For a month this summer I had the good fortune to work as a voluntary teacher at Tumul K’in Centre of Education in Belize, Central America. It is a school with a difference.

Tumul k’in is the only school that puts Mayan values and ways at the centre of the educational experience and caters for the needs of indigenous communities in the district of Toledo in southern Belize.

An important expression of the local culture is the right of each family unit to call for help from other villagers to clear enough land for a Milipas (cornfield) in the forest which they will use for period of 4-5 years. Nearer the village the families keep gardens of Squash, beans and other vegetables. It is here that the Maya make up the majority of the population with numbers having been added in the last century when Q’eqchi people fleeing the brutal hacienda regimes across the border in Guatemala settled in Toledo.

Belize, a former British Colony, the smallest country in Central America has as its official language, English, and so is unlike all its neighbours who use Spanish as the linga franca. For a country approximately the size of Munster and with a population of 250,000, it displays a remarkable diversity of cultures and peoples, serving to underline the motto of the alternative movement small is beautiful. The Caribbean coastline is home to the Garifuna people, descendants of Carib indigenous groups originally from the Grenadine islands who intermixed with escaped African slaves and proudly maintain their own language. The Creole culture predominates in the northern part of the country around Belmopan (the capital) and Belize City. Added to this are the East Indians who were brought by the British in the 19th century to work as indentured labourers, the Chinese who are the most recent arrivals, Mennonities and the Amish who meticulously adhere to their dour, prudent lifestyles. The Maya people are divided into three linquistic groups in Belize. Yucatec in the central and northern parts, Mopan and Kekchi or Q’eqchi who make up over 60 per cent of the District.

The ability of the Mopan/Q’eqchi to maintain their culture is directly connected to their holding the land throughout the colonial period, as extraction of the valuable tropical hardwood timber from the territory proved a logistical impossibility unlike in the North of the country where the British cleared whole tracts of Mahogany. The British granted customary rights to the village communities without ever guaranteeing the rights in law leaving behind a serious bone of contention in their wake.

Toledo, cut off from mainstream commercial traffic until 5 years ago when the Southern Highway was asphalted as far as Punta Gorda, the provincial capital, is by and large a primary Tropical Rainforest area drained by numerous rivers which become impassable in the rainy season. Blue Creek Village is located beside such a river. Tumul k’in an initiative of the Maya leaders’ Alliance and supported since its inception in 2001 by Development Cooperation Ireland (then APSO) through a number of grants. Two school buildings which serve as classrooms and the computer room were completely paid for by DCI, as was a Tractor and a machine room. At present DCI is supporting a Consortium of NGOs (engaged in various civil society developments) working in Belize of which Tumul K’in is in receipt of 167,500 Euros over a three year period for further work.

The school runs a vocational and agricultural programme and it sets out as one of its primary objectives the integration of field and classroom work. It holds in equal regard practical and theoretical aspects of the curriculum. All the students come from out lying villages (within a 50 mile radius of Blue Creek) live and work at Tumul K’in as do the staff. A typical day at Tumul k’in starts at 5.15 when the students receive a wholesome breakfast from Ms. Martha, the in-house chief and as soon as everybody has eaten the students quickly clean and put away the dishes. Before six the main body of students are attending to a range of chores on the farm. This includes cleaning out the Chicken Coop and spreading out Maize to dry or whatever seasonal activity is carried on at the Agricultural station at the time. The land area in use is 500 acres, which is dedicated to organic agriculture with the largest crops at the moment are Cacao and rice. Cacao is commonly grown for local consumption and the intricacies of its cultivation are well known to the locals, it is customary to be offered a drink of Cacao on entering a person’s home. Honey production is now coming to the fore with the hope of marketing and selling the organic products to demonstrate to the students that learning can occur with productivity as an end result and this concept of self –reliance in ones own ability is an important tool or facet for the young people to take back to their villages when schooling is over. The agricultural chores in the morning take place under the supervision of the Agricultural teacher Mr. Peter or under the watchful eyes of Ms. An-Lyn the food -processing teacher. The tasks in the Vegetable plots or in the rice fields are designed to compliment the learning in the classrooms in the afternoons, but the weeding out of the frijoles (black-eye beans) or setting stakes as supports for the Cucumbers is real work, similar to what the boys and girls are used to in their own villages, however the setting of the work as part of a learning and developmental curve is intended to change the negative paradigm of farming and to create in the students’ minds a positive image of being farmer. Farming as an occupation has been devalued and education was perceived as away out of backwardness to something better, this was/is a weakness of the education system in Belize and in Latin America in general. So, at Tumul k’in, learning is never divorced from life in the village, it is an extension of it. The base of knowledge and expertise in the fields and in the forests is built upon and new techniques and methods are filtered into this traditional body of knowledge and evaluated by teachers and students alike. One morning I was out with the students and I was impressed by their enthusiasm and dedication.

They displayed a particularly intimate knowledge of the growing pattern of the vegetables. The Garden Plots were surrounded by rows of Maize which, I was told served to deter some of the many harmful pests which attack the plants. There is a problem with bugs and insects, a particularly worrying insect in a weevil which is attacking the courgettes and cucumbers rendering them unfit for human consumption. One student split open a number of courgettes to demonstrate the damage caused by the weevil, he informed me that he and some other students were busy looking for an organic solution to the problem. They were in active communication with another organic farm where a natural weevil pesticide was in the process of being developed ( crushed leaves of a local plant mixed with some potash and manure). It is heartening that two senior students at the school are involved in liaising and communicating with other farmers and groups to find an effective remedy to the problem of the pests. If this or other new techniques prove effective the students hopefully in their turn will return to their villages to become farmers themselves, empowered by their own knowledge and abilities to become social actors in the life of their own district and country.

Schooling in the afternoons was along academic lines and I was amazed at the tenacity of the students of not alone working in class but doing further reading and writing in the evening supervised study. Somewhere in between they found time to practice Marimba and to put on a musical presentation with the help of some invited musicians from another school in the Cayo District. What really impacted me that the experience at Tumul K’in is about the non-programming it is about imparting knowledge and adapting new/different ideas into existing patterns in an attempt to achieve balance in development so that the these people can have a future on their own terms. Often development has been seen as way to advance beyond what was judged to be passed and irrelevant in the modern world. Tumul k’in on the other hand holds out another path for the Maya youth and other ideas about what is possible for a traditional society as it seeks to improve the economic standing of the people in the district and maintain its sense of identity.