Softheartedness

I arrived at the Ministry my second day in Lima after going to two different wrong places.  The Ministry is located in the basement of the National Museum, and so as you might expect I had to check my bag, my passport and any malicious intent I might have had at the door to obtain a pass to enter.  I walked down the stairs to a warehouse-sized floor that was stacked high with boxes containing years of bureaucratic proceedings and was divided into large cubicles each of which contained about six desks.  I asked for Olinda (the woman I report to at the Ministry) and was seated at (what I now know as) the table for people they don't know what to do with.  I waited for 45 minutes and was finally greeted by a woman with big eyes and an even bigger personality.  Within the first ten minutes of my interaction with her, I understood that I was to monitor the various virtual classrooms with which they are experimenting, evaluate the appropriateness of a recently-created national English language curriculum, travel to all 26 of the Pedagogical Institutes to observe, critique and educate the teachers, and finally, hold a national rolling conference in July on English language education.  I was given a desk, a somewhat arbitrary collection of "school supplies," a computer, and more responsibility than I'd ever had before.  I returned home exhausted, nervous and doubtful of my own ability to do this job well.



In the following weeks, I had many meetings with Olinda trying to clearly define what my job should be.  I came to anticipate these meetings with a hightened level of anxiety as the meetings were rarely clarifying and almost always concluded in an even longer list of things that Olinda would like me to do.  Slowly, surely, steadily, dread set in.  After each meeting my confidence wavered, until finally I concluded that I was not cut out for this job, would not have any more meetings with Olinda, and would do my best to fall into the background of the Ministry and wait while the months passed me by. 


A number of weeks later, the Ministry was giving a workshop to professors from all over the country.  I was to observe the workshop to get ideas for my own workshop.  I didn't know what to expect from this workshop, and so I spent the better part of the week trying to figure out just what was going on.  Finally I figured out that it was an extended brainstorming session regarding the implementation of the new national curriculum.  The last night of the workshop, we had an unexpected visitor: Viceministro Idel Vexler (the Vice Minister of the Ministry of Education).  Based on the somewhat frantic scurrying of my colleagues, I deduced that he was very important, and that this wasn't a meeting to congratulate us on our efforts.  We sat around a modern-day Round Table, and he proceeded to ask us why Superior Education in the country is failing, why we aren't working harder, faster, better, stronger, and why we continue to give "waste-time workshops."  Since I hadn't been at the Ministry long, I was astounded by this harsh "talking to," but not nearly as disheartened as others sitting around the table.  Vexler, at long last, took his leave, and the rest of us stood up to follow suit.  And this is where the story changes: Olinda asked that we take our seats again, and after a great deal of grumbling, we all sat back down.  She asked us how we felt about the meeting.  She told us how she felt about the meeting.  She conceded that superior education in Peru was lacking.  She acknowledged the hard work we all did every day.  She ended with, "In a country where a great deal of lip-service is paid to superior education, but resources are handed out infrequently and policy remembers us only now and then, it is easy to be disheartened.  There is one thing, however, that keeps me coming back to work to do a sometimes thankless job: I believe in the importance of a strong public education system, and I hope that as a team, we can change the educational landscape of Peru so that all students have excellent opportunities."  I sat at that table and seemed to see Olinda for the first time.  She is a smart, brave woman in charge of a team of at least 30 and dealing with a great deal of pressure from above.  Olinda has created a comfortable, forward-thinking, validating working space, and oh, how I appreciate her.