Welcome!

We are delighted to welcome you to the new English language version of our Spanish language blog Andares de las Bibliotecas Ruralesde Cajamarca. This blog takes up the baton from the previous English language blog which, due to a lack of volunteer translators, we were unable to maintain for a number of years. It is with great pleasure therefore, that we announce that we can now resume transmission.

Stay tuned to hear of the great work of our network of volunteers – from the city of Cajamarca to the rural highlands, who continue to honour the rich oral tradition of this ancient culture by producing, sharing and reading books by and for the campesino communities of Cajamarca.

The Network

The network was conceived and founded in 1971 by the reverend John Metcalf and the farmers who accompanied him at that time.  Since 1972 this initiative has developed through adapting to the filigree of expectations of the rural population itself.  Perhaps its greatest virtue was to not set out with a programme or model; instead experience itself giving it the possibility to grow and move forward.

Without premises, without vehicles, underpinned by volunteering, exchanging books as seeds are exchanged between the lowlands and the highlands; the network consolidated its links and established its own possibilities.

The movement is concentrated in rural areas.  It could take another name, given that “library”, in the usual sense, does not relate to the function that is carried out (in that not one academically trained librarian is employed); the use of books as tools lends that characteristic, but does not define its existence nor the objective which is sought.

In the city of Cajamarca a Central Office is run by three people dedicated to the administrative and technical duties.  Bureaucracy is considered a harmful hindrance and so all forms of centralisation in terms of decision making and timetabling are abandoned.  The office, then, merely consists of a supporting platform that reinforces the defined movement.

  

Organisation

The consistency of the Network is the key to its function: a collection of Rural Libraries-Communities makes up a Sector, lead by a Sector Coordinator who is also a librarian; a collection of Sectors makes up an Area, lead by an Area Coordinator who also has a sector and its library.  The group of Area Coordinators constitutes the Permanent Coordination Council.  This Council elects a General Coordinator, a farmer like all the Coordinators and Librarians, who is then ratified at the General Assembly (the congregation of Rural Librarians, Central Office, Sector and Area Coordinators).  Then, a Council of Elders, an entity made up of veteran Librarians and Coordinators of the movement, clarifies and focuses the key aspects of the Network.

  

So, the start and end point is the community itself.

Workings    

The Rural Librarian is elected at a community assembly.  The regard and affection demonstrated are paramount.  His/her house is the library, his/her family the librarians.  There are no shelves, it is voluntary, there are no salaries.  They manage a collection of books which are exchanged, after reading, with those from the neighbouring rural library.  The books come and go.  The harvest is collected.  To continue enriched.  

Our Objectives

• Recognise and invigorate our own culture.
• Learn to read and write as part of our own way of life.
• Continually serve to provide information and training through the use of books.
• Produce literary material from the knowledge of the population itself.
• Encourage and accompany the creation of reading groups and the application of what is read.
• Invigorate traditional knowledge.
• Support cultural activities of the rural communities.

Our Tools

“We exhibit a great range of our tools in the countryside, which represent work, which allow us to work our lands for the multiplication of lives and the primordial subsistence in all aspects... the work that we display is the collective effort of many of our brothers and sisters from different provinces, those that work at the centre of the Network of Libraries.” 

 - José Humberto Velarde Chávez, member of the community of Agomarca

Farmers: Based on the identity and dignity of the Andean populations, in whom persists the harmonious equilibrium of existence and the assurance of life through the daily work in the fields.  The rhythm of our accompaniment is fixed to the rhythm of the agricultural cycles.

Community members: The focal point, the generator and multiplier of life and health of all people.  This implies belief and faith in the sacredness of the earth and the cosmos.  To assert this sense of community, of being part of the whole, requires the invigoration of the memory of the community: to rescue the sense of being, what we always were and are.

Volunteers: The root participants of this process do not respond to circumstantial or economic stimuli, but transcend them.  It is the will to ensure the health and well being of others, to support and reciprocate.

Witnesses: To walk. This implies giving testimony to the journeys and knowledge shared.  For this reason the book is used as a tool and focal instrument of work, an assimilated cooking pot of learning and multiplier of knowledge from all communities.

Our Land

Given the conventional concept of a library it is necessary to put things into context: in our communities there is no electricity supply, nor running water or drainage.  In many communities families eat only what they manage to produce from their own plots of land.  Despite the statistics which say otherwise, in many hamlets more than half the population cannot read or write, and if they once did know how it was soon forgotten through either a lack of practice or the availability of suitable reading material.

Although their work feeds the entire country, the farmers receive laughable prices for their products.

Cajamarca

Cajamarca is located in the northern mountains of Peru and is considered one of the most deprived parts of the country.  Some call it “the poorest poverty” and that is more than just a name to the hungry.

Yet Cajamarca produces 78% of the lentils consumed in Peru.  Of the 33,000 metric tonnes of dried peas produced nationally, 37% is produced in Cajamarca.  We also produce 30% of the 120,000 metric tonnes of coffee, almost 25% of the soya and close to 20% of the 230,450 metric tonnes of amylaceous corn.  No other Department produces more milk or gold either in the whole of Peru.  Cajamarca also produces a third of the garlic in the country, and ranks second for the production of husked rice (16.6%), yams (16%), dried beans (14.3%) and wheat (12.1%); third for the production of papaya (17.3%), choclo corn (12%) and green peas (11%); fourth for the production of yucca (9.1%), and fifth for the production of potatoes (8%).

However, in Cajamarca 80% of the population can’t afford bread.  The official statistics say malnutrition affects 65% of children and each year 52 in every 1000 die before their first birthday.  But in some provinces 80% are denied any crust whatever.  The statistics also say that in some places almost 20% of people do not know how to read and write, particularly women, and in general, 10% of those between 15 and 17 are illiterate.  It is referred to technically as a “Department of Very Low Educational Development”.  Cajamarca has then been further impoverished since the exploitation with impunity of the richest gold mines on the continent.

Today, in spite of this, the whipped of history, the marginalised of the macro economy, those ignored by officious science are here today, not as objects of study, but as subjects of our own process and protagonists of a journey forged from strength and soul.

Our History

Times of revolution and change.  Times of urgencies and emergencies.  Pope Paulo VI says at the opening of the Second Latin American Episcopal conference, held in Medellin in 1968: “We cannot stand in solidarity with systems and structures which cover and favour grave and oppressive inequalities between the classes and the citizens of the same country”.  Paulo Freire in 1970: “Now nobody educates anybody, just as nobody educates themselves: people educate each other together, influenced by the world”. 

The Ministry of Education at a World Congress in 1971: “Peru is at one of the most important and decisive moments in its history [...] we are committed to a liberating education and to the mission to create a new society”.  Agrarian reform, industrial nationalisation, social mobilisation, the need to know the laws and the roots of such.   

John Metcalf, English Priest nationalised as a Peruvian, accompanies the countrymen of Cajamarca in their thirst for knowledge and the means to continue learning.  Leaflets, magazines and newspaper cuttings, novels are passed from one to another and the eagerness fuels itself: beneath each hat the arrogance always resident in the written word is steadily defeated.  A spade can be used to plough furrows or dig graves; the book, source of foreign aggression, emerges as another well from which to drink.  Like this bulls were tamed, wheat was domesticated, the harp was recreated and horses broken in.  The communities struck down by the book nurture those pages to continue strengthening  themselves.                 

Campesina Encyclopedia Project

Is the Andean oral tradition defined by its orality or does it imply a diversity of factors which are maintained in the relationship between society and nature?

The study of oral traditions from the beginnings of the Andean rural population allows a better understanding of the process of transferral of knowledge.  By establishing the role played by the natural context (time, environment, referential subject-elements, participants, variations, etc) in the oral tradition, methodological routes would become evident which could be incorporated into pedagogical approaches.

There can be no leaves without roots

The community is both the start and end point.  In 1981, the Rural Libraries of Cajamarca wrote down the stories of our communities, compiled them in books and then published them to be given back to the communities.  “It is not enough to just read and write, we must produce our own books”.  In 1986 the Campesina Encyclopaedia Project was founded and together community members gave rise to the series We the Cajamarquinos: 20 volumes in which they describe the lives of those who were and those who continue to be.  Identity and dignity form part of the process to strip away the glitz that always surrounded the book as an instrument of power.  “Now, we not only read, we also write”.  And life continues.   

Community Programme

We are group of people, organised through a Work Programme of the Network of Rural Libraries of Cajamarca, who work alongside rural families and communities with “handicapped” members, as they are commonly called.

We use, as a counterweight to this negative term, the denomination Persons with Potential Capabilities (PWPC), because we know the capability and value of each member of our community.  Our work is simply to awaken or “remind” – as they say in the country – these capabilities which are often found dormant in people.  In the countryside of Cajamarca we say remind yourself when we want to awaken someone.

The programme is communitarian as it forms part of the Andean perspective, which is always communitarian, and in which the community is the nucleus of life.

We also know that the “treatment” or “rehabilitation” of individuals doesn’t work unless it is linked to, interwoven and rooted in the vital context of the community.  Also, every journey is easier made together, and all work made lighter when shared together.

Our work, then, varies from one community to another, from one family to the next, according to the circumstances, the situations and problems encountered.  In order to carry out this work, those who work within the Programme involve themselves in a permanent exchange and constant training, always taking into account the customs and knowledge of our wise Andean forefathers.

The work of the Community Programme would not be possible without the support of Kindernothilfe, Duisberg, Germany and the supportive work of the “Davids Schleuder Association”, Speidelstr. 29, D-72213 Altensteig, Germany

Group of Studies of Andean Prehistory of The Network of Rural Libraries of Cajamarca (GEPA)

These stones hold no promise, but salvation from forgetting.

E. Galeano - Huiztilopochco 1773

The Group of Studies of Andean Prehistory (GEPA for its initials in Spanish) was formed from the efforts of the Network of Rural Libraries of Cajamarca to recover the roots and the memory of the native communities.  From its experience of the oral tradition, the GSAP undertook the task of registering the cave paintings and the iconography of Cajamarca for the urgent need to restore the links with the land and the mountains as sacred spaces, as a way to protect the mountains from the devastation in the making.  This implies long processes of exploration and revival of the memories of the communities themselves, along with the recording, study and diffusion of the extraordinary sculpture bequeathed by our forefathers.    

Archive of the Cajamarcan Oral Tradition (ATOC)

The Archive of the Cajamarcan Oral Tradition (ATOC for its abreviation in Spanish) was formed with the records compiled from within the countryside itself since 1981.  To begin with, the records were gathered on loose sheets of paper, and then from the notebooks which each member of the community managed.

 

With the first compilation it was possible to publish the Countryman Library collection, which remains current today.  We later turned to recordings on cassette, which were then transcribed and similarly archived.

With the formation of the Countryman Encyclopaedia Project the process of collecting loose papers was underpinned by the publication of our “Notebook of Recovery”, containing blank pages so that pictures can be added, along with thematic and methodological instructions, to provide extra points of interest and guidance to the compilations.

As this process of recovering the oral tradition of our communities involved teachers and school children, as well as students and other people linked to the communities, the archive grew to such an extent that it had to be considered a unique source in its own right.  Its expansion continues and information from the countryside is continually collated, which results not only in the conservation of Andean knowledge, but also facilitates the diverse publications of the Network and the consolidation of our own wisdom as it is shared throughout the communities themselves.