By IPS Correspondents
BOGOTA, Sep 30 2002 (IPS)

An internship programme has brought university students in Colombia in touch with complex local realities in this war-torn country, while local governments benefit from their energy and know-how.

The youngsters who take part in the 11-year old programme Option Colombia Corporation (COC) learn to apply their academic knowledge in hands-on situations as they help municipal governments improve their administration, plan new roads, clean up rivers and boost the quality of education.

The municipality of Sucre, in the northern department of that name on Colombia’s Caribbean coast, received student interns through COC over a space of two and a half years. By 2000, the departmental government declared Sucre the city that made the best use of resources for infrastructure projects.

And in the municipality of San Miguel, in the southern department of Putumayo, students from different disciplines have designed and helped implement projects entailing a total funding of around 370,000 dollars a year.

Since the start of the programme, 3,500 students from 93 universities and other institutes of higher learning have been posted in 895 municipalities to carry out six-month internships in their areas of study, and to “narrow the distance between the classroom and the national reality,” industrial designer Dilia Lucía Prieto told IPS.

Prieto, who received her degree at the National University in Bogota, attended a COC “workshop for country builders” held over five consecutive weekends in 1996, when she was still a student. Today she sits on the organisation’s executive committee.

“If you are a university student, are concerned about and interested in the reality of our communities, and want to find a space where you can apply your academic knowledge alongside other students, SIGN UP!” read the posters urging youngsters to take part in the workshops.

Prieto’s first experience with COC was participating in projects carried out by the government’s Social Solidarity network, which provides support to populations displaced by the four-decade civil war.

For five months, she lived in three different municipalities in the northwestern department of Antioquia, where she worked on projects involving housing, stipends for the elderly, and services for children. After returning to Bogota to complete her studies, she remained involved in COC.

“Option Colombia is a space for professional training and the development of life skills, which provides an opportunity to polish one’s administrative and leadership capacities,” she said.

There has been a stronger response to the programme by women, who constitute 65 percent of participants, said Prieto.

COC emerged in the 1980s among a group of law, industrial engineering and business administration students at the University of Los Andes, in Bogota, with the support of several professors.

The students saw the weak presence of the state in many regions as a problem, as well as the distance separating the universities from local communities and from the reality of the country, which is racked by violence involving drug traffickers and irregular armed groups on the left and on the right, said Prieto.

The group’s first experience, which had the backing of the government of the municipality of Tabio, on the outskirts of Bogota, made it clear that the internships should not take place while the students were attending class, but should be held in special four- to six-month periods. That gave rise to the creation of COC, she explained.

In the programme’s 11 years of history, participants have come from more than 115 different disciplines, including administration, agriculture, arts, biology, economics, social sciences and engineering.

Students are incorporated in the projects of local administrations through agreements between COC and national, regional and local entities like government ministries, agencies and institutes or municipal governments.

Each student receives health coverage and twice the minimum wage – around 230 dollars a month – 15 percent of which goes to COC administrative expenses.

In conflict zones, the interns subscribe to COC’s philosophy of “active neutrality,” which involves refraining from publicly expressing one’s views on “war and peace,” said Prieto.

“We have been very cautious and careful with the image of Option Colombia that we present to the actors in the armed conflict,” she added.

Giovanni Redondo, who studied sociology and psychology at the National University, can give testimony to that. He recalled his “fascinating” experience working with the Presidential Programme for the Reinsertion of ex-combatants from insurgent organisations, in the northern city of Santa Marta, located in the Caribbean coastal department of Magdalena.

One of his most gratifying experiences was teaching Juan, an ex- guerrilla fighter, to read and write. Juan, who had been “tricked into joining the insurgents,” believed reading and writing were “essential tools for getting on in life,” said Redondo.

The students who take part in the programme are “empowered in their role of citizens, makers of peace and promoters of development,” he said.

This year, COC received the National Prize for Solidarity awarded by the Alejandro Angel Escobar Foundation.

“Those who work in social processes leave their world and enter other worlds with an open heart and solidarity as the premise,” said anthropologist Lycy Wartenberg at the award ceremony.

COC’s experience will be studied at the Meeting of Andean Youth, convened by organisations of young Venezuelan volunteers, to be held in October in Caracas.

The conference will also hear about Option Latin America, a regional programme that began to take shape in 1996, based on the experience of a group of Colombian students who travelled to Costa Rica to work as guards in national parks.

Two years later, the Organisation of American States provided 30,000 dollars for financing five internship exchanges between Colombia and other Latin American countries. Since then, 69 students have taken part in the exchanges, and Option Latin America now has chapters in Brazil, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Guatemala, Mexico and Chile.

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