Native Nations, Native Voices/Bolivia

[Gordon Bronitsky]

	Native Nations, Native Voices continues to gain international
attention.  I thought you might find of interest this e-mail I just
received from Bolivia.
	Thank you.

Gordon Bronitsky

Dear Gordon Bronitsky,
Your information is certainly of outmost importance for what we are
doing at PROEIB Andes. It is indeed rewarding to learn that two of our
former students are engaged in such an important gathering. Should you
be interesting in disseminating information on this iniative through
our network (circa 1.500 subscribers), jut let us know.
With our special compliments for the initiative,
Luis Enrique Lopez


(The PROEIB Andes is the result of an initiative of a group of
organizations and institutions in Bolivia, Colombia, Chile, Ecuador and
Peru. It is conducted from Cochabamba, Bolivia in compliance with a
bilateral technical cooperation agreement between the Bolivian
government and the Federal Republic of Germany. Argentina has just been
incorporated into the program. The project is intended to contribute to
the improvement of the quality and equity of the education by promoting
academic exchanges and collaboration among the indigenous peoples of
the participating countries, from a cultural diversity framework (which
explains why it could be related to subject 3). PROIEB Andes also
fosters the articulation of the university with the elementary school,
putting into the hands of the latter, the main advances in the field of
knowledge production and research in connection with indigenous
societies, their cultures, languages and forms of education.)

Dear Gordon,
We would certainly be willing to write a letter of support, should you
tell who we should address it to. We are the Programme for
Intercultural Bilingual Education in the Andean Countries. As part of
our programme we have an MA in Intercultural Bilingual Education at
Universidad Mayor de San Andres in Cochabamba, Bolivia. Martin Castillo
and Felix Julca, both Quechua from Peru, we former students of our MA.
We receive indigenous graduate students from six South American
countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru.
We have been engaged for a few years now in training indigenous writers
and authors and we have a collection of a few thousand manuscripts in
Aymara, Guarani and Quechua, which we were produced in the course of a
Bolivian national programme for text production in indigenous
languages, we carried out between 2001.-2003, period in which we worked
with approximately 10.000 rural bilingual teachers.
One of my colleagues at PROEIB Andes, Dr. Pedro Plaza, a Quechua
linguist, also conducts a small research projects to train Quechua
peasants as authors. Through this exercise two male Quechua peasants
have produced 10  manuscripts , of about 50 pages each related to
different aspects of Quechua knowledge and culture.
We would most certainly be enchanted to host the meeting in Bolivia,
but we simply lack the necessary funds for it.
Bert regards,
Luis Enrique