Marcelino teaching
This morning we woke up bright and early to join the second-year students at the agricultural school on their field trip to a local creek. At around 8:15, a bunch of us piled into Marcelino’s jeep for the bumpy, beautiful ride through the forest. When the road was such that we could go no further, we got out and walked the rest of the way to find a section of the creek where a man-made concrete wall—a sort-of-but-not-really dam—diverted the water so that it could be more easily be used for irrigation. While we hung out at the site, Marcelino drove back to the campus to pick up the rest of the students—his car only holds so many, after all. Fernando and a couple of other students took out some fishing line and, using sticks found around the area as poles and leftover fried bread as bait, began to catch very, very small fish. By the time Marcelino showed up with the rest of the students, the kids had accrued about twenty of them, held captive in a very, very shallow puddle, flopping about and unable to escape.
When Teach arrived on the scene, fishing rods went down and the lesson began. Although the sound of flowing waters didn’t make it any easier to understand what was being said in Spanish, I think the lesson had something to do with calculating water velocities in different parts of the creek and using that information to better understand the irrigation systems. At any rate, the kids seemed to be fully engaged in what they were doing, avidly taking notes and hanging on to every word Marcelino said.
After the lesson was over, the fishing resumed—only this time, no measly sticks and hooks would do. The boys in the class quickly produced a large net and, working as a team, dove into the water and emerged with a haul of fifteen or twenty small fish. They repeated the process a few times and, before long, had well over a hundred to show for their efforts.
While the men were hunting for their prey, the girls in the class worked to prepare us a lunch of rice, salad, and steak, cooked over an open fire. Traditional gender roles, it seems, are demonstrably alive and well in this part of the Chaco—something that I found very striking as we watched the class divide themselves by sex and by task. We weren’t complaining, though, when lunch was set in front of us—it was delicious. Afterwards, we were treated to the inevitable desert of freshly-caught fish, fried and consumed in their entirety. It was a culinary experience unlike any we had ever had before, and not an unpleasant one at that. Crispy and salty, many of the fish were small enough to down in one bite. Each of us tried a few, but left the bulk of them for Marcelino and the students, who clearly relished them—a well-deserved reward for a Saturday morning spent at school.
-Jim