Champaingy Educational Center Inauguration Speech

Change is a process that is always occurring, we have opportunity to help guide it or passively watch it.  PIEAT prefers to help guide the change so to have some say in the path of their life and the life of their community.

PIEAT believes that a change in the way we raise our children will create a change for the better for ourselves and for our communities and country.  PIEAT cannot do it alone, they can only succeed with the support and active participation of the community, children, youth, and adults.  Raising children is not just a parent responsibility, it is truly a community responsibility as children grow up and affect everyone.  If children are raised with kindness or with greed creates adults who are either contributing members of society or thieves.  The way children are parented and taken care of by other members of the community affect how our community operates and directly impacts us all, especially when we are older and the children have become the decision makers.

PIEAT is a group of women working in and for the communities of Jalapa.  PIEAT has worked in Champaingy for three years bringing information and strategies around the topics of health and hygiene, child development, patio gardens, literacy, and community development. Each member has studied these topics in at length and has received credit from the Department of Education in Colorado for their learning.  This information is important for the children and parents in the community of Champaingy, but more importantly, it is important for the future of everyone living in the community.  The children are our future.  With proper care for the children while they are young, they can grown and create change in our community for the better.  It is up to the adults in our community to give the opportunity and nurturance necessary for our children to create a better world for you and themselves. 

In the first three years of life 80% of the pathways in our brain are formed.  This means that the child’s potential to solve problems, to have healthy relationships, to be a good citizen are formed in the first three years of a person’s life.  It is important to give our children the best we can give.  We need to raise them without physical and emotional violence.  We need to be role models for how we want them to behave – that means we must act without violence towards each other. We must learn how to become more compassionate and interdependent.  We can only expect children to imitate what we do, not what we tell them, but what we do.  They know what they are shown. 

It is with this information PIEAT has dedicated their time and energy to your community.  They have visited house by house collecting information about the challenges the community faces, individual family problems, and the needs of the very young children and their families.  Together with leaders in the community PIEAT has opened an educational center which includes a childcare center so children can have quality care while parents are at work. 

Workshops are given during the week on a variety of topics generated by the ideas of the primary caregivers in the community. It is important that together we learn and direct the inevitable change that takes place each day.

This work cannot be done without the support of the community.  The municipality has given Champaingy the land to construct an educational center on.  The Ministry of Education is providing salary for the teachers in the primary school.  Programs such as Si Puede, guitar workshops, and reading classes are provided to adults during the afternoon and evening.  The classrooms also provide space for people to meet and play with the children, to learn and innovate ideas for economic sustainability – such as the basket-weaving coop.  The Ministry of Health provides a doctor and nurse once a month to visit the health center situated inside the educational center. Lastly, there is a library in the center that will provide books and tools for community members to borrow and read or improve their homes and gardens

The center is a community building run and operated by the adults of Champaingy and PIEAT. There are rules created by the community to abide by to ensure the integrity and maintenance of the center.   Remember, the success of the center is up to you.  It will take support from everyone in the community to provide safe and quality care for your children. 

People in the community will need to treat the property with respect, keep the garden growing to supply food for the infants and toddlers and ensure the materials provided for the babies are protected not taken

One challenge is how to pay the educators for the infants and toddlers.  Perhaps parents can pay the teachers for the service they provide and the community can contribute the water and electricity needed to run the center.

This center is not a program built or dependent on contributions from the outside.  If the center were dependent on the contributions from the outside, they would only exist when the outside felt like contributing.  In other words you would be putting your future in the hands of other people who may or may not care about you and your community.

It is only if the community members of Champaigny take responsibility will the center become a success.  If you stand, wait, and watch to see who will do something, you will continue to stand and wait and stand and wait.  No one else is coming - you are here – it is you who must stand up and take action.

Champiny has the potential to become a wonderful neighborhood and it has the potential to become a ghetto.  The choice is yours, which will you choose, it is in your hands.

 PIEAT hopes together this land is to be used to provide quality care for your future,  keep it, protect, hold it gently, and nurture with love.

Thank-you.