The print of Mr Alburqueque

One of the best entrepreneurships of Piura has been in a little village.

 

PAIMAS, Peru – What does it depend the longed quality education for? Is it about teachers, students, parents, community, or everybody? While specialists usually discuss those issues in comfortable offices, at the countryside, where the educational needs are urging, there are initiatives that postergate the theory.

 

At Túnel VI Village’s 15425 School, 3 miles away to the east of Paimas, a town in Piura Department, four teachers looked for offering a healthy school for 84 students in the six grades of elementary education. “I live in Paimas, I move everyday to the school, we go on mototaxi,” its principal Josué Javier Alburqueque Ramírez told us.

 

Túnel VI (6th Tunnel) is named because it is one of the posts where Quiroz River is transferred under the Andean Range to Chipillico River for supplying water to San Lorenzo Valley. Around the village, about 1980 feet avove sea level, lives from agriculture – rice, corn, and beans are the crops which the most people are employed.

 

They also grow cattle but outdoors, so some got into the school perimeter due to the lack of a fence. As well, it was usual that strangers to the place went into when the classes were going on. The first it was made – closing the school around, and starting from that point, reforms were raised with more enthusiasm than money.

 

All the bacterium in a shot

Mr Alburqueque and his team considered to introduce the organic agriculture but they needed to have natural fertilizers. An agricultural technician, former school’s student, trained them to make compost, that is produced by the decomposition of vegetal matter.

 

So, they could fertilize a little orchard and a little forest of pepper tree, oak, and eucalyptus. Plus, with support of Paimas District Municipality, garden cases were built. They also noticed that breathing infections, cavitis, and parasitosis sieged the students, and the cases going to the nearby health center in Paimas Town were the most aggravated due to the late reaction of parents.

 

“Bathrooms were improved by implementing septic tanks,” Mr Alburqueque reminded. “Before, the students defecated in a latrine with a silo.” The other part of the solution was appointing preventory medical consultations, all covered by the Health Integral Insurance. Mr Alburqueque stated his students got sick the less: “Cases have been reduced in 60% to 70%.”

 

And the winner is

Once upon a day, Mr Alburqueque saw a calling on the Education Ministry website, donloaded it, fulfilled it, sent it. “I was motivated to contest because we already came working the project and we could spread what the school does,” he manifested.

 

The initiative We work together for a healthy school in Túnel VI was selected as the winner across Piura, in Teacher leaving a print contest sponsored by Interbanc. “We did hope to win because few rural schools do what we do,” he stressed.

 

Mr Alburqueque, who has a mastership in Educational Management by César Vallejo University in Piura, could follow a doctorate in the same speciality and the same campus.

 

Cooking up more ideas

Mr Alburqueque’s dream was integrating all that achievement to a virtual classroom installation connected to the Internet, purposed for boys and girls to enlarge their horizon. Also, having a little diversified library.

 

In the same way, although the teachers have reached to set up a kitchen to provide safe meals to their students, they wanted the precarious building to leave the mud bricks to be made of cement and ceramic bricks. One of their crusades was looking for an organization that fund that re-building.

 

“We need about 4000 soles (about 1530 dollars),” Mr Alburqueque explained. “From the parents association, we only receive 1000 soles (about 384 dollars) and that must cover the whole year.” Mr Alburqueque said that working at the countryside is not a justification to close down to the possibilities, and that he would follow knocking on the doors of the authorities and institutions. “I want the children feel happy and safe to go to the school,”  he underlined.

 

© 2013 Asociación Civil Factor Tierra. All Rights Reserved. If you want to help Mr Josué Alburqueque, contact him at josuevi97_34@hotmail.com