The Milan News-Leader
A Heritage Newspaper
Weekly Publication
Making a Difference
Trip opens teacher's eyes to needs
By Brian Cox, Staff Writer
PUBLISHED: March 8, 2007
If making a difference has weight, it may be a hundred pounds of books.
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That's Paddock Elementary teacher Liz Sutherland's idea, anyway, and so this summer on her next trip to a small, rural valley in Bolivia, she would like to haul with her two 50-pound suitcases crammed with books.
Sutherland hopes to set up a collection box near the Paddock office with a sign that reads: "Ms. Sutherland is going to Bolivia –– throw a book in here."
Sutherland was taken with the notion after returning from spending two weeks over winter break on the campus of Unidad Academica Campesina in Carmen Pampa, Bolivia. The university, cradled in a valley of the Yungas mountain range, was opened in 1993 to educate impoverished rural youth. It has more than 600 students enrolled in degree programs in agronomy, nursing, veterinary science, animal husbandry, primary education and ecotourism.
Sutherland said she was amazed by how much the university and its students accomplish with so few resources.
The university library has more empty shelves than it does books. The books it does have are often in English and outdated, such as a high school biology book from 1982.
"I have more Spanish-language books in my classroom alone than they have in their entire university library," Sutherland said.
A high school and elementary school also reside on the campus. School was not in session during Sutherland's visit this summer, but she toured the classrooms, which were spartan and furnished with wooden tables and chairs.
It made Sutherland appreciate the teaching resources she had back home at Paddock.
"We have so much," she said. "We have more in our closets than they have in their classrooms."
Sutherland hopes to share the teaching wealth with the Bolivian schools.
In the countryside surrounding the UAC-Carmen Pampa campus, aromatic wild ginger grows. There are fields of tea and cocoa, copses of avocado and citrus trees. Dogs roam narrow dirt tracks that serve as roads, which wind up and around rocky waterfalls. In the mornings, enormous billowy clouds shrouded the mountain tops.
It was beautiful, said Sutherland, but the natural beauty belies an abiding poverty throughout the mountainside provinces.
"It's the middle of nowhere," she said. "It's a great middle of nowhere, but it's still pretty remote."
Most of the university's students are Aymara or Quechua Indians and are grandchildren of indentured servants who were barred from any formal education. Many of the students are the only ones from their valley or family to go to university. One student Sutherland met was from a family of miners; he had little money and so borrowed texts from friends and studied at night by flashlight.
"So many (of the students) were saying I'm here so I can go back to my valley and make a difference," she said.
In a sense, Sutherland is not unlike those Bolivian students. She, too, has returned to her valley to make a difference. She is using her trip to Bolivia as a teaching tool for her first- and second-graders.
Sutherland believes the trip has made her a better teacher, more aware of educational needs outside her classroom, and prompted her to ask the question how her Milan students can become better world citizens.
"We talk to kids about taking initiative," she said. "We talk about how you should live the kind of life you can be proud of and make the world a better place.
"If I'm going to teach it, I had better do it."
Staff Writer Brian Cox can be reached at 429-7380 or bcox@heritage.com.
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