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Martha Villalba attended primary school in the mountains of the rural area of Bogotá, and secondary school, within the walls of the urban area. As a child she went to school in her village in a ruana and swamp boots, and when she grew up she had to shed her peasant clothes to continue her education. “There was no high school in the school and I couldn’t wear the ruana in the new school. I felt like I had to let go of my identity every morning,” says the 43-year-old woman, her voice dull. The imposition of abandoning that identity pushed her into a vital struggle to defend her roots. For this reason he decided to become a teacher and to create the School of Rural Culture in 2013, a non-formal education project that transmits rural knowledge to the children and young people of the Los Soches village in the municipality of Usme, the house where he spent his whole life with his family.
It was his parents who embodied the example of preserving the legacy of his grandparents. Belisario Villalba and María Contreras fought for the territory and succeeded in having Los Soches recognized in 2000 as an agropark, which constitutes a special area of conservation protected from the threat of urbanization. «The city tends to want to absorb the countryside, but we have resisted», underlines Villalba in the middle of the library he built with donations for the children of the town. On the shelves there are books by the peasant singer Jorge Velosa, lyrics about protecting the moorland, stories of community leadership and even stories she wrote about the inhabitants of Los Soches. There is also a book with a portrait of the father wearing a hat and a ruana looking to the horizon as a symbol of rural resistance.
His parents and more than ten farmers who grew up in Los Soches are the teachers at the Villalba school. «They are the experts who possess traditional knowledge», explains the educator, as she visits a section of the 3,300 square meter farm where she lives with her parents, her husband and her two children: a family that works together in the name of peasant wisdom from their home. It is there that members of more than 100 Los Soches families meet from Thursday to Saturday to learn from each other about the experiences of country life. For example, Doña Rubiela, 82, shares the craft of basket weaving, and Stiven Daza, Villalba’s son, teaches the community to move to the rhythm of carrangas, rumbas, torbellinos and bambucos. The young man has also obtained a degree and, at 23, is about to complete a master’s degree in Latin American cultural studies, training with which he intends to enhance the work of the school. “Our goal is to articulate traditional education with our knowledge,” underlines Daza, who created a dictionary with more than 150 terms typical of the peasant culture of Bogota, a city in which more than 122,000 hectares correspond to rural areas.
Growing up in the mountains
After sharing their visions of education, Villalba, his son and his teachers prepare to welcome a group of twenty children and teenagers ready to leave their energies on the farm. Belisario Villalba prepares the soil so that students can plant aromatic plants such as peppermint, chamomile, lemongrass, marigold and lemon balm. The children are ready to dig the holes and arrange the soil that will host the plants. “Nothing is too big for us farmers,” says a student aged just 10, who has been going to school since she was four. Evelin Rodríguez is one of the girls who does not hesitate to take a shovel and multiply the greenery of the fields of Los Soches.
Once the planting is done, the students make figures out of clay, the same material their great-grandparents used to make blocks and build homes on mountaintops. With brown paste they draw animal figures or bowls to feed the dogs, while they laugh comparing their sculptures. Everything is learned by doing and nothing seems to be imposed. Finally they wash their hands and prepare for Mrs. Contreras to teach them how to use the mill to grind corn and make arepas. The older ones already know the processes well and help the younger ones. They all know each other and have formed a big family on the sidewalk. Marta Villalba taught them their origins with the professionalism of a teacher and the love of a mother. “I’ve seen them all grow up here. Kevin was about 5 when he started coming and now he’s 15,” he exclaims, pointing to a light-eyed teenager who says he wants to continue living in Los Soches when he grows up. “This is where I grew up and where I want to be,” the teen shares with a smile.
Villalba’s dream is not that every child in the village dedicates himself to working the land, but that everyone can develop their maximum potential in the community. “We don’t want to reduce the vision of the farmer to agricultural work. There are farmer doctors, lawyers, researchers, teachers. What we want is for everyone to feel that they can realize their dreams starting from the territory”, says the director of the Cultural School, a free access project for the community which was supported by the agritourism work on the family farm. “We receive groups from educational institutions who want to learn from our project field,” says the community leader.
The relevance of this education with a differential rural approach is not a vision unique to Villalba. The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has underlined the importance of a “collective construction of curricular proposals anchored to the territory and community processes that are articulated and contribute to local and national educational policies”, a task that the teacher considers pending in Colombia. “Education is not in dialogue with the territory,” he says in a country where 25.4% of the population is peasant, according to the National Administrative Department of Statistics.
The importance of this rural and peasant environment and its development is what motivated the family work. “Education and territorial roots are the engine of lasting development, because it starts from the core. This way we will build a better country”, explains the mother of Stiven and Solangie, two young people committed to the heritage that Villalba is building and in the footsteps of their grandparents. “We cannot let our knowledge die,” says Solangie Daza at 15, as she thinks about all the possible professions she has contemplated for the future. The young woman doesn’t know if she will become a lawyer, a doctor or an artist, but she is convinced that she will apply what she learns along the way in any profession. After all, it was her mountain mother who taught her and the rest of the children of Los Soches to dream big.
