From the streets to the classrooms: Bogotá working children return to school

The nights rummaging through garbage cans Bogota in search of recyclable material were left behind for the Suárez brothers. Matilde and Rodrigo returned to school, this time to a high-quality, bilingual one, a dream difficult to achieve for poor families in Colombia.

“I haven’t studied for three years, it was a great opportunity because I needed to grab a notebook and write, so they can teach me,” Matilde, 12, tells AFP.

At 4:30 the sky is still dark and his mother heats water on a stove for the morning bath. Rodrigo, 11 years old, and his sister have some corn flakes without milk for breakfast and leave by bus to the Still I Rise school, founded by an Italian NGO of the same name.

There are 14 siblings and only Paula (19) has finished high school, laments Sandra Suárez, the single mother of the family, behind thick glasses. Orphaned since she was a child and raised by relatives in the world of recycling, Suárez is studying primary school at 52 years old. “We live with continuous work, every day, so we see it as normal” not to study, he explains in a country where 37% of the population is poor.

The calluses on his feet reveal four decades of carrying huge sacks of plastic, metal and cardboard through the streets of Ciudad Bolívar, one of the most populated towns in Bogotá, located in the poor south of the city. All of her children have accompanied her at some point.

In mid-2021, he removed the three little ones from the public school where they received distance education, since “They weren’t learning anything.”

A year later she tried to enroll them, but the registration window moved to a virtual portal that the mother could not access from the only cell phone in the house, without a computer or Internet and where six relatives live.

“So late, so far away”

Without school, Matilde and Rodrigo began to accompany their mother on extensive tours that began at sunset and lasted past midnight.

“It wasn’t because she was crazy, but because she couldn’t” sign them up, explains Sandra. Matilde assumed the new routine with patience.

“Sometimes I like to recycle, sometimes I don’t. I would like to change that of going to recycle so late, so far away. “Walking back is difficult for us who have no one to take us,” says the youngest.

The girl adjusts a balaca (band to hold her hair) while waiting for the bus that takes them to school.

“Here in Ciudad Bolívar there are levels of vulnerability that are very complex and very different from those we saw in other countries like Kenya, like Congo, like Syria, like Yemen in which we operate”explains Giovanni Volpe, Still I Rise official.

The organization emerged in 2018 and founds free schools for minors in unschooling contexts.

Some 470,000 primary and secondary students dropped out during the 2022-2023 academic year in Colombia, according to the Ministry of Education, which recorded 140,000 more dropouts than in the previous period.

He fifty% of those attending the recently inaugurated school in Ciudad Bolívar are Venezuelan migrants.

“For a rich man”

The orange and black building where the school operates has four floors and capacity for about 150 students. Admission is free, but kids must go through a two-week selection process. The criteria are “aptitude, curiosity and level of vulnerability.”

The Kenyan school, one of the first in Still I Rise, is about to receive International Baccalaureate (IB) certification, a seal that distinguishes some of the best primary and secondary schools in the world. They hope that Bogotá will follow the same steps.

“We want to take this methodology out of elite schools and give it to kids who couldn’t afford it.”says Nicolo Govoni, CEO of Still I Rise.

In Bogotá a private school of this type costs about US$1,000 a month. In this city of 8 million inhabitants, only nine public schools have an IB certificate. In one of the most unequal countries in the world, it takes about 11 generations (more than 300 years) to escape poverty, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (2018).

The Still I Rise school costs about US$25,000 to operate and is financed by donations from individuals, according to the NGO. After the second day of school, the little Suárez children practice their first words in English.

“A bilingual school, for me that is for a rich person”says his mother. The children also receive breakfast and lunch, a relief for Sandra, who says she earns between 15 and 20 dollars a week.

“At home I have one meal a day because there is nothing more (…) My children are not going to have just one, but they are going to have all three,” Suárez celebrates.