December 2009

Paula´s family plus me and Dana.

Here is a letter from the student council president. The rest of the students wrote similar letters too and they are in the mail.



Hi Zariannar,
My name is Alexi Flores and I am 10 years old and in 3rd grade. I am behind in school because I could not go to school for a few years. My mom died a while ago. My dad, brothers and I were living far away in Cerro Algodón and there was no school. Now we live here in Laguna and my dad has a new woman. I now have half brothers and sisters. My family works well together and we all work hard.
I am the president of the student council here. We are a rural indigenous community in the comarca. Many of the things you guys wrote about in your letters were new to us, but the teacher and Chöti explained some of it. Everything we have, we get from nature. Our beds, houses and many things are found in nature. Roofs are made of grass and walls are made of tree branches. Materials are very expensive to buy. Companies from the outside come and bring us things like notebooks, pencils, books, games, boots, clothes and backpacks. Robert from the peace corps built latrines for us and helped build another classroom for the school. Before, our school was only one room, now we have two made of cement blocks and one of wood branches. We also have solar panels, so we can watch movies.
Students have to walk very far to go to school. Some walk 2 hours each direction, but we are used to walking a lot and carrying heavy things on out heads. I don´t have to walk much because the school is close to my house. There are two communities that go to the school: Laguna #1 and Laguna #2. The school is in Laguna #1 and I live there too. Laguna #2 is farther and they have to walk to get to school.
In my community, we have horses, dogs, cows, chickens and pigs. We plant corn, rice and beans. We have papaya, bananas, lemons, mangos, oranges, cacao (chocolate), pineapple, guanabana, nance, guava, sugarcane, chayote and coffee. We have a lake with fish and in summertime it dries up. When the rain returns, so does the lake. We have another lake where we put fish during the summer.
I like to play soccer, run, fish, hunt birds, rabbits and armadillos with my slingshot. They are all very tasty. Some of you asked if we have snakes. We do and they come to the community and we kill them. They bite people and animals. Animals usually die, but most people can be saved. The snakes we have here are the X (fer de lance). We also have yellow boas. We sell the boas to the Chinesse in San Félix for 75 dollars!
We don´t have stoves, but we do have fogoms, which are three rocks with a fire in the middle. The teachers make lots of interesting foods like pancakes, hamburgers and french fries. Chöti makes cakes. Chöti made a mud oven where we can make bread.
I am religious. I am a christian. God helps us eat rice, yuca, otoe and corn. The government doesn´t help us much and programs from other countries don´t get here. The government says there aren´t poor people anymore, but it´s not true. The teacher tells us that there are poor people in other countries too: Africa, India and even in the United States where people live in the street and don´t have a place to sleep. I have a house and a place to sleep. I eat rice and don´t live in the street.
You should learn to read and write in spanish so we can write more. Our comarca has a long and interesting history.
That´s all. I hope you like my letter. When you are big and president of the United States, you can help the poor villages of the world, including Panamá.
Your friend,
Alexis Flores Santo

I hope you enjoy the letters and drawings that you get (assuming it navigates the Panamanian mail service). The kids worked very hard to do it. I debated whether the letters some of them wrote were too much for 4th or 5th graders to read. Children talked about being hungry, violent domestic problems, as well as other important but sometimes depressing aspects of their lives. They also wrote about their lives in ways you can relate (pets, food, family). We left the good and the bad in the letters when we translated them (Dana helped quite a bit). Don´t take it as an attempt to make you feel guilty or sad. The whole goal is to understand other people.

Happy new year,

Chöti