By Juan de Dios Simón Sotz
Introduction.
The first Covid-19 case reported by newspapers in Guatemala was on March 13th, 2020. At the time of this writing, the Ministry of Health and Social Assistance reported 77,828 confirmed cases of COVID-19, and 2,862 deaths in Guatemala (MSPAS, 2020). The projection is that we will have 100,000 people with COVID at the end of December. Additionally, the Guatemalan Minister of Education Claudia Ruiz informed that “schools will not be open anymore during school cycle 2020”; this means that all teachers and children will finish the year trying to interact and learn from home.
Of course, the challenges will be greater for most indigenous children in rural areas of the Western Highland who don´t have access to internet; very few have smart phones and some don´t even have electricity.
Educational
leadership challenges during Covid-19.
I am the Program manager of the Educo Foundation in Guatemala, and the Covid-19 has shaped my leadership from certainty to uncertainty. I was accustomed to work in an office dealing with my responsibilities with a group of coworkers, with specific schedules, face to face meetings, defending children’s rights. I didn´t know that in my comfort zone managing plans, results, objectives, budget, annual work plans and everything else was going to be changed. COVID-19 woke me up, with short notice I transitioned to working from home.
I could not go to meetings with government officials anymore. My bedroom at home was adjusted to put an operative office, relying on a computer and telecommunication tools such as Zoom, Teams or Skype. Many calls from the field and from regional contacts were answered in the middle of uncertainty. After a shower and breakfast, running to brushing my teeth, I didn´t have to change my cloths, I could just start working in my pajamas. Meanwhile, I was helping my 7-year-old daughter with her schoolwork as she also could not go to school. She would do her schoolwork on her iPod and thought that we would be staying at home just about three weeks. We were wrong about the timing to go back to the office and about kids going back to school safely!
I had to rethink my role as I work with a group of professionals and our programs and projects are implemented by local partners in rural communities of the wester highlands, particularly in Quiché. Now I had to balance work, home, and family, which were all taking place together in the same space. In the middle of everything I heard stories about broken businesses, people losing their employments and many children having more difficulties with food security. Some white flags were in the street, meaning that some people needed food.
The other challenge I faced was switching from being able to work with others relying on in person meetings to relying on distance communication. As a parallel I thought about education and distance education in Guatemala. While Covid-19 didn´t create inequalities in Guatemala it is widening inequality and increasing despair as COVID-19 cases continue to rise. All our contributions as an NGO to the educational reform in Guatemala in terms of curricula, teachers training, and production of materials were designed to transform classrooms. But suddenly, schools were closed, teachers were asked to stay home, and children went back home. So, no teachers training face to face, anymore. In rural areas of Guatemala, distance education is not an option as most of the children don´t have internet, nor TV. The majority don´t have computers, nor smart phones; some do not even have electricity.
A teacher told me in one of our conversations that they only have a Radio, and that was for the father, not for the child to listen to. Some kids needed to visit relatives in order to access the program Learning from Home “Aprendo en Casa” from the Ministry of education. So, given these serious needs what should we do to adapt our programs and projects? We relied on mindfulness and emotional awareness and rethought all our projects, modified our strategy and pondered the financial implications of these changes.
Listen to the children during the pandemic. One of the initiatives of our office was to listen to the voice of children and adolescents. Most of the time we listen to government officials, adults, and local partners, but in the middle of Quarantine, it was important to listen to the rights holders. Every two weeks we needed to make a report about the status and news about Covid-19 in rural areas. So, it was an excellent opportunity to conduct a survey and ask the children to answer it through phone or computers if they had access to them.
The table below shows the children’s responses to questions in the survey.
Question: What do you miss the most during COVID-19, while you
are at home?
For children schooling and education are seamlessly integrated into their lives. They don´t see any difference between schooling and their lives. They like to go to school, but not necessarily because of the content of the curriculum they access or because the interaction with teachers but because of their friends, they liked to play with them; they also missed visiting relatives and going to play outside of home.
Reformulation of
projects and preventing more inequalities.
We realized as an organization that kids being at home was a challenge and we redirected our attention from supporting schools to supporting families. We adopted new three priorities: Food security and child protection. We needed to make sure that children had their meals, as they used to have at school.
Some kids went motivated to attend school because the free lunches they received there, in addition to the interaction with their friends. Since children were now at home, we had to support their families and not just their schools. As we asked questions in the field, we realized that some children faced challenges in terms of distress, and some girls, besides helping with some domestic work, were now supporting their siblings as caregivers. Some girls now were victims of physical violence or sexual abuse from drunk relatives, or from fathers who had lost their job because of Covid-19.
According to the Ministry of Health, at the end of June 2020: there were 46,863 teen pregnancies in total. 1,912 pregnancies were between 10 to 14 years old and 44,901 pregnancies between 15-19 years old. According to the Public Ministry in charge of the investigation of child sexual abuse during the pandemic: there were 3,821 complaints registered against adults-relatives for sexual violence against girls. Many families are afraid to report them because they live with the abuser at home.
What can you do if the government tells you to stay home because of COVID-19 but your abuser is at home? What can you do when schools are closed, but the sexual abuser lives at home? Therefore,protocols of child protection were implemented.
Water, sanitation, and hygiene. We understood that promoting social distance, washing hands with soaps, required water. But reality showed us that some families needed to walk blocks from home to get water. Not all families have water at home and promoting the use of water and soap was useless, some very poor kids didn´t even have money to buy soap. So, collaboration with kits of health composed by gel, soap and giving masks were essential. Education and child protection. In theory distance education with the program “Aprendo en Casa” of the Ministry of Education was a solution, but not for many. For example, Juanita a schoolgirl from Quiché explained to us, that her brother had to to her Aunt´s house to watch the classes because they didn´t have TV at home. Some parents motivate their children to do their homework at home, but others took advantage of them, sending them to work in the fields.
In summary, my leadership was challenged in terms of focus, shifting my work model, my zone of comfort. I took a class to manage stress, I took another class related to mindfulness to pay attention to my emotions, active listening, dialogue, identify the emotions of others and develop more the emotional intelligence rather than focusing only on complex reasoning and quantitative data.
During the time of uncertainty, I also realized that strategic thinking was always conditional to external circumstances. For example, many of the irregular migrants who were captured in the USA and then were sent back home to Guatemala, tested positive with COVID-19.
Some in communities were infected because of an immigrant and sadly, the community with lack of information could react unkindly, protecting themselves.
As member of an international NGO, we needed to reformulate all the projects in process of implementation for the fiscal year 2020. As a Program Manager I coordinated meetings to set up urgent dialogues with local partners in the western highlands in Guatemala. I was challenged to think about paying salaries without working in the field, costs of opportunity between protecting lives, and promoting health or think about financial execution, particularly with external donors, no matter what. If we don´t achieve results in terms of schooling learning and outcomes, what do we need to do?
How can we attribute results of our programs if they are not fully implemented as planned? We needed to reformulate and changes some goals. So, with inputs from our headquarters in Barcelona, Spain and from our external donors we analyzed all our projects to determine which required modification, and this would involve substantial modification or no substantial modifications. Depending on the answers, with just a Yes or No, we could process and approve the reformulation of the projects. Below is the framework we used to analyze our projects.
The announcement of the Ministry of Education this week, that children will not go back to school; changed my scenario for next year. I am the program quality coordinator of 12 projects and most of them are centered in supporting schools. Now, the big challenge is to plan next year, not as an emergency response, but as part of the normalization of the new reality. Train teacher from rural areas with limited connection to internet or keeping them in small places wearing a mask does not resolve the situation. All the project activities for workshop and teachers support changed drastically.
As a parent myself, I am also worried about my daughter. My wife has told me that besides being a professional she has a second or third job; taking care about me and my daughter. This exemplifies how some parents need to work outside of home, make some money hoping they don´t get in touch with COVID-19 and come back safely home.
What helps me to wake up and start working each day is the idea that I can make a difference, there are more people facing worse difficulties, and now that I am aware that having a job during a social, health or financial crisis is a golden opportunity.
I really believe that there will be emotional consequences for children for the next 5 years in terms of how suddenly they were forced to stay home, losing some freedom and the opportunity to play. But asan eternal educator, I know we will overcome these challenges. School closures and extended periods of isolation at home may negatively impact the mental health and well-being of children and youth, but responsible adults, need to make a difference.
Juan de Dios Simón Sotz is a Program Director of the Educo Foundation in Guatemala. He graduated from the International Education Policy Program in 2005, Harvard University.
Copied from: Leading Education
Through COVID-19
Upholding the Right to Education
Fernando
M. Reimers
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© 2020 Fernando M. Reimers