Memory 2020 by Federación Internacional de Fe y Alegría

Fe y Alegría International Federation

Statement 2020

Fe y Alegría International Federation Fe y Alegría International Federation General Coordinator F. Carlos Fritzen, S.J. fi.coordinador@feyalegria.org Executive Secretariat Team Gerardo Lombardi (Coordinator) Somarick Roca Robby Ospina F. Marco Tulio Gómez, S.J. fi.secrejec@feyalegria.org Board of Directors 2020 - 2021 Fernando Anderlic – Argentina F. Daniel Villanueva, S.J. – Spain F. Miquel Cortés, S.J. - Guatemala Sabrina Burgos - Colombia Substitute: Miguel Molina - Honduras Board of Directors 2020 - 2021 F. Daniel Villanueva, S.J. – Spain F. Miquel Cortés, S.J. - Guatemala Sabrina Burgos – Colombia Miguel Molina - Honduras Suplente: F. Alfred Kiteso, S.J. – RD Congo Executive Coordination Team Popular Education Axis Gehiomara Cedeño fi.educacionpopular@feyalegria.org New Frontiers Axis F. Carlos Fritzen, S.J. fi.coordinador@feyalegria.org Sustainability Axis Gabriel Vélez fi.sostenibilidad@feyalegria.org Public Action Axis Gerardo Lombardi fi.accionpublica@feyalegria.org Responsible for the publication Communication and Technology Team Gerardo Lombardi fi.coordcomunicacion@feyalegria.org María Paula Arango fi.comunicacion@feyalegria.org José Ignacio Peraza fi.coordtecnologia@feyalegria.org

Content Management and Production Robby Ospina Pablo Ivorra Antonio Pérez-Esclarín Gerardo Lombardi Design and Layout Natalia Hernández Sánchez behance.net/nataliahs Release date: October 2021

Digital publication in Bogota, Colombia October 2021 Photographic archive International Federation of Fe y Alegría Fe y Alegría in the countries Fe y Alegría International Federation Statement 2020

Fe y Alegría International Federation

Statement 2020

Content

Introduction

Fe y Alegría declares

8 10 14

Brasil

Chad

Chile

Colombia

Ecuador

El Salvador

Spain

Guatemala

Haiti

Honduras

Italy

Madagascar

F. Carlos Fritzen, S.J.

Education emergency

Mission, Vision, Decalogue

2021- 2025 Global Federal Priorities Plan

A living Fe y Alegría, open to change

Testimonies, learnings and challenges in the time of Covid-19

Argentina

Bolivia

Fe y Alegría International Federation

Nicaragua

Panama

Paraguay

102

Peru

108

Democratic Republic of Congo

112

Dominican Republic

118

Uruguay

122

Venezuela

128

How many are we and where we are?

132

How are we organised?

133

Clear and transparent

134 136

Report on the audit of

Financial Statements 2020

Directory 2020 - 2021

136

Board of Directors

136

National Directorates

140 Office and General

130

Coordination Support Team

Mission partnerships

142

International Federation Team 3

Statement 2020

Introduction F. Carlos Fritzen, S.J. General Coordinator

The year 2020 was made out of pain and hope. Human life on the planet was threatened by the Covid-19 pandemic, which revealed old and new vulnerability and exclusion situations. The predatory development model, of which Pope Francis has warned us, seems to be one of the causes that tend to aggravate this reality. It is in the world of the poor that the effects are most dramatic. “Education is in a state of emergency”. Closed schools, decontextualized faceto-face teaching models and the majority of the population disconnected, have exposed that education and communication are still a privilege and not a right for Humankind. The rights to health and food are more violated than ever. The rights of the earth as our Common Home and the duty

Fe y Alegría International Federation

to care for it remains a major global challenge. Work and a dignified life remain a great aspiration for more than half of the population. These and other rights are increasingly at stake in a field undermined by inequalities. Ultimately, what is at stake is the sustenance of human life on earth. “Staying at home” has become impossible for more than half of the population who have to go out to earn their daily bread. Globally, one in four people lack drinking water at home, making “washing hands” both a necessity and a luxury. “Staying at home” also aggravated situations of vulnerability and abuse of children, women and the elderly, causing deep wounds and even death. And when it comes to migrating to another home in another territory, the consequences are even more difficult. We have lost many human lives in our countries, families and in Fe y Alegría because of the consequences of the pandemic. To them we offer our loving and hopeful remembrance. For their families, a word of comfort and solidarity. We are sure that they already enjoy the embrace and blessing of our good Father. In the midst of this global situation, Fe y Alegría continues to be good news for the poor. Fe y Alegría has reinvented itself to provide unprecedented responses to a reality that has taken us by storm. We have responded to the humanitarian emergency in a variety of ways and in very different contexts. Our educators have responded by distributing food and health kits and by making our educational centers available to accompany our participants and their families. They have had to adapt the pedagogical models of our Popular Education to guarantee the quality education that characterizes us. They have had to overcome

the lack of internet connectivity in their homes and in their students’ homes. And they have had to accompany the families in a very special way, who have become more involved in the educational process of their sons and daughters. As an International Federation, we have undergone a rich and participatory process of discernment and planning that has resulted in the Global Federation Priorities Plan 2021-2025 and in the Implementation Plan 2021-2023. We have ratified and updated our mission and vision, the four missional axes, our twelve federative initiatives about joint work and the way of proceeding to “network ourselves”; to give us a Movement of Popular Education and Social Promotion managed in networks among us and in alliances with other organizations linked to the Church, the Society of Jesus, the different States and the Civil Society. On this reflections of the International Federation, we would like to report on these and many other processes that we experienced during 2020. We will share our reflections and actions around the declaration of “Education in Emergency” as a source of analysis and perspective to face the crisis generated by the pandemic. We update our statistics and financial data with the transparency in management that characterizes us. We recount the testimonies of the people who make Fe y Alegría an event, a life experience, in which the poor become the subjects of our own development. People transformed by the spirit and education to change the world. Enjoy it!

Statement 2020

Fe y Alegría declares education emergency

After several days of reflection during the first eight months of the pandemic, the International Federation’s Council of National Directorates produced this statement, which we share for reference. The full text can be found on our website www.feyalegria.org and can also be accessed via the QR code at the bottom of this page. Fe y Alegría declares education emergency November 2020 “Fe y Alegría declares Education in Emergency and proposes to promote the guarantee of the Universal Right to Quality Education from the perspective of Popular Education in times of the consequences of Covid-19”. ... “We have the political will to influence processes of change and social transformation, which is based on the historical commitments of Fe y Alegría”. ... “What is at stake is sustainable life on the planet. Life on the planet as it is, it is unsustainable. The pandemic has exposed an unprecedented crisis of our ‘civilisation’.” ... “We oppose the predatory development model. This model that squeezes nature’s goods while disrespecting its rights, that exposes it and sacrifices it to economic profit”. ... “We are outraged by the strengthening of a patriarchal culture. This very model of development and the crisis it generates, brings with it inequality and inequity in human relationships, ...” ... “The right to quality education is under threat. We note the systematic reduction of public resources allocated to education due

Fe y Alegría International Federation

to the absence of public policies to guarantee this right...”. ... “Faced with this reality, Fe y Alegría is committed to generate responses and proposals, actions and global strategies for social transformation from the “popular”. ...” … “Fe y Alegría is committed to working for education as a public good within the framework of the Sustainable Development Goals, especially Goal 4 (SDG4), which aims to “ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all” and the 2030 Agenda. ...” … “Fe y Alegría promotes Education for All everywhere and the guarantee of the Universal Right to Quality Education linked to the right to communication, which first guarantees access to education, but not just any education, to quality education. ...” ... “Fe y Alegría is committed to fostering working relationships with people of good will and institutions with the same educational goals. ... bearing in mind the local reality, without losing sight of the global vision and the possibilities of impact...” … “We commit ourselves to the gestation and development of a new educational model, not from the institutional epic, but from the personal and institutional vulnerability of who we are and what we do in the face of the magnitude of the challenge. ... we commit ourselves to: … “ “Promote “emergency education” for people in vulnerable situations for Global Citizenship. To develop flexible, mixed education proposals that com-

bine formal and non-formal, school and non-school and face-to-face and virtual education through the available communication tools. ...” … To develop processes of reflection and training of educators in popular education...” . … “Ratify the importance of educational centres as a necessary and indispensable space for the processes of socialisation and people’s citizenship …”. … To support the integral development of people, from a perspective of equality and equity in all its expressions, with special emphasis on gender equality...” ...”. “Fe y Alegría places itself at the service of society ... ratifies once again its commitment to save life on the planet, ...”.

Consulte acá la Declaración del Consejo de Direcciones Nacionales de la Federación Internacional

Statement 2020

Mission

Fe y Alegría is an International Movement of Popular Education and Social Promotion, promoted by the Society of Jesus in collaboration with various people and institutions committed to the construction of a more humane and fairer world. It promotes from, with and for the communities in which it works, integral and inclusive educational processes, promoting and defending the universality of the right to quality education as a public good. Fe y Alegría is committed to the transformation of people and the promotion of global citizenship for the construction of democratic social systems.

Vision

Fe y Alegría is a reference point for comprehensive, inclusive and quality popular education, working on the frontiers of greatest exclusion and promoting and defending the universal right to quality education, in a context of educational emergency.

Fe y Alegría International Federation

Decalogue 1. 2. 3.

Our project is born from faith.

With joy as our attitude.

Always in Movement.

We educate.

We are Popular Education.

We are Social Promotion.

We are committed.

We opt for the Excluded Sectors.

We work for Justice and Peace.

10.

We build a fraternal and democratic society.

Consulte acá Nuestro Decálogo por la educación

Statement 2020

Federation Priorities Global Plan 2021 - 2025 FE Y ALEGRIA

In 2020 the International Federation of Fe y Alegría updated its “mission plan”, we produced the new Global Federation Priorities Plan 2021 - 2025.

Plan Global de Prioridades Federativas

2021 2025 10

With this Global Plan we updated our mission and vision, as well as how Fe y Alegría intends to face the challenges and opportunities posed by the diverse economic, political and social contexts in which we work. It was a participatory process of review, reflection, discernment and planning. In this process, the International Federation of Fe y Alegría declared “education in emergency” as a frame of reference. It set as its main challenge the need to unite efforts to keep contributing to overcoming situations of inequality and social injustice in a context characterized by the Covid - 19 crisis, in which new and old forms of vulnerability and exclusion became evident in all parts of the world. Especially among the poorest in our countries. During the discernment process for the updating of the “mission plan”, Fe y Alegría

Fe y Alegría International Federation

was always guided by the Universal Apostolic Preferences of the Society of Jesus (PAU). This dialogue with the PAU led us to reaffirm our commitment to young people, to accompany the spirituality of the people who make Fe y Alegría from our identity of Popular Education and with the attention of the common home. All of this is expressed in the four missional axes and the twelve federative work networks, as a concrete contribution to the promotion of the Universal Right to Quality Education. Fe y Alegría, therefore, assumes the commitment to project and organise itself in order to continue building a Global Movement! We hope to strengthen the mission of providing quality education to the most vulnerable populations in Africa, Asia and Latin America! On the other hand, in the new Global Plan of Federal Priorities 2021 - 2025, Fe y Alegria deepened the importance of networking as a way of proceeding

through which people and organisations linked to the work commit themselves to be co-responsible in the mission and to put their particular capacities and resources at the service of the mission. Finally, Fe y Alegría is increasingly aware of the importance of undertaking global actions that transcend territorial and institutional borders and that carry within them the seed of a more inclusive world in which the full realisation of each person is the objective of all social transformation. In the Global Plan of Federal Priorities 2021 - 2025, Fe y Alegría projects itself as a global actor that contributes through education and social promotion to build fairer and more humane societies! This is our mission.

Statement 2020

Priority Axis 1

Priority Axis 2

Popular education is our path

Focusing our work on the exclusion frontiers

To promote the generation of innovative pedagogical practices, considering popular education as a missionary axis, in all modalities and levels, based on listening, critical thinking and intercultural and intergenerational dialogue.

In the countries where we are present, we would like to develop new initiatives which contribute to the social, cultural and labour insertion of people who are victims of violence, discrimination or new forms of social exclusion, as well as migration, and pay special attention to the children protection.

To strengthen the socio-political and ethical dimensions of popular education with a transformative intentionality that promotes the development of a democratic culture with respect for diversity, gender equality and equity, and all of these from a spirituality committed to justice. To strengthen the quality of education with social inclusion by promoting an institutional culture in this regard and implementing educational innovation initiatives that consider training for life through decent work. To develop proposals for socio-affective accompaniment in order to search and build the meaning of personal and community life.

To study, promote and accompany the creation and strengthening of Fe y Alegría in new countries, in Africa, Asia and other continents, enriching the socio-educational proposal of Fe y Alegría according to the texts and cultures, giving priority to those places where there is the greatest need or exclusion. To dynamise the institutional mission by attending to the development of new themes for reflection and responding to the challenges of the context for missionary action and, in this particular period, to respond to education in emergencies due to the PostCovid-19 health crisis, humanitarian aid, spirituality and care for the common home.

Fe y Alegría International Federation

Priority Axis 3

Priority Axis 4

Sustainability is our commitment

Our public action has an impact on processes of cultural, social and political transformation

To attend to the renewal of the institutional identity, strengthening its spiritual dimension and counting on the contribution of the charisms and spiritualities in Fe y Alegría. To implement a proposal for institutional strengthening and flexible and innovative management, incorporating improvement aspects at planning, evaluation, information management and knowledge level. To diversify and broaden our alliances and sources of resources at the service of the mission, developing national and regional collaborative strategies, and maintaining and strengthening existing ones with an emphasis on transparency.

To develop proposals and promote our own political advocacy initiatives, and/or participate in alliances and networks with other actors for social transformation and the defence of the universal right to quality education as a public good in state, private and civil society spheres. To build and position new narratives of common life, promoting a change of values in our society based on Fe y Alegría’s proposal and accompanying young people as a central factor for ethical and cultural renewal, promoting global citizenship. To dynamise and renew the way we link with communities in the face of changes in local realities and in the institutional reality of Fe y Alegría.

Consulte acá nuestro Plan Gobal de Prioridades Federativas 2021-2025

Statement 2020

A living and open to change Fe y Alegría Testimonies, learnings and challenges in times of Covid-19

Fe y Alegría International Federation

The COVID-19 pandemic deepened the serious crises and deprivations of the populations with whom Fe y Alegría works and brought more uncertainty, fear, suffering and death. It is a great fallacy to say, naively, that the pandemic treats everyone equally, when the reality is that it hits in the most aggressive way, the most vulnerable populations. It is not true that we are all - during this crisis - in the same boat. We are, yes, in the same storm. For some, it is very easy to comply with recommendations such as “stay indoors”, “wash your hands”, “wear masks” and “keep your social distance”. For those who have no water, live in overcrowded conditions, cannot afford to buy gels and masks, and cannot eat unless they go out to work, these simple recommendations are impossible to be followed. Also in education, it is the poor who suffer the worst consequences. Faced with the difficulty of carrying out face-to-face education, which is what makes true education possible, virtual education was proposed. We cannot ignore the fact that not everyone has equal access to this virtual world, which means that, in addition to the new discriminations and inequalities, there are also digital ones, given that the most vulnerable populations and impoverished and excluded groups have little access to the world of the internet. For this reason, the terms info-poor and info-rich have long been coined to underline the digital gap. And if, for many people, surfing the internet is an everyday action, we cannot forget that, worldwide, there are still more than 4 billion people who live without access to the internet. According to data from the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the agency for communication and new technologies, only 51% of the world’s population is connected to the internet: more than 85% in developed regions (Europe, North America), but less

than 40% in poorer regions such as Africa and Latin America. In fact, although many believe that new technologies are contributing to greater equality in education, the reality is that, with their very uneven use, instead of favouring democratisation and a greater extension of education, they are leading to discrimination against people who, because of their economic resources or the area or countries where they live, cannot have access to these new tools. The problem is that the digital gap becomes a social divide, so that technology becomes an element of exclusion and not of social inclusion. However, in spite of the shortages and shocks caused by the closure of the schools and the forced confinement, Fe y Alegría responded with great audacity, commitment and creativity to ensure that education did not stop and continued to be guaranteed to its students. The educational emergency forced us to give priority to distance education, which meant: taking on virtuality without being technologically or pedagogically prepared for it; networking - covering the educational potential of the radios; resizing planning and projects; taking on new roles; reorganizing teams; promoting articulations and networks; reinventing new forms of accompaniment and meetings; and even accelerating the process of international communication and articulation which we must go in depth. And because the confinement deepened poverty and hunger, as most Fe y Alegría families, working in the informal economy, were forced to stay in their homes and were left behind without income, humanitarian aid had to be multiplied and food bags and hygiene kits were distributed.

Statement 2020

It is incredible and worthy of admiration and recognition for the work of most of the people of Fe y Alegría who, despite suffering directly from the painful consequences of the coronavirus and the precariousness of the resources to deal with it, have shown great commitment and extraordinary creativity. They did not shy away from problems and shortages, but turned them into challenges to overcome. They had to compulsively train themselves in the use of new technologies; they managed to get smartphones and pay for internet; they spent the day sending and receiving WhatsApp messages and emails; they recorded radio lessons and prepared study workshops that they even handed out at home; and they participated in numerous virtual training meetings. All the directors acknowledge and enthusiastically underline the commitment of their staff. This confirms once again that Fe y Alegría’s main asset is its people, a guarantee that we will continue innovating and recreating ourselves constantly. Below, we will present the most significant achievements in each country and we will add some testimonies which exemplify what we say and show the human quality of our people. In the end, we tried a transversal reading of what has been said in order to detect the outbreaks of that new Fe y Alegría which is already born, but we must keep strengthening it so that it responds more coherently, as a popular education and social promotion movement, to the demands of the new contexts and realities.

Learnings and challenges “Let’s not pretend that things will change if we always do the same thing. Crisis is the best blessing that can happen to us because crisis brings progress. Creativity is born out of anguish as day is born out of night. It is in crisis time that inventiveness, discoveries and great strategies are born. Whoever overcomes the crisis overcomes himself. Those who attribute their failures and hardships to the crisis violate their own talents and respect problems more than solutions. The real crisis is the crisis of incompetence. The drawback of people and countries is laziness in finding ways out and solutions. Without a crisis there is no merit. It is in the crisis that the best in everyone comes to the surface. To remain silent in a crisis is to exalt conformism. Let us work hard instead. Let us finally put an end to the only threatening crisis, which is the tragedy of not wanting to fight to overcome it” (text attributed to Albert Einstein).

Fe y Alegría International Federation

The COVID-19 pandemic has deepened the pandemics of hunger, misery and hardship of the most vulnerable populations, who are the inalienable center of Fe y Alegría’s work. This is why we must emerge from this crisis strengthened and renewed in order to assume with greater radicalism and coherence the fundamental principles of popular education, which today are more relevant than ever. Social and economic differences have widened, which shows the need to change political, economic, social and educational models. COVID-19 has highlighted many of the shortcomings of our society and, in particular, the crisis in education which, for some time now, popular education and critical pedagogies have been pointing out because, instead of being oriented towards transforming reality and creating a fairer and more fraternal world, it was contributing to reproduce the unjust world we live in and exacerbating inequalities. Apparently, education is now a banking pedagogy which denies people and favors decontextualized, fragmented and repetitive learning, which exiles the intrinsic values of human beings and does

not take into account their integrality. In particular, their affectivity, identity, citizenship, spirituality and sense of life. Consequently, the humanitarian and educational emergencies also cry out to us in Fe y Alegría the need to question, in depth, what we do and to attempt a profound change in our vision, organization and ways of proceeding and doing things. We need to strengthen an epistemological vision that is based on recognising the other who is beaten and wounded, seeing their needs and learning to be like the Good Samaritan (Lk 10, 25-37), highlighting compassion, love of neighbor, humility and humanity. The pandemic invites us to rethink our human values and principles, looking for a sustainability based on ecology, care for the common home and the construction of citizenship in order to move towards a participatory, protagonist, equitable society, with a solidarity economy, with training and productive work at local and global level for all. This means rethinking, in earnest, the aims of education and the means we use to 17

Statement 2020

achieve those aims, seeking greater coherence between proclamations and deeds, between desires and realities. The pandemic brings us back to our epistemological place: the place of the poor and excluded from society; it reminds us about where we come from, our roots; it demands of us the commitment to end all types of exclusion and discrimination and the search for dignified living conditions for all those populations who are denied and who are the centre of our option.

Since it is evident that in Fe y Alegría the Ignitian education discourse is winning more and more ground over the popular education, a sincere, profound and unprejudiced dialogue is urgently needed in order to analyze their similarities, highlight possible differences and, above all, mutually enrich both proposals so that we can achieve greater coherence between desires and practices, between proclamations and realities. While it is easy to agree on liberating intentions, we have the obligation to discern whether our way of proceeding and the values that are embedded in our structures and practices make it possible to achieve the objectives we are proposing. It could be a serious mistake to replicate with the poor, without the proper analysis, the traditional educational models of the upper and middle classes. Let us not forget that popular education is an ethical, political, pedagogical and epistemological proposal, aimed at transforming people so that they become agents of transformation of the structures and values that cause and maintain injustice and exclusion. This means, above all, at a time when the pandemic has left millions of people without education and there is a danger that governments, in the face of the economic crisis, will neglect to prioritize education, which means the we must intensify our efforts in order to guarantee - for everyone - quality education, which is the essential means for personal and social development. This requires a strong defense of quality public education as a fundamental right and a fight against the mentality which wants to turn it into a commodity or a privilege. It also requires raising awareness that education is everyone’s responsibility. If education is an essential right - because it enables the achievement of other fundamental rights it is also a duty of society as a whole. For this reason, Fe y Alegría must articulate itself

Fe y Alegría International Federation

more closely as a global movement to position itself as an international and national actor and raise its voice more forcefully in all spheres, instances, organizations and forums so that States and public bodies, institutions, churches, the media and trade unions support education as an essential means to build citizenship and combat the pandemics of hunger, injustice and misery. This presupposes that Fe y Alegría assumes its role as a relevant international and national actor in the field of quality popular education in order to influence the definition of international cooperation policies and public education policies in the States, with an emphasis on increasing the public budget for education. The horizon is to develop Fe y Alegría’s own educational model, which presents it with humility and conviction as a response to the growing dissatisfaction with the educational models in vogue, a response to the generalized clamor about the need to change education. Of course, this model must be developed from the needs of the impoverished and marginalized who need an education that makes them the agents of their lives and builders of a more humane world. This model must abandon, once and for all, this education that teaches us to answer inconsequential questions that are far from the reality and concerns of the students, to work for an education that teaches us to permanently question the reality of each day to discover the mechanisms of oppression and discrimination, and to promote critical and self-critical thinking. An education that teaches us not to repeat information, but to process and analyze it. An education to solve problems, to know how to recognise and demystify the magical proposals of certainty that come to us from

the centers of power which do not seek, precisely, to transform the world, but rather to maintain it in its injustice and inhumanity. An education that teaches us to unlearn, learn and relearn, permanently and that promotes, more than teaching, continuous learning. An education that integrates and articulates, ever more firmly, with families and communities, which implies, among other things, flexible, relevant and different curricula that respond to their own realities and needs and contribute to their social and community promotion. An education that recovers the radio and enhances its enormous educational potential and assumes the media as genuinely formative instances that promote critical and self-critical thinking and combat the culture of superficiality, triviality, false truths, rumor and gossip, and become the voice of all those who are denied a voice. An education that contributes to overcoming the digital gap and makes access to virtual education possible for everyone - because today the right to education implies the right to be connected - but that maintains and fosters a critical attitude towards the excessive mythification of technologies and their possible use to impose authoritarian models that restrict freedoms. An education that also helps to move towards a more pedagogical use of technologies, which have the danger of favoring and fostering a banking, transmissive education and not one that promotes critical thinking, lifelong learning and co-learning, and the dialogue of knowledge. Today, in general, technologies are being used in a transmissive way, as if they were replacing the old blackboards or textbooks with screens. It is urgent that we make progress in a more appropriate use of technologies to enable greater autonomy in learning and training. For this reason, the provision of technolo-

Statement 2020

gies and efforts to achieve better connectivity must be accompanied by pedagogical training to ensure their appropriate use, which will also allow us to establish real networks that foster alliances among ourselves and with those who pursue similar objectives, closer coordination and the formative exchange of practices that contribute to solving problems collectively and to foster solidarity and commitment. But, beyond all this, education must strongly retake its humanizing essence and be oriented towards the formation of essential human values that allow us to realize ourselves as authentic humans, to coexist with others who are different and to defend human, animal and plant life wherever it is being threatened, abused and destroyed. An education that considers diversity as a richness, strengthens democratic culture and combats all racist, discriminatory and exclusionary behaviour. Hence, the need for an educational model that promotes critical thinking, the development of communication and creative skills, the ability to sustain the discipline of continuous learning and teamwork, productivity and entrepreneurship for social promotion and sustainability, and, above all, human education. An education that teaches to connect hearts, hands and brains and to cultivate the inner world; that develops emotional and spiritual intelligence, that allows us to understand, modulate, and transform emotions and to understand people’s feelings and develops empathy, compassion and solidarity.

Fe y Alegría International Federation

An education that teaches us to live fully, to live with others who are different and with nature, and also teaches us to live for others, to spend our lives in effective and loving service to others, in order to achieve a more just and fraternal world. To do this, we need to fill educational, social, managerial, pastoral and community processes with human, spiritual, integral, inclusive, transformative, ecological, democratic and flexible meaning; to emphasize what is really important; to emphasize the development of abilities, capacities, skills and attitudes for life, avoiding the attachment to the accumulation of programmatic content or activities and practices that are not helping us to learn, to be, to live together and to transform. This requires us to insist on the permanent pedagogical, human and spiritual education of all of us, in order to become genuine popular educators and teachers of life, which implies a permanent conversion and a continuous revision not so much of our words and good intentions, but of our actions and ways of proceeding. It is hard to recognise that often the new generations do not find “teachers of life”. What life can our young people find in a mutilated teaching, which provides facts, figures and codes, but offers no answers to the most disturbing questions that nestle in the human being? Teaching reduced to information, in which the teacher can be replaced by the corresponding video or computer programme, will hardly help pupils grow. Our society needs “teachers of existence”. Men and women who teach the art of opening one’s eyes, marveling at life and questioning with simplicity the ultimate meaning of everything. Teachers who, with their personal testimony of life, sow restlessness and commitment, spread life and help ask, honestly, the deepest questions of

existence and spend their lives in defense of a dignified life for all. Education as a process of transformation is only possible when the individual recognises and accepts the need for him or herself to change, to convert to a new conception and style of assuming his or her role as an educator. Consequently, the formative and transformative process must be aimed at everyone, including, and especially, at managers, so that they may increasingly assume, with greater strength, a leadership of service. As Xavier Marcet states, “it is in the adversities of complexity, such as that produced in this global crisis of the coronavirus, that genuine leadership is tested. We need leaders who, in these moments, rather than being ‘alone in the face of danger’, project their teams and stimulate them to offer their best version. They should attract profiles more powerful than their own to face complexity with some choice. It is clear that we prefer leaders who are humble and good people, but we also need them to be capable. And when I say capable, I don’t mean infallible. I mean capable of making decisions in the midst of doubts and rectifying without any hint of arrogance. There are times when only ability and authenticity count. We need to learn how to lead from a distance. To know how to align teams and to know how to recognise people without the need for physical presence. Managers are there to lead. Their job is to make decisions and multiply by empowering people. If they do not empower, they do not multiply, and managers are not there to add... they are there to multiply”.

Statement 2020

Argentina

Fe y Alegría International Federation

Testimony

Candela She is 18 years old. She is a student at the Fe y Alegría School in the Ongay neighbourhood. Her dream, when she finishes high school, is to go on to study psychology. So far, it seems like the story of a normal teenager who, in times of pandemic, tells how she continues her educational life, but it is not. Accompanied by her family and her teachers, it can be said that she is coping with the difficult task of learning at a distance with great courage, as she suffers from spastic cerebral palsy, which prevents her from controlling her joints and her vision is impaired. As a result, her educational continuity was more complicated. Thanks to the help of her teachers, she was able to continue her fourth year of secondary school by video conference, so far with very good results. She chose to study psychology because her great desire is to “help people like her”. She wants to follow in the footsteps of a professional in the same field who helped her when she was younger and who aroused great admiration in her. For Candela, the COVID-19 pandemic, and therefore the cessation of classes, changed her life. Not only because she stopped contacting her friends, stopped going to school, but also because everything became much more difficult. For her, unlike her classmates, the only way to continue studying is through video calls because she cannot write and the teachers need to know that she is understanding what she is being taught. “To be able to teach Candela, I had to adapt a part of my home, install an ecological blackboard, buy a tripod for the

phone and even a semi-professional headset to be able to hear her well,” says Oscar Ayala, a mathematics teacher.

Candela became national news for being a true example of struggle and perseverance

The difference with the rest of the students is that the 18-year-old - who dreams about becoming a psychologist - can’t be sent assignments, but has to do them together with her teachers. For this reason, each teacher has to dedicate extra time exclusively to the student, whom they have been accompanying since the beginning of secondary school. “We are all adapting to this new time we are living in and we do it with a lot of responsibility. Candela’s case is more visible because of all the effort she makes to continue studying, but the truth is that we have had to adapt to the reality of all our students,” admits Ayala. The school, where the mathematics teacher works, is located in one of the marginalized neighborhoods of the capital. It is there where the gap about connectivity with other areas of the city or the province can be seen for certain. “What happens to us is that sometimes we have several school-age children in the same household and they all depend on a telephone, so they send their homework when they can, when their siblings leave them or when they have prepaid 23

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internet, which is not always. Some of them even do it on a Saturday night or on Sunday and you have to be careful,” the teacher explains.

“They are very good to me. They treat me like a normal girl. That helps me a lot.

Candela thanks her teachers and her special education assistant for how well they treat her. Some of my teachers call me, they help me and I study with my special education assistant, whose name is María José”, she explains excitedly. The young girl knows her limitations perfectly. She even says that she studies with a phone, with all that means. “The battery doesn’t last long and my classes are sometimes long,” she says, because each teacher takes a little more than an hour to connect with Candela. There is no doubt that cases like this are a real challenge for the education system. “This pandemic took for surprised all sectors equally and the truth is that we teachers were not prepared to cope with more than half a year of virtual classes. It was a resounding change that required a lot of creativity, commitment and empathy,” says Oscar Ayala.

Candela is the youngest of four siblings. Her mother, Margarita, is amazed by the passion she has for her studies: “Sometimes one of her sisters who is studying physical education helps her, but her greatest support are her teachers and her Assistant,” she says, not forgetting to mention that the biggest problem they have is often the lack of a good internet connection and even the lack of prepaid internet. We, the school and the children in this story are part of a poor neighbourhood in which most of them don’t have wifi, they work with prepaid internet and sometimes they don’t have credit on their phones and, in any case, we have to accompany them so that they can continue studying and, above all, maintain the link and contact with our students,” says Vicente Ayala, vice-director of Fe y Alegría school.

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These are the real problems that the educational family has to deal with on a daily basis, but, for Candela, it is not the most important thing because they can be solved. Her request to society is not to discriminate her: “The only thing I ask, when they see me in the street, is that they don’t say ‘poor thing, poor girl’, that they don’t look at me funny, but that they think and say “strength”. I don’t want them to feel sorry for me,” she says with great emotion. When she started first grade, it was something new for everyone because she was the first student with a disability in our school. Today, she is fully included, she learns and is happy, although she misses the face-to-face classes. She receives the support she needs and, when she finishes her studies, she will have her diploma on an equal footing with the rest of the stu-

dents. “People like me often don’t dare to take the step of going to a regular school. There is a lot of fear of harassment and discrimination,” she says. Margarita, Candela’s mother, is grateful that her daughter was never discriminated at school, but as a mother, she found it hard to accept that she would not be able to walk and acknowledges that there are many prejudices about disability. “My daughter was born at 29 weeks gestation from a twin pregnancy, of which only she saw the light”.

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them. We also took the opportunity to give them instructions on the importance of preventing contagion and how to do it. Education didn’t stop. We improvised virtual courses, created groups on WhatsApp, Facebook and other digital platforms, and prepared materials and study workshops for those students and families who did not have technological resources. Learning and challenges

Teachers are our greatest asset The pandemic caught us by surprise, with no resources to deal with it, and we had to reinvent ourselves and completely change our plans. On Marc 3rd 2020, we started the new school year and on the 8th we were forced to close schools. Some teachers did not even get to meet their students. While bewilderment was widespread, a collective and creative response soon emerged. Teachers organized themselves into groups and began to contact and organize their students and families. Fortunately, because there are only a few of us, we have a technological structure that allows us to keep in touch and follow up with each of our students and their families. As the pandemic and forced confinement deepened the misery of our students’ families, we organize ourselves to collect food and distribute food bags and hygiene kits to alleviate hunger and prevent contagion. Each week, the bags were delivered to the schools and representatives went to collect

To prevent the dangers of forced confinement, with its consequences of domestic violence and problems of stress, anguish and fear, we privileged emotional and spiritual accompaniment, the pedagogy of care and we insisted a lot on coexistence, respect and solidarity. Fernando Anderlic, director of Fe y Alegría Argentina, insists on standing out the generous and creative response of the staff: “The enthusiasm with which they took on the new challenges is amazing. I feel very proud of them. I would even go so far as to say that the pandemic brought us closer together and strengthened our bonds of friendship. The pandemic was also an opportunity for us to get closer to families and to rescue their essential role as the first educators of their children. It is clear that we must keep strengthening this relationship and begin to build a school-community where we educate together and solve problems creatively and in solidarity. Also, during the pandemic, we strengthened our links with the Fe y Alegría networks nearby, a dimension that we had been working on before, especially with the youth networks, so that they could assume their leadership role in the transformation of the current unfair and exclusive world. In the words of a young participant, “with the situation posed by the health crisis, we

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have continued working virtually and, this year, in the annual planning, we decided to stand up against all the situations that prevent us from the right to education. Working remotely has been based on three axes: the right to education, care and affectivity, and gender violence. Facing the facts that outrage, especially the connectivity gap and the lack of resources... There are many boys and girls in my village who cannot access virtual education because they don’t have a mobile phone or a computer, or because they don’t have access to the internet. Therefore, I am committed to keep working and being part of the youth protagonist group and together with them, find a solution that we could give them to get, in solidarity, those resources they need”.

This means releasing people with a great capacity for reflection, research, systematization and proposals, capable of thinking and visualizing the future of Fe y Alegría. This would contribute to fostering our identity and union. Moreover, in this way, we could have a much greater impact on the world of education and help to make the proposal of quality education for all a reality. This could be our main contribution in these times when there is a growing consensus on the need to change the current educational model.

The articulation between the neighboring countries allowed us to celebrate together some Eucharists and liturgies of the Word, and organize, in common, training days on spirituality, belonging, identity. We think that this is one of the dimensions that we must keep strengthening in order to create an awareness of belonging to a multinational educational movement. Among the proposals to be worked on, we see the need to make great efforts to provide the centers with the necessary technological resources to respond adequately to the challenges of virtual education, which is here to stay and which we cannot ignore if we are truly seeking quality education. Fernando believes that one of the most important challenges for Fe y Alegría, at the federative level, is to dare to carry out and propose our own original educational model of quality education for the poor, where we concretise the theoretical principles based on the rich experiences that are being carried out in different countries.

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Bolivia

Fe y Alegría International Federation

Testimony

Julia Rocabado Professor Julia is a teacher at Fe y Alegría’s Colegio América, part of “Plan 3,000” in Bolivia. She is 75 years old and has an extraordinary youthful spirit. An educator by vocation, she has devoted her whole life to teaching with passion and dedication, and she intends to continue doing so for as long as she is able to. She expresses it herself with conviction: “I have not stopped activities, I have continued because I like my career. People ask me why I keep working and I tell them it’s because I like it. They say ‘retire’, but I don’t want to. When the pandemic hit and face-to-face classes were abolished, she managed to continue educating her students remotely. With the help of her granddaughter, she transformed a space in her home into a virtual classroom, installing a blackboard, a monitor, a laptop, a webcam and all the necessary accessories to continue educating her students. “We try to do the best we can using our own means. The little camera is to make it look good. I pay for the internet myself.

“If it was necessary to take the path - new to her - of technology, she, despite her age, would take it.

Julia was one of the families affected by the floods in Santa Cruz in 1983. She had to leave her homeland and came to the Toro neighborhood, where she has lived ever since, carrying out her mission as an educator with deep “Faith (fe)“ and great “Joy (alegría)“.

Teacher Julia teaches six subjects to her fourth-grade students, including mathematics, social studies and values. Her granddaughter is always by her side to support her with technology.

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Captains of Santa Cruz and the Ministry of Education to enable distance education for girls and boys through radio is noteworthy.

Learnings and challenges

Fe y Alegría will not be stopped by anyone The presence of COVID-19 in Bolivia was so sudden and accelerated that it did not take more than seven days after the appearance of patient zero for the national authorities to decide to suspend school and educational work throughout the country. The decision was so sudden that no one was prepared for what was coming. However, Fe y Alegría never accepted that students would not continue with their education and then, Fe y Alegría decided to initiate, almost immediately, with great courage and creativity, a virtual education experience called “Online Educational Crusade” so that students from different educational modalities and levels could exercise their right to quality education in times of quarantine because of coronavirus. Teachers used their initiative and, with great dedication and enthusiasm, worked to prepare materials, didactic units or radio classes to reach those places where there was no connectivity or it was poor. With regard to radio education, the signing of an agreement between the IRFA Foundation, the Council of Guaraní 30

Taking the necessary health precautions, but overcoming fear and insecurity, we also distributed materials house to house and, one day a week, the teachers met with their students in a vacant lot or in a kiosk in the square. Thus, when education in Bolivia was almost completely paralysed - as the Ministry closed the school year and the unions refused to implement virtual or distance education, claiming that there were no conditions for it - Fe y Alegría decided not to stop. Francisco Pifarré, S.J., national director of Fe y Alegría Bolivia, underlines this with real pride: “Fe y Alegría will not be stopped by anyone”. To justify his attitude, which could appear to be rebellious, we refer to the Constitution, which guarantees the right to education. Most of the church schools joined Fe y Alegría’s attitude and there were even some state schools that followed its example. Fe y Alegría’s decision and example to educate in emergencies, despite the problems, favored alliances with the Ministry of Education and made it possible to exchange practices and proposals. Alliances with other educational, health and humanitarian organizations were also strengthened. It is worth highlighting the training process that took place among the teachers themselves, according to the skills of each one, which they made available to their colleagues. They were trained on technology and were given courses on identity and several teaching methods. The situation of precariousness, uncertainty and hardship strengthened pastoral work, training in values and spirituality, which was worked on as an essential element to strengthen identity

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and the vocation of service. As a significant fact, it is important to mention that more than one hundred teachers made the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius for fifteen days. At the same time, the students also showed a great spirit of initiative and they organised, communicated and educated themselves through different digital platforms. In addition to the willingness and dedication of the teachers and office staff, we must highlight the close attitude and determined support of parents and representatives who, together with the teachers, assumed their role as the main educators of their children. It should also be mentioned that the pandemic allowed us to be more closely linked and articulate with them. It also fostered, as never before, community work, a fact that we must keep strengthening beyond the pandemic. In Fe y Alegría Bolivia, we believe that the pandemic has revitalized the importance of the school as a point of articulation and social strength. We also believe that we must rethink Technical Productive Technological

Education in order to design it based on the very characteristics of the communities, taking into account people’s experience, their local knowledge and techniques, the development of their human capital, the development of their local productive economic activity, according to their resources, needs, vocations and potential. Productive Technological Technical Education has been revalued in these social and economic crisis times thanks to COVID-19 because it is a shorter education and requires less investment. For this reason, we must calmly digest the learnings which have forced us to re-plan and face, creatively, many unprecedented situations. We also underline the need to further strengthen the networks to enable better coordination between the different Fe y Alegría organizations, allowing us to grow through the exchange of experiences, good practices and resources, both financial and human, and to rethink and build the future of Fe y Alegría together.

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Brazil

Fe y Alegría International Federation

Testimony

José Alberto Romero Blanco I am José Romero a Venezuelan migrant and like thousands, one day I arrived in Brazil fleeing from the terrible economic, political and mainly moral crisis that our country is suffering, I crossed the border with my wife and 3 children (11-12-15 years old) each one with a suitcase carrying and trying to summarize a whole life in the few indispensable elements that fit inside it. While I was walking I was praying deep in my heart: “Lord allow us to get into the country, for my children and if possible allow me to be useful for your work”. God answered my prayer and not only took care of me, but also allowed me to be part of the founding team of the office of the Fe y Alegría Foundation in Roraima - Brazil, which I have been coordinating since then. I am certain that He placed me in this place and that besides being able to support my family He gave me the privilege of being part of this work of the company of Jesus which helps thousands of migrants with special attention to families, women and children. For that I give glory to Him. And one day the news came, what seemed far away was here, knocking at our door in Latin America, a pandemic on a global scale. My first reactions were uncertainty and fear, it is not easy to be a migrant, the feeling of loneliness is sometimes here. However, the Fe y Alegría family came together, not only making decisions to save

the lives of its collaborators, but also thinking about how we could help in this deeply challenging scenario.

“We decided to concentrate on protecting the health and safeguarding the lives of the most vulnerable families...

During the first and part of the second month we were very prudent in our actions, and with the orientations of our president director Fr. Antonio Tabosa Gomes, we decided to concentrate on protecting the health and safeguarding the lives of the most vulnerable families, which meant renegotiating with all our funders to start a big day of humanitarian aid to guarantee food and support for the families of our beneficiaries, and we began to help with food, solidarity rent, gas refills, nappies and sanitary towels, layettes and hygiene kits for the prevention of covid-19. Today we are adapting to a post-pandemic reality that left people poorer and more marginalized than before, but we learnt to be more supportive, more flexible and adaptable (MAGIS). I remember that in the moments of greatest fear I found comfort in the words God spoke in the book of Joshua 1:9 “ Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go”. I still find comfort in these words and I hope you do too.

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Learnings and challenges

Going through the pandemic, we privilege the pedagogy of care During the difficult period of social distancing caused by COVID-19, Fe y Alegría centers in Brazil suspended face-to-face activities. To address the negative impact of the pandemic - which has generated a further deepening of poverty, as many families have lost their informal work which had to do with supporting tourism, and it was paralysed - Fe y Alegría started the “Feed a family” campaign in the fourteen states where it works. The aim was to provide basic food baskets, hygiene kits and masks to benefit more than 10,000 people. It also aimed to raise awareness of the need to take preventive measures to avoid contagion, as it was perceived, with great concern, how many people were not taking the pandemic seriously. In addition to humanitarian aid, Fe y Alegría provided its staff with a free virtual training cycle on popular education and Ignatian pedagogy, emphasizing the protection

of the rights of children and adolescents, and the achievement of environments free of violence or any type of abuse; given that forced confinement could exacerbate the practices of domestic and family violence. A total of 130 professionals were trained in the -pedagogy of care and affection-. In order to provide better care for children and young people, their psychological and social aspects were studied in depth. In order to carry out these courses, we had the support of some Jesuit works and also of the International Federation of Fe y Alegría. With the support of Manos Unidas, we are dedicated, in the north of the country - bordering Venezuela - to take care of Venezuelan children and adolescents from 6 to 12 years old who had left their country and were living on the streets or in shelters. Since 2017, Fe y Alegría’s Centro Social Libertad in Boavista has been supporting migrants, providing them with food and socio-educational activities. Although Fe y Alegría Brazil does not have a virtual platform to work virtually with children and adolescents, at the Fe y Alegría Frei Antonio Center, located in Tocantínia (northern Brazil) - where half of the population is indigenous - a WhatsApp group was created, with the participation of parents and students, to send didactic activities, to develop school content, to suggest books, films and to promote learning tools through the INDITEX reading and writing project, “Free Children”. The pandemic is forcing Fe y Alegría Brazil to rethink its work in depth, which, among other things, will require the provision of technological tools which make it possible to provide non-face-to-face care to the most vulnerable populations. Fe y Alegría Brazil also considers it very necessary to

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learn more about the experiences and challenges of other Fe y Alegría organizations in order to learn from them, to respond more appropriately to our specificity, to rethink our future challenges, and to articulate ourselves more firmly as a global educational movement.

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Chad

Fe y Alegría International Federation

Testimony

Minitaknde Casimir Ralongar In Chad, I was terrified, like everyone else here, when the government announced the first case of COVID-19 in early March 2020. Given the precarious health context in the country, I thought that this pandemic was going to have disastrous consequences, but thanks to God and the containment plan organized by the State, the spread of the disease was stopped. In the province of Guéra, where Fe y Alegria is present, the situation was very alarming, mainly due to the population’s ignorance of the existence of the pandemic. In order to limit the spread of the virus, the state decreed the closure of schools throughout the country. In response to this, Fe y Alegría began to reflect on how to guarantee education for the students, despite the crisis. We started by protecting the staff from the virus and provided them with hygiene kits.

vated the situation of vulnerability of the local populations.

“It has been such a beautiful experience, which has shown me the impact of Fe y Alegría’s actions with the poorest populations.

It has been such a beautiful experience that has shown me the impact of Fe y Alegría’s actions with the poorest populations. Thanks to our actions, many people have been able to face the pandemic and survive it.

We implemented radio courses with the Provincial Delegation of Education. Also, thanks to the collaboration of the Provincial Health Delegation, Fe y Alegría was able to undertake prevention and pandemic prevention days activities in its areas. In addition to these actions, Fe y Alegría distributed food bags and hygiene kits to the most vulnerable families in the areas where it operates. I was very pleased to see the efforts we have made and, above all, to feel very useful, providing innovative solutions in this period of health crisis that has aggra-

Statement 2020

Learnings and challenges

Ensuring education through the radio In response to the closure of schools - decreed by the State of Chad in mid March in an attempt to curb the spread of the coronavirus, Fe y Alegría signed an agreement with Mongo Community Radio (MCR) to enable education during the period of confinement. This has allowed us to fulfill the essential right to education, including, in times of pandemic, raising awareness of the need to take measures to avoid contagion and helping communities with micro-credits to solve their most urgent economic problems. In the words of F. Djimasra Aimé, S.J., director of the Mongo community center, “The COVID-19 situation is very distressing and disastrous for education and requires the courage to propose something different from what is usually done. The experience of the radio courses, in collaboration with Mongo community radio and organized by Fe y Alegría, is a relief for me as an educator and also a precious help that has allowed the students to study without

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leaving home - because the schools are closed - and to raise awareness in the communities about the need to prevent contagion and to support each other in the emergency. We realized that, with very limited resources, it was possible to continue educating in rural schools and, despite the difficulties, to fulfill our mission of transforming people’s lives. We have also provided credit to the mothers of the students for income-generating initiatives to help them cope with their dire economic situation and to guarantee their right to education”. Among the educational activities implemented by Fe y Alegría in Chad, there is the “Tree of the Word” - an ancestral symbol in the country - a key space where community decisions are made and which has become a space for listening, participation and protection of girls. Every weekend, girls gather under the tree to share their experiences and discuss important issues such as child marriage - forced by some parents - husbands’ prohibition of married girls from going to school, education and girls’ and women’s rights.

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Chile

Fe y Alegría International Federation

Testimony

The invitation now is to look at our path from that learning.

Cynthia Osorio Since the pandemic began and during this time, reality has surpassed fiction - by far and put us in a situation that no one thought it was possible. It took me by surprise, all of us, unprepared and, needless to say, too busy to pay attention to what was initially happening far away, but quickly began to narrow its distance to our countries, our communities, our families. Something invisible knocked on our door and changed our lives; we could not see it, but we felt its presence in every dimension of our daily lives. In my experience, the challenges of the pandemic were many and varied. From channeling affection and the need to be with my people, to completely reinventing the way I carried out my professional work. The communicators in the Fe y Alegría offices played a very important role in connecting people and institutions, and that meant learning new platforms, systems, programmes, etc. I feel that we became “frontier” workers with the great mission of building bridges and maintaining links despite the complexity of virtuality. A world certainly not explored by many of us.

None of us will be the same after what we have faced as humanity;

Little by little we will regain our everyday life with more freedom, but not as before. None of us will be the same after what we have faced as humanity; what we were is behind us. Hope will be placed in that future of people who learned to value their own and others’ lives, who understood that real strength is made as a bloc when we organize and get together, who felt the deep love for their families and who today look at life as a second chance to make things better. Ironically this invisible threat opened my eyes to see all the things that used to pass so quickly, - like a phoenix - we must be reborn to a society which embraces and rises up for and by everyone.

Did we need a pause?...I think we did. We, the world, the earth. Today I realize that there are things that can wait, what is urgent is not necessarily what is important and I realize that we always have the possibility of redirecting our personal efforts, correcting our course. The pandemic forced me to rethink my whole life, from the routines I had every day to the real horizon of meaning.

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very rich and was highly valued by the participants who understood that they are instruments of God to transform the world following Christ’s project. This implies, among other things, the need to assume the pedagogy of listening, empathy and service, giving priority to the most needy and deprived.

Learnings and challenges

Deepening our identity and spirituality En este 2020, marcado por una pandemia In this 2020, marked by a pandemic that had our schools and colleges closed, Fe y Alegría remained active and present, reinventing itself in order to keep existing and networking, despite everything. We not only faced common problems together, but we also took the opportunity to deepen our identity and build stronger dreams about the Fe y Alegría we want. We insist on raising awareness about being an Ignatian educational network - with our own pedagogical style which brings us closer and distinguishes us - and we provide educators with materials to deepen and reinforce the keys to our spirituality and the meaning of our educational mission. For this reason, we favor network formation and the exchange of experiences in the “To Love is to Serve” programme, with an emphasis on discernment in order to seek God’s will in all things. The induction for the new educators, although it could not be face-to-face, was

In the academic area, we held meetings and dialogues among ourselves and with other schools outside the network, with whom we shared innovations during the pandemic, which strengthened the conviction that we need to keep innovating during and after the pandemic in order to strengthen students’ autonomy, personalisation and self-management. Well aware of the importance of autonomous reading as an essential tool for lifelong learning, we promoted it through workshops, group readings, book and website recommendations and virtual activities. The teacher librarians also organized two competitions. The first, inviting students to write a micro-story related to quarantine experiences; more than fifty texts were received from teachers and students from different schools in the network. With the second contest, students participated by making a video, which they uploaded to social networks, about a book they had read during this period; with this contest, they sought to take advantage of the use of social networks as a tool to promote reading. We also took advantage of the pandemic to examine the challenges of training technicians in the context of COVID-19. To this end, we invited representatives of the Ministry of Education and the director of the vocational training area of the Father Piquer Center in Madrid.

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In order to keep up spiritual practice, we organize Spiritual Exercises for managers and we celebrate Holy Week in community with the participation of educators, families and young people. We also celebrated St. Ignatius Day as a network, with the intention of deepening Ignatian spirituality. Something really significant was the celebration of the vigil of Pentecost with members of Fe y Alegría from Argentina and Uruguay, which opens us to the need to articulate ourselves more closely with the different Fe y Alegría around the continent and even to the possibility of organizing ourselves as a sub-region. With young people, we keep insisting on the education for Ignatian leadership so that they commit themselves to the construction of a fair and fraternal society. The message of the Chilean youth, in these times of crisis, is to continue organizing themselves. Today, more than ever, in the “new reality”, student leadership will be a crucial issue and the youth will be the main characters of many issues that are very necessary in the future, such as: care for the environment, gender inequality and local issues, such as the Chilean plebiscite for the change of the constitution. The Chilean youth are the ones who have promoted this initiative. In short, we must face and be prepared, in an organized way, for what is coming. With the #Enredarte campaign, we offered creative instances of participation around art and music, promoting and bringing these dimensions closer to students and their families. And with the #EnRedDarnos campaign, we obtained the economic support from Chilean society to implement our projects.

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Colombia

Fe y Alegría International Federation

Testimony

Claudia Marcela Vega González Changes come to life sometimes abruptly to force us to let things go and I feel that this has been my learning with all this uncertain situation. Accustomed to the practicality that characterizes me to quickly find ways to resolve a situation, my first lesson has been to pause. To pause in order to look closely at my self and the feelings of the people around me; to pause in order to reorganize myself and understand that I cannot keep doing the same thing, because the reality is different; and to pause in order to agree, together, on the area of work on which we would focus. In my work as a teacher accompanier, and during these almost ten months of walking alongside them, I have seen their tensions, pains, fatigue and, of course, their creativity in responding to this new reality in the midst of their lack of knowledge. I have seen how excellent teachers, with a good command of the technological mediations of remote education, preferred to resign because they could not stand the pressure. But I have also seen teachers with little technical capacity who set out to learn and, today, they use platforms, make workshops and even set up the living room or kitchen of their homes as spaces to broadcast their classes. This takes me to identify my second lesson, which is the willingness to learn.

knowing what to do on some occasions or not knowing how to guide the people I accompany. But, with the humility of recognising that I did not have the right answers, I dared to build some, to opt for what was fundamental and to put aside what we had to postpone.

“That’s how I migrated to the world of remote work that allows me to “travel” from one city to another in just a few minutes, or to meet people from different geographies...

From the naivety of believing that the confinement would last a couple of weeks or that it was a temporary situation, I began to assimilate the resources that were within my reach, to investigate, from intuition or the advice of experts, how they worked and what their potential was. This is how I migrated to the world of remote work, which allows me to “travel” from one city to another in just a few minutes, or to meet people from different geographies and who, apparently, are more connected for longer periods. I say “seemingly” because interacting all day long through a screen, for me, is becoming exhausting.

Personally, I see this disposition reflected in the persistence I have maintained in my work, despite the fatigue, despite not

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I miss human contact, meeting people, school spaces, children’s laughter, morning coffee and meetings with families. Personally, I miss sharing with my colleagues in the office, the intimate conversations about the events of our lives, the looks, the affection, the expressions of love. Thus, my third lesson has to do with cultivating better interpersonal relationships.

“COVID-19 led me to recognise that I only have the present moment…

The world is made up of human encounters and confinement has shown us that the essence of the school of life are relationships, interactions, affection, physical contact, conversations, discussions, astonishment, connecting with passion, friendship, complicity, questioning life, among others. The world of knowledge is being constructed in a different way and requires us, those of us who work in education, to make better use of technological resources to facilitate the learning that is required at this time. But let us not forget that the greatest demand from students has to do with the world of social coexistence. If confinement continues as planned in my country, the poorest communities will undoubtedly be the most affected. A large group of children are being denied access to the collective education system, guaran-

teed by the state in fulfillment of their most basic rights. In the process, they are losing the supporting, exchange and protection networks in which they were immersed. This is how my fourth lesson reaffirms Fe y Alegría’s commitment to the school as a guarantor of rights and possibilities, and a minimiser of inequality gaps. The COVID-19 pandemic is pushing us to build another kind of school, another society, another world, and I wonder if I am or we are in the best position to make them come true. In closing, the most important lesson has been to recognise that living is a miracle abundant in awareness and love. COVID-19 led me to recognise that I only have the present moment and that I often live in anxiety about a future that is increasingly uncertain and even complex. This has been a time to look inwards, to rejoice in the simplicity of connecting with my breathing, to experience confusion and sadness, but also deep gratitude for the woman I am, for being a friend, a listener and a forger of possibilities, for being the professional who commits herself with total strength to take forward the challenges which, from Fe y Alegría, we have set ourselves. Although these have not been easy times, at least for me, they have been times of great learning and realizing the greatness of what we are as humanity in our fragility.

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Learning and challenges

New realities demand new proposals

As Victor Murillo, director of Fe y Alegría Colombia, says with conviction, the coronavirus crisis radically changed our agenda. Working from home, confinement and distance learning were not on our horizon and we were caught “dancing on the wrong foot”. Our concern was threefold: on the one hand, people; on the other hand, learning outcomes; and on top of that, the finance that allows us to breathe. People at Fe y Alegría are the source of value. We believe in them and we know that they have the capacity and talent necessary to keep doing good and doing it well. Leadership is the key to directing, inspiring, caring and making everyone want to do what they have to do. The results depend on management teams and teachers who have to connect and keep connected to distant children, adolescents, young people and families with diverse and sometimes adverse cultures to work “at a distance” and in unfavorable circumstances, generated by a quarantine that highlights poverty, exclusion and even hunger. Our finances are our air, what allows us to breathe, and it will depend on the value that people add to connect and keep working with those entrusted to us by the state, to get them to learn, really learn, and not lose any of them. It also depends on the commitment of the state itself to respond to its obligations on time.

Aware that the crisis situation generated by COVID-19 put our future at stake, we decided to manage it from our mission, which leverages the fundamental purpose of Fe y Alegría: social transformation through education. Based on our mission, we defined the strategy - or strategies - that we were going to prioritize, without stopping at large and rigorous planning which would waste our time and will distance us from the strategy. We took on board what Xavier Marcet says: “More strategy, less planning”. We were aware that, at that time, less was more. More than ever, we needed to bring out the best in everyone. We had to use people’s talents to connect students and nurture their desire to learn. In our agenda, we placed three points, slightly differentiated according to the areas of interest:

Formal education

Early Childhood Care

1. Work on caring for people and nurturing good coexistence in families. 2. To increase the learning levels of students. Produce learning through distance education.

2. To increase children’s learning levels for the development of skills and competencies, through comprehensive care from a distance.

3. To connect and keep all learners wanting to learn. We cannot ‘’lose’’ any through disengagement (dropout) or because they do not learn.

3. To connect and keep all the children’s families involved and linked to the Children’s Centre. We cannot “lose” any family.

Statement 2020

Strategies developed from the administrative management Strategies developed from pedagogical management The first focus was addressed by the national guidance team, the pastoral and human resources coordinators. The 2nd and 3rd focuses, in formal education, were taken on by the pedagogical area. We assumed that the pedagogical work was responsible for the learning outcomes.

The regional directors and the National Directorate, with their administrative work teams, had to focus their work and decisions on safeguarding the good state of the finance to ensure the breathing of the organization/movement. We made decisions that streamlined management, offloading responsibilities to the regional and national directorates, while empowering the people of the teams we had at all levels.

We accepted that, during the crisis, more than ever, we needed to be able to shift from “doing everything” to “doing what matters” and that “less is more”; we needed to focus on the critical learning that our students needed in order to keep learning. We needed all students learning; all teachers teaching and mediating the learning processes; all support staff supporting the strategies defined around the three points of our agenda.

What does it mean to safeguard the good state of the finances? Primarily, it means providing reasons and evidence to demonstrate that the early childhood and formal education service was provided according to the requirements of the contracts in the new circumstances and that students were effectively served. As evidence there is the verification of the enrolled students effectively served, the contracted staff, the maintenance and conservation of the physical infrastructure and the equipment provided. In early childhood, everything related to the purchase and delivery of “Raciones para Preparar” (RPP) and pedagogical kits to families was directly bought.

In order to achieve the purpose set out in focus 1, different strategies were implemented, named as follows: “Caring for carers”, “Reflections to feed the soul”, “Talking about life”, “Tips for family care through infographics”, “Learning more about integral health”.

In order to successfully carry out all these activities, we organized ourselves into multiple networks in permanent exchange and communication. Networks in which members of the hierarchy participated, without having a special role and on an equal footing with the other members of the hierarchy.

Fe y Alegría International Federation

Three learnings that are here to stay and reinforce the non-negotiables items in Fe y Alegría 1. We reaffirm the need to install the spiral of learning-unlearning-relearning in order to escape from mediocrity and seek relevant answers to the new questions posed by the new reality. Changing ways of proceeding, thinking, acting, being and being - out of conviction or necessity - implies, as we have been affirming these years, getting into a permanent dynamic of writing, erasing, rewriting - suddenly, to erase again -, ordering and disordering in order to order again. 2. The most valuable capital of Fe y Alegría is the people who make it up. Believing in the people, in their capacities and their commitment, required us to distribute leadership and democratize management. Changing the ways of managing and organizing ourselves required us to trust in other people and the humility to give up and transfer our own responsibilities to them. 3. Our dream was to make stable structures (hierarchy) and dynamic structures (redarchy) coexist for the deployment of the new score. The new realities brought about by COVID-19 and the need to respond with agility and flexibility to them, definitively established the “redarchy” in Fe y Alegría. Actions such as creating guidelines and protocols for alternation (distance and faceto-face work) and building strategies for education in emergencies, found in redarchy a precise way to obtain the desired results.

Victor Murillo insists on the idea that it would be a grave and unforgivable mistake to return to the education of the past, that is to say, to the abnormal normality that we lived through, which contradicts the essence of popular education, which seeks to transform reality in terms of seeking greater justice and humanisation. Fe y Alegría must emerge from the pandemic stronger as a global education movement, which will require a re-reading of autonomies, a review of leadership and a greater openness to the awareness of belonging to a global movement, avoiding isolation, strengthening alliances, training processes, support for weaker countries and networking, both internally and with organizations and institutions concerned with guaranteeing quality education for all. This requires humility in recognising that we do not have all the answers and a willingness to learn from others. Networks make sense if they encourage reflection and innovation, if they call for common projects, if they are oriented towards solving problems, which, among other things, implies a redistribution of power. As a global movement, Fe y Alegría must have a permanent and courageous voice with governments and multinational bodies in defense of education as an essential right, because the pandemic has shown that states have not invested enough in education for the poor and have, in fact, abandoned it.

Statement 2020

Ecuador

Fe y Alegría International Federation

Testimonies

Erick Vimos In this time of pandemic, I have been happy because I was with my whole family, but also sad because I could not go to school. We have been happy with my family because before I was alone with my grandparents. My mother worked on the coast in a vegetable market and we barely saw each other, as she only came every fortnight, but in these weeks we have been able to share more. I miss the teacher who taught us, I miss going to school and all my classmates. There were only twelve of us and we were all twelve together. I’ve only been able to talk to them a little via WhatsApp, when I top up my phone. Now, we are planting onions, beetroot and herbs on the land. My grandmother goes out to sell what we have sown and harvested in Guamote. I also help with the planting and the animals, that is, the cows, pigs and guinea pigs. Of all these animals, my favorite one is the guinea pig. I help, together with my sister, to cut grass to feed the guinea pigs, to take the pigs out every morning and then to keep them in the corral. I also help to feed grass to the cows three times a day, give them water and milk them.

“I miss the teacher who taught us, I miss going to study and all my classmates.

Now, I’m making a cardboard table football. Since I’ve been able to make sense of it, I’ve really liked numbers and I also like to draw. I would like to have more of these activities, but it has been difficult to study because we don’t have the money to print the sheets they send out on Tuesdays every week, or to go to an internet center to do homework. I would like us to be able to learn English at school. We don’t have a teacher to teach us. So I wish we could have a teacher at least one day a week. This time, I have been reading the Bible to learn the word of God, I have been praying that this whole pandemic will pass so that we can see each other again with my classmates, with my friends.

At home, I did educational work, I learned to read more and to live with the whole family. Some homework was easy, some was difficult. With Math, I did very well. I liked it because it was interesting and fun. Also, I liked doing arts and crafts. I made a guitar, maracas, I did everything.

Statement 2020

Catalina Cartagena My son was at the Colegio Fe y Alegría in Cuenca. He has just finished the third year of baccalaureate and today was the incorporation ceremony. I am happy and sad at the same time because he has finished his studies. It’s a bit sad because I don’t get to see the teachers and talk to them anymore. I feel sad because they have been very good people. He was the last one to graduate.... From there, I have two more children. One is already a professional, the other is at university and my other son, God willing, will also go to university. Really, Jeez! This time was very hard for us because we lost my brother to this disease. He was in the United States. It was all sad, really very sad until now... I mean, we can’t get over that. The situation has been really hard, stressful. I was in quarantine without being able to work. When the “traffic light turned yellow”, I started to open my hairdressing salon, but the situation is really bad, really bad. Economically speaking, it’s weak. In the midst of the bad situation, in this time that we have been confined, we have been able to see the unity in the family - being all together - and the support for each other. We have been closer, more attentive. As I was working, I didn’t spend time at

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home. My children have been alone and, let’s say, they have done their own things. My husband, too, like me, works and we were late. When I would come home from work, they would explain to me: “Mummy, I did this, Mummy this”. I, too, would ask them about homework and they would say, “Yes, mommy, I already sent in my homework. The truth is, I haven’t had any problems, but now we’ve had more company. I also feel calmer knowing that they are here with me. Although we have been supporting each other, sometimes, they have felt depressed too. Not being able to go out makes them feel like they are bored. Me too, sometimes get the blues, but in those moments, they are there watching me, supporting me. This company has been very valuable. Regarding school, teachers have always been attentive to my son’s education and he has been responding as well. He is now more responsible and has been doing his own things, his own homework. For this reason, I am very grateful to his teachers. Everyone, everyone has been very good and I think the education has been good. I find hope and joy in knowing that my son is finishing his studies, that he is doing his homework. He’s paying attention... that’s the most important thing. My children like drawing. That’s what they spend their afternoons doing, when they are free. They both like drawing. They are always doing something... they are doing some activity on the computer, like listening to music or watching a film. In this time, since school, they have been in playful activities. Also with art... that has been very supportive. They have also been doing cooking activities. They were sent to make biscuits. They made them themselves... I accompa-

nied them. Afterwards, we all tasted them and, to be honest, the biscuits were really good... ha, ha, ha, ha. Everyone uses the computer. Well, they do not do it at the same time because we have only one... everyone has their own time. One was already listening to the music, the other one was at the computer doing homework, while the other was drawing. That’s why there were no fights but laughter. In the afternoon, we talked for a while. At the afternoon snack, the same thing... We talked to each other in the apartment. The teacher, the tutor, has always been attentive and hasn’t let the kids down. She has always said: “Come on! You can do it! We have to go out!”. She has always been, constantly, calling, talking to the kids... she hasn’t really left them behind. Today, it was the incorporation... It was by Zoom. They did the investiture. Today I didn’t open the business to be there at the graduation. It was sad... they were sad because it’s not the same as being present. At times, the bad communication interrupted the ceremony, but... anyway, we were happy there because our little boy had finished his studies. It has been a pleasure to have belonged to the Fe y Alegría family. Honestly, from all this time that we have gone through, I think we have learned that it is important to make the most of each day because we don’t know if we will really be there for the next day... that, more than anything else. In other words, we have to make the most of it, to be with our children at home, to share the good times and the bad times too, because, afterwards, we will really need all that. I hope that soon, in reality, this situation will change because this is killing us, it is killing us.

Statement 2020

Soon we realized that the situation was not going to be temporary and that we had to completely change our plans and routines in order to respond quickly to the emergency that was falling on us like an avalanche.

Learnings and challenges

Pandemic forces us to think seriously about education On March 16th 2020, the government decreed a state of emergency for public calamity throughout the national territory, which established the suspension of classes in schools, colleges and universities, the suspension of the working day, the limitation of mobility and the establishment of a general curfew in the evenings and at night. This forced us to start teleworking and telestudy facing great uncertainty and precariousness about internet access and the lack of basic equipment for remote communication for all our educators, students and families, particularly in those places in the mountains where there was no access, not even to WhatsApp. As well, uncertainty about how to move forward with the school year, which saw its normal development abruptly interrupted; or about how the families who lived off the daily work would find the means to carry on with their lives now that there is a sanitarian emergency.

We set out on the road, implementing communication strategies with families and students; emergent training for teachers, principals and families; reflective dialogues open to the community; permanent reflection meetings for national, regional, zonal and center principals; emotional support meetings with teachers, students and families; support for food and medicine for vulnerable families; production of pedagogical resources to carry out classes, both virtual and at a distance; among other initiatives that were produced, raising a strong wall made with large and small hands, of different pieces woven against the helplessness, sadness, loneliness, fears and anguish caused by the pandemic. Working against all odds, IRFEYAL prepared 383 radio lectures in order to ensure distance education for the baccalaureate, especially in regions where virtual education was not possible. Each radio lesson lasts seven minutes in order to keep the student’s attention and concentration. The production was broadcast by Radio Irfeyal in Quito (1.090 A.M.) - and its online radio at (www. irfeyal. org) - and by Radio Católica Nacional and Radio María throughout the country. Carlos Vargas, national director of Fe y Alegría Ecuador, insists on the need to rethink our education, listening to the warnings and lessons that COVID-19 is teaching us. “The pandemic brings us back to our epistemological place: the place of the poor and excluded from society. It reminds us where we come from, our roots: an experience of faith commitment to seek better

Fe y Alegría International Federation

living conditions in sectors and people in poverty. The education of Fe y Alegría declares itself to be transformative and, from there, the emphasis has to be placed on educating people capable of transforming their lives and their contexts. We need to fill with human, spiritual, integral, inclusive, transformative, ecological, democratic and flexible meaning the educational, coexistence, managerial and pastoral processes; to put the accent on what is truly important; to place the emphasis on the development of abilities, capacities, skills, attitudes for life, obviating the attachment to the accumulation of programmatic contents or of activities and practices that are not helping to learn, to be and to live together. In particular, in education we have an urgent need to build the coherence that is lacking inordinately, between the meaning described and drawn in our institutional horizons and in the philosophical frameworks of the official curricula, and what we actually do in the classroom. If we truly defend education for all, we must dare to go where others do not reach, to go to the countryside where there is no education or where there is much poverty. We must also be more proactive and negotiate with the State on the need for differentiated education, with a curriculum that responds to different realities and needs. We must not homogenize educational projects, but open doors and windows to diversity and autonomy, go where education does not reach and negotiate an alternative curriculum with the state”.

all. To this end, teacher training in popular education, which requires a life choice and practices that are different from those commonly used, will be very necessary. But we cannot forget the necessary symbiosis between globality and locality. We cannot speak about globalization if we do not emphasize on solving our local problems. It is at the local level where we must place the emphasis and, from there, demand and propose global education for everyone.

Fe y Alegría must prepare itself, from a human and Christian vision, for a situation of extreme vulnerability after COVID-19. The Federation’s strength should be focused on public actions which contribute to guaranteeing the right to quality education for

Statement 2020

El Salvador

Fe y Alegría International Federation

Testimonies

Karen Abigail Cruz Navas I am an instructor at the Centro de Educación para Todos, Fe y Alegría Zacamil, in the area of Beverage and Table Service, with the courses of Waiter, Bartender and Banqueting Services; and in the area of Food with the courses of Pastry and Sweet Bread. I am 31 years old, single mother of a 6 year old boy and I live in San Marcos, San Salvador. I want to share with you my experience during the quarantine due to the COVID-19 pandemic. When the authorities announced the suspension of face-to-face activities and the closure of education and training centers, I was scared, I anguished over the uncertain situation we were going through, but I was hoping that it would only last a month, maximum two months. However, as the days passed and the quarantine became longer and stricter, I got much more worried. Financially, because my contract at the Centre is for professional services - that is, I am paid by the hour - and if I don’t teach classes, I don’t get any kind of payment; and personally, because I was undergoing treatment for cancerous cells, which was suspended because the hospitals were no longer treating this type of case, because the priority was COVID-19 patients. Also, as I live with my mother - an elderly woman -, a sister and a brother - both younger than me - and my son, I was terrified about the idea of getting the virus and infecting them, as I had to go out to buy groceries or whatever I could. In order not to be under too much stress and not to let down the young people in my class, I started preparing videos

and sending information to the WhatsApp group, explaining practical content of the topics we had already seen. Gradually, we started interacting more and more through messages and video calls. I thought I had the virus and I was very afraid that I might spread it at home, but thank God it didn’t go any further.

‘‘… I was scared, I anguish over the uncertain situation we were going through, but I was hoping that it would only last a month …

On top of the pandemic crisis came Storm Amanda, that was a severe blow to my family and my home. On June 3rd 2020, in the early hours of the morning, I went out into the courtyard of my house and, after a few minutes, I decided to go back to bed with my son. At that moment, a loud noise and a bang echoed through the house. My siblings shouted for me and, in the darkness and the storm, we saw how the back wall of the house had collapsed and a flood was passing through the middle of our home. We tried to retrieve some things to avoid damage, called Civil Protection and Emergencies, who told us that we had to evacuate to avoid a major tragedy. That day, I felt a huge emptiness. My siblings and I cried as we watched my mother’s work for years go, and ours, too. We prayed to God and Our Lady of sorrow for strength to face all the trials we were going through. God’s 57

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love and mercy was always with us, as we received support from many people. The Fe y Alegría family immediately reached out to me when they heard about my situation: they gave us money, food and clothes, as well as words of encouragement and comfort. We separated as a family and, in my case, I stayed for two months with my son at a friend’s house - in Zacatecoluca - who gave me shelter, food and more during that time. My sister was at the place where she works and my brother took turns between work and home to keep an eye on the belongings we had or what was left. Despite the situation, I didn’t neglect my work, during this time I was also helping develop the contents of the bartender course with virtual tools... a real challenge. First, because I didn’t have the technological equipment to develop the proposal and I didn’t have internet at my friend’s house either. Thank God, I was able to get them to rent us a laptop and get an internet package to be able to make the proposal, although it was complicated to transmit the knowledge through a virtual tool. However, the Fe y Alegría coordinators, concerned about this situation, managed to create a course on how to use digital tools for instructors who had little experience, which gave me a lot of ideas on how to develop the subjects and use them in virtual environments. But I couldn’t stay on the course for long, due to a lack of money to top up. LCOVID-19 took the life of a family member. We increased, within our means, the biosecurity protocols and tried to follow the Fe y Alegría guidelines carefully to take care of ourselves. When I needed to go back home and I was able to earn some money, I decided to start a business, which is about making and selling desserts and cakes to order. But, as there were no public transportation to make my deliveries and buy the fun-

damental elements, I chose to walk to all my delivery destinations. Once I was back home and with the support of the director of the training center, I rejoined the virtual course I had quit before. When I found out that we would be able to start face-to-face classes, I was really happy, as I was once again doing what I love most and, with this, having a more stable income, as it was frustrating not to work and just stay at home. To this day, God has not forsaken me at any time. I have learned to ask for help, which was almost impossible for me, I have left my comfort zone, I value every moment with my son and I am proud of being part of Fe y Alegría, a comfortable family, always together in good and bad times.

Fe y Alegría International Federation

Hugo Eduardo Gutiérrez I live with my family, my 6 year old daughter Alessandra and my wife Gabriela Morales de Gutiérrez. I am currently working at Fe y Alegría El Salvador. In the last two years, I have held the position of educational pedagogical technician, accompanying and monitoring the educational institutions of the Fe y Alegría El Salvador network. With the COVID-19 pandemic in our country, the government, as a preventive measure, established mandatory home quarantine for all people who do not work in the first line of care against this disease. At first, my household was all uncertain about the new mode of teleworking, as we did not know how long this mode would last and how we would cope with it. With the closure of schools, universities, shopping centers and informal businesses, life would be different. Telework mode pushed us to immerse ourselves in the use of technological tools. At home, we only had an old computer that did not allow us to develop some of the modalities of virtual education, but we had to make the effort. The first blow that quarantine gave us was my wife’s dismissal from her job, as she worked in a medical clinic and clinical laboratory as a nurse administrator. The clinic had to close because of the COVID-19 situation. My wife was in the process of getting her nursing degree, but it was halted because the university did not have strategies in place to address the mandatory home quarantine situation. This reduced our household income and I was the only breadwinner of my family. Adjusting to the new mode was difficult because of the timetable. The attention de-

manded by my daughter was immense, as she was also affected by no longer attending her school. The days were long and it seemed that I never stopped working because I spent my time in front of the computer working, solving pending tasks and even consuming my food while working. Those were difficult months due to the economic downturn, because, although many expenses were reduced by not leaving our home, others were increased in food and utilities.

“With the closure of schools, universities, shopping centers and informal businesses, life would be different.

Taking advantage of the lockdown, my wife decided to study a speciality in COVID-19 care, which opened the door for her to opt for a job on the front line of fighting the virus in a corporate clinic. While this opportunity helped us financially, it was emotionally devastating to know that she was more at risk of infection. It was a difficult time isolating ourselves from my wife given that we lived with the daily anxiety of possible infection. The picture changed for me, as I had to play the role of mother, father and technician. From home, I had to prepare food for the whole family, take care of my daughter, work, maintain the household and do all the family laundry. I had fun days playing with my daughter, while I was also 59

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busy with meetings, strategising on how to approach my work and making phone calls. It was very difficult for my wife to come home worried that she wouldn’t get the virus and be able to share with us.

‘‘I was worried at that time because I was afraid of going outside and getting the virus and get someone in my family infected...

As the months passed, in July, the quarantine was no longer mandatory and became voluntary. Some companies started working face-to-face, while in the education sector we were still teleworking. This caused people to come out after a long time and was a trigger for contagions to become more evident in our area. In fact, my father was one of those affected by COVID-19 infection. My father, a 70-year-old senior citizen, who lives with my older sister and cousin, are my neighbors. He fought from home against the virus, as he refused to go to a hospital because he was afraid of never coming back. So, with my whole family, we struggled to take care of him. My wife visited him daily to check his vital signs; my sister and I fed him, looked after him and moved him, as he was very badly affected and lost mobility in his lower limbs. He lost his voice, which

made it very difficult to communicate with him. It was a time of uncertainty. We did not know if he would survive or if any of us who took care of him would get the virus, too. The days went by and he evolved in the best possible way, overcame the illness and, little by little, recovered his strength and his voice. These were moments of relief and blessing, because any other member of the family was infected. Teleworking continued in the next months and it was in September that we were called back, gradually, to our work at the head office. I was distressed at that time because going outside could mean getting sick or make someone in my family sick, but it was my trust in God that gave me the strength to go ahead and continue. It was difficult to adapt to the new reality, but, thanks to God and to the fact that we have not let our guard down on prevention measures, we keep facing the virus together.

Fe y Alegría International Federation

Learnings and challenges

Physical distance strengthened our integration At Fe y Alegría El Salvador, we finished 2019 strengthened and very hopeful about continue deepening our educational service to the most needy populations of the country through quality education which will enable them to work with dignity. COVID-19 disrupted our projects and planning, and forced us to take on virtual and distance education, even though we did not have the necessary resources nor were we pedagogically prepared. However, we did not give up and we faced the new difficulties and challenges in good spirits. So that the physical distancing did not lead to an emotional one, we worked hard on the emotional dimension, psycho-emotional work, intra-family relations and the practice of interiority and spirituality. In fact, we believe that the physical distance led us to a greater integration between the educators, the families and the students.

us to take on a more ambitious dimension about significant community production. In order to address health emergencies and soothe the misery caused by the pandemic among the most vulnerable populations, we also launched the “Hope for Life campaign”, with the aim of raising awareness of the need to show solidarity and obtain donations of food and hygiene materials to face the onslaught of the pandemic and those caused later by tropical storms like Amanda and Cristobal, which wreaked havoc in many of the most vulnerable sectors of the country. For them, we launched the “Dignified Return Home” project, which made possible to help more than a thousand families affected by tropical storm Amanda. Today, Fe y Alegría El Salvador’s most challenging aspect is financial sustainability and guaranteeing education. Also, the need to deepen the training of educators from the perspective of popular education, which requires a great choice of life and a kind of militancy to transform the unjust structures which cause misery and exclusion. In order to do this, we need to transform ourselves and, in the same way, transform our practices. We are also challenged to take on virtual education in a more creative way, so that it can help us to build a more creative and critical pedagogy, which also requires us to prepare parents for these new realities.

Reality forced us to resize the educational proposal, especially in the Vocational Training Institutes, where we were not allowed to do practical work which is fundamental for this kind of training. This led us to resize some of the proposals and to reorient the centers to the solution of concrete problems in the communities. For this reason, together with the families, and in order to smooth the food problem, we promoted school gardens. We believe that these actions can lead

Statement 2020

Spain

Fe y Alegría International Federation

Testimony

Ángeles Palacios I am 40 years old and I am a religion teacher; I am also the coordinator of the Youth Solidarity Network at the Virgen de Gracia Secondary School in Oliva de la Frontera (Badajoz, Extremadura). Throughout my life, I have always liked to get involved in initiatives to achieve a better world. Although the rural area where I live has not been so affected by COVID-19, the pandemic has stirred my awareness of globality, of solidarity with the problems of our colleagues who we saw so recently during the Global Gathering in February 2020. I feel sorry for other people, especially those in power, because they had to learn the lesson in the hard way with a tragedy of this magnitude.

‘’...my main challenge is to keep transmitting humanity and accompaniment during the educational process,...

Despite all the difficulties, including all that we have experienced in these months and what we are being exposed to because of this pandemic, in the end, it will be worth it if we come out stronger and more aware of what is good for our world, and if we are really able to promote a change of mindset through education.

As a teacher, my main challenge is to keep transmitting humanity and accompaniment during the educational process, and digital media are our allies in this challenge, but they can never fully replace the human dimension and closeness of the process. For this reason, it requires a greater effort. We have a great challenge ahead of us, given that education is being left out of the axes that governments call essential for “reconstruction” after the pandemic. More than ever, we must make them hear our voices. However, I believe that, in general terms, it will bring about a positive change in young people, even if, often in societies, everything that happens tends to volatilise too quickly. Therefore, it will require constant and tenacious work by those of us who are truly aware of the need for this change.

Statement 2020

order to respond to this challenge and demand that international cooperation policy prioritize educational needs, especially in the most disadvantaged contexts, with protection measures for children at risk. Consequently, we worked hard and launched several campaigns to ensure continuity in the education system based on inclusion and equity since, according to UNESCO, twenty-four million students would not return to school by 2020, keeping in mind that eleven million are girls.

Learnings and challenges

Global solidarity must be redoubled in order to respond to challenges Well aware of the painful consequences of the pandemic on the education of the most vulnerable populations, at “Entreculturas” we are reevaluating our planning and projects to address the educational emergency and ensure that education does not stop. We are well aware that if countries do not educate its people properly, if priority is not given to the most disadvantaged groups and if the international community does not improve cooperation with fragile or impoverished countries, the health crisis will widen the already existing education gap and the commitments to the right to education for all people will not be fulfilled, follow by a new injustice gap without remedy. For this reason, at “Entreculturas” we believe it is essential to redouble global solidarity in 64

To provide education during emergencies specifically during the COVID-19 pandemic - is not only a duty, but also an ideal way to mitigate the psychosocial impact of the crisis, giving a sense of normality, stability, structure and hope to the population, not just the student body. Teaching teams, for example, are an essential support to families in times of emergency. Through them, not only are children’s right to education guaranteed, but families can receive concrete and simple advice on activities which help lower levels of stress, distress and violence. It is therefore crucial to maintain their job stability and provide them with the necessary tools to carry out their work. In addition, maintaining education during emergencies helps reduce the level of trauma and emotional instability in large groups of children and adolescents, and is crucial for building messages and attitudes of confidence and optimism, encompassing families and wider communities. Finally, by keeping the functioning of educational processes, community dynamics preserve people’s shared sense of belonging, connectedness and integration, thus soothing feelings of hopelessness, loneliness or abandonment. Since the beginning of the pandemic, to enable distance education, we have pro-

Fe y Alegría International Federation

vided humanitarian support to teachers, students and families to ensure education, even in the most difficult contexts, such as Venezuela and Haiti. To make the transition to virtual education possible, we provided many teachers in several countries with technological tools. Here in Spain, we also provide technological, pedagogical and emotional support to the 758 teachers in the schools we have been supporting to. In addition, we reinforced education in values, citizenship, coexistence, respect, culture of peace and care, because the xenophobia and violence problems were increasing thanks to the pandemic. The young people from the Generation 21 Network demonstrated a great spirit of solidarity and participated in several projects to help people who were particularly hard hit by the pandemic. We were in constant contact with the twenty-eight delegations we have in Spain and were able to witness the spirit of generosity, dedication and helpfulness of many delegates who dedicated themselves to support the most needy people and offer them encouragement and hope in order to overcome the culture of resignation and fear. Dani Villanueava, S.J. summed up the work and spirit of “Entreculturas” in this year of uncertainty and, therefore, a year of opportunities: “2020 has been a difficult year that has made us to reinvent new ways of accompanying, of being close, of keep growing, and also a time to remember that, despite everything, hope is reborn, transforming our way to perceive reality. A look that not only gives us legitimacy, but also encourages us and gives us the strength to keep working on our mission day by day. A vision that does not hide, that pushes us to continue

offering opportunities in the midst of this global educational emergency. In programmes which demonstrate the enormous resilience of our educational networks, such as in Lebanon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Amazonia or in our beloved Venezuela, we were achieving, through radio, WhatsApp and the simplest technologies: that education does not stop; that thousands of refugee populations and girls threatened by violence keep being supported; that fundamental rights are not stopped; that access to education does not desist and, with it, years of achievement and effort in the fight against inequality. A scope to show solidarity, even with our closest environment, as we did in the precious collaboration with Rozalén and the network of Jesuit Migrant Service flats in Valencia. Or the support for the caring project and reception for the migrant and refugee population in Nador; an example of our commitment to justice at the borders. It is also a vision that keep us alive and makes it possible for us to keep working in order to accompany more than 230,000 people who go through poverty and exclusion situations, and that intention moves us to promote, more than ever, a welcoming culture, which in contrast to the culture of discarding, rebuilds relationships and fosters inclusion. In short, a vision that transforms reality, that cannot be stopped and that drives us to keep building a better future”.

Statement 2020

Guatemala

Fe y Alegría International Federation

Testimonies

Gilmer Aldana During the COVID-19 crisis, I have identified myself more with the community, with coexistence and I have strengthened communication with parents and students. I have visited homes to guide parents so that they can support their children in developing activities which will strengthen their skills. I have been able to use all the resources that the school has, such as the phone bank for parents and students, WhatsApp groups to clarify doubts, and personal calls to explain and guide the activities in the self-learning workshops. My students success is to bring them to resilience, to put me in their thoughts, to encourage them to overcome their frustrated desires of not wanting to do homework at home. I have been able to get my students to reflect, to be motivated and to bring them to that desire to change that education that they need. This is a joint education. My students’ desire to grow, both intellectually and spiritually, has led us to explore and experiment with the different projects that are presented, to achieve their willingness to self-learn. Today, we continue with these same groups of students to keep moving in this line of accompaniment. Personally, I have visited poor families, brought them food, medicine and, most importantly, a bit of my service and listening. In my experience, I have felt an empathetic conscience because in the homes I have visited I have found, because of the pandemic, that they have lost their incomes. As a result, students have had to look for employment in order to contribute to the family economy.

‘’My challenge has been to get to know and support each of my students...

Among the main problems I have seen, we could talk about: the distance from the educational center to their communities; the lack of internet in the communities; and the lack of support to provide them with didactic materials so that the students can carry out their activities. My challenge has been to get to know and support each of my students in their different situations. For example, for students with a lack of teaching materials, I bought the materials and delivered them to their communities. In other cases, with students who were working, we organized the time from 17:00 to 19:00 to make calls and send messages to clarify doubts and explain. This way, it could be done outside working hours. I know it was going to be a bit tiring, but I was counting on the student’s interest to improve themselves. It is easy to complain - as some people do about the students poor knowledge, or their “little understanding”, or the lack of interest in learning, but I have to put myself in their situation and realize that it is my responsibility as a teacher to offer them opportunities for improvement. Today, I want to share that, as a teacher, I did not have time, I did not have a timetable, because my objective was to help these young people, who are the future of our Guatemala, to get ahead.

Statement 2020

felt supported with the self-learning workshops. We thought they were not going to give us the education we had when we went to face-to-face classes, but the teachers were always helping us with the workshops, they were giving us support through a group created on Facebook. Now we are learning in Classroom. There we are sending our assignments, which is another platform where we have the possibilities to learn. For those who don’t have those possibilities, they give us a day to visit the educational center and, thus, give in the workshops in person and solve doubts, we have never stopped learning…

Gabriela Rodríguez

The teachers are always there, always looking at how we are learning, following up to make sure we hand in our homework, supporting each other, telling us that we can all make it, because it is the last year we have to graduate from high school. Some teachers asked us if we had the possibility to connect through internet to each other to find out how to organize ourselves. In my case, as I was working, the teacher was online on Sunday so that we could all be together. In spite of the difficulties, the teachers were always taking care of us in order to receive our classes and continue our education. Also, the teachers recorded the classes for those who could not connect, printed out some workshops and always told us that if we had any questions we could contact them.

At the beginning, I had no possibility to have a phone - although I did have the internet - but I managed to get a phone despite its broken camera. However, I had to learn to be satisfied with that phone because not everyone has the possibility to have one. At least I had a way to join the classes. We had to accepted. When it all started, we

I feel that I am very blessed in this sense because Fe y Alegría supported us in our education, they were very attentive to us, asking us if we had the possibility to connect to internet. When the whole country was closed, they always told us that they were going to be close to us and they never left us. They always encouraged us, they gave us tasks to learn something new.

Fe y Alegría International Federation

Byron Jiménez Studying during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis was an experience never imagined by any of us, students and teachers. It was a new experience and a great learning experience. We realised that education, as we have always been told, begins at home and today we have been educated from the values of our home, of our family, and Fe y Alegría has been there to support and help us. One of the difficulties we have faced with this pandemic is that, many times, we don’t have the resources to have an education at home. Many people don’t have a smart device so they can connect to the internet or ask some questions they might have. Similarly, there are people who have lost their jobs, money has been scarce in their homes and they haven’t had that support. For me personally, I was affected by the fact that I often had limited internet access to do my homework, so I had to find some other sources to be able to complete my studies. During the emergency, Fe y Alegría has been involved. From the first workshop that was sent to our homes, the teachers have always been available to answer any questions or situations that we might have. They have also made home visits to see how we are doing. They visit us being careful to get to our homes. They have also sent us self-care guidelines that have helped us to become aware of what we need to do and avoid in this pandemic. Fe y Alegría has been with us, holding our hands.

Statement 2020

Saralin de María Pérez I am 16 years old and I am a fifth year student of Intercultural Bilingual Education at Fe y Alegría Guatemala. I dedicate myself to studying and supporting my mum in any way I can. I am part of Red Generación 21+ and, here in Guatemala, we call it “Protagonismo Juvenil Organizado” (PJO). This crisis we are going through has drastically changed our daily routine and has also affected the most vulnerable people. Related to what I experienced in February this year at the VII Global Meeting of the Youth Solidarity Network in Madrid, COVID-19 makes me think about how necessary it is to be prepared, and by that I mean the little importance given here to health, jobs and so many other problems that have come to light. As PJO, we have organized ourselves through virtual meetings where we participate and come up with ideas on how to transmit positive messages and share them on social media, to keep having an impact and raising awareness. We set out our point of view and experience from our environment, because, as I live in a rural community close to the city, my opinion will be totally different from the opinion of a girl who lives in an urban area.

Learnings and challenges

The pandemic strengthened innovation, communication and creativity To young people, I say let’s start to question ourselves, let’s get to know ourselves and the reality that hits us, and see this as an opportunity for change. Let us be protagonists of our own history. We have immeasurable powers... we have the capacity. It’s just a matter of putting it all into practice and showing what we can do. We must use our youth for something productive. “There is a quote from Paulo Coelho that I always carry with me: “Fight for your dreams or others will impose theirs on you”. 2020 was a difficult year for all of us, due to the pandemic caused by the new coronavirus. Fe y Alegría’s reality was no different: all our educational communities had to close their doors and continue their teaching and learning processes from home to ensure the right to quality education. However, although learning from home is, and it will be, an unprecedented challenge, Fe y Alegría’s work did not stop and kept serving 16,124 students at all educational levels and training all the teaching, administrative, support and service staff during the 2020 cycle, in pedagogical aspects and personal growth, with the aim of keeping them up to date as teachers. In fact, Fr Miquel Cortés, S.J., director of Fe y Alegría Guatemala, believes that the pan-

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demic has strengthened innovation, communication, creativity and the optimisation of scarce resources. The school feeding programme, financed by the State, was a very important vehicle not only for pedagogical work, but also for greater articulation with families, which allowed us to promote their self-learning and the need for personal and health care. Also, the prevention of domestic violence, which is so threatening in these times of forced confinement. The pandemic made us to go in depth in our networking among ourselves and with other institutions, which meant fearlessly taking on, both institutionally and personally, the new learning that it demanded. Numerous WhatsApp groups were created, even by classes, and learning communities were set up via email and Facebook.

resource for creative and critical learning, both personal and in teams. At the federative level, we must: deepen the links to move forward the “union of souls” of the national Fe y Alegría, thinking about building networks of hope; communicate and share successful experiences; assume together, and as a body, the problems and urgencies; support, in solidarity, the weakest countries and reflect together on the demands of sustainability; the need for greater investment in education is evident so everyone has access to it; and the new educational requirements, including job training, insisting on integration, otherwise there is no point on it. To this end, we must begin by recognising that we are not pioneers here and that we have to learn from those who are way ahead of us.

To strengthen resilience, we also insisted on caring for caregivers, strengthening their emotional and spiritual practice. We encourage youth leadership, and, in pastoral care, we deepen the promotion of the contagion of solidarity and resilience. We insisted on “together we will move forward”. This also led to humanitarian work with migrant populations and with those affected by tropical storms. We also put into practice protocols to ensure a healthy and safe return to school. As learning and challenges, we believe that we must keep going on depth in the comprehensive training of educators so that they can take on the challenges of the new times. We must also deal more creatively with hybrid education - the mix between face-to-face and virtual education - which means not only the provision of adequate connectivity, but also pedagogical training, essential understand and use the new technologies that must become a necessary

Statement 2020

Haiti

Fe y Alegría International Federation

Testimony

able to repeat the distribution of food to our students’ families.

Sr Matilde Moreno, rscj.

What seems like something out of a science fiction movie is to imagine that, during the pandemic, families living in our camps could be locked in their homes. Most of the houses here, except for a few that are made of blocks, are built out of palms, mud and sheet metal. They are used to sleep in and to store the few belongings the family owns. Life is lived outside the house, in close coexistence with the neighbors, and if someone gets sick, they take care of each other and infect each other.

Not to brag, but in Haiti we have had the longest “pandemic” of all, and we are still going on! The school year 2019-20 started as usual in the first week of September, but in the middle of the month a wave of violence broke out in the country, so strong that all the schools in Puerto Principe and nearby towns and villages had to close. In Balan, where I live with my Sacred Heart community, attending a Comprehensive Health Center and a Fe y Alegria school, we did not suffer the violence directly, but we could not even go out on the road to buy bread. This was our first “pandemic” which lasted until December when classes started again. It was a time of uncertainty, suffering and hunger because peasants could not go out to sell their produce. At Christmas, the first news of “the Corona”, as it is called here, arrived, but it sounded very distant and foreign. Just when it seemed that everything was getting back on track, the big blow came. The President addressed the nation: everyone went home, everything was closed... and from March 20th our ordeal began again. Churches, public centers and schools were closed until 31 July. Fear, insecurity and hunger again. What to do? In Fe y Alegría we organize ourselves to look for resources and to be able to offer to the families lots of rice, beans and oil as well as masks, soap and bleach. Some relief but clearly not enough. We, in Balan, found friends who helped us during the whole period of the confinement and every month we were

The consequences of our particular “pandemic” are proving disastrous. The virus has not hit too hard, thank God, but the aftermath of a lost school year, jobs that fade away and the violence that is growing at full speed with more than 70 armed gangs that control more and more neighborhoods and areas of the country in a very violent way, make it more and more difficult to live in this country. But do not misunderstand me and don’t forget it! These are wonderful people who know how to live against the odds. People of unshakable faith and inexplicable joy in the midst of so much suffering. People from whom there is much to learn and who must never be forgotten. May God keep sharing our lives and keep blessing us.

Statement 2020

Learnings and challenges

Awareness-raising and humanitarian support work 2020 was a very difficult year for Fe y Alegría Haiti. In addition to the structural problems, political instability, social insecurity and weaknesses of our educational system and Fe y Alegría’s as well, there was the enormous effort we had to make to keep providing education in the forced confinement required by the pandemic. Not only did we have to readjust our practices to the demands of distance education, but we also had to work very hard to raise awareness among the population so that they would take the pandemic seriously, and to promote and make possible the necessary health measures, as many did not comply with them, either because they did not believe in the consequences of COVID-19, or because they did not have the resources to do so, or because they had to go out on the streets to get food. For this reason, alongside the efforts to maintain the educational work, we had to undertake humanitarian

work by distributing food bags and hygiene kits among the most vulnerable populations, which allowed us to raise awareness and educate families. However, the COVID-19, which forced us to confine ourselves to our homes and the insecurity in the places where the Fe y Alegría centres are located, did not allow us to communicate as much as we would have liked with the families, as we believe that this is an essential dimension that we must strengthen. We also see an urgent need for job training and the development of productive

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projects which could contribute to improve the living conditions of people traditionally affected not only by this pandemic, but also by poverty and hunger. We would like to mention that, despite the difficulties, our students got good marks in the national exams promoted by the government, which encourages us to keep working and supporting the most vulnerable people through quality education. We are also asking the Federation for support in order to strengthen Fe y Alegría Haiti, which is in a very weak situation.

Statement 2020

Honduras

Fe y Alegría International Federation

Testimony

Belkis Avilés My name is Belkis Avilés and I belong to the work team of the Nazareth Technical Centre of Fe y Alegría Honduras, located in the community of Urraco Norte (El Progreso, Yoro). I was born and raised in Urraco Pueblo, where we have a land rich in nutrients for crops due to its location on the right bank of one of the most abundant and meandering rivers in the country: the Ulúa. The area is divided into 35 communities, all of them are rural areas, with difficult access to the city “El Progreso”. We live abandoned and ignored by the government and barely have access to essential utilities. 2020 was a very difficult year which brought us fear, anguish and pain. It was a year without body or soul. We started with the fateful news of a looming local and global confinement by a virus, forcing us into total confinement in our homes and bodies. We had to abandon our family, personal, professional goals and the dreams of our young students were shattered because Nazareth, for the first time in its history, was closing its gates. We then tried to communicate through a blurry screen and, in many cases, with no internet signal; on top of that 38% of our young people do not have a smartphone or internet connection, due to the economic matter. During the pandemic, it was painful to see how many families disintegrated, unable to coexist in the midst of the confinement or to cope with the lack of the most basic utilities. It was distressing to see the desperation of heads of households when

they found out that they had lost their jobs because their companies had suspended their employment contracts without any explanation. Some young people decided to emigrate with their masks and joined the caravans because life had become difficult at home.

“2020 was a very difficult year which brought us fear, anguish and pain.

We teachers made an effort to communicate with families and students to meet through virtual platforms. We kept each other informed and communicated and embraced each other with words of encouragement. Others, however, had to endure the confinement isolated and alone, but the worst was yet to come. The winds of November came... It seemed like a quiet month, with days of hope that would restore peace and tranquility, but it was not meant to be. Two unexpected visitors passed through our town: hurricanes Eta and Iota, which devastated what we had left. It is outrageous to see that the emergency authorities did not warn the country about the high impact of these natural phenomena, knowing the level of vulnerability in which we live due to the lack of maintenance on the right and left banks of the Ulúa River. One day, suddenly, we woke up with water on our feet. It was 4:50 a.m. I remember waking up to the noise in the street. I went out to have a look and the first thing I 77

Statement 2020

saw was a child, about eight months old, crying naked on an old mattress in front of my house. Then I saw an elderly lady carrying a heavy cooker. I ran to help her, she smiled at me in fright and went back to her house for more. It was very hard to see all my neighbors taking out their belongings, mattresses, tables, utensils, chickens, pigs, ducks and everything they could carry without knowing where to go. When I went back home, the water was already up to my knees. I looked at the faces of my relatives and they were beside themselves, scrambling to get their belongings. I remember going into my room to get some clothes and my backpack with the computer that I am using to write this text. I grabbed two sacks of mescal, filled one with clothes and in the other one I put the food we had bought for the month.

“I closed my eyes and images came to my mind of all the efforts and sacrifices we had made to ensure effective learning for our young people.

I went out into the street and everything was chaos. We were surrounded by the currents of the river. I called my brother by mobile phone to take us to one of the hills in the community, as we had discussed the day before, in case of emergency, but there was no 78

signal on the mobile phones. There was no safe way to walk through either. Miraculously, my brother showed up, cutting through the water with his three wheel loading motorcycle. What a joy! We all left with only what we had on our bodies. On the way, we saw painful episodes: people screaming, others crying, disoriented children, old people sitting in their chairs, people taking out their belongings... It was like watching a ship sink. We were all silent, holding on as best we could to the metal bars of the three wheel motorcycle. On the way, we passed the Nazareth Centre, my second home, where I had lived for eighteen years. It had become an arm of the Ulúa River. I closed my eyes and images came to my mind of all the efforts and sacrifices we had made to ensure effective learning for our young people. “We lost everything,” I told

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myself, and I broke down. We arrived at the shelter and were isolated and out of reach for several days. In the shelter, we survived the storm of high winds, the destruction of roads, people sheltering in the streets in tents made of sheets, cooking the last of their food in the open air. A few months later, the waters returned to their banks and we also went back to our homes, almost buried by the mud. It was like starting from scratch... the water had washed away everything we have saved. We couldn’t go to the city because the roads were totally destroyed. We shared and exchanged the food we had left with neighbours and relatives. Through what used to be a street, a boat finally arrived with some food and water,

which we had to ration. A month later, the roads were opened and solidarity aid from people from other countries arrived just in time with food, water and clothes. We also returned to the Nazareth Center to join forces with Fe y Alegría to support the affected families. We toured the communities, visited families who were still recovering from the material losses and supported them with food, water, mattresses and clothes. We are still doing this because the needs are many. I think that adversity always leaves us with many lessons to be more brothers and sisters and more human, and that is the most important thing in life. We are grateful about being alive and we come out stronger to fulfill the mission that God and our ancestors entrusted to us to help each other. Nazareth is alive... we will be a light for impoverished families and we will work for social transformation.

Statement 2020

Learnings and challenges

The pandemic and the hurricanes forced us to make a radical change The COVID-19 pandemic, which confined us to our homes, forced us to take on virtual and distance education, without being technologically or pedagogically prepared for it. However, we made great efforts to guarantee, as adequately as possible, the right to education of our students, including the indigenous Garifuna, a community we have been working with for seven years now with an education that fosters their identity and respects and promotes their culture. The pandemic also deepened poverty and hunger, which made us to take on humanitarian aid by distributing bags of food and hygiene and virus prevention kits. It also multiplied migration, even entire families were now migrating, which forced us to intervene more decisively on this border, and to organize ourselves into networks with institutions that have been working on the

problem of migration. We had to implement educational and training programmes with the students so that they could improve their living conditions with the idea of stopping their migration, or face the future outside the country with a better preparation, given that we already knew that many of them would leave again. As if that were not enough, on November 3rd 2020, Hurricane Eta hit Honduran territory, with very heavy rains, causing rivers overflowings, landslides and the destruction of many villages. Following the hurricane, and with no time to recover, another hurricane of immense proportions threaten us - Iota which devastated crops, drowned livestock and destroyed entire municipalities with a significant death toll and entire populations who lost everything, including, of course, their homes and all their belongings.

Fe y Alegría International Federation

The hurricanes made us to turn around. It was no longer merely a matter of guaranteeing education, guaranteeing life. We took on the three R’s: reorganize, reconvert and respond to emergencies. We formed working groups, we changed our roles, we dedicated ourselves to what was most urgent: distributing food, water, clothes, blankets... anything that would help save lives. We reached 122 shelters where, not only responding to the most urgent needs, but also giving workshops on stress management, solidarity and life skills. As Miguel Molina, national director of Fe y Alegría Honduras, says with conviction, “the pandemic and the hurricanes are helping us to rethink our work in depth. Rather than rebuilding our destroyed centers, we must relaunch them in a more community-based dimension, responding more directly to

the extreme needs of the poorest, who are always hit by all kinds of pandemics and disasters. We need to strengthen our networking with other institutions and among the various Fe y Alegría organizations. This is where we stake our identity and our future as popular educators. A Fe y Alegría entrenched in its own trenches, where each country is only concerned about doing its own work, does not make sense today. Together we are strong, a strength that we must use more decisively with governments, organizations and institutions in order to get the necessary resources so that everyone can exercise their right to a dignified life and a quality education, especially in these times when the pandemic has left millions without a school.

Statement 2020

Italy

Fe y Alegría International Federation

Testimony

María Elena Guevara She is 61 years old, an Ecuadorian widow, mother of three boys, grandmother of three grandchildren, graduate in Educational Sciences with a specialization in Physics and Mathematics, and she is a teacher at IRFEYAL of Fe y Alegria Milan and at the University of Loja. Her vocation was born during her studies, thanks to some substitutes and the example she got at home. “I always saw my mother teaching the children in the neighborhood. I would have liked to be a doctor, my family supported me, but in the end I abandoned the idea because of the costs involved”. And, she adds laughing, “putting on the mask now is the closest thing I have to what I wanted to be, so I’m not mad about it!”. She is a strong and determined person. “In 1999, the economic instability we teachers suffered made me to leave my family, my home and the teaching profession I had been in for the last nineteen years, but it was for a good reason: my children. The idea was to come for two years. It didn’t matter if I had to cook, clean, take care of old people or children. At first, it was very hard. The two years turned into twenty. My husband kept working as a teacher in Ecuador and, after his death at a young age, I brought my sixteen-year-old son to Italy. She still remembers her husband’s words as they said goodbye at the airport: “Maria Elena, you are going to another country, but never forget that you are a teacher and, as such, you will have to guide people, show them the skills you have and you will be loved in any job.

Regarding her working life, she says: “My priority was to send money home, but with my degree I could not apply for teaching jobs in Italian schools. However, with great satisfaction, I have been able to keep teaching mathematics at the IRFEYAL of Fe y Alegria Milan and at the University of Loja, as well as giving private lessons. But my main source of income has been, firstly, looking after an old lady and, for many years now, with a family, taking care of their children”.

“Show them the skills you have and you will be loved in any job.

Thanks to her efforts, all her children have been able to complete their studies, reaching the level of graduates. The eldest, a degree in Education Sciences, specializing in Physics and Mathematics, from the University of Loja, Milan Extension; the second, in Electronic Engineering and Telecommunications from the Polytechnic University of Quito; and finally, the third one, studied Aeronautical Engineering in Italy, thus fulfilling his father’s dream of having one of his children educated abroad. The first time I saw Maria Elena was at school, dancing and laughing at a party among her students. When I ask her what a good educator should be like, she replies: “Kind and loving, able to pass on their knowledge, to put themselves at the service of their students, to master the subject, but always ready to improve”. She remembers the students who have passed through her

Statement 2020

life in detail and how, sometimes, a simple gesture or a word could help. “Recently, one of them said to me: ‘teacher, you brought me back to life’... this is what fulfills me. At the IRFEYAL Institute, there are so many children with difficulties, women who suffer violence, others who regret having dropped out of school or who have to rebuild their lives with a mother they hardly know or with the mother’s new partner. I don’t want to interfere in their lives, but just to know enough in order to motivate them in the best possible way”. One of her classmates says about her: “I recognise and greatly admire María Elena Guevara’s capacity for learning, development, creativity and commitment. And Julio, one of her students, aged 51, comments: “My special thanks go to María Elena, for her availability, affection and patience”.

Learnings and challenges

The pandemic favored integration with families For twenty years, Fe y Alegría Italy has been offering, in collaboration with IRFEYAL Ecuador, the possibility for Latin American students in Italy to finish their studies with a degree which is valid for university entrance. The pandemic forced us to push harder for distance education in virtual mode, which meant that we undertook campaigns to get computers for those students who did not have one. Since our campaign to get second-hand computers donated to us was not very successful, we bought them ourselves and lent them to students with the commitment that they would give them back. For others, we gave them discounts on their tuition fees so that they could buy them for themselves. Despite the difficulties, we have to highlight that our teachers took on their tasks with great responsibility and commitment.

Fe y Alegría International Federation

They visited their students in their homes, which led them to become more integrated with them and to get to know in a better way their families and the way they live. The students, in turn, also showed service and solidarity, with some of them serving as translators for the Cuban doctors who came to support the pandemic response. Since at the beginning of the health crisis several students, who were working in hospitals and homes for the elderly, showed signs of a strong emotional crisis, we provided them with personalized attention to help them cope with the situation and manage their emotions. The students have expressed great satisfaction and gratitude for this accompaniment.

the transmissive pedagogy and open up to critical and creative pedagogy so that students can learn in a permanent way. They are concerned about becoming a diplomagiving NGO and not taking seriously the educational conception and mission of Fe y Alegría which seeks personal and social transformation, as they are well aware that our challenge and objective is to change lives, to help students grow strong in their own identity and to open themselves creatively to other cultures and to a universal citizenship. This will require them to work harder on identity and spirituality and to insist strongly on self-care.

At the graduation ceremony of forty new baccalaureate graduates in Milan, attended by the consuls of Ecuador and Peru, Fr Florin Silaghi, S.J., national director of Fe y Alegría Italy, congratulated the students with the following words: “This year has been a very difficult year. Without self-denial, constant commitment, trust, passion, creativity, prayer, dialogue and sacrifice, we could not have reached this moment of realization and celebration. For this, I thank God, your families, your teachers and all who have supported you. To be filled with gratitude for others and for oneself is always the fruit of an education that is never an end in itself, an education that makes us wise, that transforms hearts, that dissolves fears, that makes us truer and more creative, thus more capable of being responsible not only for our personal dreams, but also for our common desires”. According to the pedagogical coordinator, Olga Pérez Sastre, one of Fe y Alegría Italia’s most important challenges is to deepen the training of teachers so that they can overcome, with greater emphasis,

Statement 2020

Madagascar

Fe y Alegría International Federation

Testimony

F. Jean Guy Tahina, S.J.

I am Fr Tahina Jean Guy, a Jesuit, serving as executive director of Fe y Alegría in Madagascar. I work with Fr Emile Ranaivoarisoa, also a Jesuit, who is the General Director and with many educators who are in the bush making it possible for Fe y Alegría to be an educational service for the poorest and most excluded of our country. When the pandemic hit, it was added to the many precarious conditions of our people, including lack of food and water. We took care of the Joakim students in Fianarantsoa with the protocols we could. The same goes for the students we have had since 2015 in the center of Ikalamavony district, 100 kilometers from Fianarantsoa in the middle of the west. We have serious problems moving around the country. On the one hand, the insecurity caused by armed groups, and on the other hand, the distances. It may seem that the distances are not so great, but because of the condition of the roads, 100 kilometers can be covered in four-wheel drive vehicles in between 9 and 12 hours.

This is a recently started initiative. With the students and their families we did construction work in Fitampito, because we need infrastructure to guarantee quality education. We did this work together with the Jesuits in Madagascar, who are celebrating the jubilee of 50 years as a Jesuit province this year 2020. In the midst of the pandemic we had very good news, the state recognised the existence of Fe y Alegría as an NGO dedicated to education, registered under the number 02/2020 BIM/ ONG/PREF/Ftsoa.

“We are happy

because despite the conditions, we provided teachers in remote areas with pedagogical training to meet our educational challenge.”

In Malagasy, the native language of Madagascar, Fe y Alegría is translated as FIHAM. FIHAM. FInoana HAravoan’ny Malagasy, FIHAM , we continue with Fe y Alegría.

We are very happy because despite the conditions, we provided teachers in remote areas with pedagogical training to meet our educational challenge. We also promoted income-generating activities for schools and families, such as planting oranges and avocados. We started working with people who cannot read and write.

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We also took advantage of the deliveries to conduct awareness-raising and information days for parents and families belonging to our movement about COVID-19 and the need to follow preventive measures. This helped us to establish closer relations with the communities, who appreciate and value us very much. This is perhaps the greatest strength of Fe y Alegría Madagascar and we must keep wishing to turn our schools into true community centers. Parents are very cooperative and contribute to their children’s education with their work or with food from their crops. We have also had to provide financial support to teachers who are very poorly paid, but who, despite the difficulties, have managed, creatively, to ensure the continuity of their students’ education.

Learnings and challenges

We insist on raising awareness of the importance of education

In Madagascar, the situation during the pandemic is similar to many other countries: schools were closed and Fe y Alegría people organized themselves into teams and collaborated with the Catholic Diocese of Fianarantsoa to support the delivery of humanitarian aid (food, masks, soaps and disinfectants) to the families of the educational community. The forced confinement left most of the parents who are engaged in the informal economy without work and, consequently, without income.

Madagascar is a country with poor infrastructure and we have many needs of all kinds. Our 42 schools are small and very poor, they are far away from the cities and reaching them by dirt roads is very difficult, especially in winter, when it is almost impossible. The buildings are very rustic - with walls and roofs made of palm leaves - and the equipment is practically non-existent, as we don’t even have desks. The teachers need a lot of training, both in pedagogy and in popular education and the identity of Fe y Alegría. Their knowledge is very rudimentary, as most of them only have elementary schooling. So we need a lot of support from the Federation. Despite this, they are very willing and eager to continue their education. Some of them, like teacher Rassoa, are also extremely generous. In her spare time, she raises chickens to buy notebooks and pens for her students. The most important educational challenge in Madagascar is to keep promoting the importance of education, as neither the state nor the families pay attention to it.

Fe y Alegría International Federation

Families do not see it as an essential means to progress and get out of poverty, as they do not have any reference of someone who has left their communities and progressed through their studies. For this reason, when the children grow up, they take them to the countryside to help them sow rice or look after the cows. That is why, unlike in other African countries, girls in Madagascar attend school more than boys. We are also insisting on caring for nature, as many people burn the forests to make pasture for their cattle, which is leading to a rapid desertification of the country. As a result, we are initiating, in schools and with families, planting projects, tree care and school gardens to help them get a better nutrition.

Statement 2020

Nicaragua

Fe y Alegría International Federation

Testimonies

Hasly Medelid Méndez Montoya Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, it brought a lot of sadness, fear, terror and concern to me, because at the age of 14 it was a new situation for me, never seen before. It was very shocking to me that, in such a short time, everything we knew had suddenly changed. The simplest activities had become acts of great risk and danger. While everything changed for me, from my home, school and community activities, more importantly, there was a personal change, for in 2020 I had the opportunity to reflect on those things that I had previously considered of great importance and in the time of social isolation were no longer important. I realized that I had to appreciate, love and protect those people who were and are always there for me, value our health and life, and the others’ too. Despite the context, I carried on with my life with a lot of enthusiasm and dedication. I decided that this situation was not going to stop me. In 2019, I started a training process in socio-political identity, where I have expanded my knowledge and developed leadership skills. Last year, I started a Virtual Diploma in socio political Participation of Youth in a Culture of Peace, from which I learned that it is necessary to know how to work as a team - which is a great virtue - because, knowing the opinions of others, we are ready to collaborate so that, together, we can transform our reality.

The exchanges of virtual experiences, promoted by the Generation 21+ Network an initiative promoted by the International Federation of Fe y Alegría - allowed me to get to know the experiences of other girls and boys from other countries, which have definitely enriched my learning. Together we saw the positive side of the different situations to which we are called to influence and transform in order to change what causes us so much harm and indignation.

“Together we saw the possitive side of the different situations to which we are called to influence and transform in order to change what causes us so much harm and indignation.

I believe that, intending to be a good leader, it is important to know how to master this skill. My greatest achievements have been to transmit positive energy, enthusiasm, as well as to develop my creativity and leadership as an agent of change. I have learned a lot: from knowing how I feel, how I can make a change, the importance of building peace, reflecting on each conflict and, above all, discovering the power that lies within me. The skills I developed throughout this training were very noticeable, as before I was very shy and did not like to speak in public. Now I can do it by facilitating youth training in my study center. All this has helped me at school, at home and in the community, as 91

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I have established better communication and confidence in everything around me and I am more self-confident.

complex content and, in special cases, greater dedication of time using technological tools such as educational videos.

Every training that was given to me was a great help because I was able to create, socialize, strengthen, internalize, develop and grow as a person. I would like you to continue promoting these activities so that, just as I did, other young people can see that we have that light of change and that we can make a difference.

My group of students was a big challenge for me, as most of them did not have internet or photocopies to make the weekly workshops. I had to innovate and motivate others to share with those who did not have the resources to keep studying.

Johana Espinal Zepeda

The context of COVID-19 created an emotional state of fear in me, as I was a victim of this pandemic at the age of 51. I got it and, as a consequence, infected my family. At the beginning, the bad news was an important factor in that moment of my life because it was a new disease and I knew very little about it. As a result of this disease, the most important change I experienced was my hygienic habits, which I incorporated much more. On the other hand, I have become used to living with this disease as with any other disease. The pandemic not only altered the health system and social coexistence to which we were commonly accustomed. During the pandemic, attention to learners was also modified, working online through the distance strategy - and now hybrid learning - has implied greater reinforcement of 92

It was a lot more work, a lot more fatigue, but with the satisfaction that none of them got the disease. They worked from home and managed to learn. There are many anecdotes to tell, but the happy faces of each of them is what always motivates me to give more and more.

Fe y Alegría International Federation

Aprendizajes y retos The pandemic made us change plans and projects, and we had to innovate along the way. Although in Nicaragua we have never had reliable data on the spread and impact of COVID-19, we have suffered its consequences very closely, with cases of infected teachers, students and even office staff. The situation made us change plans and projects, to innovate on the fly to meet the most urgent needs, ranging from the provision of food and hygiene kits to protect health and emotional and psychological support for affected or fearful staff. We also placed special emphasis on human development, harmonious coexistence and spirituality in order to prevent all types of violence, which tends to multiply in situations of confinement. Our research and efforts led to the elaboration of the “Plan of Attention and Pedagogical Accompaniment in Times of Emergency”, which is about using the possibilities offered by virtual and distance education. In this way, numerous WhatsApp and Facebook groups were created, and video calls and virtual classes were multiplied wherever possible, which required great efforts in technological training along the way. In order to keep working with the students in the most marginalised and rural areas, where virtual education was not possible, teachers prepared study workshops that parents had to pick up weekly at the school. They also took the opportunity to insist that they take sanitary measures and that they live in a climate of harmony and collaboration at home.

With the teachers, we prioritized discussions and training processes on the culture of peace, emotional intelligence, dialogic pedagogical models, spiritual formation and the cultivation of identity. In spite of the situation, we even managed to hold several spiritual retreats that greatly stimulated commitment and resilience. Despite the difficult situations experienced with the pandemic, and the hurricanes that deepened the shortages and problems, the young people of Fe y Alegría Nicaragua did not stop, because, from their spaces, they kept developing processes of reflection and concrete actions to influence issues such as culture of peace, gender violence, the right to quality education, mental health, sexual education, environment, among others. Also, together with other university students, they organized art, theater and mural painting workshops. The challenges remain, we have to strengthen virtual training, which means more and better equipment, as well as training in identity and popular education in order to be able to use technologies as resources to achieve learning and knowledge committed to transforming reality. We believe that, at the federative level, networks and the cultivation of the consciousness of a global movement in defense of quality education for all must be strengthened. We also see the need for a greater exchange of proposals and a more collective reflection on the essential issues and the development of the new popular education after the pandemic.

Statement 2020

Panama

Fe y Alegría International Federation

Testimonies

Melbin Emigdio Herrera I spent most of the pandemic just with the country director. At first, we thought it was going to pass quickly, but before we knew, days, weeks and months went by. Here in Panama, the quarantine was almost from the beginning of the situation and it is still going on. Closures of businesses, hotels, casinos, cinemas... everything. And, at the same time, in the offices, first the calls began, then the pilgrimage of people - especially migrants - all telling the same story:

“We got up early and went to bed late, but we never lost faith (Fe) and joy (Alegría)...

“We’ve lost our jobs, we haven’t been able to eat, I owe the house, they’re going to throw me out”. It is hard my dear fellow, to want to help everyone and to be limited, but, with the director, we organised ourselves and set up two places to attend to people. We were contacted by embassies, we knocked on doors, the Jesuits supported us from the College and the Novitiate. We also received help from private people and we made our own scarce institutional resources available. It was a tremendous task. We got up early and went to bed late, but we never lost faith (Fe) and joy (Alegría)… To see the gratitude, the words and the generosity of the people, even in the midst of their vulnerability, made me feel good because as the director says, “we don’t solve problems, but we mitigate sorrows”. And I believe him because COVID-19, I think, has won us a battle, but not our lives.

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Learnings and challenges

Educating is a vocation that encourages us to be joyful witnesses of the faith Like all countries, Panama was affected by the global pandemic caused by COVID-19, which made us drastically transform the work we had been doing. The lockdown prompted us to multiply communications and training processes through social networks, telephone, e-mail, the dissemination of communiqués and the preparation of training materials, especially in the NgäbeBuglé region, where we distributed teaching materials to help develop the workshops sent by the Ministry of Education and thus ensure better learning for the indigenous population. In coordination with the National Directorate for Training and Professional Development (DNFPP), we have provided training on topics such as: conflict mediation in the classroom, motivational strategies in the classroom, active and participatory didactics, art as a learning tool, play and learn methodology, creation and management of school gardens, among others.

In response to the deepening poverty caused by the pandemic, we provided humanitarian aid for food (grocery vouchers) and hygiene kits. We guided beneficiaries to access to other social services provided by the national government. We always insisted strongly on the need for self-care to prevent infection and made continuous calls for responsibility and solidarity through the “Solidarity that transforms” campaign. We gave priority to young people, parents, guardians, single mothers, mothers who are heads of households with underage children and women at risk (human trafficking). We also promote training activities on psychological care, self-esteem and overcoming stress. We also held workshops on school gardens so that families and communities could boost their productivity and partly remedy food shortages. During the pandemic, we deepened the work that we have been doing for years with migrants, displaced people and refugees, providing them with food, medicine and shelter. We also provided them with psycho-emotional support trying to strengthening their resilience, promoting better coexistence and preventing violence. We also work hand in hand with the consulates of Canada, Peru, Chile, Colombia and El Salvador to respond to migrants who cannot leave the country and who need shelter. We also helped facilitate the repatriation of five Colombian nationals on a humanitarian flight. In addition, we have worked with the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) to manage housing for victims of human trafficking. In short, the pandemic fuelled our creativity, forcing us to rethink ourselves in the midst of a reality no one was prepared for. Faithful to the institutional mission and in line with the Jesuit way of proceeding, Fe y

Fe y Alegría International Federation

Alegría Panama courageously tackled the challenges, maintaining the spirit of being where technology (the new asphalt) ends. With closeness, humanity and dedication, we have been able to create new ways of being and doing popular education in frontiers where others have not gone. We are aware of the importance of quality and we are committed to it; beyond virtuality, education is a human action which is born from the encounter and the deep conviction that, although it is not enough to change the world, it must help to change the people who are going to change it. This is why the work must be creative and critical, which places the educator and the learner in front of reality, and promotes solidarity in all educational activities.

education is also in danger of becoming formalized. We have discovered, as never before, that, as one of our colleagues said, “educating is a vocation” that pushes us to be joyful witnesses of the faith. Beyond the programmes, there is the reality of an impoverished people who pushes us to continue, evangelizes us, educates us with the quality that only they can give. Commitment is not limited to “doing”, because it demands radicalism... not limiting ourselves to being “checkers of achievements” and “fillers of forms and forms”, but it pushes us to the encounter of life with those who are beyond the asphalt.

Therefore, we are proud to say that we did not do what we could, but we did what we had to do. We learned to maximize resources, to educate and learn without classrooms. We have even, in a way, de-formalised the informal, because non-formal

Statement 2020

Paraguay

Fe y Alegría International Federation

Testimony

Selva The last time I saw Selva was in a canoe in Bañado Norte in May 2019. The flood had wreaked havoc in the area and, as headmistress of Fe y Alegría’s Caacupemí School, she was determined not to leave any child behind because of the flood. So, almost every day, I would ride in a canoe to take homework booklets to the homes of those who could not get to school. I remember the sound of the water in the canoe, the shared journey and the deep admiration I felt when I realized the size of her immense vocation: Selva, with wet feet and a determined smile, transcending the physical space of the school to become a community leader. A leader in every sense of the word. It is difficult to forget the embrace of the children and the joy they felt when they saw her. In the last frontier of oblivion. In the last corner of poverty. A pandemic was not going to stop her now. That is why, when the quarantine began, they vowed again that no child would be left out. In Bañado, they soon realized that virtual distance education would not work and, among the directors and coordinators of the Fe y Alegría Network, they carried out a context analysis, trying to solve the challenge of the technological gap. Suddenly, the idea came up to use a tool they already had: Frequency 1.300 A. M. Radio Fe y Alegría. With that idea in mind, they adapted the workshops already used through PREBIR (Programa Rural de Educación Bilingüe Intercultural por Radio) - aimed at young peo-

ple and adults - and applied them to a children’s and youth programme. Since then, a silent gear makes the miracle happen: different groups elaborate curricula that are converted into radio scripts, which are then recorded for broadcasting on the radio station or mobile phone. The programmer makes the arrangements and compresses the audios to prevent them from being too heavy to be delivered. When there is no access to the radio, they are sent via WhatsApp audio.

“...almost every day, she rode un a canoe to take homework booklets to the homes of those who could not get to school.”

And in this way, they are overcoming the isolation of everyday life, in a daily struggle to keep their spirit alive. On Mondays and Wednesdays they are at school, so that parents and older siblings can come to clarify any doubts that they might have. Those who have a different learning pace are not left out either. In these cases, the curriculum is adapted to take into account each individual student. Selva is proud when she tells me that her school has not had any dropouts so far. On the contrary, there are students who, thanks to this system, have been joining the school.

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“The distance is physical, not emotional, not missionary,” Selva concludes. When she says it again, the image of the canoe and the heroic dimension of her vocation comes back to me, the mission that moves her world. The one that, every day, she fights, silently, for the dignified right to education. Today, Fe y Alegría responds to around 9,600 students with an outreach of 7,000 families and 570 teachers and educators involved in the process. In this joint effort, there are teachers, directors, national office liaisons and radio people who work until the early hours of the morning to get the audios ready and keep the wheels moving and no one is excluded in this pandemic.

Learnings and challenges

Radio: an invaluable educational resource In order to mitigate the poverty and hunger caused by the pandemic, Fe y Alegría Paraguay, together with other social works of the Society of Jesus, started a campaign in order to collect food and hygiene kits for the most vulnerable populations who do not receive support from the State. It should be pointed out that later, when we realized that the situation was getting longer, the entrepreneurship and productivity programmes were oriented towards the production of soaps, cleaning gels and masks. When we realized that it was not possible to generalize virtual education due to the great deficiencies in connectivity and the lack of economic and technological resources of the students and their families, we opted to promote and extend education by radio. To do this, we used the rich and long experience accumulated with the Programa Rural de Educación Bilingüe Intercultural (PREBIR), an education programme for young people and adults approved by the Paraguayan Ministry of Education and Science, which, in this case, Fe y Alegría and its teachers have adapted to the children. There are three keys to carrying out this educational programme through the radio. Firstly, the establishment of a specific timetable for each school grade; secondly, the preparation by teams and delivery of a weekly booklet to be able to follow the previously recorded classes, complete the tasks and carry out a self-evaluation; and thirdly, the family support that the students

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receive from home. In this sense, it is worth underlining the great collaboration of the parents, which has led us to become more integrated and has shown us the ways to keep deepening this essential and key dimension that popular education is. To increase coverage, we have made alliances with community radio stations. The Ministry of Education even joined Fe y Alegría’s radio project, so we managed to get the network of educational radio stations - including the country’s National Radio to broadcast the classes we proposed. As education has largely moved to the home, we also provide families with pedagogical and human training, as they are taking on many tasks they are not prepared for. And we encourage productivity on them, promoting the preparation of gardens, mobile vegetable gardens and seedbeds, which we not only manage to transfer theoretical knowledge into practice, but we are also encouraging family gatherings. In November 2020, we celebrated Fe y Alegría Week, where we share the main learnings and experiences about quality education, paying special attention to equity and equality for all children and adolescents in times of pandemic. There, the commitment, enthusiasm, collaboration and creativity of all the staff was evident, and they did not shy away from the problems, but faced them with courage and creativity. The first day was dedicated to strengthen identity, the second to present the experience of distance education by radio, and the third one to collect the work with young people to cultivate their leadership in order to achieve their commitment to a fairer and more fraternal society. In the fourth day, we presented the work and activities carried out in social promotion and improvement of the living conditions of the most vulnerable

population. We close the week with a discussion about Education in Emergency. Ricardo Jacquet, S.J., national director of Fe y Alegría Paraguay, underlines the importance of radio as an educational platform to reach all corners of the country and proposes that Fe y Alegría should have a bank of radio classes for all levels and even seriously consider developing its own curriculum with quality materials - negotiated with the Ministry of Education - to respond to the demands of the new education system. He thinks, among the needs detected which should be further developed, was the ongoing training of educators in identity and in pedagogical and human aspects. He proposed that, at the federative level, Fe y Alegría should insist on the need to position the following message: COVID-19 has led to an educational emergency and it is necessary that education is not left out of the strategic priorities of donors and governments. Education is an emergency and must be ensured for all, as an essential basis for coexistence and development. It should be pointed out that, in order to raise funds and despite the difficulties, we organized the traditional raffle for which we had to resort to digital payments and virtual ticket sales. The response of the people exceeded all expectations, as we managed to sell 23,000 tickets when we had set a target of 20,000. This proves that Fe y Alegría is planted in the hearts of the Paraguayan people, who greatly value its educational service to the most disadvantaged populations.

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Peru

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hope, that solidarity would become our main “weapon” and discipline our greatest protective shield.

Testimony

César Stalyn Castañeda Tang “Joy does not come only with the encounter of what has been found, but is part of the process of searching.” Paulo Freire I am convinced that, as in its origins, it is this search that animates our educational movement and, at the same time, becomes the fuel that animates the work of all of us who are part of a school of Fe y Alegría. There are those who say that we were not prepared to face a pandemic like the one we are going through... nothing could be further from the truth. Those of us involved in popular education know the daily struggle of each family and the value of community in overcoming adversity. Having a forward-looking view of reality, promoting participatory leadership, cultivating a mystique of passionate work and maintaining a strong link with the community were decisive in facing the growing uncertainty generated since March 6th 2021, when the first case of the coronavirus was announced in Peru. Although the start of the school year was delayed by a month, we were convinced that our students needed us and, from the obligatory social isolation, we began with diagnostic, awareness-raising and accompaniment actions. I consider this time as a time of blessing. We were able to realize that fear was not greater than

“Those of us involved in popular education know the daily struggle of each family and the value of community in overcoming adversity...

“Miss, I am coming back to Arequipa to do my homework. Miss, what I told you, I miss you... miss, I miss you very much, I want to see your face, I want to talk to you”. This message, sent by a student to his teacher, shook every fiber of our vocation. We had to organize ourselves and go out to meet their needs: they had no mobile phones, we had to get them some; they had no internet connection, we had to set up the Solidarity Hearts project; if the families had no connection, we had to go to their homes; if food was needed, we could all collaborate. This time did not have to be lost for education. On the contrary: there is learning in the family and in the community that we had all neglected. Often, in extreme situations such as the ones we are living through, human beings bring out the best out if them, their humanity, their transcendent being. Like doctors, nurses, custodians of order and anyone who has been on the front line, we teachers, in a very short time, have had to reconvert our practice, adapt resources and 103

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materials, accompany the learning process in exhausting but very rewarding days. Thus, seeking to generate favorable conditions for remote work and the achievement of learning. Thanks to the technology team, we managed, with the sponsorship of Google Education, to implement the Classroom platform, which demanded tireless days of training, collegial work and mutual support.

“…I invite you to teach with your eyes fixed on Jesus Christ, the inexhaustible source of life, hope and merciful love.

Little by little, we saw that it was possible to undertake projects such as: sponsoring one hundred lines for students who had no connectivity; promoting virtual dancing workshops, cosmetology and sewing for parents; promoting reinforcement for students who needed it; implementing virtual workshops in chess, football, theater, singing, music, English and Python programming for students; promoting emotional support workshops for students, parents and teachers; pedagogical talks for teachers; virtual concerts, among others. It is this process of searching for pertinent answers that nourishes our faith and our joy. Undoubtedly, the link with the community and participatory leadership strengthen the management of each of our schools. Doing 104

good and doing it well involves commitment, creativity and passion. In the year in which we celebrate our golden jubilee. As Pope Francis asks us, let us face the challenges of education with “courage and tenacity”, in the certainty that “we are all one”. Together with Saint Paola Frassinetti, saint of our institution, I ask that the Father bless us with his omnipotence, His Son bless us with his wisdom and the Holy Spirit bless us with his unity. Amen. During 2020, various creative strategies were applied to strengthen and facilitate learning, strategies like: making models; periodic tables; simple laboratory and recycling (things they had in their homes); videos were recorded and were shared to cheer up each other.

Fe y Alegría International Federation

Aprendizajes y retos

Innovating to face the future

Regarding my family, we improved hygiene, mask use, kitchen protocol, cleaning and use of specific materials for the prevention and control of the virus, such as first aid kits, new cleaning products, food supply and preventive use of natural medicine such as herbal teas, tea, among others. During this period of pandemic, we were able to fulfill the tasks entrusted to us during the 2020 school year. I consider it a satisfaction to have acquired greater commitments and challenges to develop innovative pedagogical skills and strategies in difficult times such as COVID-19.

Aware of the serious effect that COVID-19 has had on education, Fe y Alegría Peru designed a five-year work plan. During the first two years, we will face the emergency, our first aim is to guarantee essential learning and to prevent them from dropping out. Afterwards, we will dedicate ourselves to recovering the learning processes and continuing making progress towards a comprehensive quality education. This includes the need for a cross-sectoral strategy with health institutions and other areas. The school must be a node of articulation between health care, humanitarian assistance and educational services. All this must be followed by the reinforcement of teachers with pedagogical resources and human and spiritual education, as they are already doing with the cycle #JuevesDigital - a set of virtual seminars that are transmitted weekly from Facebook Institution’s profile -, which have become a space for dialogue on the educational use of ICTs as a response to the need for distance education. 105

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Some of the topics addressed in those times were the use of educational platforms, the advantages of Google tools in the educational field, creative resources for teachers, virtual learning management systems, digital whiteboards, virtual tutoring, learning based on integrated projects, and experiences in the use of ICT in rural contexts. Fe y Alegría thus joins the exchange and dialogue of Peruvian teachers in order to generate creative proposals which meet the need for distance education. In turn, with the radio programme “Capsulitas de Opinión”, we try to promote reading, research and critical thinking in children through the use of ICT, as they are using these tools in their daily life to analyze issues and find answers together, students, teachers and parents. The project was one of the winners in the National Contest for Educational Innovation Projects “Ideas that Transform”, organized by the National Fund for the Development of Peruvian Education (FONDEP). Well aware that the pandemic has hit the most vulnerable populations the hardest, Fe y Alegría Peru has concentrated, during the crisis, on rural areas and the Amazon region... two of the areas most affected and which have received the least support from the State. To fight the digital gap, we have distributed tablets to students in rural and remote areas. We have also multiplied our efforts to attend to migrants, both internal migrants - who return to the countryside because they cannot survive in the city, as confinement has left them without work - and external migrants, especially Venezuelans. As a result of all our research and achievements, and in order to communicate and share our experience and knowledge,

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Fe y Alegría Peru has launched the “Proposal to guarantee learning in times of emergency”. On it, we present a broad and original proposal to ensure the right to a quality public education which provides the necessary skills for life and work to all students. The proposal consists of six different but well-articulated elements: 1. Learning is the most important thing we must ensure and to this end we must prioritize essential competences through a flexible plan. 2. The selected and prioritized competences that respond to this specific context are worked on integrated projects, thus avoiding isolated activities. 3. To intervene with this proposal, we have two scenarios: students who have access to the internet, television or radio; and students who have no access at all because they are in very remote areas and have no possibility to carry on their studies in this

Fe y Alegría International Federation

way. It is especially for these students that we generate self-learning materials. 4. Everything presented needs conditions that ensure its implementation. A fundamental actor in this scenario is the teacher. In the current context, in order to implement this proposal, we require a teacher who has understood that his or her role has changed and who challenges him or herself, developing new personal and professional competencies to ensure that students learn in new scenarios. 5. We need teachers who recognise that they cannot get very far on their own. Therefore, teamwork is a response of the educational community to this emergency situation: we organize ourselves to understand the situation, try to explain it, set concrete goals and objectives and keep moving forward.

6. Last but not least, it is necessary to have a system of accompaniment so that all the teams and the entire educational community feel part of a collective that supports and backs them. Ernesto Cavassa, S.J., director of Fe y Alegría Peru, insists on the need to establish alliances with different actors (State, civil society, networks of the Society of Jesus and the Catholic Church) to guarantee the right of everyone to a quality education. We must insist on the message that Fe y Alegría brings to the nation states a quality public school. It is up to the Federation to provide new quality resources that are being released by universities, think tanks, among others, in order not to fall behind in terms of learning achievements.

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Democratic Republic of Congo

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Fe y Alegría International Federation

Testimony

Delphin Kangu Tundenge I would like to share with you, in a few lines, my commitment, courage and bravery in this period of global health crisis caused by COVID-19. We must begin by acknowledging that this disease has contributed, in large part - and still contributes - to deepening the misery of the most vulnerable populations. Living conditions during this period of pandemic could not have been conducive to peace and security for families, starting with my own. Everyone was afraid of catching the disease and even dying. And I, as a parent, was no an exception. I live in Kisantu with my wife and all my children live in Kinshasa, the capital, which is considered the epicentre of the disease. The border closure and the state of emergency paralysed everything internally. I could not move to go to Kinshaha to support my children. As everyone knows, this pandemic has paralysed many activities. We ourselves, as teachers, have found it very difficult to survive on the paltry salary that the state gives us at the end of each month. We have had to live through very difficult times. It was necessary to fight hard to survive and it was also necessary to think together with Fe y Alegría in order not to lose our dynamism. To cope with the difficulties and to survive, I had to show a lot of courage and bravery. I needed to overcome the fear of being infected. I was committed to helping my brothers and sisters understand that the disease existed and that we should not

be carried away by false rumors that the disease only attacked the wealthy. We needed to lose our fear and take on life in a positive way. We needed to fight like a lion and continue our work in the fields to ensure our survival.

“To cope with the difficulties and to survive, I had to show a lot of courage and bravery.

As coordinator of the Fe y Alegría network in Kisantu, we kept in touch with our educational partners. During the first wave, I had felt the need to listen to them, talk to them and give them the official message about the consequences of the pandemic. In agreement with the national team, I organized awareness-raising sessions with parents, teachers and principals on measures to prevent infection. I also took the opportunity to raise community awareness through various Fe y Alegria radio programmes on the radio of the Diocese of Kisantu. Our local team, under my leadership, has helped, to overcome the closure of schools during the first wave and the confinement that lasted five months - from March to August 2020.

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Learnings and challenges

Educating to end all pandemics Fe y Alegría is committed to quality education for all. It is true that this task requires the responsible commitment of the teachers, who are the main actors in the education of children and who, nevertheless, carry out their task with very poor salary conditions. In addition to the difficult salary situation, due to the fact that Fe y Alegría’s education is free of charge, there is the pandemic. Since March 2020, all teachers in the country, like the rest of the citizens, have been forced to remain confined to their homes without any activity that allows them to survive and support their families and without the necessary help from the state, which has deepened the levels of hunger and misery. As a result, all teachers have stopped going to school, thus opening the way to forced unemployment, the social consequences of which are still complex and very difficult to bear with. 110

Overall, the lockdown time, while painful, has also brought benefits, as it has allowed the teachers to shape themselves and strengthen the family relationship. Staying together all the time allowed them to develop other useful ways of living together. Moreover, this time helped to look at the other person in a different way. It was also an opportunity to think even more about the students and to make greater efforts to guarantee them the right to education, taking into account preventive health measures. This motivated us to turn to radio as a means of literacy and education, awareness raising and also helped us to get through the lockdown in a more pleasant way. Most of the programmes started with the aim of raising people’s awareness so that they would take preventive measures seriously. Then we saw and used their

Fe y Alegría International Federation

training potential, both for students and teachers, training that we need to deepen, as we have many pedagogical deficiencies. In our country, we must place great emphasis on the importance of education as a means of improving the quality of life, as many students - especially girls do not go to school. This means working systematically with families to talk them into the importance of education. In addition to guaranteeing the right to education for all, and in order to improve the quality of education, we have the challenge of improving the infrastructure, because our schools are very poor... they don’t even have benches. We must also direct education towards training them for work and productivity so that they can improve their lives and get out of extreme poverty.

The national director of Fe y Alegría Congo, Fr Alfred Kiteso, S.J., insists that the Federation must promote a vigorous campaign at world level on the need to guarantee education for all, as a basis for sustainable human development that combats poverty. Let’s not forget that some African countries are used to living with several pandemics, now COVID-19, but also malaria and Ebola, among others.

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Dominican Republic

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Fe y Alegría International Federation

Testimonio

Ana Digna My name is Ana Digna Castillo. I am 15 years old, I am from the Dominican Republic and I am currently a leader of the Fe y Alegría Dominican Youth Network. When I joined the educational center where I am now - Fe y Alegría - I was asked to be part of this network. They told me about it and I loved the idea of a young person being able to decide on the issues that affect their community.

young person, I am in a vulnerable place, as there are many feminicides in my country. And that is what we are working on raising awareness among young people. From this whole process, I have learned that we can transform our realities through the network. First, by training ourselves, mobilizing ourselves and then raising awareness in the community. I recommend to the other young people that, even if they feel that what they are doing is not working, they should not get discouraged because, just like them, there are other young people who are going through similar situations and are mobilizing to do what they are doing. In time, they will see the results.

“Another thing that encouraged me to join was the idea that I, as young person, could change my context.”

Another thing that encouraged me to join was the idea that I, as a young person, could change my context. Being part of the Network has helped me, above all, on a personal level, as it develops me as a person and, more than that, it helps me to be a leader and a reference to be able to motivate other young people and have an influence on the problems that affect them. The main issues that are currently affecting my community are gender inequality, care and respect for the environment. As a

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Luz del Alba de la Cruz The Santo Niño Jesús School is located in Batey Lechería, a community of Haitian descendants, today, also with very poor populations from the Dominican Republic. Before the arrival of the sisters, the community lacked basic goods and services such as food, adequate housing, drinking water, health and education. It was very difficult for the community to live together.

“The education community faced the following challenge: how to continue to ensure quality education in this crisis?

The sisters, and the rest of the staff of the educational center, dedicated themselves to promote good treatment among people, equal rights, creation of job opportunities, improvement of health, good nutrition, child care, promotion of values and a comprehensive quality education for the excluded, based on Christian values and Human Rights. We were always guided by the words of Fr. José María Vélaz, S.J.: “The education of the poor cannot be a poor education”; and those of Cornelia Conelly, founder of the Congregation of the Holy Child of Jesus, who repeated: “Actions not words”.

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On March 19th 2020, the day on which our country started its quarantine by COVID-19, the education community faced the following challenge: how to keep ensuring quality education in this crisis? From the beginning, through the School-Community Relations team, we started to identify the needs of the people, detecting that people in the community live from day to day, so staying at home meant not having food. So, from the beginning, we decided to give food and hygiene kits to the elderly of the community, single mothers and the most vulnerable people. For us, the priority of educating the community includes a holistic view of the people, which also implies collaborating with the basic needs such as food and health of the people. The school does not work alone, it works together with the community looking for solutions, because we are called to go beyond and not be indifferent to the community’s problems.

Fe y Alegría International Federation

At the educational level, we have used different strategies to ensure that our children are able to learn and that the bread of learning reaches them in a creative and very humane way, despite the very low levels of connectivity. Although the school has been closed since March 2020, the management team, together with the staff, managed to ensure that the educational process did not come to a halt. They created school reinforcement materials, WhatsApp groups to follow up with families, provided school supplies for families to support education, as well as podcasts that were shared every week on parent groups and other media like YouTube. With the collaboration of the Parents and Guardians Society, the idea of the school from the grocery store was designed, an activity that consisted of using businesses in the area to place the podcasts recorded on USB memory sticks, with the aim that all

students and families would have access to the training offered by radio, without the need for internet. In the midst of the pandemic, our center has kept accompanying the families, motivating them and believing in the children. In turn, they believe in the school staff who work with heart, giving their best in every task we undertake. In conclusion, this pandemic has taught us to keep improving every day as a Center, to bring out the best we have to give to others, to look for strategies that help our students to learn, to be, to do and to live together in the midst of difficulties. It fills us with joy to serve and help improve the lives of people in the community. We believe, faithfully, that every person has the right to an integral quality education and for this reason we work with courage and enthusiasm.

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been the main means of communication and interrelation. The communication strategy has been a fundamental key, as groups of students, teachers, administrative and support staff have been created. Also, families have been actively involved and committed, despite their great limitations and weaknesses. Many parents have become empowered in the educational processes and in the use of ICT.

Learnings and challenges

Zero abuse, infinite care Fe y Alegría Dominicana has responded since the emergency started, and it has not only been concerned, but has also managed to keep the different processes moving on, attending to the calls for care and prevention during the quarantine period. In order to guarantee education in times of pandemic and to combat its consequences, Fe y Alegría educators made great efforts to keep teaching and attending to students at a distance, although we had to face the consequences of the digital gap and the lack of technological training. This forced us to learn as we went along and we had to be creative to overcome, by other means, the problems and deficiencies. WhatsApp has

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Regarding motivation and performance, there are students who are highly motivated with virtuality; even students who were doing badly are now doing very well. There are also students who keep their pace low and there are others whose performance has been affected by the move to virtuality. The school should take this diversity into account in order to be able to respond in the future to the different learning processes of these students. But we can affirm that Fe y Alegría Dominicana, today more than ever, even more than when we had proposed it, is an authentic network of networks especially through WhatsApp - which gives us a real opportunity to promote “edu communication” and virtual education, although we need real pedagogical training to guarantee a more formative use of the technologies that today are being used to transmit knowledge and not to promote permanent and critical self-learning. Given the deepening poverty caused by the pandemic among the most vulnerable families who depend all on informal work which was suspended - we collaborated in the distribution of food bags and hygiene kits to the neediest populations, whether or not they were members of Fe y Alegría. In addition to the supplies provided by the government, Fe y Alegría received significant aid from companies, groups and support organizations.

Fe y Alegría International Federation

Aware of the personal, family, social and educational effects caused by the pandemic, we had to plan a new path that would allow us to continue our education and reconnect with the confidence to live from faith and joy. To do this, we implemented different dynamics that we share through social networks and technological platforms; we aim to develop the emotional, psychosocial and spiritual skills necessary to help us face, overcome, heal and learn in times of COVID-19. As a movement of integral popular education and social promotion that works in the most impoverished and vulnerable sectors of the country, we are committed to deepening on the caring measures as the main axis of our work, through the “Proposal on socioemotional and spiritual skills”. The proposal includes many dimensions, such as care for the environment, care for others and, especially, care against gender violence and self-care in the context of the pandemic that we have been facing since the beginning of 2020. Fe y Alegría has assumed, with great responsibility, the training for coexistence and respect, the incorporation of the gender perspective in all its pedagogical and institutional management, in its curricular programmes and in daily life to strengthen quality education, social promotion and community development with a reflexive approach.

are raising awareness in their communities about issues of inequality, abuse and violence, and promoting care. These actions have greatly contributed to the empowerment and servant leadership of the students. In conclusion, Fe y Alegría Dominicana has developed four main actions during the pandemic: 1. Distribution of food rations to the neediest families; 2. Design and implementation a selfcare strategy for the entire educational community; 3. Training for environments;

teachers

virtual

design, elaboration and 4. And implementation of a complementary school year plan so that education could reach the children from “where the asphalt ends”. This last plan is still in place until the end of the school year in August 2021.

To this end, among other activities, we launched the campaign “Zero abuse, infinite care” in 63 educational centers and the respective communities in 16 provinces throughout the country, which was attended online by hundreds of children, teenagers, teachers, men and women. In this way, using networks and different technologies, more than 35,000 students

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Uruguay

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Testimony

Alejandra Gutiérrez The “Nuestro Lugar Children’s Club” is a nonformal education project, where children attend four hours a day, after school. On March 13th 2020, we went for a walk with the children, as we used to do every Friday. When we said goodbye to them that day, we never imagined how much would change from then on. The word that first struck us was uncertainty. That weekend, we didn’t know what the following days would bring. It was officially decided that the children would not go to school or to centers like ours. That Monday, we went to work and found ourselves in the midst of this uncertain, indefinable feeling. This feeling was short-lived. As a team, we shared this feeling and made a pact, not explicit, to accompany each other in what was happening to us. That’s when the certainties began: we were together, and that’s how we were going to face whatever was coming. We shook off the uncertainty and chose to trust. There were many things that didn’t depend on us, but the things that did depend on us we lived as it was described. At a more macro level, with the other Fe y Alegría Centers in Uruguay and with the national office, we experienced something similar: nobody knew what was coming, but we were sure that we were going to be together to get through it. Here, the centers never closed. The food emergency was on everyone’s agenda and framed the work in those first months, but we were convinced that our work had to go

much further. The weekly food deliveries to several of the families was an opportunity for us to meet, to see how they were doing. With those we didn’t see often, we looked for ways to keep in touch periodically.

“We gave ourselves time to reflect, so as not to fall into an activism that emptied itself of meaning, so as not to stop asking ourselves “why” and “what for”.

Although uncertainty was still present, it gradually gave way to meet again. This meant listening to the families and children, as well as to what was happening to us as a team and as a network. When, at the end of June, we received our first child, the experience took on a dimension that is difficult to put into words. We were moved by the joy they transmitted to us for coming back. We allowed ourselves to feel everything that this generated in us, to be able to listen to them and also to understand everything they experienced during those months when we didn’t see them. We came out stronger, without a doubt. We chose to trust, to accompany, to listen, not without moments of falls and failed attempts. We did what we could, and what we could not, we entrusted to God. “Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life??”, Matthew 6:27.

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Learnings and challenges

Teachers worked much harder and they did it with enthusiasm When the pandemic hit and schools were ordered to close, we had to spend the first three months providing food and hygiene kits to the families of our students who, forced to stay at home, were unable to continue their informal jobs and, consequently, they lost their income. Thousands of bags were distributed with products donated by the state and also by private companies. And although Fe y Alegría’s mission is to educate, we were obliged to provide humanitarian assistance to make education possible, given the economic hardship caused by the pandemic among the most impoverished population. Although teachers were very cooperative from the beginning, they soon began to raise the need to continue with the education, as they were very hurt that the Fe y Alegría students were left behind, while those in public schools continued to enjoy this benefit.

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This forced us to work hard to achieve virtual and distance education, and to overcome the many problems we had. As many did not have computers, we started a campaign to get companies to donate the ones they did not use - because they had replaced them with more modern ones which made it possible for us to provide these tools to many families who did not have them. Along with the equipment, we had to overcome the problem of poor or non-existent connectivity, which forced us to find other kind of instruments that would allow us to continue with the educational processes which had been interrupted and prevent the dropout rate, which we thought could be very high. In addition to all this, we also had to undertake a hurried training process, both with teachers and families, for the appropriate use of these new technologies.

Fe y Alegría International Federation

It should be noted that, despite the difficulties, the teachers of Fe y Alegría Uruguay have shown outstanding work, forging with vocation and dedication the education we dream of. Father Martín Haretche, Director of Fe y Alegría Uruguay, underlines this with real emotion and gratitude: “The teachers showed great enthusiasm and dedication. They worked harder than ever... I think they worked three times harder. They made a truly courageous effort to meet the new challenges and courageously took on board the hasty changes in the ways and styles of education, starting from home conditions, poor internet connectivity, difficulties in sustaining the motivation of parents, the availability of platforms or devices, the ease of incorporating ICT for learning or the resistance to using them”.

The pandemic also made it possible for us to increase our articulation with neighboring Fe y Alegría, especially with Argentina. Teachers’ networks were created in order to nurture pedagogical, emotional and spiritual education. Virtual forums and meetings were organized, which were highly appreciated and valued by the participants. We even had virtual masses to celebrate Pentecost, and Fe y Alegría educators from Chile and Paraguay joined us. This type of activity opens the way to greater coordination between the different Fe y Alegría organizations, which could lead us to establish a regional federative platform between the countries of the South.

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Venezuela

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Testimony

Belkis Belkis is now a pedagogical coordinator in a rural Fe y Alegría center with three unitary schools. She began working as a unitary teacher - one of those who attends several grades at the same time - and has also been a pastoral coordinator. But she is still “the teacher Belkis”. Her heart swells with joy when the children and the representatives shout happily when they see her passing by: “Here comes teacher Belkis”. She has been educating in these increasingly dangerous lands for nineteen years now, as irregular mining is entering with all its consequences of marginalization and violence. Belkis’ sadness rises to her face when she says: “Sometimes the children don’t finish primary school because they go to the mines with their parents. It’s hard. And even though they say there is gold, the children are still hungry. Belkis recalls that shortly after she started working in this rural center, there was an outbreak of malaria between 2002 and 2003. “We had a stretcher in the center and the children would fall over from shivering. There is still malaria in the area, but Belkis has not considered moving elsewhere. There are no shops or stationery stores nearby, just a few shops with a few products. They made their food with cassava, which the families grow themselves. The parents and pupils were happy to help and proudly displayed their notebooks.

“In order to be able to do their homework in this pandemic, they had a workshop to make notebooks out of waste paper and from what they could salvage from the notebooks of previous years.

Belkis gets a lot of exercise because, although she lives in the area, she has to walk to each of the venues. One is thirty minutes away, but another is two hours away - and she doesn’t complain. With almost two decades of greeting and giving love to children, she thinks she still has a lot to do. People don’t understand why she continues in this job with a salary that doesn’t pay her anything, even though she has a degree. She says that the effort to help others is worth it. She supplements her income by making sweets and cakes with ingredients she harvests in the area and, by the way, she teaches how to do it to mothers and students.

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Milber Milber lives in Pedregal, a town in the municipality of Marcano, in the state of Nueva Esparta. She has a bachelor’s degree in education and a master’s degree. She has been working for eight years at the María Luisa Tubores School of Fe y Alegría in the same municipality. She lives in a remote area of the school. She doesn’t like public transport, so she has to walk there. To shorten the journey, he crosses pastures and, with cows and other teachers, runs through the fields.

“The most beautiful thing is when, as I walk through the community, they greet me: “Goodbye, teacher!

He walks forty minutes there and forty minutes back. He doesn’t complain, he never misses. “I am very happy with my work. I like what I do. I started at the school as a classroom teacher. I love children, but three years ago, the headmistress asked me to take over as pastoral and citizenship coordinator. I didn’t really agree, but then I saw the importance of it. “The hardest thing is to see the need that families go through. There is a lot of hunger... that is very hard. The most beautiful thing is when, as I walk through the community, 124

they greet me: “Goodbye, teacher! That’s gratifying: to see their happy faces, to know that you can contribute with a little grain of sugar in their lives. Belkis, his headmistress, praises Milber’s spirit of solidarity: “She is attentive to everything and everyone. More than once, she has shown up with a tanker truck to help the teachers with the water problem”. The school is in a very poor area, with a squatter settlement next door. The school only has a primary school. The children, and most of the teachers, all live in the sector. The Internet is almost non-existent and only two teachers have it. Most families do not have smart phones to enable distance learning, but the staff are very committed to the school and have managed to maintain education. They meet every week at one of the teachers place where they have internet. They download the materials sent by the national Programa Escuela team, workshops with instructions, and a copy of it for each student is delivered in person even if it means spending the whole afternoon on it. The maintenance staff also helps in this task. One of the workers, who has very good handwriting, gives them a hand. Then they hand out the sheets to the students or some parents go to the teachers’ house to pick them up. One of the workers, who has a bicycle, also helps out by delivering the sheets to the students’ homes. The director, Belkis Valencia, is an extraordinary woman and a great animator. She values her staff tremendously and even collaborates with the education of the community by sending Fe y Alegría training materials to the community radio station.

Fe y Alegría International Federation

Aprendizajes y retos

Sharp and creative in the crisis

to educate. They pulled strength from weakness and sowed hope and spiritual strength so our students, hand in hand with their families, could take up the challenge of their education. The support staff, administrative staff and workers have been faithful and heroic, attending to the representatives, taking care of the centers together with neighbors and organized communities. The generosity of friends, benefactors and international organizations helped many of our students and staff to have access to food, transport and medicines. We were also able to provide many with smartphones to carry out their educational practice.

The pandemic has deepened the hardships and problems that we have been suffering for years: food shortages; the deficiencies of our health system; the high cost of any medicine; the shortage of public transport; the lack of water, gas and petrol; the frequent blackouts; and the impossibility of maintaining social isolation because we have to go out to be able to take food home every day. At the national level, the educational problem has worsened because we were not prepared to face it, nor did we have the necessary infrastructure for distance education education. In the words of Fr Jaime Aristorena, S.J., National Director of Fe y Alegría, “2020 has been a tough, atypical year, where we created and innovated, we responded to a changing and challenging reality, we faced it and we did our best. The very serious humanitarian crisis hit us hard even long before the pandemic. Staff, especially teachers and communicators, did not shy away from it. We created teams that found new ways to respond to the commitment

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We had to reorganize times, spaces and environments. We identified essential knowledge and prioritized cognitive and social competences. We supported the spiritual, socio-emotional and cognitive aspects of teachers and students. We set up campaigns on staying in school, valuing education and coexistence, pedagogy of love, resilience and social commitment. With the support of many, we provided food for 48,079 students and 4,123 workers in 85 schools. We implemented the “Todos y todas a la escuela” programme, creating safe and pleasant environments, with the provision of school supplies. We did this in 96 schools with 59,253 students and 2,310 teachers. Given that we consider ourselves to be more than a school, we promoted the reconstruction of the social fabric, community strengthening, we educated for entrepreneurship, we organized mothers who promote peace, youth groups through the Huellas Youth Movement, we trained university youth leaders, we attended to our 7,450 children left behind by the society and promoted environments of peace and citizenship, among others. During the pandemic, protecting students and staff from contracting the virus has been crucial. Caring for them from a distance has been the challenge. And we worked hard to do so. We created mixed teams and learned how to educate in emergencies and in several ways. We developed a wide variety of educational materials: teaching guides, infographics, post on social media, networks, healthy habits, prevention of COVID-19, videos, radio classes and microphones for the cultivation of interiority and spirituality, the prevention of violence, the culture of peace and the accompaniment of the family.

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In the university institutes, we have adopted project-based learning, learning communities, the use of radio and digital strategies. To train teachers in multimodal teaching, we produced fifteen training workshops, provided assistance for the purchase and provision of equipment and the credit for their telephones. We promoted the “Teachers on the phone” campaign, with the intention of raising funds to buy a thousand telephones. Our educational radio stations, with their open microphones, put the emphasis on life-saving communication, with useful information services for families and campaigns to prevent infections. We have learned from our successes and mistakes, and we are very happy with what we have achieved, even though we know there is still much to do. We have learned

Fe y Alegría International Federation

to take care of ourselves, to plan for emergencies, to take the context into account, to educate and manage remotely - with few methods, with virtual monitoring teams and to accompany teachers and families. We combined creativity and commitment to reach our students and participants, using the internet, social media, WhatsApp, smartphones, broadcasters, text messages, billboards and even home visits with the support of community organizations - with scarce resources, lack of equipment and poor connectivity services. We made parents our responsible partners in their children’s education. All these elements give us guidelines to continue strengthening education in the future. To this end, as an indispensable condition, we must keep demanding a decent salary for educators from the

State and society, because the miserable salary conditions of the staff (less than five dollars a month), at any moment, could collapse the entire education system if the appropriate measures are not taken. We will be left without teachers and, consequently, without schools, because “without teachers there are no schools”. We also consider it very important and necessary for the Federation to be a platform for the exchange of good practices and experiences to face the crisis, and also for solidarity support. Fe y Alegría, as a global movement of popular education for all, must strengthen its presence and raise its voice in public spaces to ensure that the proclaimed right to quality education becomes a reality for everyone.

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How many of us are we and where we are

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Fe y Alegría International Federation

+ 935.844 Participants

+ 40 mille

Workers

+ 1.5 mille

Geographic Locations

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Mission Partnerships

Society of Jesus

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JRS: Servicio Jesuita a Refugiados www.sjrlac.org

CPAL: Conferencia de Provinciales de América Latina y el Caribe www.jesuitas.lat/es

JRM: Servicio Jesuita a Migrantes www.sjme.org

FLACSI: Federación Latinoamericana de Colegios de la Compañía de Jesús wwwwww.flacsi.net

Secretariado para la Justica Social y la Ecología de la Compañía de Jesús www.sjcuria.global/es/secretariados-y-redes

AUSJAL: Asociación de Universidades confiadas a la Compañía de Jesús www.ausjal.org

Red Xavier www.xavier.network

ICAJE: Comisión Internacional para el Apostolado de la Educación Jesuítica www.sjweb.infoeducation/icaje. cfm?LangTop=1&Publang=1

Alboan www.alboan.org/es

IAJU: Asociación Internacional de Universidades Jesuitas www.iaju.org

Red Claver www.jesuitas.lat/es/hacemos/ red-claver

EDUCATE MAGIS www.educatemagis.org

Magis Americas www.magisamericas.org

Fe y Alegría International Federation

Unión Internacional de Religiosas www.internationalunionsuperiorsgeneral.org/es

IBM www.ibm.org/initiatives/p-tech

Ole Comunications www.olecommunications.com

Related Organizations

CLADE www.redclade.org ACCENTURE www.accenture.com/es-es OIJ www.oij.org AECID www.aecid.es/ES UNESCO www.es.unesco.org INDITEX www.inditex.com/es/comprometidos-con-las-personas/ apoyo-a-la-comunidad/programas-educativos-de-entreculturas

PORTICUS www.porticus.com/en/home

ADVENIAT www.adveniat.org

ALER www.aler.org

CME www.campaignforeducation.org

CELAM www.celam.org

Diócesis de Rottenburg – Stuttgart www.drs.de

Naciones Unidas www.un.org

SEDATEX

CIEC www.ciec.edu.co

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Note:

How are we organized

Teams, commissions and networks, have a group of people who are international referents.

C.DD.NN Assembly

Board of Directors DB

Work and Support Teams

General Coordinator GC

Advisory Committees

Internationalization

Global strategy

Leadership training

Popular Education

Child protection

Executive Secretariat Team ES

Sustainability Public Action

Technology and communication Management, Planning and Projects

Child protection

Economic Advice New Frontiers Axis

Sustainability Axis

Executive Coordination Team EC

Popular Education Axis

Public Action Axis

Virtual School

Initiative Leadership Team

Pedagogical training Educational Quality Inclusive education Youth Integral Ecology and Panamazonia

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Assessment and Impact measurement Gender

Networks Federal Initiatives Migration Citizenship

Identity and spirituality

Training for work Early Childhood Care

Fe y Alegría International Federation

Clear and transparent 62,56%

18,68%

People

Own funds

16,57%

Foundations/ Corporations

2,25%

Government

FIFYA 2020 Funding Sources and Expenditure

48,89% Training for work

56,65% Programs

27,03% Social Promotion

19,53% Measuring impact

4,7%

Education in values

7,09% Others

36,26%

Management

0,38%

Panamazonia

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Report on the audit of Financial Statements 2020

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Statement 2020

Directory 2020 -2021 Board of Directors F. Carlos Fritzen, S.J. General Coordinator International Federation of Fe y Alegría fi.coordinador@feyalegria.org F. Miquel Cortés Bofill, S.J. Director Fe y Alegría en Guatemala gt.director@feyalegria.org F. Daniel Villanueva, S.J. Vice-president Entreculturas – Fe y Alegría en España d.villanueva@entreculturas.org Sabrina Burgos Director New Frontiers and Public Action nuevasfronteras@feyalegria.org.co Miguel Molina Escalante Director Fe y Alegría en Honduras m.molina@feyalegria.org.hn F. Alfred Kiteso, S.J. Director Fe y Alegría Democratic Republic of Congo talk.be08@yahoo.fr 136

National Directorates Fernando Anderlic Fe y Alegría Director Argentina anderlic@feyalegria.org.ar Callao 542, C1022AAS -CABA, Buenos Aires Phone number:(5411) 52352281 www.feyalegria.org.ar

F. Francisco Pifarré, S.J. Fe y Alegría Director Bolivia direccionp@feyalegria.edu.bo Av. Arce N° 2519 esquina Plaza Isabel la Católica Zona San Jorge La Paz – Bolivia Phone numbers: (591) 2 – 2444134 / 2444136 / 2444139 www.feyalegria.edu.bo

F. Antonio Tabosa, S.J. Fe y Alegría Director Brazil antonio.tabosa@fealegria.org.br Rúa Rodrigo Lobato 141, Sumaré, Sao Paulo, SP, Brazil CEP 05030-130 Phone number: (55) 61 9944 9124 www.fealegria.org.br

Fe y Alegría International Federation

F. Tsayem Dongmo Saturnin, S.J. Fe y Alegría Director Republic of Chad

J. Alejandro Calderón Tobar Fe y Alegría Director El Salvador

dir.foijoietchad@gmail.com B.P. 8, Mongo, Chad Phone number: (235) 6776829 www.foietjoie-tchad.org

a.calderon@feyalegria.org.sv Calle del Mediterráneo, S/N, entre Av. Río Amazonas y Av. Antiguo Cuscatlán, Col. Jardines de Guadalupe, Antiguo Cuscatlán, La Libertad, El Salvador. Postal code: 662 Phone numbers: (503) 22431282 / 22439738

F. Juan Cristóbal García Huidobro, S.J. Fe y Alegría Substitute Chile jgarciah@jesuits.net Lord Cochrane 110, Piso 3. Santiago, Chile Phone number: (56) 9 9757 2174 www.feyalegria.cl

Víctor Murillo Fe y Alegría Director Colombia victormurillo@feyalegria.org.co Carrera 5 No. 34-39. Bogotá, Colombia. Phone number: (57) 1-3209360 www.feyalegria.org.co

Carlos Vargas Fe y Alegría Director Ecuador c.vargas@feyalegria.org.ec Calle Asunción OE 238 y Manuel Larrea (esquina) sector El Ejido, Postal code: 17-08-8623. Quito – Ecuador Phone number: (593 2) 321 44 55 www.feyalegria.org.ec

F. Daniel Villanueva, S.J. Vice- president Entreculturas Fe y Alegría Spain d.villanueva@entreculturas.org Calle Maldonado, 1A, 28006 Madrid – España Phone number: (34) 91-5902672 www.entreculturas.org P. Francisco Iznardo, S.J. Fe y Alegría Director Guatemala francisco.iznardo@feyalegria.org.gt 12 Avenida 2-07, Zona 1. Guatemala –Guatemala Phone number: (502) 2324-0000 www.feyalegria.org.gt P. Paul-Fils Belotte, S.J. Fe y Alegría Director Haiti ht.directeur@foietjoie.org Comunidad Jesuita 95, Route du Canape Vert, Port-au-Prince, Haiti, W.I Phone number: (509)409-5623 www.foietjoie-haiti.org

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Miguel Molina Escalante Fe y Alegría Director Honduras

F. Marco Tulio Gómez, S.J. Fe y Alegría Director Panama

m.molina@feyalegria.org.hn Zona de la Compañía, dentro del Centro Técnico Loyola, Yoro – Honduras Phone numbers: (504) 26473516/2647-4741 www.feyalegria.org/honduras

pa.director@feyalegria.org Parque Alicante, final Calle Principal. Las Mañanitas, Panamá. República de Panamá. Phone number: (507) 66074757 www.feyalegria.org.pa

F. Florin Silaghi, S.J. Fe y Alegría Director Italy direzione@feyalegria.it Plaza San Fedele 4. Milano. Phone number: 0286352305 www.feyalegria.org/italia F. Emile Ranaivoarisoa, S.J. Fe y Alegría Director Madagascar Mahamanina - B.P. 1200 Fianarantsoa 301 Madagascar Phone number: +261 344893643 eranaivoarisoa@yahoo.com F. Everardo Víctor, S.J. Fe y Alegría Director Nicaragua ni.director@feyalegria.org Walmart 1 c. al sur 3 1/2 c. abajo. Reparto San Martín, No. 36. Managua, Nicaragua Phone number: (505) 2266-4994 www.feyalegria.org.ni

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Nancy Raquel Fretes, odn Fe y Alegría Director Paraguay director@feyalegria.org.py Juan E. O’Leary N° 1.847 e/6a y 7a Proyectadas. Asunción – Paraguay Phone number: (595) 9826 22257 www.feyalegria.org.py F. Ernesto Cavassa, S.J. Fe y Alegría Director Peru ecavassa@feyalegria.org.pe Cahuide 884 Jesús María Lima 11 – Perú Phone number: +51 1 471-3428 www.feyalegria.org.pe F. Alfred Kiteso, S.J. Fe y Alegría Director Democratic Republic of Congo talk.be08@yahoo.fr Communauté du Collège Boboto 7, Avenue Père Boka. B.P. 7245, Kinshasa I. République Démocratique du Congo

Fe y Alegría International Federation

F. José Ramón López, S.J. Fe y Alegría Director Dominican Republic direccion@feyalegria.org.do Calle Cayetano Rodríguez 114, Gazcue, Santo Domingo. Dto. Nacional, República Dominicana. Postal Code: 25310 Phone number: +1 (829) 259 8430 www.feyalegria.org.do Martín Haretche Fe y Alegría Director Uruguay mharetche@feyalegria.org.uy Calle 8 de octubre No. 2738. Montevideo, Uruguay. Phone number: (598-2) 4872717 ext. 356 www.feyalegria.org.uy P. Manuel Jaime Aristorena, S.J. Fe y Alegría Director Venezuela ve.director@feyalegria.org Edif. Centro Valores, Piso 7, esquina Luneta, Altagracia. Caracas – Venezuela. Phone numbers: (58) 212– 5647423 / 5631776 / 5645013 www.feyalegria.edu.ve

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Office and support team for the General Coordination Carrera 5 N° 34-39 Bogotá, Colombia. (57) 314 868 4603 www.feyalegria.org

Leadership training Miguel Cruzado fi.formacion@feyalegria.org Wendy Pérez wendy.perez@feyalegria.org.gt Virtual Schoo Nancy Montero Olmos | fi.coordescuelavirtual@feyalegria.org

General Coordinator F. Carlos Fritzen, S.J. fi.coordinador@feyalegria.org Executive Secretariat Team Somarick Roca Robby Ospina F. Marco Tulio Gómez, S.J. Gerardo Lombardi (C) fi.secrejec@feyalegria.org Executive Coordination Team Popular Education Axis Gehiomara Cedeño | fi.educacionpopular@feyalegria.org New Frontiers Axis F. Carlos Fritzen, S.J. | fi.coordinador@feyalegria.org Sustainability Axis Gabriel Vélez | fi.sostenibilidad@feyalegria.org Public action axis Gerardo Lombardi | fi.accionpublica@feyalegria.org

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Janeth Angarita Cisneros | fi.adminescuelavirtual@feyalegria.org Management, Planning and Projects Management Somarick Roca | fi.administracion@feyalegria.org Planining Robby Ospina | fi.planificacion@feyalegria.org Projects Gabriel Vélez | fi.proyectos@feyalegria.org Services Aleida Betancurt | fi.servicios@feyalegria.org Communication and Technology Communication Coordination Gerardo Lombardi | fi.coordcomunicacion@feyalegria.org

Fe y Alegría International Federation

Content management María Paula Arango | fi.comunicacion@feyalegria.org Communication Support Erika Briceño | fi.soportecomunicacion@feyalegria.org Digital Communication Daniela Londoño | fi.comunicaciondigital@feyalegria.org Graphic Design Pablo Ivorra | fi.imagengrafica@feyalegria.org Technology Coordination José Ignacio Peraza | fi.coordtecnologia@feyalegria.org Technology Support Maximiliano Burgos | fi.soportetecnologia@feyalegria.org Internationalization F. Carlos Fritzen, S.J. | fi.coordinador@feyalegria.org F. Daniel Villanueva, S.J. | d.villanueva@entreculturas.org María Luisa Berzosa | mlberzosa@gmail.com Pablo Funes | p.funes@entreculturas.org Luca Fabris | l.fabris@entreculturas.org Robby Ospina | fi.planificacion@feyalegria.org

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International F ederative Team

Referents Gabriel Vélez | fi.sostenibilidad@feyalegria.org Somarick Roca | fi.administracion@feyalegria.org

Pedagogical training

Integral ecology and Panamazonia

Leader Venezuela: Beatriz Borjas | beatrizborjasb@gmail.com Second Leader Ecuador: Beatriz García | beatriz.garcia@feyalegria.org.ec Referent Gehiomara Cedeño | fi.educacionpopular@feyalegria.org

Leader Perú: Irma Mariño| imarino@feyalegria.org.pe Second Leader Brasil: José Blanco jose.blanco@fealegria.org.br Referents F. Carlos Fritzen, S.J.| fi.coordinador@feyalegria.org F. Marco T. Gómez, S.J.| pa.director@feyalegria.org Robby Ospina| fi.planificacion@feyalegria.org

Educational quality Leader Ecuador: Marlene Villegas| m.villegas@feyalegria.org.ec Other leaders Guatemala: Wendy Pérez | wendy.perez@feyalegria.org.gt España: Yenifer López| y.lopez@entreculturas.org Referent Gehiomara Cedeño | fi.educacionpopular@feyalegria.org Assessment and Impact measurement Leaderv España: Lucila Rodríguez| l.rodriguez@entreculturas.org Second Leader Equipo de coordinación ejecutiva fi.secrejec@feyalegria.org

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Job training Leader Bolivia: Adela Colque| a.colque@formacionparaeltrabajo.org Second Leader Honduras: Óscar Cáceres o.caceres@feyalegria.org.hn Referent Gabriel Vélez| fi.sostenibilidad@feyalegria.org Youth Leader Colombia: Juan Pablo Rayo | fi.jovenes-ciudadania@feyalegria.org Second Leader España: Jessica García | j.garcia@entreculturas.org

Fe y Alegría International Federation

Argentina: Yanina Garbesi | yaninagarbesi@feyalegria.org.ar Referent Gehiomara Cedeño | fi.educacionpopular@feyalegria.org Citizenship Leader España: Irene Ortega | i.ortega@entreculturas.org Second Leader Colombia: Por asignar Referent Gerardo Lombardi | fi.accionpublica@feyalegria.org Gender Leader Nicaragua: Lucila Cerillo | fi.genero.coordinacion@feyalegria.org Second Leader Rep. Dominicana: Yesenia Caraballo | convivenciayciudadania4@feyalegria.org.do Referent Gehiomara Cedeño | fi.educacionpopular@feyalegria.org

Migration Leader Guatemala: Blanca Gutiérrez | blanca.gutierrez@feyalegria.org.gt Second Leader Haití: Por asignar Referents Gerardo Lombardi | fi.accionpublica@feyalegria.org Gabriel Vélez| fi.sostenibilidad@feyalegria.org Identity and spirituality Leader Paraguay: Catalino Corvalán | katatoto@gmail.com Other Leaders Chile: Macarena Rubio | mrubio@redignaciana.cl Madagascar: Por asignar Referents Gerardo Lombardi | fi.accionpublica@feyalegria.org F. Marco T. Gómez, S.J.| pa.director@feyalegria.org Early childhood care

Inclusive education Leader Bolivia: Carmiña de la Cruz | areaespecial@feyalegria.edu.bo Second Leader Ecuador: Nelly Andrade | nelly.andrade@feyalegria.org.ec Referent Gehiomara Cedeño | fi.educacionpopular@feyalegria.org

Leader Uruguay: Fiorella Magnano | fmagnano@feyalegria.org.uy Other Leaders Congo: Arvie Muayi | mrubio@redignaciana.cl Colombia: Fabiola Garcerá Arango| direccion.cali@feyalegria.org.co Referent Gehiomara Cedeño | fi.educacionpopular@feyalegria.org

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