Grad night 2005
Today several students are graduating from colegio (high school). They and their parents will be going to Desamparados (a big city) to a dinner and dance that will last until midnight. My next-door neighbors’ son is among the graduates.
This morning his mother woke up at 4 a.m. and walked to a neighboring farm to pick coffee until noon. Then she went to a neighbor’s house to have her nails done, then to her sister-in-law’s house to have her hair done. She is wearing a light blue dress sewn by the local seamstress in our community. At work today in the coffee she stepped on some old barbed wire and it went through her shoe, so in addition to being nervous about her night out on the town (she told me she had never been to such a formal party before), and more importantly, watching her oldest child achieve something she and her husband never did (they both quit at primary school), she has an aching foot.
My neighbors built their house with help from the government. They own no land. He works as a farm laborer and caretaker and she works in coffee (which is seasonal) and cleans houses. Some months they live on about one hundred dollars. In addition to their three kids, all of whom are attending high school, they also are guardians of a niece, who is also attending high school. They are masters at making ends meet.
When Ancho first left in May, the mother sent her daughter to ask me if I needed one of them to sleep in the house with me. They are a caring and hard-working bunch.
I felt honored to have the opportunity to watch them nervously running around getting ready for their big evening. I snapped photos of them before they took off in the taxi that came to take them into San Ignacio.
Their son borrowed my camera for the night. He was so worried about running out of batteries that he took my battery charger too. I can’t wait to see the photos. It is so rejuvenating to see the excitement of rites of passage and an unknown future. Tomorrow, their son will go into San Jose to find the business where he will complete his “practica,” a sort of a co-op working situation where high school graduates go to gain work experience. He will work there for a few months and then ... who knows? During his practica he will live in San Jose and will only come home on the weekends to visit with his parents, like many young adults here. He is stepping into a new social and familial role, to be sure. And I got to sit right here and watch it all go down! This is why anthropologists do fieldwork. There’s just so much more context.
posted by ancho and lefty @ 3:44 PM
2 comments
2 Comments:
Will the girls' graduations be as big a deal? Will they do a practica in San Jose, too?
Yes. There are already several female graduates from here who completed their "practicas" then went on to university and are now studying and working simultaneously.
The high school in the municipal center of the canton is specially designed to prepare students (who elect to take this path) for positions in accounting. (This is a result of the high school transitioning from a ag school to a agro and technical school several years ago.)
So, graduates can find jobs working in accounting departments of private and public entities. This includes women. Two women under twenty years old from this community currently work a full-day keeping books then go to university at night. They live in San Jose with extended family members and return here on the weekends. Of course, their parents worried about them initially- negotiating the city alone, working long hours, etc. But now that young women are showing that it can be done I believe the younger high school women find the idea of working and studying in San Jose less daunting.
In a short period of time many families here have gone from being hesistant about sending their kids into the municipal center for high school to viewing it as the best chance for their kids, boys and girls, to succeed.
Hard core ag families continue to take their kids out of school after primary education, or their kids elect to work with parents in ag enterprises. But at least in this community this tends to occur in families that have lots of agricultural assets- cattle, land, coffee, etc.
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