Saturday, October 26, 2013
Tuesday, September 24, 2013
From my un-exotic desk in Atlanta...
Lately I´ve been playing with the idea of re-entering the world of public journaling. Though I´m no longer walking through the mountains (the title of this blog), I feel like I am still on the same journey that I began in Peru. My three years in Musho raised a lot of questions for me about how the world works, how the world should works, why malnutrition is so insidious if it´s relatively simple to prevent...
So I applied to graduate school. After a few nail-biting months, I was accepted. Now in my second month, I´ve learned more questions than answers. It is thrilling and terrifying to realize how many questions you can ask to which NO ONE knows the answer. Or, answers that seem obvious yet that are completely ignored in the general public. Why? Why doesn´t everyone eat a healthy diet, not smoke, exercise 150 minutes a week, use condoms, and get enough sleep? Maybe we are not asking or answering all the questions there either.
My solution-- only to my own surplus of questions and wondering-- is to write. This is a non-official, not-scientific, not-school related way of sharing my learning process with the 2 people who might ever stumble upon it.
Oh, and eventually I will go back to Peru and get some cute kid pictures again.
So I applied to graduate school. After a few nail-biting months, I was accepted. Now in my second month, I´ve learned more questions than answers. It is thrilling and terrifying to realize how many questions you can ask to which NO ONE knows the answer. Or, answers that seem obvious yet that are completely ignored in the general public. Why? Why doesn´t everyone eat a healthy diet, not smoke, exercise 150 minutes a week, use condoms, and get enough sleep? Maybe we are not asking or answering all the questions there either.
My solution-- only to my own surplus of questions and wondering-- is to write. This is a non-official, not-scientific, not-school related way of sharing my learning process with the 2 people who might ever stumble upon it.
Oh, and eventually I will go back to Peru and get some cute kid pictures again.
Sunday, October 7, 2012
Being a fly on the wall
Throughout my early
childhood development project this year, and, in fact, in all my projects, I´ve
faced a puzzle. How do you actually measure a behavior, like handwashing,
protein consumption or time spent playing with a baby. Self-reporting has been
proved biased and squidgy by countless studies, especially in the imprecise
area of diet. In all my projects, I´ve looked for the magic question, some way
to approximate what I really want to know.
For example, to measure hand-washing, I asked about the important times
to wash hands, for the person to demonstrate hand-washing, and then check if
there is a towel and soap next to their sink. While it´s far from perfect, it
gives me a decent idea of whether the household is likely to wash their hands.
Then there is the product indicator: does anyone have diarrhea in their house
at the moment? The later measures almost too much, of course.
With nutrition and
early childhood stimulation, I´ve fumbled for an adequate measure and still,
after over a year of work, am not satisfied. For nutrition, I try to plan house
visits for a time when the mother will be cooking to at least see that the
beans or salad or meat exists. Even so, I have no way of knowing how frequent
this happens (once a week, once a month, daily?), the typical portion size for
the child, or how many times a day the child actually eats. Frequent visits
give me a sense of these questions, true, but they are difficult to nail down.
For early stimulation, I ask where and with what the child plays (the answers
to these questions are comedic and often bizarre. To “what does your child
usually play with?” “Chickens” is a common answer. “The dog” and “with whatever
he can find” being close seconds). It´s not good enough, by far, and I´ve
considered far more complex surveys, but discarded them in favor of simpler
questions that can be replicated by my health promoters.
After all this
pondering, I stumbled upon the answer this week. For background, I´m in the
midst of a final phase of my Early Stimulation project, which entails creating
Play Corners in all the homes with the mothers. For the past 5 months, I´ve
held weekly or bi-weekly meetings with mothers to make toys, and now, in each
home, we are paint murals as a final stimulant for the children. Originally, my
plan was to use stencils and have the mothers paint on their own. However, I
love drawing and painting, and the number of moms is less than I´d planned for,
so I decided to draw and paint with the families. It means spending hours in
someone´s home, while daily life hums along around you. Thus, it is a far
better observation and investigation than any short survey could hope for.
Instead of asking how often a child eats, I see how often they eat over the
course of a day. Instead of asking where a child spends most of his time, I see
that he is usually sitting on the floor, laying on the bed, or running around
in the road like a crazy man (the last subject, a wayward 2 year-old, is no
surprise. His mother can often be found dragging him out of neighbor´s houses,
the corner store, or the health post, where he wanders alone).
The problem is, though
my curiousity is satisfied, I´m not sure how to use this information in any
evaluation of my project. Since I didn´t do a baseline study in the same way, I
have no comparison. Still, I wouldn´t give up the opportunity, and what better
way to spend my last months than painting, surrounding by the moms and children
that I love?
Saturday, September 22, 2012
Seeing another side of the sierra
In Mancos, I am not, despite vicious gossip to the contrary, living in
sin with a man. No sir, I live alone, in a room a bit smaller than my Musho one
and infinitely more comfortable. As I might have written, my decision to move
was based on drama and family problems in Musho and an impulse caused by a
devious temptation a sign claiming Se
Aquila Cuarto con BaƱo Privado (Room rented with private bathroom).
Now, 4 months later, I am delighted with my sanctuary, as I think of it.
However, it did come with an add-on that I didn´t realize at first—a family. It
isn´t a host family but rather a group of fascinating, friendly and kind people
living their own lives and occasionally crossing paths with me. The more I know
them, these landlords and fellow Mancosinos, the more I want to know them.
Spending “family time” with this family has shown me a side of the sierra that
I didn´t know—a well educated, well-informed, sophisticated group of people,
despite cooking on a wood burning stove and loving guinea pig and beer as much
as any self-respecting Mushino.
Nancy, the cook, head of business, and general of the entire operation,
is a Quechua-speaking, village-born woman—and mother of six professionals
(though one is a soon-to-be-graduate). She churns out lunch for 50 daily (your
standard tasty Peruvian menu) yet always finds a moment to joke with me in
Quechua even in the midst of the rush. Sometimes she astounds me. A couple of
days ago, Kelly and I ran into her and I said, in my broken Quechua: Kelly shamun peliculata rikanapaq (Kelly
comes to see a movie). Nancy responded something like “Calapicapaq?” Confused, I asked her to translated, and she
translated to “naked man movie?” I´m unsure and worried where she got this idea
of Kelly and I.
While I have no intention of replacing my compadres in Musho with a new family, it is wonderful to discover
new friends and ideas. It brings balance to my chaotic life here.
In pictures we have: Sandra Guadalupe, one of my favorite early stimulation babies, Olga and Tatiana, probably the worst (translate, most delayed, most malnoursished) baby, two of my terrible English students (Lloshi, the boy, is about to start dropping all the crayons down the crack in the desk as Betsy tries to color), and an unwilling participant in a recent meeting of mine.
PS: Strike news? The teacher strike goes on, but it seems that no one in
Musho is involved, thank goodness. On the other hand, there is a potential
mining strike nearby that could get violent… things are never dull.
Friday, August 24, 2012
This is reality but I don´t like it.
** I suspect this blog, long overdue, is not up to any standard of
writing. I wrote it as a rant, to clear my own head, and to puzzle over the
question of how much inequality we can just live with.**
In my unusually roomy colectivo today,
I sat with three teachers from Musho, Piscuy (a small neighborhood 10 minute
walk away) and Apa Chico (a village 40 minutes walking from Musho and the same
from Mancos). The Apa Chico and Piscuy teachers work in 1-room schools, with 4
grades in the same room. In a small space, eavesdropping is impossible to
avoid, and I listened with curiosity to their plans to participate in the
upcoming teachers´ strike. The strike, beginning on September 5, is indefinite,
and will leave their schools completely closed.
The opportunity to uncover their motives was too
much to resist and I joined, eventually coming to expound the radical idea that
teachers could be paid by quality of work (such as not closing their school for
indefinite amounts of time), test results (controversial, but I´m not sure what
else would be a measure) and other measures, instead of a flat salary.
Amazingly, the teacher I spoke with bristled at this idea and began a rant
about the inability to compare academic achievement in a school in Musho as a
school in Lima. Of course, poverty, malnutrition, lack of reading materials,
stimulation, study time, parent commitment and a host of other determinants
keep Musho children far below the level of their Lima counterparts.
The teacher went on to describe the difficulty of teaching children in a
1-room school to the level of children with a teacher per-grade level. I
agreed, and suggested that the one-room schools be closed, and that those
students study in Musho or Mancos. This, perhaps, was too near to suggesting
My actual point was this: does a Ministry of Education not have a responsibility to even the playing field as much as possible. Students with 1 teacher for 4 grades will not have as much grade level-specific attention as a student with a teacher specifically for his level. It´s a fact. If a 10 minute walk is the difference between those two options, why would a parent chose the inferior option? Most of the parents that do are un-educated themselves and see no better life for their children. Should the Ministry of Education not close the inferior school and focus on getting children to the better one?
Of course, the Musho school, to my un-trained eye, hardly shows strong
outcomes. The teacher argued in the car, and I agree with her, that students
from Musho would never match test results of students from Lima. This may be
true. However, it reveals a systematic inequality. To enter into higher
education of any kind—police academy, technical school, university—applicants
must take an exam. The results are rated nationally and only the top scores
enter. The inequality is life-long. While a Musho may achieve prosperity and
success in business or agriculture—and there are some professionals as well—the
general trend is to keep the poor in poverty.
I choose to believe that the solution lies in early interventions.
Parenting classes, preschool and pre-preschool programs and aggressive early
childhood health interventions have shown developmental advances worldwide, in
low-income populations. Government involvement in parenting smells suspiciously
of Big Brother, yet the alternative, leaving the generation to muddle along in
poverty, except for a few lucky ones, scares me more.
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