Amelia Possanza | Phoenix Staff

Jean Strout plays a game with her students in between classes in Ecuador.

BY MINH-DUYEN NGUYEN

In print | Published September 10, 2009 — Updated September 12, 2009 17:03

Correction Appended

With two hundred dollars, you could just buy another costly textbook. Or you could, with the help of the Village Education Project, send a student in Ecuador to school. The Village Education Project founders, including Katie Chamblee ’07, chose to see the latter potential of this two hundred dollars.

The Village Education Project, four years after its creation by founders Chamblee, Ecuadorian school administrator Gilberto Cifuentes, and volunteer Jane Foley, is now making plans to build its own school in Otavalo, Ecuador. This international non-profit provides summer classes in English and math to prepare children living in villages outside Otavalo, Ecuador, for high school. Students who do well over the summer receive a scholarship for high school. Although the Ecuadorian government provides free primary education to students, many of the students are unable to afford the $200 cost of books, uniforms and transportation. While the organization originally sponsored four Ecuadorian students, it has grown in past years to sponsor more than 100.

A new school is estimated to cost $100,000 and support 180 students. The Village Education Project also plans to create a busing system to help students living far away on the peripheries of Otavalo. With all these new ideas, the organization intends to continue its summer school and scholarship program.

Jake Ban ’10, director of the Swarthmore staff for the Village Education Project, expressed the need for the school. By building a new school, the Village Education Project hopes to make its work more sustainable. Rather than being just a scholarship and summer volunteer program, dependent upon the facilities of the government-run schools, the new school will provide a base from which the program can work.

“We send these indigenous village students to the public schools where they’re really looked down upon for being indigenous,” Ban said. “They’re really marginalized in the classrooms. We wanted to build a school where we would have culturally relevant curriculum that is more in tune to their realities.” Chamblee added that she hopes the school will foster a sense of community for both students and parents.

“Schools have historically been a social space for impoverished communities to meet where they can have recreational activities, that they can use as a meeting place, where they can have some personal capital,” Chamblee said. “I hope the school will have that effect—a real galvanizing, mobilizing effect.”

This links to Chamblee’s original inspiration to start the Village Education Project. “The students we were supporting were going [to school] in isolation,” Chamblee said. “They would be the only ones in their community learning. We thought that if we sponsored entire villages all the kids would go to school together as an entire community. They would have each other as a support network and education would be part of the culture and expectation of the people in these communities.”

Members of the organization are working with co-founder Gilberto Cifuentes, a principal at one of the local schools. Cifuentes owns both the hostel where volunteers both from Swarthmore and other universities stay for the summer and the land on which the school will be built. “He is basically the lynchpin of the Village Education Project. He is our Ecuadorian connection,” said Jean Strout ’09, a volunteer for the Village Education Project last summer.

Plans for the school still remain in the early stages. “We aren’t sure when the construction will start, but we are planning to keep the Village Education Project around for a long time. The program is growing bigger and bigger every year,” Strout said. “[W]e are able to provide more scholarships every year and have more students in our program.”

Chamblee said that there is still some uncertainty over what issues will arise. “We will find out what the biggest obstacles are once we refine our plan,” Chamblee said. She added, though, “The biggest obstacle is always money. The biggest challenge is how we are going to keep funding this school year after year after year.”

Chamblee was first motivated to start the Village Education Project after she traveled to Ecuador as a Global Vision International volunteer in 2005. She was supported by the Phillip Evans Scholarship.

While there, she learned from her host father about the dearth of educational opportunities available for students living in indigenous areas. Chamblee described him as “an incredibly dedicated educator in Otavalo” who is “very passionate about indigenous rights issues.”

“We began having conversations about how unfair it was that some of the promising students I was working with would never have the chance to attend school,” Chamblee said. “Through him I learned that it is a very endemic problem that indigenous students, who tend to be poorer than their mestizo counterparts, are often excluded from educational opportunities. I realized how little financial need is needed to send these kids to school. It’s only two hundred dollars a year.”

With the new school, the Village Education Project continues to grow.

“It’s a big challenge and it’s humbling,” Chamblee said. “It’s a lot of hard work. You might prescribe a great idea but there are people on the ground doing that work.”

The project welcomes all volunteers who are willing to learn and is offering other positions as well. “We have to hire a summer program director,” Strout said. “We are definitely looking for candidates for that position for this coming summer and volunteers who want to learn.”

Ban and Strout recommend that interested students visit the group’s website at www.villageeducation.org.

Disclosure note: Amelia Possanza ’12 is Assistant News Editor for The Phoenix. She played no role in the production of this article.

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