For her submission to the 2025 DukeEngage Reflection Challenge, Sophia Fratta T’28 wrote a reflective essay about her experience learning from the children of the Arhuaco and Kogi communities in the Sierra Nevada. Excerpts appear here.
My DukeEngage team, led by Dr. Dalia Patiño-Echeverri and Dr. Miguel Rojas-Sotelo, arrived in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta on the heels of one of Colombia’s most groundbreaking edicts. The Sistema Educativo Indígena Propio (SEIP) grants Colombia’s indigenous communities — over a hundred — complete authority over the education of their youth: their course content, school structure, and educational pedagogy. The bill, which had been pushed for tirelessly by indigenous leaders and various indigenous organizations (such as ONIC, the Organizacion Nacional Indigena de Colombia) throughout the country, finally went through on the year of Santa Marta’s five-hundredth birthday: that is, five hundred years of colonization. Now, indigenous communities all over the country are grappling with the future that educational freedom promises them.
During our first three weeks, our mission as volunteers was not to act: instead, we partook in the experience of sitting in the back row, watching and listening. We heard from indigenous leaders working in the nation’s capital of Bogota, organized and hosted a three-day workshop for leaders and teachers in indigenous schools to share their thoughts and experiences, and sat in on classes at several schools to understand teachers’ pedagogical philosophies and their struggles in the classroom.
In Bogotá, during our first week in Colombia, we had the wonderful opportunity to visit the Ministry of Education. We spent an afternoon with Dr. Abadio Green, current advisor in the Colombian Ministry of Education and leader of the Guna people. He shared with us his experiences being pulled out of mamo training — the highly specialized education that young men chosen to become spiritual leaders in their communities undergo — and sent to a Colombian school. Boys training to be mamos often spend years without speaking. When I asked him about that experience, he told me “el silencio fue mi mejor pedagogo, mi mejor aliado”: silence was my best tutor, my best ally. From listening to silence as a child, he learned to listen to la madre, to Mother Nature.
I puzzled over this answer during the entirety of my trip. It was the grade schoolers who taught me what it meant.
At Gunmaku, a large Arhuaco school, I am led to a classroom building further down a hill, where the preschool students are learning numbers and letters. Their ages range from five to twelve years old: many families live far from even the closest schools, and the sacrifice getting to Gunmaku means that children often wait several years before leaving their homes to start school.
The students and I walk around the school in the hot, heavy sun. The fallen mangoes make the air sweet and sour, and somebody’s donkey manages to yank its post from the ground. We laugh as it trots around the parking lot, dragging rope and post behind it. Afternoons with them fill me with hope: I love their stories and their sums, their intelligence and excitement.
The DukeEngage team traveled to other schools, too. Gunmaku is large and well-established, but plenty of satellite schools — what administrators called sedes — operate farther into the Sierra. At the school of Mulkuaguinaka, we meet with Juliet, the sole teacher of a single-classroom school serving Kogui and Wiwa students near the coast. We had brought her tables and chairs: at the time, Mulkuaguinaka was three months old and still not officially recognized by the Colombian government, so all its resources were personal contributions from the community. Most of Mulkuaguinaka’s students are young, and its remote location means that many of them had little familiarity in speaking Spanish. Instead, we learn to sing “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes” in Kogui and Wiwa languages from the student’s mothers and aunts, who often accompany them in their lessons.
We spent four weeks visiting Teyku. Led by the intrepid Rubiela, Teyku is a Kogui school situated in the Parque Nacional de Tayrona, an area sacred to indigenous communities of the Sierra and beloved by tourists from all over the world. At Tekyu, we learn about the Friday-morning cultural classes, where the children learn skills like stool-carving and mochila-weaving from their parents. We are shown the stone steps left by the ancient Tayrona people before colonization fractured them into the communities known today: the Kogui, the Arhuaco, the Wiwa, and the Kankuamo.
“To engage in silence is to listen for what the world around you hopes to tell you; it’s to look for what you can learn from others and what you can give to others; it’s to find connection without ego or the necessity of spoken word. To listen to silence is to give the world room to show you community and your role in it.”
I spend the morning playing with the second and third graders, who don’t have teachers today. We toss around the mandarin lemons that grow on the carefully cultivated trees around the school. We play catch, then soccer, then we race. When we get tired, I pull out my notebook and ask everyone for their names. To demonstrate, I draw a stick figure and my name next to it: not everyone can write, but I want everyone to have a chance to sign the notebook if they want to. We gather a small crowd and manage to get through twelve signatures before recess is over, pointing and miming through our mutually choppy Spanish.
By the end of our trip, our grand listening experiment had yielded several projects: two personalized documentaries, one for Gunmaku and one for Tekyu; an audiovisual message from mamos in various communities warning against climate change; lesson plans for teachers across several schools; individualized ICFES (Colombian SAT equivalent) tutoring for graduating students; and my pet project, a library of over ninety books, complete with a personalized library guide and teaching resources for professors at the school of Gunmaku.
But I’d learned so much more. From each mamo who welcomed us and gave us permission to enter and work with their community, I learned about respecting la madre, our Mother Nature, in both thought and action. From each professor who shared their thoughts and feelings with us, I learned about structural and systemic obstacles in the Colombian education system, and the courageous effort it takes to overtake them. From each student I spent walking with, sitting with, playing with, eating with, and reading with, I learned how to listen to silence.
Silence is an active verb. To engage in silence is to listen for what the world around you hopes to tell you; it’s to look for what you can learn from others and what you can give to others; it’s to find connection without ego or the necessity of spoken word. To listen to silence is to give the world room to show you community and your role in it. Silence is revelation; it’s storytelling; it’s the catalyst for change. The grade schoolers at Gunmaku, Mulkuaguinaka, and Teyku knew silence, and they were kind enough to share it with me. I know they will do great things.