On September 10th, fifty students of Achuar nationality who are majoring in Intercultural Bilingual Education started their first semester. This first semester classes will be on campus while the other three will be held in the Wasakentza Support Center, in the province of Morona Santiago, where UPS professors will go to teach their class.

Benjamín Jeencham, Maribel Kajekai, Eduardo Kukush, Wasump Umkum and their classmates has to walk from two to four days from their communities in order to get to Macas, where there awaited a bus that would take them to the university's branch in Quito.

Benjamin is a seventh level student who wishes to become a teacher in one of the 63 education centers in his province. "I think that since we are bilingual we can teach children in our native tongue and not loose our identity", he said.

Eduardo Kukush thanks UPS for the opportunity, "This major will educate us to be bilingual teachers and not to lose our culture, we will therefore teach from our own cosmovision  and language", he said.

They do however recognize that they have some academic difficulties because of the language, like Maribel says: "Spanish is a complicated language because words are difficult, modern, many times we do not understand them quickly". Wasump, on the other hand, is happy and eager to finish his studies so he can teach children from his community. "I studied this major because in our area people are not prepared and this represents an advantage for us", he says.

Since its foundation in 1994, UPS has considered interculturality as a way to strengthen intercultural bilingual education in our country. For Aurora Iza, coordinator of this major, "education is a permanent process of liberation in order to build a society that promotes decision making from considering the common good and life with dignity"