Children Experiencing the Harsh Realities of Colombia

I found this article on Cnn.com, that focused on the children's experience of war in Toribio, Colombia. The article talks about how school has been cancelled for three weeks now because of FARC uprisings. The FARC has bombed homes and buildings in this town, leaving some people dead, which has forced the school to close. What is really sad is that these children are experiencing the realities of war at such a young age and the article cites that some of these children can distinguish between the sounds of a gas cylinder bomb and a mortar round. What is interesting though is that this article talks about bilingual education in this region of Colombia, where both the indigenous language and Spanish are taught at school, and this has attracted many more students to this particular school. However, the article cites that many of the children prefer to speak Spanish rather than their indigenous language and that their parents only force them to take some classes in their indigenous language. I found this to be interesting because we just read that essay by Rodriguez about bilingual education.