MUNDO ANTIGUO

PERU AND CUSCO

OUR COURSES

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Norma Guevara and Rik Duijm are the founders of Mundo Antiguo Spanish School and are a guarantee for (local) experience, an independent and result driven vision, and with an eye for the personal and the special.
Before starting Mundo Antiguo, Norma has has twelve years of experience as a Spanish teacher and academic coordinator at two of Peru’s largest language schools, whilst Rik is a Dutch travel journalist, who for the last few years is working and living in Peru.

We invite you to visit Cusco, Peru. We’re sure that it will be a very special experience for you!

Our objectives
1. To be qualitatively the best Spanish language school in Peru.
2. To add to your experience for a unique holiday

Our means
- Nosotros. Involved professionals who after years of practical experience have started the project of their life and who want to raise service and customer directed thinking in Cusco to a different level.
- An experienced staff of teachers who are being challenged to distinguish themselves. How can we guarantee teachers like that among the many language schools in Cusco? Simple: we pay them in accordance with their capacities, with a premium if you indicate that you are satisfied with your classes.
- A supporting travel agency that isn’t satisfied with offering just standard tours. We offer the packages to meet your personal wishes.

Our vision
It’s not our goal to teach Spanish; it’s our goal to teach you Spanish.

About us
Norma Guevara and Rik Duijm are a Peruvian-Dutch couple. From their experience they know that the many Peruvian language schools rarely deliver the promised quality. Ever changing employees are called ‘experienced teachers with a suitable academic study’ after some weeks and sometimes just days of training. Groups are often poorly classified and students who experience difficulties are preserved by all means in the group, while offering someone private classes instead, is more expensive. And courses are literally copied from other institutions, without sign of a self-developed philosophy.

With other schools, students that aim for quality classes and their own, personal experience have a good chance of being disappointed.

We don’t want to be big; we want to be excellent.

Rik Duijm
After finishing his study of Journalism at the age of 22, Rik travelled for the first time through Latin America. He spent a month in Cusco, studying Spanish. After that, he travelled on his own by bus through South-Peru, Bolivia and to the south of Argentina.

In the 3 years after this journey he worked as an editor for several magazines in the Netherlands, amongst others for REIZEN Magazine and Op Pad, the largest travel and outdoor sports magazine of the country. Later, he travelled again to Latin America – this time to Peru and Chile – and decided to quit his Latin American Studies. He decided to work in another culture instead and after working for three months for a travel agency in Cusco, he became 'volunteer work coordinator' in Peru's largest Spanish school. For 9 months he collaborated with nearly 30 social projects in and around Cusco; an experience that gave him quite another perspective of the country that other gringos have. He also worked for some time as a tour conductor in Peru and Bolivia and created Mundo Antiguo Tours in January 2008.

Norma Guevara
Norma got to know Rik in the Spanish school, where she worked since it begun 10 years before. She started working as a professor and as the school grew she became the academic coordinator, handling a staff of 24 teachers and around 140 foreign students per week during high season. In the last few years she continued to teach Spanish classes every day. The last year before the creation of Mundo Antiguo she worked in another large language institute, also as a coordinator.

Her family is both from Santa Teresa – one of the villages close to Machu Picchu – and Maras (in the Sacred Valley). She herself grew up in Cusco in the turbulent eighties; with the first government of president Alán García that almost left Peru bankrupt, the rise of the terrorists of the Shining Path and with Alberto Fujimori, who managed to end the raging civil war but now is in jail for crimes committed in that period. Since the mid nineties Peru has recovered itself remarkably and with that Cusco became one of Latin America's most famous tourist places.

How many tourists has she told about Peruvian society and how many people has she taught Spanish? Who knows, but it’s a fact that there is some real experience here!