UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — For Joe Levitan and Kayla Johnson, their research quite literally has become their life’s work. What started as Levitan’s research has expanded to include Johnson’s area of expertise, and it has been life-changing for both of them, as well as for the indigenous people in rural communities in Peru with whom they are working.
The two graduate students, who earned their doctorates from Penn State this past semester and will marry this summer, are part of a larger group that is making an education available to residents of rural regions of Peru, which in turn is making a real difference in their lives and the lives of their families.
The Sacred Valley Project (SVP), founded in 2009, provides access to secondary school for Quechua or indigenous girls, in the Peruvian Andes. While Levitan and his colleagues initially thought that the main issue preventing these girls from receiving an education was the distance between these rural communities and the nearest school, they quickly discovered there were bigger issues to overcome.
“Students coming from the rural communities have linguistic differences from the kids in the town because students from rural communities are bilingual but primarily speak Quechua, and students in towns primarily speak Spanish, although many town students understand Quechua,” Levitan said. “Secondary school (in the larger towns) is taught only in Spanish, but primary school in the local communities is mostly taught in Quechua, so students from rural communities are developing second-language learners, even within their same region."
There also are academic differences because the rural students go to school for only two or three hours a day. “They need to herd animals and help on their family farms,” Levitan said. “The town kids usually go to school for four, five or six hours a day in elementary school. So, we learned that we needed to offer a lot more academic and linguistic support for the students.”
Girls have additional barriers to overcome. If parents must choose to educate only one child, which is a common dilemma in the area because of material poverty, boys are much more likely to be chosen, because they are seen as having greater economic opportunity. Also, it is common for boys to stay with families in town who have businesses, and work while they go to school. “However, parents see this practice as more dangerous for girls, so it is not a common option for them,” Levitan said.