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Luz Nellis Camacho, the teacher who built a school to heal the wounds of the armed conflict in Colombia

2022-10-26T03:39:37.682Z


Broken families, broken communities and thousands of children deprived of their future are some of the effects of the internal war in the Latin American country. In more than four decades, nearly eight million people have been displaced from their homes, the most affected are the smallest


To speak of Luz Nellis Camacho (Sucre, 56 years old) is to speak of development, resilience, and above all, willpower.

Her life and her struggle is affected by the impact of one of the biggest humanitarian crises in the world: the conflict between the Colombian State, the paramilitary groups and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

This internal war has resulted in more than eight million victims of forced displacement from 1985 to 2021. The teacher found her vocation as a teacher at the age of 31, when she already had two children and worked as a cashier in a store.

Since then, she has managed the construction of a school and the foundation of a community where 70 families of farmers displaced from their lands and homes live together.

The Santa Fe de Icotea school, in the Paso El Medio community,

from the district of Bolívar – the second department with the most displaced persons in the country (631,276), between 1985 and 2019 – now has 147 students who receive psycho-emotional and academic help, four classrooms and a dining room.

The goal is to prevent school dropout.

But in 2007, when Luz Nellis arrived in the community, she found herself in a completely different reality.

She “she had a list of 160 students.

Only four came to classes”, she comments by phone call from a neighbor's house, which for today will be hers.

“Where I go with my backpack is where I stay to sleep.

These people are my family,” she clarifies.

The fear due to the armed conflict made things even more difficult for him.

She says that the children were very aggressive, too quiet, very afraid and distrustful.

"When people came from outside the town, the little ones would run to the tallest trees to hide."

And although she confesses that she once doubted being a teacher in the town of

Paso El Medio

, the poverty and need of these families showed her the way.

“I am from a rural area, I grew up in the countryside.

My mother died without knowing how to read or write and my father wrote his first words when I was already an adult.

I cannot deny these children their only chance to study,” she assures.

Iciar Bosch, responsible for education at the NGO Ayuda en Acción, clarifies that children are the most vulnerable in conflict situations and that one of the most affected rights is access to education.

“Schools are places of learning, socialization and safe spaces.

When you stop attending classes, you are exposed to labor and sexual exploitation and become a target of armed groups.”

Luz Nellis, together with her basic education students, in one of the four classrooms of the Santa Fe de Icotea school, in the department of Bolívar (Colombia).

Luz Nellis Camacho knows well the impact of the invisible traces that insecurity and war leave on children.

And she remembers one of her students, Roberto Arias, who at just seven years old refused to wear boots because he associated them with death and violence.

“I brought clothes, shoes and food to donate to families.

But when Roberto saw the boots I gave him, he began to cry inconsolably.

He told me that the people who use them, they kill”.

The little boy, who together with his parents took refuge in

Paso El Medio

fleeing from the war, had seen, hidden under his bed, how the armed groups entered the houses, usurped and murdered.

“I could only see the shoes of their perpetrators.

These children are doomed to silence.

They cannot say what they have witnessed,” she narrates.

The UN has verified more than 266,000 serious violations of children's rights in more than 30 conflict zones in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America, from 2005 to 2021. The international organization has detected more than 75 violations of children's rights, of which the most common are killing and maiming, as well as the recruitment and use of child soldiers.

A school that is the center of the community

But Meaestra Camacho's commitment to rural education forced her to manage the creation of a new school and the foundation of a new community settled around it.

The siege by the army and the boom in African palm production in Paso El Medio were the triggers for a decision that would change her life and that of 70 families.

The idea was to move that small social nucleus to a safer place, which is why both the educational center, Santa Fe de Icotea, and the new community keep the same names as those they left behind.

Camacho acknowledges that the educational center he founded is located in an area where criminal groups dumped the lifeless bodies of their confrontations.

"When I saw the land I took off my shoes, closed my eyes and knew that we would build the new school here," she says excitedly.

And she assures that this solution would never be complete if the families did not have their own land near the school.

In Colombia, only 51% of displaced youth attend secondary school, compared to 63% of non-displaced youth

The distance, the danger and the necessity were the perfect combination for school dropout.

90% of the inhabitants of Paso El Medio

they arrived from other regions and cities as displaced people.

Camacho mentions that in this community the peasants found a new hope to rebuild their lives, a little further away from the violence.

"When the boom in African palm production came, the farmers who lived by renting land for the production of cassava, rice and yams (a type of tuber common in the area) were left without their work tools," he recalls. the.

That was the moment when “La seño”, as she is called in the community, began to manage the birth of the new Paso El Medio, in which the farmers would be the owners and workers of the land.

And she obtained the support of an NGO to develop her idea.

“When we won the project, they gave us a little more than three hectares so that the families could be producers.

That day we celebrated so much, imagine that we all ate from a single hen!”.

Building a school is not easy, but that has not been an impediment for the teacher.

She and another teacher bought the land for 800,000 pesos (172 euros).

“I earned 800,000, so I put in half my salary, my partner put in 200,000 and a neighbor gave 100,000 pesos.

We were able to buy it, although we were a bit short on money,” she recounts.

But the most complicated task was to raise the structures.

Camacho says that the education minister promised to build the classrooms during a visit to the Bolívar district.

“For a year I made his life bitter.

I couldn't let him forget about her promise,” she recalls with a laugh.

And she finally complied: the Ministry installed two classrooms, a school canteen and bathrooms.

School absenteeism, a latent threat

Camacho, who decided to specialize in ethnic education just before arriving at Paso El Medio, now merges his knowledge in the day-to-day life of the educational center.

He assures that what has most attracted him to this teaching strategy is that it respects the ethnic identity and the historical memory of the communities, their traditions and lifestyle.

For this reason, he has created the project called Coexistence and Peace, which teaches dance, theater and painting workshops so that children, victims of armed violence, find new tools for managing their emotions.

“We must make an accompaniment with psychologists who teach them about self-care and handling of feelings.

Many of our children and their families need to process grief over the loss of a loved one and even the dispossession of their homes,” he explains.

During his 15 years of work in education, he has understood the relationship between the displaced population and school dropout rates and grade repetition rates.

“They are very poor families.

Many times, to be able to bear expenses, parents demand that their children work on the farms.

I do business with them, I tell them to come to class three days and the other two to go to work.

Then we help them update the content they lost, ”she specifies.

In Colombia, only 51% of displaced youth attend secondary school, compared to 63% of non-displaced youth, according to UNESCO data.

Schools are places of learning, socialization and safe spaces.

When a child stops attending classes, she is exposed to labor and sexual exploitation and becomes a target of armed groups

Responsible for education of the NGO Ayuda en Acción

For the person in charge of Ayuda en Acción, Iciar Bosch, the reasons why school dropout is so high in children who have lived in conflict situations is due to the fact that educational systems are not prepared to face the traumas derived from war.

"In these areas there is a clear deficiency of teaching staff, who have also been impacted by the violence."

For this, the expert recommends that the educational system integrate community work that helps the entire family face the violation of their rights, improve health systems with psychosocial care and generate an environment and learning opportunities.

"If a child misses classes more than three times, that makes him feel that he is behind the others and that it is difficult for him to keep up with the class," she explains.

The solution, says Bosch, in the case of the displaced,

Camacho organizes micro-soccer games, plays and reading development projects, although he admits that he would like to have a library for the children, now he only has three shelves with donated books.

“We tell them that those who come to class the most and those who notify us of the days that they will not come will be able to participate in these activities.

This way we make sure that less and less will be missing.”

Now they prepare a play in which the history of the community is dramatized and the reasons why the neighbors left the land where they used to live are explained.

“It is a job of recovering our historical memory.”

Regarding the fruits of her work,

La seño

confesses that she now greets former students who are already at university.

She proudly boasts that they are studying arts, nursing or agronomy.

"I will see them working for their community," she assures, convinced.

The voice of Luz Nellis Camacho,

La seño

, is vibrant, energetic, happy.

That same joy is the basis with which she has managed for a group of families and their children to overcome the traces of pain of war.

“If I weren't a teacher, I would surely be helping children in rural communities in other ways.

The goat looks for the mountain, that's why, when I retire, I want to build a communal hall in our town, to continue surrounded by my children and my families”.

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Source: elparis

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