By Pierre Bélanger, SJ

In 1987, I did a three-month internship at Radio Santa María in La Vega, in the heart of the Dominican Republic. My expertise in radio and television could undoubtedly be useful, but above all, it was an opportunity to get to know a Jesuit work in a developing country, and to practice my Spanish! The station has a wide range of programming which, for some thirty years by then, had been offering grassroots education, civic engagement and Christian formation to the scattered population of the vast Cibao region.

But Radio Santa Maríawas already best known throughout the country for its unique Escuelas Radiofónicas Santa María service (EE RR S M). In a country where the school system was struggling to reach rural populations, the EE RR S M opened up the possibility for all those who had not been able to complete their primary education to do so and receive the official diploma from the Ministry of Education.

The initiative for this service, based on daily radio lessons in the evenings, the distribution of workbooks to the thousands of people enrolled and personal support on weekends in rural communities by maestros correctores, was not born in the Dominican Republic. The project was ‘imported’ from a Jesuit work in the Canary Islands, the region of Spain furthest from Madrid. There too, for 15 years and in a context of populations scattered over several islands with no easy access to schools, the Jesuits had invented a suitable and effective way of providing much-needed formal education for all. That was Radio ECCA.

I have continued to collaborate with Radio Santa María over the years and decades. The Radio Schools grew, soon offering secondary education, and evolved from radio programmes that people had to listen to at fixed hours, to a flexible system that uses the Internet. Nearly a million Dominican men and women have benefited from these educational services, so rooted in the Jesuit tradition of promoting education for all.

I always had in mind the desire to go to the source, to visit Radio ECCA. The opportunity finally presented itself a few weeks ago, and in Las Palmas, I was able to discover a Jesuit organisation in full strength, as committed as ever to education, but also more broadly to social issues, serving the human and spiritual growth of people in remote regions that are all too often marginalised.

The first surprise when I got the reply from the Jesuit José María Segura, the current director of ECCA, was that Radio ECCA no longer existed for about a year. Following an analysis of the needs of the people it sought to serve, the work was transformed into two sections: one still dedicated to distance education, the other offering various social programmes. In both cases, the projects are linked to government ministries and are part of the services recognised as essential needs.

The radio component is now essentially transformed into digital services, programmes that can be accessed at any time and that meet the specific educational needs of students. It’s a form of lifelong adult education, online, to help people make themselves available and better able to contribute to the society in which they live. There is always basic education, for those who have not been able to go to school for long. But there is also the secondary education diploma, the “baccillerato”, as it is called in several Spanish-speaking countries. In addition, a whole range of courses are available to choose from, according to individual needs and interests: this is what is known as the aula abierta or open classroom.

The ecca.edu motto, almost a slogan, sums it all up: Tu futuro a tu ritmo - Your future at your own pace.

Ecca.edu was founded in the same spirit as the Jesuits’ educational commitments since the time of St Ignatius, uniting formal education with social commitments. This is why Ecca Social was created. The projects are aimed at raising awareness of civic participation, protecting minors, training for employment and opening up to international cooperation. All this against a backdrop of preparing the participants to be committed people in the service of others, according to the spirit of the Gospel.

This is what Radio Santa María has done and continues to do in the Dominican Republic, thousands of kilometres from Las Palmas, but in the same spirit of community service and education that has characterised ECCA since the 1960s. A fine Jesuit work; a true Jesuit work!