Awra Amba RJ 300612 EN - Contacter un comité local d'Attac

Awra Amba, a current experiment of utopian socialism
The nursery school is open to all, but welcomes only children from the village (Yi07/61; Crespo,
2012). That is not surprising according to Yi07/61, because the parents from the neighbouring
villages do not want their children to be educated according to the Awra Amba principles.
All children would go to nursery school between the ages of 3 and 7 (Jo10b/6), even from the age of
2 (Crespo, 2011) until the age of 5 or 6 (Yi07/4). However, it should be in 2010 around 15 children
for each year of age, when we take into account the 119 children under 10 recorded by Atnafu in
2005 and the increase of the population from 364 to 412 people in 5 years; Yirga (2007/73) states
however that only 6 children entered the first level of school in 2006-2007. Therefore, it should be
around 45 children between the ages of 3 and 5, around 75 children between the ages of 3 and 7 and
around 90 children between the ages of 2 and 7; these figures are much higher than the number of
children – about 20 – present in the nursery school a day of April 2010 according to Jo10b/6, as two
years later (Crespo, 2012) (see Picture 14). It is therefore clear that children are far to go to nursery
school every day, or that all children go to this school (Question 33 in Annex).
Picture 14: Kindergarten a Thursday afternoon in April 2010.
Moreover, the community planned in January 2011 to create a care service for the very young
children under two, who today accompany their parents to work in the fields or in the weaving
workshop, which is very noisy and whose many machines are not protected; this service is still not
created in 2012 (Crespo, 2011; 2012).
According to Yi07/94, the peer education and especially the kindergarten encourage ethnocentrism
of children: children receive an education, to his mind, too centred on the community values and
principles, which makes them reluctant to discover other cultures (Yi07/ii). However, if the values,
principles and behaviours of the Awra Amba community are considered by Awra Amba children
(and adults) much higher than those of the traditional Amhara society, the reverse could also be true,
when looking at many examples of distrust of Awra Amba by neighbours and especially by the
children, reported by different authors. We do not see how the Awra Amba community could survive
in a hostile environment without asserting its values and educating its children while respecting its
values. Nevertheless, other cultures are very far to be limited to the culture of neighbouring
communities, even to the Amhara culture. If one of the goals of the kindergarten is to help children
to remove from their family cocoon and to open to a more complex environment (Kendal, 1983), the
Awra Amba kindergarten could, even ignoring hostile close cultures, open up to the world. Yirga
asserts it is not the case (Question 34 in Annex).
The community built its first library in 1997, no longer used but preserved as witness of the past. A
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