After an almost two-month absence from school (because of the holidays & class cancellations due to the swine flu scare), I returned to school yesterday. I taught the class while the teacher disappeared for an hour and a half. Afterwards, as I was trying to track down the director to tell him about the ECO-Club I’m starting, I was asked to sign a document stating I would attend the teacher’s meeting at 12pm that day. I thought it would be a great opportunity to spread the word about the ECO-Club, so I returned at 12pm. The elementary school teachers that I needed to talk to weren’t there, so I didn’t get a chance to talk about the club. I did, however, volunteer for the “Caldo de Cabeza” committee. You will realize that “Head Soup” is my least favorite food in the world. And I’ve eaten huge fried ants, fish heads, and chicken feet. How this volunteerism occurred is a long story, but has a lot to do with the lack of participation by the teachers. The meeting was to plan the logistics of next week’s school Anniversary.
The meeting went something like this:
The school director was finishing up a meeting with the equivalent of the Parent/Teacher Association. Except instead of it being Parents & Teachers, it is just the Parents. The parents were yelling at the director, presumably after spending the morning fixing up the school in a mandatory work day, or face a fine. These people are poor. The majority showed up to haul rocks and cement walls, to avoid the fine they can’t afford to pay. They must be getting hungry, so they start to trickle away by 12:30pm. The director tells the teachers, who have been congregating in the courtyard, to enter the room to start the meeting. Twenty minutes later, 12 of the 23 teachers are inside. Another 10 minutes of shuffling papers and piddling around, and the director begins the meeting in record time. Only one hour behind schedule. That is amazing. They start going over the food, budget, and necessary committees. Who’s going to buy the food, what are the ingredients, how much food is needed, who will prepare the food, who will serve the food, etc.
Out of the 12 teachers who actually showed up, no one wants to sign up for any of the committees. This is painful to be a part of. One teacher brings up an obvious point: That only 12 out of the 23 teachers are signing up. Yes! Someone understands! I make a suggestion. I say that where I come from, if we are forming committees, we make lists of the committees and leave open slots for each committee. Ideally, there would be 23 tasks divided into however many committees there are. This way, everyone has to sign up for something, whether you’re at the meeting or not. This also rewards the people who are present, because they get first dibs on the committees they want to be on.
This advice falls on deaf ears. The director tells me they have a list. They are writing down the names as people volunteer themselves to a task. He’s not getting it. No one’s volunteering, and on top of that, they keep coming up with new committees. One week before this huge event, and they don’t even know how many people they need for each committee, because they don’t even know how many committees are needed. Somewhere in the confusion of the meeting, I volunteer to “support” the cooking team. I end up being the only one on the committee. I say that I will not cook head soup alone because I am not from Peru and don’t know how to cook it. I repeat that I will help, but not do it alone. After much discussion, and teachers volunteer each other rather than themselves, and there are 4 more people, including men who I’m SURE do not know how to cook. They are arguing, because someone else volunteered them, and the director suggests the men enlist the help of their wives to come in and cook. My god, is this really happening?
This goes on for 3 hours. They keep adding tasks such as, “Oh, what about prizes for the winning soccer team?” “Oh hey, we forgot about food for the band.” And my favorite… “Hey, do we have a band?”
I leave the meeting in a stupor. I got two different answers about when I need to be there to cook the soup. As we are walking up the steep, rocky footpath towards the main road, I ask about how they will collect the vast amounts of trash produced by the disposable plates, cups, and cutlery. They ask me what I mean by collect it. You know—Haul it away, take it to the main road, carry the cylinders up the hill. By donkey? They laugh. Haha, a donkey. Why is this a difficult question? I re-phrase the question. WHAT do you do with the trash collected in the schools’ cylinders? The answer: We burn it.
As an Environmental Education volunteer, it is hard for me to hear that they burn trash in the school, when there is a fully functioning municipal landfill with collection twice a week. All they need to do is haul it up the hill. All they need to do is bury it in a mini-landfill. All they need to do is CARE a little bit about ANYTHING beyond planning yet another party that detracts from the actual point of a school—education.
Seeing this as an opportunity rather than a quandary, I return to the school the next day with presentation in hand. I implore the director to build a mini-landfill. One class can get it done in an hour. It won’t cost anything. He leads me outside as we search for the groundskeeper who is in charge of burning the trash. The groundskeeper looks frazzled. He shows the director the broken pvc-pipe he is fixing, and lists all the other projects he is working on. He doesn’t care about the girl who shows up and orders him to dig a hole. I tell the director, in front of the groundskeeper, that we need to find a teacher and class to dig the hole. Not the groundskeeper himself. All the groundskeeper needs to do is throw the trash in the hole and put dirt on top, and NOT BURN IT! Back in the director’s office, I hang up the poster I drew about how to dig a mini-landfill. 1 meter by 1 meter by 2 meters in depth. Not rocket science here. It’s a hole. You fill it with trash, then dirt, then plant a tree if so inclined.
I leave a note to the teachers explaining the importance of respecting the environment; stating that I will return at 8:00am Monday morning to help dig the hole. I tell the director that in the meantime, please find a teacher willing to help. In my mind, I know I’m talking to a brick wall. He just doesn’t understand that it is HIS responsibility to get this hole dug. No teacher will willingly volunteer their class and time when they have other things to get done before the Anniversary.
Once again, I walk home with my tail between my legs. How do I change custom? How do I change mentality? How do I make someone CARE about something they don’t care about? How do I CONVINCE someone to care about something they don’t care about? Where is it even my place to push my dogma on someone else?
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