Educated Travelers and NETC Tour Consultants Victoria Aviles and Leigh Fitzgerald visited Peru on
NETC's Incan Empire educational tour this summer. Over the next few days they'll share their experiences exploring the amazing sites and discovering all Peru has to offer.
As our journey through Peru continued, we had the very special opportunity to visit a local rural school and spend time with the children there. This was an event everyone was looking forward to and our student travel groups from the states brought two huge suitcases full of donations!
The drive was breathtakingly scenic, giant hills swept the countryside along fields of vegetation and flowers. We stopped at this lake to take photos, since it was just so amazingly beautiful – the way the bright blue sky reflected off the lake water was spectacular!
We rolled up to the small Peruvian school and the first thing we noticed were a series of desks lined up on the school courtyard. My initial thought was, nice – the students get to have classes outdoors!
Once we were all off the bus, the kids came out of the classrooms and stood in lines, grouped by class age. Immediately, we could tell that these kids lead very different lives then we do back home. You could see it in their faces, their eyes wide and dark – watching us with a deep sense of curiosity and they had an almost giddiness to them. All the students wore matching navy blue school sweaters, with tattered clothing and shoes, dirty from the long days and living conditions. These children lived in small remote villages and many had to walk two or three hours to get to school every day.
The school’s headmaster was a loud, boastful man who wore aviator style sunglasses and was SO proud of his school and students. The teachers and kids were so welcoming and appreciative of our visit; it easily brought me to tears.
Soon we found out that the outdoor desks we saw in the courtyard were for a special one-on-one playtime with a student. I was partnered up with a little boy named Jorge, who was probably six or seven years old. He was so shy!
I tried to encourage him to draw and asked him (in my
very basic Spanish) about his family and life in Peru. He drew me a picture of his house and pets, while I did my best to draw some cartoon characters I thought he might recognize, like Mickey Mouse and Goofy.
Our group leaders walked around passing out various items donated to the kids, including coloring books and crayons. Many of these students have only the most the basic school supplies and lack many necessities. The poorest families have difficulty even getting a notebook and a pen or pencil for each of their children. We were overjoyed to know our small donations meant a lot to this school and its students – probably even more than we realized.
Although the country has made significant strides in education in recent years, the quality of education in Peru remains among the lowest in Latin America and the Caribbean, as shown by below average scores for math and reading (UNESCO 2008). Peru's government has made it a priority to improve educational standards, with special attention to reducing inequality by targeting rural areas and disadvantaged populations such as indigenous groups, women and girls. Unfortunately, in much of Peru, educational achievement is linked directly to poverty.