Foundation of the South Alternative University (UAS) of Longo Mai

With a brief cultural ceremony, the "South Alternative University" (UAS) of Longo Mai has been founded in the home of the finca Sonador. This educative center will work as a cooperative, whom both teachers and students will be members, bringing in work and experience for the developpment of projects who will benefit not only to the comunity, but to the whole area, as explained by Juan Gomez, Social Sciences student at the "Universidad Nacional", also one of the founders of this project.

In that way, the University will integrate various projects that, somehow, are already working among the Longo Mai comunity, as the Comedy and Mime School of Granada, runned by Diego Gene; the artistic and interactive education center, runned by the national songwriter Guadalupe Urbina, and the language school "Rio Sonador" de la asosiacion Finca Sonador. Furthermore, the indians comunities of Salitre and Terraba will start a new project for teaching the local indian languages.

The rector of UNIALSUR is Mr. François Houtart, general secretary of the World Forum, an international organization who try to colaborate with social movements of the whole world who aim to promote new forms of developpment and alternatives to the globalizacion.

"The world is shaped from below, from here, from the local", said Mr. Houtart during the tree sowing who took place that day, among withothers activities; "From this way it extends to the dimension of the whole world". The inauguration of a wood sculpture called "metamorphosis" also took place that day. The sculpture, by Susanna Meoño, was given to the new university as a part of what Mr. Houtart called "creating symbols that serve as a source of inspiration".

Then, the Cultural Alternative Association of the South has been created, as a basis for the UNIALSUR. This association will integrate representants from the comunities of Longo Mai, Terraba and Salitre, who already run projects in that area, and also the teachers and the students. That way, the association will include, along with the University, a college (partly virtual), a website to share the knowledge learnt by the students and all the differents projects from the students, the teachers and the community. Each one of those projects will be independantly developped; the only form of centralization will be the group formed by the rector and the members of the association.

At the beginning, the University will function with the participation of newly graduated professors, who will bring in their knowledge and experience to the students, and as soon as the University will strenghten, it will sollicitate the support of the CONASUP.

"This University, as its name tell, is an alternative for the south of the country, especially for the area of Buenos Aires; but its dimension go further." said the professor Eduardo Rivera, from the language school Rio Sonador. "Ideologically, it pretends to promote elements of a life more harmonic with the human beings and the environment. The fundamental idea is to eliminate any sort of violence and to create spaces of work and opinion who show respect for each others. We believe that we can achieve a process of sensibilization and conscientness of the human being himself because the actual society needs urgently to switch its mind and its productivity".

The activities that surrounded the foundation were witnessed by students from the National University of Costa Rica, the University of Panama, the Central University of Venezuela and the Latino-americans Studies Institute, and also by representants from the comunities of Salitre, Terraba, Longo Mai, the association UNAPROA and the Comedy and Mime School from Granada de Nicaragua.

(Text translated from the newspaper "Estrella del Sur", edition 437)