Peru: Kusi Kawsay School
Renovation of the Kusi Kawsay School
In the school year 2023/ 2024, the Kusi Kawsay School would like to improve and rebuild its infrastructure. After the years of the pandemic, everyone was looking forward to returning to face-to-face teaching. However, the teaching team found that the classrooms were deteriorated during the time when no children were allowed to come to school. Unfortunately, due to the weather and lack of maintenance, the classrooms are currently in very poor condition. The hygienic services are limited and the biodigester, the school had, doesn’t work anymore.
To fix the school and to buy construction materials, the school needs about 7,200 euros. The parents and teachers of the children will work together to repair the school.
About the project:
Kusi Kawasy translates to "live happily" and is the name of the small Waldorf school in Pisac, a town in the Andes. The Kusi Kawsay Andean School is an autonomous, non-profit school deeply rooted in Andean tradition that gives children from economically disadvantaged families in the region the opportunity to develop into confident and free young adults who want to make the world a better place.
It is an independent, co-educational school attended by a total of 120 children. 90 percent of the children come from indigenous communities in the area. Here, children are taught in kindergarten, elementary school and secondary school. The school's 18 teachers use an alternative pedagogy that combines aspects of Waldorf education, traditional Andean values and environmental sustainability to develop lifelong learners.
Kusi Kawsay teaches all academic subjects following the Andean agrarian calendar that honors and celebrates the local natural cosmic cycles. Here, children are provided with a solid education that not only ensures a sense of dignity and self-esteem, but also provides tools to promote economic and emotional well-being. This will help the children, and by extension their families, to emerge from the state of marginalization in which they live and empower them to protect their right to participate in modern society with the full richness of their culture, acting as advocates in the context of the outside world.
"Our ecological ethos is a social ethos, for we are all interconnected, interlinked and interdependent in this existence. Attention to ecology goes even further, into the realm of heart, respect and love for the earth."