Faces of Baramita

Impressions of Baramita

The jungle canopy spread out before me like an emerald sea. Millions of acres of jungle broken only by an occasional river or small piece of jungle cleared for a garden. And then we were upon it: a small clearing cradling a muddy airstrip. Shops and homes lined each side intermingled with jungle grasses and wild guava trees.

I’d arrived in the interior town of Baramita which can only be reached by air or a seven day trek through the jungle. Although the Baramita is located on an airstrip, the majority of its people live in outlying villages within a 3 to 5 mile radius. Interestingly the villages have no nucleus and each house is located 10 to 15 minutes apart on a web of trails that make it impossible to accurately determine where one village starts and another ends.

I soon learned that homes were extremely basic. Although those closest to the airstrip were actual buildings built on stilts, those in the jungle were often nothing more than a tarp on a stick frame, with hammocks strung underneath. A small cooking fire would be near by with a pot or two resting beside it. Any other belongings were tied under the tarp and onto the wooden frame.

Carib, a local dialect that’s indigenous to Brazil, Venezuela, and Guyana, was spoken by more than 50% of the people. Thus, making contact with the outside world difficult at best. These Amerindians are a shy people, with National Geographic-ish looks, who rarely meet your gaze. Communication is limited not only by the language barrier, but by cultural norms which dictate a reserve with the outside world.

The heat is sticky and intense so children often wear nothing but underwear or a skirt while at home. Children are not children long in the interior, however. I learned that it was not uncommon to hand out condoms to 12 year olds, treat 13 year olds for STD’s, and deliver the babies of 14 year olds. In an area where babies raise babies, family is important. Teenage mothers often live with their own parents and receive assistance in raising their children. Life is hard and most age prematurely or die leaving the youngest of their children to be raised by others.

Life is hard, but thats life. So with a string of batteries they power their jungle radios and listen to some music while they beat their cassava roots into bread and wait for the jungle breeze.

Mashabo School

The room was alive with laughing voices, crinkling paper, and the sound of desks being scraped across the floor. Children squeezed two or three to a desk hunched over their books copying their lessons while others chased each other or sat chatting and eating bright orange ajuara fruits. The room was divided into sections by movable chalk boards and the voice of a teacher could be heard from the far end of the room. How anyone could accomplish something in a school that loud was an amazing feat.

Due to teacher shortages, Mashabo Primary School has only three teachers for seven classes. The teachers divide their time between the classes, with 20 minute sessions followed by hour long periods of independent copying of lessons. In total the children get less than 2 hours of teacher student interaction each day.

Walking through the third grade classroom the children shyly peaked out at me from behind their books. “Can I see what your doing?” I asked. Eagerly they brought me their notebooks where they’d scribbled out an assignment about air and sound for science class. “What did you write?” I asked. “We don’t know,” they replied, “we just copied the part we’re supposed to.

I noticed that many of the children had no spacing between the words they’d written and others had not only misspelled things, but had switched sentences midline. “Do you know what the assignment is about?” “No, we haven’t talked about it yet,” was their answer.

“Can you read,” I asked Deborah, the little girl whose paper I held. “No, not really.” “Can you?” I asked another child. Once again the answer was “No.” One by one I asked each child and from each the answer was the same “No, I don’t know how to read.”

Throughout the week I continued my investigation and to my dismay I learned that not only could none of the first, second, or third graders read, but neither could the rest of the children through grade six. With the exception of two children…TWO! It seemed unfathomable that nearly 90 children who had been attending school since they were 4 years old could still not read.

That week I spent two days teaching the 3rd graders. We talked about phonics, science, art, and math. We did experiments, skits, and colored (something they had rarely done as none of them owned crayons). They loved it all.

Nearly three weeks have passed since then and I’ve often thought about the children of Mashabo. And so, when spring break ends next Monday and the children return to school, they’ll be returning to find one more teacher. And hopefully, with a lot of patient effort on my part as well as a lot of prayer, all thirteen 3rd graders in Mashabo will be reading by June.

*Anyone wishing to contribute to purchasing phonics materials and other school supplies here in Guyana for the Mashabo children, e-mail: alexisacs@hotmail.com.