Some volunteers and I with a few of the girls from the PRE. Note the girl who brought a stuffed animal for the pic.

One of the classes I teach is with the schools pre-university students. They are a swollen group of over 80 kids completing a curriculum that stands somewhere between minimum high school standards and college generals. For English they are divided into four groups but generally they have all their classes at the same time in the same low ceilinged closed up classroom that unmercifully overlooks the fútsal court.


Before the semester started, around 200 kids came and took an entrance exam, none passed but the 85 highest scores were accepted to the “PRE”. After the successful completion of the pre-curriculum they will all move into one of the other 5 “carreras” Veterinary, Agronomy, Nursing, Teaching, or Eco-Tourism.


I like the PRE, they remind me of kids at a summer camp experiencing a lot of new exciting stuff for the first time, sometimes full of excitement and wonder and other times just frustrated and homesick. Most of all they just seem young. They illustrate the conflict that exists in all the UAC students, a dichotomy between being emotionally young in many fundamental ways while having lived through incomprehensibly (for us anyway) difficult things. These are kids that don’t like to walk at in the dark because they believe there are ghosts and ghouls out at night. Kids who giggle in class and draw dirty pictures in their notebooks (carry around stuffed animals {told you so}). Many of them however have worked in subsistence agriculture as long as they have been physically able. They have seen preventable illness take friends or family members. They have cared for younger siblings, cooked, cleaned, and otherwise supported their families more like Cinderella than anyone else I can think of, minus the part about not being loved which depends on the family.


I don’t want to get carried away now… but really they are sort of the antithesis to my brother Nathan.


Anyway just like Nate they are very loveable.

Don't get jealous but this is their bathroom.

I said the group was a little too big, last semester there were only like 60 of them. Needless to say just finding enough beds has been a challenge. Below you can see a typical dorm room the girls have two of these. The classroom that felt crowded with 60 has the qualities of a beehive with 80+.


Most of these students are the first generation in their family to go to college which probably isn’t a surprise. But what is a surprise is that most students in the PRE are girls. I think there are only about 25 boys, or less than one third. The school as a whole has more female students but not by this margin. This kind of gender imbalance exists in the US at many institutions but it’s really interesting to see it here. Remember that college education being available to the general population is sort of a novel idea here. I wouldn’t dare speculate what it means, but many development experts including Greg Mortenson (Three Cups of Tea) who has been building schools in Central Asia for a decade and a half, say that educating girls is one of the biggest steps a country can take to reducing poverty and creating real social change.


SO maybe I would speculate that is a pretty darn good thing (and by the way we do accept donations).


In this time of economic crisis be thankful your diet includes meat!

Thanks for the time,

LOVE

andy