CAMAGÜEY.- Olga Góngora Lezcano was born in this city, but the family was of Vertientes, she studied educational practice in Santa Clara, in the School of Rural Household, and she returned to the soil, where after her graduation in 1944, she came to have a classroom fifteen years later, due to the triumph of the Revolution, in the intricate area of Santa Lucia 1, among mud and birds and weathering storms.

She spent the five years of scholarship away from the family until the end of the year in which she enjoyed three months of holidays, but as recounted her only daughter, there she learned to embroider, to work with dies, to weave, to do everything.

I did not imagined that a 94-year-old woman who celebrated the past October 11 her birthday, had the agility that showed while descending from the vehicle in which Omar brought her to where she lives, his sister, in Latin America neighborhood, so that the interview was in a quiet atmosphere.

In the same 1959, she served as a volunteer teacher in Saint Lucia for three years, giving classes to 64 students in the morning, from third to sixth grades, and in the evening she provided the bread of the teaching to ten illiterate men, one of them with a particular responsibility, the only thing he knew was to sign.

Olga, a woman's voice, picked up the "gascar" in Vertientes, a means of railway transportation, up to Cuatro Compañeros (Four companions), where she got off, a student on a horse waited for her, she mounted and the boy went running through the river at an astonishing speed. At weekends, she went back to the house to repeat the return on Monday.

Of that panorama of poverty, without classroom, she doesn't want to remember: "No way!, I had a desire to work. There were teachers who earn their salary and brought another person to give classes, but I did not accept it, that I would not have ever made it".

In her privileged memory reviews the years sharing classroom and the school direction in such centers as "Jorge Mendoza", during a four-year period. Found in this place boys and girls undisciplined, but warned them not to give them classes until "that they say: we are going to learn."

Successively she went to a semi-boarding school, Sergio Gonzalez school, left the classroom and assumed the direction of the school for 19 years until her retirement with a guarantee of 37 springs.

The differentiated attention of the students was a practice that by intuition she applied, before it was established as a standard by Education. "When the commission of Camagüey arrived, I said to them: I have to this student with difficulties and after they told me: 'Indeed these boys have concentration problems'."

Olga laughed when I asked her if she had ever given a blow with a ruler. "They came to be afraid, I was strong, I even met with the parents and told them how were the rules of the game. In the "Pedro Mendoza" school, the family supported me. When they finished they passed to second grade, with the security that they had learned".

- How many children did you teach during those 37 years?

- Ugh, I don´t known! In Saint Lucia, I taught Acacia, the cleaning auxiliary so she would help me, I had groups from first to fifth grades. She became a teacher and retired as such.

- What is the greatest reward for a teacher?

- Is to have a classroom and teach their students. That is my concept.

- What happens when you see there your students…?

-I'm going to Vertientes and there comes out forty former students to greet me. And among these men and women who feel pride in it, there are here Raul Sarmiento, Intensive Specialist of the Provincial Hospital Manuel Ascunce; Leydis Cabrera, urologist; Alexis Salgado, surgeon, Iliana Porro, or the Doctor Carlos Enrique Arevalo Tan, head of international medical care of the Camagüey´s Branch, to name just a few.

When we reminded her of the celebration of the Day of the Educator, the 22 of December, she brought to the conversation more than 200 or 300 greeting cards for that reason, on Mothers´ Day or because of the end of the year.

She feels the pride of what has achieved in these 94 years, that her three children are professional, of belonging to the Communist Party of Cuba, having worked in the FMC, in the CDR and as president of the Electoral College one of the 27 Constituency of Vertientes, or possess nearly a dozen awards or medals.

Among them: the distinction by the Cuban Education, signed by José Ramón Fernández; that one of the Literacy, the one of September 28, of the CDR, the FMC, the commemorating 40 years of the FAR, the seal of Surveillance, the Production and the Defense and the one of Rafael Maria Mendive.

To conclude, what would you say to the new generations of teachers and professors on the basis of your personal experience: "They should achieve all the requirements of education and of heart, they should teach".

Olga, one of the 18 children who had her parents, believes that she keeps her memory and that she forgets nothing, because she reads a lot, newspaper, magazines, she completes the crossword puzzles, she doesn't like to depend on others and the wife of her grandson knows it well when she asks for Olga´s clothes to wash them and Olga dodges the proposal: I don't have anything dirty, however, when the young girl returns she sees the hanging laundry, Olga is a lot of Olga.

  • Translated by Linet Acuña Quilez