huelga

The teacher strikes that have been happening all across the country all year long have finally come to Tacuati. There are a bunch of different teachers unions in Paraguay, and unlike in NY membership is not mandatory. I find it interesting that membership in the unions doesn’t fall along political lines here – that members of both the Colorado and liberale party join the same union if they want. It’s a little unclear to me the differences between the unions here, but the teachers seem to know why one is better than the other.

Anyway, the strikes have been happening off and on for a while now, over issues that I think are pretty important to education – school supplies that never reach the schools, school milk that also never makes it to the kids, higher salaries, more salaried positions, etc. So I think I support the striking teachers, at least in theory. The tough part is that the unions choose to strike at various times. For example, one union is striking today and tomorrow, so those teachers won’t be showing up to school. The other union is striking tomorrow and Thursday. In the high school, this means that no one goes to school at all because they don’t want to end up with class first period but not second period, etc, and it seems like in the elementary schools there’s a tendency for teachers and students alike to just blow off the day when some of the teachers are striking. It’d be nice to think that with all this free time teachers would be into making materials or planning lessons or something, but I have lost some of that idealism after being here so long!!

I found out about the strikes yesterday morning, after I spent time planning with Noemi a whole bunch of activities and workshops and meetings for this week, all of which we had to postpone once we got confirmation of the strike. So once again it was a hurry up and wait, or get excited and then get let down, kind of morning, but for some reason it didn’t phase me. Maybe I’m used to this kind of thing now, that it takes forever to get things done here, or maybe I was just generally in a good mood bc I’m over the flu and felt fine. I also am confident that our plans will be realized the following week, and in the grand scheme a difference of 8 days doesn’t matter so much.