At the edge of the road, where Route 56 begins, with her white coat on so that they can identify that she is a teacher, she stretches out her right arm and shows her hand.
It is 8 o’clock on a freezing winter morning and María Domínguez (29 years old) is at the entrance to the small city of Florida, 90 kilometers north of Montevideo, trying to get a driver to stop and offer her a ride.
He has to be at the rural school in Paso de la Cruz del Yí before 10, 108 kilometers from his house, in the middle of nowhere, to teach Juliana, 4 years old, and Benjamín, 9, the only ones two students from that Uruguayan educational center.
“They are children of families who live in the area and work in the field,” he tells BBC Mundo.
María has no other way to get to school other than hitchhiking, which in that South American country is known as “hitchhiking.”
He doesn’t have his own car, and if he had he couldn’t afford the fuel for such a long trip every day.
Yes, he has a motorcycle, but he says that making the entire journey on it is impossible. “I would never do it, there are many kilometers and with the first trip I already destroyed it. Furthermore, the route is not in good condition,” she says.
He points out, in turn, that there is a significant flow of large vehicles on these roads, making it dangerous for him to travel those more than 100 kilometers one way and another 100 kilometers back on two wheels.
The problem doesn’t end there.
If I wanted to go by public transportation I would have to take two buses, first one that leaves Florida at 6:15 am and then another that according to the timetable should leave at 9. “But since the route is in arrangement, with luck it happens at 9:30, so I wouldn’t arrive on time,” he explains.
For the return trip, there is a bus line that passes along the route near the school only when the sun goes down, and for the second trip there is no public transportation until the next day.
A journey in four sections
María arrives at the starting point on a motorcycle and parks it in front, next to a service station. Sometimes she even leaves the key on. She knows that when she returns it will be intact.
The motorcycle he uses in Florida is not his, but his partner’s. Since he doesn’t need it, he lends it to her so he can make the first leg of his long daily commute.
There he waits for Noelia, a colleague who works at another nearby rural school.
When they get someone to stop to take them, they first have a 31-kilometer trip to the east ahead of them.
“The ones I have the most luck with are truck drivers,” he says.
It is also successful with people who work in the fields, and those who agree to wear it are almost always men.
After that first section, they get off at a parador in San Gabriel, a town of 172 people where the route they were traveling along intersects with another that goes from south to north of the country.
Then, they return to their position at the edge of the asphalt in search of someone willing to lift them into their vehicle and take them up the map.
María has a 63 kilometer journey ahead of her; Noelia descends a little earlier.
María says that sometimes the driver takes a detour or ends his journey earlier than she needs, so she must resort to the generosity of a third driver.
After 40 minutes of travel, she arrives at the Jazmín ranch, a country estate where she meets Eco, as she calls her, “or La Guerrera, because she has been through so many things…”.
“She never did a dirt road. She started doing a dirt road last year,” says María, as if personifying her.
Eco is a small displacement motorcycle that his mother gave him when he turned 15.
“He gave me the choice between the party and the motorcycle, and I always thought that the motorcycle was going to serve me much more than a little party where I was going to spend a good night and that’s it,” he recalls.
Now she is the one who takes her to the remote school every day.
Thanks to Umpiérrez, the landlord of the Jazmín ranch, you can leave the Eco indoors.
Entry to rural areas
María finished studying a teaching degree in 2019. The following year was the beginning of the covid-19 pandemic and in-person classes were suspended in Uruguay, as throughout the world.
The first students to return to the classrooms were those from rural areas, in May 2020. That is why María began as a substitute teacher in rural schools and the directors of the schools in the area shared her contact for when they had to cover absences. of tenured teachers.
“At first when they wrote to me I said yes and then asked how to get there,” he says.
But in both 2020 and 2021 he could go and return by bus to the schools where he had to teach.
“The experience of hitchhiking is from last year,” he says.
In 2022 she was assigned to another rural school, close to the current one, and on some occasions it happened to her that when she returned, no one would take her and she had to return to school on the motorcycle before the sun went down.
In the dark it is impossible to travel those dirt and stone roads with a motorcycle light that is very dim and cattle that are loose in the field.
A second mother
María gets on the motorcycle, rides a mile and a half onto a winding dirt road where she passes another rural school, a train station abandoned since the 1990s and whose tracks are covered by grass, and It travels 12 kilometers until it arrives at 9:45, 9:50, with a short margin to open the premises and wait for the arrival of Juliana and Benjamín to start the class at 10.
Why have a school open for only two children?
“There may be different reasons why that child needs to go to that school: because he lives far away and the closest school is that one; because of the parents’ jobs, who may leave the child there on the way; or because there is a ravine that rainy days grow and the school he can access is that one,” the teacher responds.
The Paso de la Cruz del Yí school is like a house built with blocks and a gable roof. It has a classroom, two bathrooms, a kitchen and a small bedroom that no one uses now, but where María has a mattress and blankets in case she one day has to spend the night there.
Benja arrives with her mother, Carla, who at the end of March was hired by the public education administration body to clean and cook at the school.
Between the start of classes on March 6 and Carla’s arrival, María had to take care of, in addition to academic tasks, cleaning and cooking for the children.
Every 15 days, the teacher goes to the supermarket and purchases food and cleaning products that are necessary for her educational center. With a menu previously designed by nutritionists from the public administration, she looks for the ingredients with which Carla will then cook for the children and for themselves.
Teaching two students of such different ages at the same time is not easy. While one has to learn to multiply and divide, the youngest does not know how to read or write.
Therefore, start the class by talking about what the children want to share and then, as you move on to each one’s tasks, try to find ways for the two of you to work together, even if the learning levels are different.
“With the same instruction, I can ask the little one to draw and the big one to write. If there is a craft job, I can add the big one to the little one,” he says.
“It would be a shame if every day were separated, everyone in their own little bubble,” he adds.
The class schedule ends at 3 in the afternoon, and in the middle they have a one-hour break to eat and play.
Since there are so few in the school, things become very familiar.
“The children have called me mom on more than one occasion. It is inevitable, because the bond is very close,” she says.
After closing the school, María returns in the Eco to the farm, leaves it under protection and positions herself again on the side of the road.
Waiting for the next ride.
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BBC-NEWS-SRC: https://www.bbc.com/mundo/articles/c19gzz70ndno, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-09-13 11:40:06
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