THE CORRESPONDENCE
My name is Julio Zanuttini and I am 50 years old. I consecrated myself to Mary at the age of 12, in the chapel of the Colegio Corazonista de Venado Tuerto, where I completed the last year of primary school and the whole of secondary school.
I met the Marists when I was studying to be a teacher at ISMA. A few years later I was called to work at Champagnat School in Montevideo Street.
On one occasion, in the middle of 2004, a brother invited me to do voluntary work in the Chaco. I had asked him to move to Rosario, closer to my family, but he insisted that I go first to the school of the Wichi, which the Marists have accompanied since their foundation, in the Impenetrable Chaqueño.
‘Coming to the Chaco is a dose of adventure, mission and risk’, Brother Arturo, who was already working in Misión Nueva Pompeya, told me to convince me.
I asked for the corresponding permissions and went to meet him, with my suitcase to leave and my travelling bag. I remember saying to myself that if I didn’t like the place, I would make the effort to stay until the end of the year. But it turned out very differently. I was delighted with the project. I met Biemba, also a teacher at the Cacique Francisco Supaz school, and soon after we got married. We have two children: Geronimo, 17, and Maria Paz, 15. It will soon be 20 years since I arrived.
The task of accompaniment
The Marist Brothers arrived in this area in 1979. They first worked in the village, with a Creole population and a few natives who were able to come to the village to study. They ran the school N°562 ‘Saint Marcellin Champagnat’. They participated in the birth of other institutions in this incipient population that was being constituted as a town.
500 km from the city of Resistencia, in the heart of this great forest mass, the Wichi were left alone, once again, and longing for the ‘those’ times of the Franciscan presence first, and that of Sister Guillermina, lay people and Passionist priests (known as the time of the Cooperative). Once again they had lost everything: territory, work, resources?
In the context of the 500th anniversary of the evangelisation, the brothers proposed a ‘living monument’, and invited all the schools to join the resources to support the dream of the Wichi community to have their own school, which would take into account their language and culture. On 1 July 1994, with 42 children enrolled, the school began to operate under the ‘Intercultural Bilingual’ modality.
The brothers, especially Teo and Arturo, passed on to us lay people their way of working as a team, their attentive listening, their passion and humility… and a clear objective: that members of the community should take over the running, administration and management of the institution.
When I joined in 2005, there was a shortage of teachers and there was a need to implement EGB3. They had sent out invitations to the different Marist works in Argentina asking for teachers who wanted to come for a while. I was asked to teach Spanish as a second language, and also in the alternancias (socio-community research and intervention projects). For the first time, and without teacher training, I learnt to work in a pedagogical partnership with a Wichi colleague, as I did not have the main skills (linguistic and cultural) to work in this reality. I also joined ENDEPA (National Aboriginal Pastoral Team), and participated in the project of self-building 351 cisterns in the houses located within the 20,000 hectares (community territory with title deeds).
From the first moment I felt welcomed, and I believed it was possible. Today, when I look back at the process of these 30 years, I reinforce the idea that the school is a transformer of contexts.
At present, the headmasters, secretaries, teachers, guide teachers, intercultural teachers, teaching assistants, bilingual teachers, teachers in charge of the pantry, cooks… are all Wichi (many of them former pupils). Not satisfied with the qualification , they continue to do postgraduate courses, diploma courses, degree courses… The profiles of the young indigenous teachers who are joining the project are very encouraging. I remember when Héctor Palavecino (with a technical degree) took over as the first Wichi director, and the malicious comments in the village that the school would collapse. However, enrolment doubled….
It is no small thing to know that at every stage of construction there were members of the community building as they learned the trade. The sense of belonging is so strong, not least because we all know that Cacique Supaz is a Wichi school.
Ten years ago, workers from Volkswagen’s Pacheco plant joined in. Twice a year they come twice a year to spend a week with the students. They bring them backpacks with school supplies, shoes, clothes, food for the canteen… and they help us with maintenance work, painting and different training workshops.
I think that here we can see very clearly the conjunction of the joint contribution of the State, the families, the congregation, the sponsors and so many people who individually make it possible for this small dream of a group of parents to continue growing and sustaining itself over time.
Since the year 2023, due to different circumstances, we lay people have been in charge and with the responsibility of ensuring that the charism continues to be present. There is no doubt that the brothers, especially Teo and Arturo, knew how to transmit to us that particular way of accompanying that we Marists have. We always say in our meetings that they knew how to listen to what the Wichi people were asking of them… with passion and against the current, they left us with a clear objective towards which to walk.
We value and need the close presence of the ‘great Marist family’, who, through the visits of the different teams, volunteers or the Provincial himself, make us feel loved.
We hope, in spite of everything, to be able to continue to guarantee rights to the smallest and historically neglected of our national territory, in the hope that one day society as a whole will understand that multiculturalism is a richness, and that the original peoples are a reservoir of humanity to which we can turn when we realise that material things never acquire greater value than the person himself.
We send you a big hug and an invitation to come and visit us!
Julio Zanuttini