Teachers who are not on any payroll: Hugo and doña Ligia
A rural head teacher and the guardian of a plant nursery — two community educators who have taught us more than we could ever teach them.
On paper, the Foundation “supports” Pijao’s educational community. In practice, half of what we know was taught to us by the community itself. These are two of our teachers — neither appears on any payroll of ours, and without them nothing would work.
Hugo Murcia has been head teacher of the La Mariela school since long before the Foundation existed: the relationship with his school community goes back to 2018. From him we learned that a rural school is not sustained by good wishes but by continuity — during the pandemic, when in-person classes stopped, the answer was technology so as not to lose touch with the students; later, the focus matured towards food sovereignty: tools, seeds and technical assistance so families could grow their own food. The school garden ended up teaching the market who is in charge.
“Thank you for dreaming our dreams, for empathising with our reality and for walking by our side. With your help, today we sow hope, cultivate dignity and harvest a fairer, more sustainable future.” — Hugo Murcia, head teacher of the La Mariela school
Doña Ligia Villamil is the guardian of El Patio, the plant nursery that today houses the Bonplandia Laboratory — a space that belongs to her and that she opened to the municipality’s children. Her knowledge of medicinal plants is her own heritage, older than us and than any laboratory; our task has merely been to put a roof next to it and bring her students. Her philosophy fits in three words that give her testimony its name: “to sow is to heal”. And her favourite botanical lesson disarms any agronomist: “what many call ‘weeds’ are actually treasures.”
The lesson from both is the same, spoken in two accents: education is not brought in from outside. It was already in the territory — in a head teacher who did not give up and in a woman who turned her nursery into a school. What a learning foundation does is join, in partnership and with respect, the teachers who were already there.