I remember my childhood education 26 years ago when I studied at the Rio Cofanes school in the A’i Cofán community of Sinangoe. We lived 5 kilometers from the community, on the banks of the Aguarico River at the mouth of the Candue River. Every morning my mother woke up at 3 a.m. to make breakfast and send us to school. We were 3 siblings, 2 younger than me, who studied. We left home at 5 a.m. to get to school at 7.30 a.m. We arrived tired, unable to even breathe well because we were so tired. But we had a great desire to learn, even in our dirty uniforms, stained by bad weather.
We had very small wooden classrooms where we studied 6 grades at different levels in the same classroom. It wasn’t pleasant because none of my classmates could concentrate on any subject that the teacher instructed us in. We listened to all the classes from first to sixth grade and we were very confused.
Since then my dream was for our community to have large and beautiful classrooms for all the different grades so we could receive and engage with the best possible education. As time went by I grew older and we were only given one more classroom.
At that time I remember that the parents used to go as a commission to the district’s educational authority to beg for more classrooms to be built in the community. Twenty-six years have passed since my dream as a child and I still see the same discomfort of our sons and daughters having to study several grades in the same classroom.
The attitude of the State has not changed at all. My dreams as a child of having classrooms, sports fields, playgrounds with swings and more are still my dreams for future generations.
Now the community is large and has a lot of indignation. They will no longer allow the dreams of our sons and daughters to remain as mere dreams.
We’ve had enough of allowing our children to take classes in a warehouse or in a communal house because it is not a suitable or good place for our children to study nor a good place for the teachers. This situation emerged in 2019 when the river rose and took part of the school’s field, endangering the lives of our children who could now no longer receive classes in that place.
Now it gives me a lot of anger and anguish to see that the government through the Ministry of Education continues to violate fundamental rights such as the right to a decent life, the right to a quality education with cultural relevance, the right to not to be discriminated against, and all the rights of our children in the community. I’m tired having grown up in an educational environment that does not guarantee any rights, seeing how the Indigenous communities are forgotten and discriminated against by the Ecuadorian government.
The struggle for our rights as Indigenous peoples continues to intensify every day, due to the abandonment of the government.
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Alexandra Narváez is an A’i Cofán Indigenous leader from the community of Sinangoe. She was the first woman to be part of the Indigenous guard of her community. In 2022 she was awarded, along with Alex Lucitante, the international Goldman Prize for her community’s struggle against gold mining and for the right of Indigenous peoples to decide over their territories.
