Adoption needed:
Would anyone like to adopt the "Palo 30" school? It has two cement classrooms, a storage room, a well made out-house and a water storage tank. The building is in relatively good shape, but does not have desks or benches. By the way, a teacher for the school would be nice, since it has been abandoned by Public Education for the last few years.
Rapidly changing demographics:
This school was a serious effort by Public Education to reach the children who live in the Palo 30 community. It took many trips of engineers, dump trucks carrying materials, and other inputs to create the school. It is the only hurricane proof building in the area. But what the Education Planners did not take into account was the phenomena of rapid immigration from the countryside to the towns and cities along the coast.
Flight:
Parents have incentives to move into the towns. The biggest one is the educational wall which confronts their children if they remain in the countryside. After the primary grades it becomes more and more challenging to reach the secondary schools. By the time an adolescent is ready for high school, the distances become an insurmountable burden. Also, the towns have electricity, running water and access to clinics or hospitals. Even as the school reached completion, the exodus from the campo to the city accelerated.
New need:
The Palo 30 school is not without children and youths surrounding it, who need an education. Today there are new families in the area: Haitian immigrants who work the coffee plantations and grow the crops for Dominican landowners. You can find between 40 and 50 young people in the community who would benefit from literacy classes in this school.
Work Plan:
Next month we will return to Palo 30 and meet with parents and children looking for a functioning school. We will plant the idea of forming a Committee of parents and students to fix the doors, clean out the classrooms and do other repairs. If we can encourage the local community to fix up the building to the best of their ability and resources, it will be a sign to the Department of Public Education that this community is committed to educating their children. But the real test will be in February.
Who will be gone?
Along the East Coast there are towns which empty in the winter months, only to be renewed by the time summer comes around. With Palo 30, the cycle has to do with the coffee crop. The greatest demand for workers living in the community is in these months leading up to January. When we count the number of Haitian and Dominican children in the community in the month of February, we will have a solid number of residents who are not transient visitors.
In the mean time:
A solid but empty cement school building is an excellent challenge for community organization. If the local people respond to the need for self-sacrifice in order to repair the facilities, we can celebrate with them the Word of God as it connects with their experience of learning to be a dynamic community. Will we find a "Moises" who leads his people out of apathy?
