Ecuador: community education during the Covid pandemic
When the pandemic struck Ecuador it turned back the clock for many indigenous and African-Ecuadorean families, forcing them to return to the places they were born and fall back on themselves as in times gone by.
Johis Alarcón is a photographer based in Ecuador. Her work is supported and produced by the Magnum Foundation, a non-profit organisation that expands creativity and diversity in documentary photography, with a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation.
As Covid-19 ravaged Ecuador’s largest city, Guayaquil, in the first months of the pandemic and spread through the rest of the country, smaller and more isolated communities were often the safest but forced to look to themselves to educate their children.
As the photographer Johis Alarcón discovered on her visits to the indigenous village of San Clemente in the Andean highlands and the African-Ecuadorean hamlet of Playa de Oro in the coastal rainforest bordering Colombia, a renewed sense of community grew.
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