have to pay.” Armida and Lety glanced at each other, as if wondering where to begin. They offered me an indulgent look before explaining that most work in Las Varas is agricultural, not only seasonal but weather dependent; that jobs in tiendas (stores) and taco stands and repair shops are temporary and low paying; that 60% to 70% of the children in the school are looked after by a single parent or relative.
Cowed by these realities, I backed down. “You must raise tuition,” I insisted. “A little. You must try to collect from every parent. And you can no longer afford to offer becas (scholarships).”
I came away from that first strategic planning meeting with a sobering glimpse into the reality of life in rural Mexico. Armida and Lety came away from it with a very specific idea of how to spend Don and Betty’s gift. They had identified three clear goals: to drill a well, to work toward improving the school’s finances, and to complete the computer lab they’d begun to build.
A well? I thought. Really? I never imagined that a well would emerge as the school’s #1 priority.
Leaving dusty Las Varas and driving back to the paradise of a gated community overlooking the ocean in Chacala, I remembered Betty’s sage advice when we first started volunteering in Chacala’s little 2-room school: Why don’t we wait until we have enough Spanish to ask the teachers what they need?
I learned then, and I had just learned it again now, that we gringos cannot imagine the reality of life in a rough Mexican town. Though we often offer to help, we are in no position to identify what people actually need.
This is the 15th story in the weekly publication A Remarkable Education: Lessons Learned in a Mexican Rural School. The next story describes the opening of the computer lab in el Colegio Patria.
The previous story describes the founding of the school.
Starting in the winter of 2009, Diane Douglas volunteered three years in the two-room school in the fishing village of Chacala, north of Puerto Vallarta. Since 2012, she’s been working to improve online learning at el Colegio Patria, a remarkable rural school in the poor, agricultural town of Las Varas.
