Wrestling with my Limits

As I mentioned in a previous post, my goals as a Peace Corps Trainee/Volunteer are primarily personal. I have acknowledged before many of you my doubts about being able to bring about positive change in my host community. Many of my fellow Trainees came in with the same thoughts. But of course, the training process is primarily designed to make you a more effective “development professional,” and we do a lot of thinking about how to maximize (respectful and wanted) impact on our communities. We go to visit current Volunteers, and it is impossible not to evaluate them based on their effectiveness in accomplishing things in their municipalities. This part of the equation is scary, because it is hard to imagine exactly what I will be doing, and this week I began to come face to face with some of my limits in being able to help.

First, as part of the last week of Spanish class, my training group of four and our teacher visited a nursing home. Guatemalans are much less individualistic than Americans, and children generally consider it their duty to care for their elderly parents regardless of the cost and effort involved. So the elderly who are in nursing homes come often from broken family situations and enter with few economic resources. They do not pay to be in nursing homes; the homes have to raise funds from outside. They have a lot of trouble doing so, especially of late. The home that we visited had recently cut one of their two locations and had reduced food rations. It was a pretty depressing place. One man, in particular, shook me. He had a medical condition which was causing him to shake somewhat violently all day long. When I met him, he told me that God was punishing him for his sins with this illness. He said that he had committed a lot of sins in his life and this was what he was getting for them. I tried to argue with him that God doesn’t work that way, but I think eventually I had to concede that he had a point. Somebody always pays for our misdeeds; it’s not always us, but sometimes it is. Who knows – maybe his lifestyle had led him to become weak and susceptible to diseases. He continued then by saying that he didn’t think God forgave sins or at least some of them were unforgivable. I argued with him pretty strongly on this one, with some success, but he then said that he wanted Jesus to come down and heal him and started cursing the fact that this wasn’t happening. Even though we know that those types of healings are quite rare, it is still a bit jarring to hear that frustration coming out of the mouth of someone. Certainly, his negative attitude wasn’t helping him recover. But then he added another twist to the story. He more or less said that I could be his Jesus, his healer if only I would buy him some medicine. The nursing home had previously provided him with medicine to stop his shaking, but since the recession began had stopped providing it to him. And so I was faced with a dilemma of whether to buy him medicine. Our Spanish teacher had said when we entered the nursing home that we were not there to provide financial assistance, but only moral support. And, though it didn’t cross my mind at the time, I actually couldn’t have bought him prescription medicine myself. (But this did not enter my decision.) I was well tempted to give the medicine: a) so that he would know that God does still heal people, just sometimes through the actions of other people, b) to cure him, c) to change his whole life point of view, and d) because my grandmother in the U.S. takes this medicine every day, and I would gladly spend for her to stay on it. I wanted him to stop focusing on the drugs, but how fair was that? I probably wouldn’t have asked the same of my grandmother. He was asking for a medicine which cost a lot (Q.250). But by U.S. standards, it was very little ($30). Am I holding Guatemalans to a higher standard? Guatemalans in general are held to a higher standard because any slip-up or bad luck can ruin your life here. There is an incredible safety net in the developed world which turns the average person into a success, whereas in the developing world it seems like only the exceptional succeed and the average fail. I wrote about this in my Chile blog, and I’m sure I’ll write more about this later. But back to the decision to give or not give money, I first thought that I was limited by the policies in place – we were not at the nursing home to provide cash assistance. Secondly, I wondered if I respond financially to this person, could I be able to respond to everyone? Obviously not. It pained me very much to leave him with an empty-feeling “I hope that God blesses you,” when giving might have meant so much to him. But on the other hand I felt confronted by my own limits in the situation.

Second, I had come to know quite well two teenage girls in the town. They were the only friends I had who were anywhere close to my age. One day, I talked to one of them in the street, and unfortunately this caused a minor scandal. It seems that the girls had a quite troubled past and present, and it was not good to be seen with one of them. I had to stop talking to them, though it pained me to do so. The same reasons for which they were unfit to be seen with were the same reasons for which they needed help and a friend. Here, the first people I actually could have helped in Peace Corps and social and interpersonal limits stopped me from trying. Out of respect for them, I cannot divulge more information publicly on this blog, but if you would like to pray for them, please e-mail me. Prayer is the only mechanism of help I have left with them.
Out of all this, I am very glad that “God is breaking my heart for the poor” in Christian lingo, or rather I am very glad that I am feeling something when people need help. I’m not really the kind of person who weeps upon the sight of a child left alone or upon hearing that some people live in garbage dumps. I’ve always been very intellectually convinced of the necessity for social justice, but now it’s coming to the heart too. It’s still about statistics, but slowly it’s becoming about María and Héctor and Guadalupe. At this point, even as I’m getting very used to my house and thinking of it less as “Third World and difficult” and more as “middle-class and comfortable,” I don’t think that I’ll have a hard time identifying needs. Rather, the question will be, “Where am I not constrained? Where can I actually make a difference?” And that’s going to be a really difficult question to answer. That’s why they say that “Peace Corps is the hardest job you’ll ever love.”