Colombia Should Support Safe Schools Globally

(GCPEA) – “And now we can go to school!” declared 10-year-old “Pablo,” taking off his cap and using it to gesture towards the small cement and wood structure across the yard. Grabbing me by the hand, he pulled me off the covered patio into the pouring rain, over to the three new classrooms awaiting their first students. It was March 2011, and this village in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountains on the Caribbean coast of Colombia was being resettled as part of government efforts to support indigenous communities’ return to their ancestral lands. Security conditions had recently improved, and several new villages were being built in the lower parts of the Sierra, from which the communities had been displaced due to conflict-related violence years before. Each village had a health facility and school. Children who had previously had to walk for hours to get to school from their displaced communities high in the Sierra now found their education just across the yard. This, and the decreasing violence in the area, were reasons for hope for Pablo and his companions.

Link