Casa Isabel

Centro de Compartimiento, AC

El Espinal, Oaxaca, México

August 2007

Back to School

We are happy to announce that the school year started on time!  With five months of strike last year and renewed agitation in May there was some fear of problems again this year.  The problems are still not totally resolved, but the teachers have decided to teach, but continue with protests and marches in the state capital on weekends and holidays.  Oaxacan children continue to test lower on average than every other state in Mexico, and funding problems and issues of quality of teaching need to be urgently addressed. 

Isabel, who has been with us for three months, was able to enroll in first year middle school.   We decided to see if we could place her in the regular school system because the open school system, where you work mostly on your own and then test out of subjects, was to0 unstructured for her.  After three years out of school she is returning.  She is excited to be back in a regular classroom although she is on the average four years older than the other students.  She has overcome her  initial shock at the strict uniform code, but she is not thrilled with it.  Here in Oaxaca the children in public primary schools wear a uniform only on Mondays, but the middle and high school students wear uniforms daily.  The uniform for girls at the local middle school is a white blouse, maroon skirt, white knee high socks, and black buckle strap shoes.  The uniform code does not stop at dress as the students must have a “normal” hair cut, natural color hair, no make-up, no nail polish, regular eyebrows (no tweezing) and subdued styles of jewelry.  Isabel was not too happy to dye her hair back to its original color and she will have to let her eyebrows grow out, but her will to go to school won out and she is willing to make the changes. 

This year we will have three students in middle school, one student in first year high school, and one student in open school.  We have room for one more student and have some candidates from the area.   Students still have two weeks before registration closes at the schools and then can only transfer if they have registered at another school. 

Welcome Leticia

In July Casa Isabel welcomed Leticia Torres Garcia, a 17 year old from the village of San Antonio Nuevo Paraiso, in the Chimalpas, a cloud forest area in the far east of Oaxaca.  The majority of the students in the Centro De Compartimeinto programs at Casa Isabel and the Servant Leadership house in Juchitan are from the Chimalapas. Most of the young women live in areas that are only about two or three hours away from us, but Leti has an eight hour journey back to her home, four hours of which can not be traversed by vehicle.   We visited Leti’s village last year and the trip was quite an adventure.  The second oldest of  nine and the first in her family to attend high school, Leti has been living away from her family for almost four years..  She first left her village to attend middle school, she lived in a larger village where she worked and rented a room with several other students.  The village where she lived has a middle school but not a high school, so she needed to find a place to attend high school.  One of our other students, Lucy, is from her village and she and her mother came down in July to ask for placement in Casa Isabel.  We are very pleased to have Leti with us. She is hard working and pleasant, and is a very good role model for the younger students.

ENLACE

This month the Mexican government has received the results of the ENLACE test, a national test that measures the knowledge of primary and secondary school students in the areas of math and Spanish. The test was given in April to over ten million students in the Mexican equivalents of third, fourth, fifth, sixth and ninth grade.  The results, although better than last year’s, show clearly the lack of quality education throughout the country.  The results were given in four classifications for each subject: insufficient, elemental, good and excellent knowledge.  Overall only 2.8 percent of students achieved the excellent level and 75.5 percent were in the insufficient or elementary level.  In math 67.7 percent of the students were in the insufficient level.  Although there is a 4 percent increase in the number of students in the good and excellent levels this year, the numbers are still very low and indicative of the massive effort that is needed to improve the educational system in Mexico.  Last year the state of Oaxaca came in 32nd in ranking of the 32 states, and we are waiting until September for the individual state and school results to see how we fared this year.  Of course these are the results for children who are actually in school.  At last Census, 34 percent of the indigenous primary school age children in Oaxaca were not even in school.  Your prayers and support are much needed to help our young women stay in school and improve their lives. 

God bless you all and thank you for your prayers and continuing support of the young women here Oaxaca.

Respectfully,

Kristin Lietz