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Education has been one of Un Mundo's most important tools, with many projects and programs since the beginning of our involvement in Honduras, and more planned.
Current and Ongoing
Each year through music, poetry, dance, theater, photography, film and other visual arts, youth of the Cangrejal River Valley have the opportunity to discover how diverse art forms are used around the world to distinguish cultural characteristics as well as to document history. Participants also analyze how visual and performance art has been used to document the history and culture of the people here in Honduras. Through these discoveries, festival participants use one of the above mentioned art forms to document their own stories of the Cangrejal River Valley.
Instituto Elvira Pineda Madrid Del Pital
In October 2007, after years of planning and many obstacles, the community of El Pital broke ground on their first public high school. Since construction began, the existing three-room school has been expanded, now equipped with eight classrooms, a library space and computer lab. When the project is complete, the facility will have a recreational space as well as electrical, carpentry and metal workshops; serving four times as many students as the previous facility. This seven phase project will exceed $250,000, with the majority of the labor being donated by the community. Once construction is complete, the school will serve over 200 students in the Cangrejal River Valley, providing a specialized education to hundreds of marginalized youth.
El Pital Community Library & Biblio-Burro
Un Mundo has recently partnered with the El Pital high school, the community of El Pital and the Riecken Foundation to develop the internal infrastructure for a community library, which will be located in the new high school. Un Mundo has been working with the community members in El Pital to form a library board of six to ten community members. Once this committee is organized they will be trained in library management and development, sustaining the internal infrastructure of the library for the years to come.
Cangrejal Special Education Project
In February 2009 Un Mundo launched the "Cangrejal Special Education Pilot Program" which allows eight disabled children to attend a special needs school in La Ceiba. This scholarship covers the transportation and matriculation costs for each eligible student. The first year of this program includes disabled children living in El Naranjo, Las Mangas, La Muralla and El Pital. A committee of parents of all participating children is highly active in managing this program and developing solutions to any challenges that are encountered.
Literacy Support in Cangrejal Schools
In 2009, at the request of the Director of the La Muralla school, Un Mundo is providing literacy support at the small one-room school. La Muralla is a small community located on the hillsides of the Cangrejal Valley. The community can only be accessed by hiking forty-five minutes up the steep hillsides to reach the modest adobe and palm homes. A few years ago, the community built its first school, supported by one teacher with over 30 children of all ages and grades. Un Mundo's education coordinator is currently spending two days each week working closely with the students and teacher, bringing innovative methods and lessons to the school.
Proposed
El Pital High School Newspaper
In partnership with the high school in El Pital, Un Mundo is proposing to institute a local newspaper as an extra-curricular high school offering. This newspaper would operate under the supervision of the high school administration, with the facilitation of Un Mundo volunteers, and would be carried out by the local high school students themselves. The main goals of this project would be to increase literacy, develop a greater sense of community, and create a medium to organize the communities and to better inform the larger Cuenca.
Teacher Professional Development
Un Mundo would like to provide access to professional development opportunities for the teachers in El Pital to allow them to improve their skills as teachers. Although this program has not yet been fully developed, we envision conducting workshops on a monthly or tri-annual basis, bringing in new ideas, topics and modes for teaching.
Past or Completed
The majority of our education programs have taken place during the first stage of our partnering process, when Un Mundo focused on encouraging communities to build a vision and vocabulary to conceptualize and communicate their reality. Many marginalized people simply do not have the words to accurately describe their reality, much less to envision different ways of living, which is necessary for them to affect change. We have found that at this stage of the ‘development process’ art is an extremely powerful agent for promoting the consciousness and unity needed to begin the process of self-determination.
The following are past programs that have used art as an agent for promoting community consciousness and discussion:
In August 2008, Un Mundo invited performing artist Meredith Ferrill to El Pital to conduct a month-long movement and dance workshop. This workshop used dance as a way to unite young people around a common cause and build self-esteem and respect for one another. Boys and girls ages 6-16 came together each day, exploring dance and rhythms from all over the world and learning how to express themselves through movement. The workshop concluded in a second session in December 2008, first with a week of review and preparation and finally a celebration and presentation to the entire community on December 8.
In February 2008, in anticipation of the new community library, which is part of the new high school, visiting artist Marisa Jahn facilitated 60 youths ages 6-20 from El Pital to create and design more than 100 of their own books for display in the library. The bookmaking workshop precedes Jahn’s next literacy project, Biblio-Burro, a bookmobile curculated via a burro.
In July 2008, Un Mundo partnered with Rachel McIntire and Amanda Lichtenstein from Break Arts, an international collaborative advancing learning and teaching through the arts, and with the students of El Pital to investigate the community of El Pital through text, image and language. The project worked with students ages 13-16 to reveal the hidden and layered feelings of the community that may go unrevealed during an "official" census. "We wanted to combine the power of text and image with a public performance of a cordel, the Brazilian tradition of 'living language,' dating back to the 1500s, in which canvases were hung from ropes in public squares," said Amanda. First the students were asked to compose questions eliciting information about their community that they wanted to know and that might otherwise be unanswered. After compiling a list, students voted on one question for the focus of their project: How many people need true love? The group then created a poem based on their interviews with community members. To bring the cordel to life, the team worked with local artisans from the Juan Pablo Segundo Sewing Cooperative in El Pital, who provided the fabric for the canvases. The art was displayed in the schoolyard for the community to see and now hangs on the walls of the new high school as a reminder of the power of art and how it can be used to unite a community.
Un Mundo's Cinema Campesino films festivals have celebrated the difficult yet beautiful life of the campesino, with content and process designed to stimulate the self-awareness, creativity, and cooperation at the heart of the development process. Post-film discussion focused on the power of freedom of expression and honest dialogue. Here are reports from the Cinema Campesino festivals:
And here is a link to a video that Ronald Reinds posted on You Tube, showing the documentary about Cinema Campesino:
The Latin American mural tradition has deep pre-Columbian roots that have blossomed over the centuries: from the Mayan murals of Bonampak, through the indigenous images embedded in the monastic murals of New Spain, to the revolutionary works of the Mexican and Nicaraguan muralists, and up to the Chicano murals that have sprouted up in cities across the United States and the world since the 1970s. Mural Campesino projects have extended the Latin American mural tradition to promote positive social change by putting the power of visual representation in the hands of the people. Here are reports from the Mural Campesino projects:
La Esperanza del Futura
La Unidad Familia
Arte Campesino
Saber es Poder
A weeklong celebration of art and athletics culminated in a festival in El Pital on August 7, 2004. Volunteers facilitated a mural project, a theatre workshop and a soccer tournament in an attempt to raise the villagers' consciousness of AIDS and encourage them to protect themselves.
MINKE STICHTING IS OUR DUTCH SISTER ORGANIZATION WHICH HELPS TO FUND VARIOUS EDUCATION PROJECTS IN THE COMMUNITIES WHERE WE WORK. CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THEIR PROJECTS IN HONDURAS.