Saturday morning, Animals House. Claudia, the littlest, special-needs woolly monkey, is a nice warm, fast asleep, softly snoring, getting better lump on my lap. It’s raining quietly outside, with no drama. The river’s rising.
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| Dr. Sara Bennett with manatee |
There is no crisis at the moment and no one’s being bad (Aladino having just fixed the hole one of the squirrel monkeys either made or found to get into the kitchen and make a big mess). A faraway hoodoo pigeon is calling “hoo doo, hoo doo.” Lo, the spirit moves.
A friend from Palmeras, the community just upriver, told us last week that there was a woolly monkey in Eugenio’s house that was probably the aforementioned Surba. Jhon and I went up to check it out. It checked out and we’re concerned again. They’d come across her in the woods about a two hour walk away, and either she came back with them or they brought her back and was with them a few days in their house. They left the house alone on Sunday and she was gone when they came back. The upriver communities think woolly monkeys are delicious and fair game. The four downriver communities think woolly monkeys are delicious and have agreed not to hunt them. We have spread the word that if someone helps us round her up (alive), the reward will be better than one monkey stew.
So, ahem, Topic for the Day here: environmental education in acculturated indigenous communities. Whatever does this mean and how do you do whatever it is? Without being Right, culturally insensitive, overbearing, arrogant, well-meaning, out-of-context, irrelevant, disrespectful … There are a lot of reasons to let this be someone else’s responsibility. Someone Else hasn’t shown up.
[Time Out.]
Somebody showed up. María Gasca – they’re going to saw wood to fix up their kitchen today; she came to pick up some lubricant I brought back from Leticia for the chainsaw. “How’re the kids?” “ Good, but Germán (2nd grade) doesn’t know how to take care of his stuff— it’s only the first week of school and he’s already lost a pen and an eraser.” As in, they go out for recess and when they get back, useful items are gone. I protest and say this is a structural problem: if the kids don’t have any place they can safely leave things, then … not to mention that if the kids are stealing from one another the first week of school when EACH of them got a nice kit of supplies (plenty of pencils and erasers to go around) on Monday from the monkey interpreter group … the trouble is bigger than just Germán being heedless. She says the teacher says it’s impossible to fix, not his problem. Shrugs her shoulders and heads off to her project.
This drives me nuts.
The week before school started, we (the national park team) organized a workshop for the teachers from the eight communities closest to the park. The Ministry of Education decreed a few years ago that each school in the country should have an Environmental Education Project (PRAE) as a transverse curricular organizing principle; haven’t been there or done that yet around here. The UN General Assembly declared 2010 The Year of Biodiversity.
So we called the workshop Biophilia: the Love for Nature. The general subject matter: biodiversity, traditional culture, multiple intelligences. It was pretty good; each school came up with a theme. We changed the general name from Environmental Education Project to Environmental Philosophy of Education (FAE) to emphasize that recycling trash—the typical PRAE, which typically fails to spark anybody’s imagination—isn’t necessarily the ideal PRAE. The name for their FAE is Naãneküé, meaning “Mother Earth” in Tikuna. There was a long discussion about whether it should be Mother Forest or Mother Earth; they chose the more all-inclusive term.
Carlos Rodríguez—the charismatic Director of TROPENBOS-Colombia and originator and academic/professional champion of the “dialogue of ways of knowing” approach to education, conservation, and natural resources management in the Colombian Amazon—led a discussion about how traditional Amazonian culture expresses beautifully each of the “multiple intelligences” (the list of intelligences we were considering: mathematical, linguistic, kinesthetic, visual, musical, spatial, and emotional).
Some background: The Catholic Church was the subcontractor for education in the Colombian Amazon until about 10 years ago. This implies a certain way of perceiving and organizing how the world should be and what/how children should learn. Since then, there has been more awareness in the communities about the value of “ethnoeducation”, without much consensus about what this should look like or what the results should be. Most schoolteachers in the communities around the park are either white people from Leticia, or those from the communities who were successful under the ancien régime. To cast asparagus, the general quality of education here is…dreadful. Little emphasis on problem-solving, creativity, conceptual tools of any stripe (i.e., the best of “white” education) and little of what would have been a traditional education (i.e., watching and doing with parents and family in everything, everywhere).
So it’s a really good sign that the teachers were receptive and enthusiastic. Only … they are the people who probably know the least about biodiversity here. We did a game at the start: each teacher wrote down five animal names on the blackboard, with no repeats allowed. The result was predictable: cow, dog, rabbit, elephant, giraffe, bird, etc.—in other words, domestic animals, animals from some other part of the world, enormous categories. (There are 500+ bird species on the regional list.)
Another illustration of the nature of the challenge: during the introduction to the idea of multiple intelligences, Alberto Parente, a Tikuna who has been part of the national park team for over twenty years, said he wanted to tell a traditional story. He’s good at this. Went something like this:
The hoatzins had a lovely daughter who had come of age and was ready to marry. All the birds sent their handsomest sons to court the pretty young hoatzin. It was the tiger heron who got the nod. He’ll be a good son-in-law, the parents said to one another, and accepted.
The first morning, the father said to his new son-in-law, “Son-in-law, time to get up and go make a chagra.” The son-in-law responded with an indifferent “mmmmmmmrnnnnghhhhh” and went back to sleep.
This surprised the parents-in-law, but they let it pass. The next morning, the father-in-law hoatzin said, “Son-in-law, time to get up and go make a canoe.” The son-in-law, unconvinced, responded, “mmmmmmmrnnnnghhhhh”, and went back to sleep.
Now the parents-in-law were truly chagrined. They waited the next morning to see what the son-in-law would do on his own initiative. Slept all day long. When evening came, the father-in-law, now cross and anxious, said, “Son-in-law, time to get up and go fish.” The son-in-law responded “herka herka herka herka!” and happily went off to fish and brought back lots of fish.
This made me howl; Alberto does the sounds just right. It was perfect – both the message and the timing. The teachers got it. Only most of them didn’t seem to think it was nearly as hilarious as I did, which puzzled me, until I realized that they didn’t have a mental picture of a hoatzin (local Spanish name translates as “stinking guan”), or a tiger heron, or the sounds that the tiger heron makes (like a loud and mournful cow or squawky), or that the tiger heron is a nocturnal fisher.
So… we’ll take it bird by bird (bottom-line advice from book of same name). We all enjoyed the chance to get to know one another, talk, reflect, plan, “throw out [electrical] current” (=brainstorm) and generally get fired up about a new school year. We’re enthusiastic about another encounter in 2 months to debrief together and share what they’re doing and how it’s going and where they want to go. The eight communities are grouped together into an umbrella Educational Institution, which was the reason it made sense to work with eight and not three or ten. Two of these communities have never been included as part of the “area of influence” of the park. They’re the communities where many if not most of the animals that show up in the regional (illegal) wildlife traffic originate. New possibilities for ongoing dialogue about ways of knowing.
It blew our minds that most thought that Amacayacu is a hotel or tourist destination. Simply did not occur to them that the people, the library, or the ecosystems themselves of a major national park might be educational resources available to them. There’s a lot of information here about the priority of environmental education in local schools in the park’s budget and the consequences of that choice. (We were able to do the workshop thanks to a generous donation from ACT Colombia.) So the next workshop will be two days during the last week of March, in the park. The first day: How’s it going in each grade/each school? And presentations by university psychologists from Leticia in emotional intelligence, and how to develop these skills in the curriculum. Second day – in the field at Amacayacu.
Meanwhile, back at the Animals House. This is the time of year when the forest here is full of fruit, and when many animals have their young—a squirrel monkey troop passed through last week, and Leoncio was able to count 17 mounted infants—and many animals lose their young to human or nonhuman predators. Newest members of the troop of familiars* arrived last week: a baby three-toed sloth and an adult pygmy marmoset confiscated in Manizales. (*Like the Lost Boys in Peter Pan!)
If environmental education – of sellers and buyers all along the chain - could put us out of the animal rehab business, it would feel like success. This probably is not going to happen next week. My hypothesis is that one index for constructive change in the system might be the number of pencils ripped off during the wild rumpus at recess.
Hello!!! How can I contact Mrs.Sara Bennett?
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