Like many principals, she lay awake at night tormented by the toll that gang warfare was taking on her school. The shooting deaths of two students on their way to school in 1997 was only one measure of the crisis.
Most of her young charges had at least one relative, friend or neighbor who had been killed over turf or drugs. To discover a loaded pistol in a child’s book bag no longer sent shock waves through her staff — only a deeper sadness.
Although the prevalence of firearms had reduced education to survival mode, she realized that increased security was not a lasting answer. She had to find a way to make peace more than just an absence of weapons, but rather a presence of strength and healing.
Ligia Alzate sat in our office one morning last spring and described a world both familiar and surreal. The very name of her city — Medellín, Colombia — connotes for many outsiders the instant stereotype of a society in a death spiral.
So vivid and relentless are the media images of narco-terrorists, urban warfare and child assassins that, from a distance, we’re almost incapable of imagining pockets of humanity and hope amid the chaos.
Yet, up close, in Ligia Alzate’s soft, patient voice, her firsthand struggles with youth violence, family reticence and funding shortages resonate strongly with the daily concerns of many U.S. educators.
The Living Together project that Alzate co-founded in 1998 appears to be working. The student killings in the neighborhood have stopped. Further, the program’s comprehensive model of critical pedagogy, community education and parent involvement has spread to more than 40 schools.
The context of national calamity has forced Alzate and her colleagues to question, at the deepest level, what it means to be a teacher. Their answer, field-tested under the harshest conditions and documented in their “Manual of Co-existence,” affirms the core values of multicultural and anti-bias education: tolerance, respect, dialogue, cooperation.
But one additional goal may offer special encouragement for teachers everywhere facing new global uncertainties. Solidarity, the manual explains, "is to feel participatory in each other’s difficulty and to collaborate on solutions."
Ligia Alzate’s visit highlights both the worst nightmare of globalization and its brightest promise. In the cold heart of the international drug trade, there lives a teacher without borders.
Sometimes the narrowest of windows — a crowded school in a war-torn city — can reveal the broad vista of universal human rights. Alzate’s vision of solidarity challenges us to open our own windows onto a wider world.
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