We are so excited to announce that tomorrow, November 22nd, 2019 we will launch our online Raffle to win a Trip for Two to Peru! This incredibly unique experience welcomes you to explore the Sacred Valley, Machu Picchu & Cusco, an authentic cultural immersion supported by several local Peruvian businesses. The trip is hand tailored for two. This is also a great gift to purchase for friends while at the same time supporting a worthwhile cause. Click this link which will take you to our website where you may view the full program of this trip. All the funds we will collect through this Riffle, will go directly towards realizing another great year of learning and teaching at Kusi Kawsay.
 
The Raffle will be open from November 22nd, 2019 until January 31st, 2020. The drawing will take place towards the end February 2020.  The exact date for the drawing will be announced soon.

Please note that if you want to support us and if you want a Tax Deduction, you should be part of our Online Campaign because to buy a Raffle ticket does not give right to a tax deduction.

The learning process in the Andes is different compared to the conventional understanding of Western education.  In order to give you an idea of all the complexities involved in the Andean system of learning, living and creating, we would like to share with you how Lucia Ccana, our weaving teacher, from the community Amaru which is near Pisac, realizes her amazing lessons.
  

Showing students how to weave a narrow chumpi (a women’s or man’s belt), Lucia performs the action over and over again, without words accompanying the action. Only when they master the design, when they show that they know the exact way to realize it, she speaks and she say Yachankiña, ‘You know it’, just that, not ‘You should know it’ because they have completed the process for weaving that particular figure so now they know it.  Imagine how different it is from the weaving process in a Western way, written out in complex pattern instructions. Lucia is not using any written pattern, nor are her students.  Indeed, she is stimulating the ‘vision’ of the students, as she is remembering the design by ‘seeing’ the weaving sequence, where one row becomes the logical consequence of the previous one. Threads are not numbers but represent the entities themselves.

In rural areas of the Andes, the society is founded on principles of reciprocity, on complementary or alternating opposites, and on a desire to maintain harmony with the cosmos. Some of the words she`s using to describe the weaving process include words such as tinku (to encounter) and iwala (to join), which are relevant to this view of sociality as well as to the structure and process of weaving.  Weaving teaches people about their role in society, about appropriate behavior, about the history of the community and the significance in history and society of the local landmarks.  These are just some of the important reasons for why we strive to include this as part of our curriculum at Kusi Kawsay.