Me, Guatemala, During my masters research project in
Patzun, Chimaltengo, Guatemala 1982
When I first traveled to
Latin America, or more specifically, Guatemala, in the early 80’s and when I worked
with kids in schools there, or met in communities I visited, I naively asked them
what they wanted to do when they grew up. The answer was always, a shrug and a “no
se” (I don’t know).
It wasn’t a middle class,
bored USAan[i]
teenager “I don’t know”, it was a literal a not-dreams-were-possible-because-there-was-little-to
any-future-I-don’t-know. Sometimes it was a “I don’t know” that said they were content
to carry on doing the same thing that their parents and grandparents had been
doing for hundreds of years I don’t know.
The “I don’t know” of contentment,
which for me is admirable. I come from a
particular social class and culture of discontentment, and needing and wanting more,
and better and faster and bigger is a genetic flaw that, as a Buddhist, I have
to constantly work to tamp down, to ignore, to send this discontentment away.
So when my husband finished graduate
school, and we decided to move to Brasil, mostly because as you either may or
may not know, the USA does not afford GLBT people equal marriage rights and the ability to sponsor
of their spouses, as striaght people do. We applied for and were awarded positions as faculty members
in small university high in the mountains of Minas Gerais. I retired from California
State University, Sacramento and we are both professors in the Centro de Educação
Aberta e a Distância (the Center of Open and Distance Education) at the Universidade
Federal de Ouro Preto part of UAB (the Open University of Brasil) which provides
higher education opportunities to thousands of Brazilians that traditionally would
never have had access.
I have been teaching K-Univeristy students since
1978. My first teaching job was in a rural school in Oregon. I went to Oregon
State, taught school in Oregon, then Guatemala, after which I went to graduate school in New
Mexico, returned to Guatemala for masters work, and did research in Puebla
Mexico with computers and kids as part of my doctoral research.If I recall, the school there was a test site Apple de México, and they were debugging the very first keyboard that allowed accents and things necessary in Spanish and Portuguese. Before that time you printed out the document, and then drew in the accents and the all important ~ over the letter n. My research replicated what we were doing in Guatemala and New Mexico with LOGO and kids in their math lab.
My first trip to Brasil was
in 1992, and once again I asked kids, “What do you want to do when you grow up?”
And again the answer was, more often than not, “Não se". And for much for the same reason
I found in Guatemala a few years earlier. Yet I began to notice a subtle difference, more and more, the answer began to
change, “Eu quero ser um…” I want to
be a… I began to see dreams. Brasil, like much of South America was awakening, the Green Giant was waking from its slumber, it was moving forward.
In 2005-2006, when my husband
Milton and I realized his visa prospects were wearing thin, and it became to
expensive for us to stay in the United States (over 12 years his visa had cost
us over $30,000.00) I took up an offer as visiting professor on Ouro Preto,
thinking it was time for us to begin moving south. Half way through my stay in
Ouro Preto, the San Juan Unified School District in a suburb of Sacramento, offered to sponsor him for his green
card. Obviously, this changed everything, and his dream, of earning a doctorate, was suddenly
possible. This allowed him to pursue a doctorate degree, and he graduated as
CSU’s first doctoral student! So back I went, all the time our dream was to
return to Brasil, so I continued working at CSUS and visiting, working as a
visiting professor, publishing, and lecturing until the time came for us to pull of stakes.
Our program sends course work to over 5000 students in 30 polos in three states in Brasil. A
few months ago, I represented the university at a graduation of our students in
one of our polos
in the state of Bahia. As is my custom, I asked a 9 year old daughter of one of
our students, “o que você
quer ser quando crescer?”
She looked up at me, pointing
her finger at me and with great confidence said to me, “Vou ser um médico!” (I am going to be an doctor!). It was more than a
dream, it was an expectation, a right, an assertion and knowledge that she
could, no she would do it, because she had seen her Mother study, and now
graduate, and so would she.
Like I said earlier, I have
been teaching since 1978, and rarely if ever have I been privileged to actually
witness the physical difference in what I do makes in the lives of my students and the communities
they came from, at another graduation, in a region of Brasil that made a discovery
of natural gas and oil, the mayor and the school superintendent told me that if
it hadn’t been for UFOP, this tiny town of 7000 people would have lost any hope
of taking part of the wealth. Hundreds of people were expected to move in from outside,
and traditionally when this occurred the locals were relegated to menial jobs,
but because of the student earning business administration, pedagogy and math
degrees via CEAD-UFOP, they had been given their own tools to build their own stores, open their own restaurants,
build their own apartments to rent, even a new hotel. They were creating and achieving opportunities…
dreams. It was then, at the ripe old age of 57, that I realized that I was finally doing what I wanted to
do when I grew up.
So, I ask you, “What do you
want to do when you grow up?”
Me, teaching online CEAD-UFOP, 2012
[i] I use the term USAan, or more
accurately “estadunidense” for my nationality, as America is a continent, we who live in both
North & South America ARE all Americans…
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