Discovering the Dominican school system (or lack thereof)

I have now been living in the community of Los Marranitos for a full two weeks, and settling into my new role as “La Maestra” as well as “La Americana.” The community is tiny, with a population of less than 300, and most of the households scattered along one sloping stretch of the one dirt road. On the same road, right before arriving in the main stretch of the community, is the entrance to the Finca Alta Gracia, an organic fair trade coffee farm that also produces a variety of other food products. But contrary to the popular image of rural campesinos, the majority of community members do not own much land and do not grow food for themselves at all. A few of the men are hired by Alta Gracia and many work as day laborers on other farms, while the women mostly stay home and start having children at an early age.

The community is too small to have its own school. The children who do go to school have to walk 45 minutes each way to the neighboring community of Los Dajaos. Those who don’t attend school are only slightly less well off, considering that the Dominican Republic has statistically the worst school system in all of Latin America (and that is a feat). As a result, illiteracy is widespread. A little over a decade ago, Julia (Alvarez) and her husband Bill (the owners of the farm), with a group of volunteers, constructed a small library on the road leading up to the community. Since then, an American volunteer has come to serve as a teacher in the library almost every year, with the goal of increasing literacy skills and fostering a love of books. Last year, though, the community had no “maestra”, so unfortunately the library remained closed. The children’s excitement about my arrival and the reopening of the library has been very tangible and a little overwhelming. Along with Dylan, another Middlebury grad and volunteer here working on issues pertaining more to the farm, I am quite a celebrity. At this point I’m not sure what is more exciting to the kids, the books and activities that go on in the library or my mere presence. Pretty much every time I walk through the main stretch of the community a kid or three yells at me, “Americana! Vas a abrir la biblioteca ahora?” (“Are you going to open the library now?”) The parents, for their part, keep asking me, “When are you going to give classes?” This has been a difficult question since I have not figured out yet exactly what kind of “classes” I’m going to give, let alone come up with a regular schedule, so my answer has to be either “now” or a vague “later” (luckily these inexact measurements of time are all anyone really expects from you in the Dominican campo). Nevertheless, I consider it a success that probably about 70% of the kids in the community between the ages of 5 and 15 have come to the library and taken out books (I made up that statistic, but so what). And I have succeeded, on some occasions, in carrying out organized activities almost resembling classes, despite huge age and education ranges between kids who are in the library at once. The next step is training kids to call me by my actual name instead of just “La Americana.”

On three occasions now I have made the trip to Los Dajaos, where the children from Los Marranitos go to school (if they go at all). The first time I went was with Miguelina, a 16-year-old girl in the community who was a good friend of the last volunteer here, Caroline. The purpose of the trip was for Miguelina to show me around and introduce me to everyone, but I also took the opportunity to sit in on a couple classes. What I saw confirmed my suspicions about the Dominican school system: basically, it doesn’t work. Imagine a schoolhouse with three classrooms. In the afternoon, one classroom contains about thirty 1st and 2nd graders, the second another thirty 3rd and 4th graders, and the third twenty 5th graders. They attend school only from 2-5 PM, which includes a half hour for recess. Three hours in the morning are reserved for 6th-8th graders, with the same routine. The schoolhouse is not the worst I have seen; at least the classrooms are spacey and the kids have some elbow room. But the acoustics are terrible. You can hear every noise coming from every classroom in each of the other classrooms, and this problem is made worse by the fact that kids are constantly talking to their friends and/or wandering in and out of other classrooms. The classrooms are all set up with kids sitting around several circular tables, but since group activities don’t really seem to exist in the Dominican school system, this arrangement only serves as a further distraction. The teachers only half-heartedly feign control of their class; in reality the teacher usually only has the attention of about 20% of the room in any given moment. However, this may be irrelevant to them considering that a Dominican class consists of the teacher writing things on the board and the kids all mindlessly copying it down.

After observing a couple classes, I chatted with a friendly, surely well-meaning teacher called Profesora Miriam. She asked me if I could come to the school some afternoon the following week to read books to first and second graders. I agreed. The next Tuesday when I arrived, I was shown to one of the circular tables in the 1st and 2nd grade room, and instructed to read a book to the five kids there or do an activity with them or something. It was unclear what any of the kids were supposed to be doing at that moment. The teacher (not Miriam, a different one) was sitting in a corner looking odiously at her desk as if in attempt to shut out the rest of the world. A lot of the kids were ambling around the classroom or quarrelling among themselves, and the rest were distractedly writing in their notebooks. I knew one of the kids at my table, Johanni, from Los Marranitos. I noticed that he was drawing a row of the letter ‘B’, so I asked him what letter it was he was drawing. “That,” he said, pointing to the board. I said, “The letter B, right? And what sound does the letter ‘B’ make?” Johanni looked at me apprehensively and did not answer.

“So, who wants to hear a story?” I suggested. The kids around me perked up, eagerly nodding their heads and saying “me!”. By the time I was done reading the first book, every single kid in the room had gathered around the table I was sitting at to listen. Seeing that the situation was getting out of control and that the teacher was still sitting snugly in her corner and observing me amusedly, I stood up, extracted myself from the mob of 6-year-olds, and instructed the kids to sit on the floor in front of me. I then commenced reading “Juevos verdes com Jamón”, the Spanish version of “Green Eggs and Ham”. (I should mention that while some Dr. Seuss books just don’t seem to work in Spanish, Green Eggs and Ham is an exception, due in large part to the fact that “Sam I am” is translated to “Juan Ramón” in order to keep the rhyme with “jamón”.) Before I began reading, I asked the group who among them liked green eggs and ham. About half the children raised their hands. Roughly the same group of kids raised their hands when asked who among them didn’t like green eggs and ham, seemingly for the sheer excitement of raising their hands. Once I had finished the book, I asked, “OK, now, who wants to try green eggs and ham?” Nearly every child raised his or her hand, some even jumping up and down in excitement.

Two days later I returned to the school in Los Dajaos with the intention of reading to kids for 15 minutes, then teaching an hour-long English class to the 5th graders (Profesora Miriam is supposed to teach the class once a week, but she doesn’t know much English, and one of the kids told me she had only taught one English lesson so far that year because she had been waiting to see if an “Americana” would show up and offer to take over). When I arrived, though, the 1st and 2nd grade teacher was missing in action, and I was instructed to read books to the preschool class until she showed up. Profesora Miriam had decided to take an hour off as well since I was teaching the English class, so the girl she had sent as my assistant was put in charge of the 5th graders. Well, guess what—the 1st and 2nd grade teacher never showed up. I read to the kids for about 45 minutes, and then when there were no books left to read, started my own lesson about the alphabet in which I drew things on the board beginning with a certain letter and the kids had to guess what the word was that I was drawing. Finally after an hour and a half, Miriam arrived and told me to go teach English in her class for a half hour. I got through a lesson of “What’s your name?” and a review of the numbers, but only by screaming as loud as I could so that the kids could hear me. By the end of the two hours I had scarcely enough voice left to ask Miriam if I could leave. All things considered, though, the day was a success and definitely a learning experience.