This past week we Municipal Development Trainees visited northwest Guatemala for our Field-Based Training. This was an opportunity for us to go out and see current Municipal Development Volunteers to find out what kinds of things they are doing, what successes and failures they’ve had, and what their lives are like. It was also a big opportunity for all of us Trainees and our Associate Peace Corps Director (APCD) to get to know each other better. Our APCD is the one who places us in our various sites, so it’s important to get to know him so that he’ll be able to place us in a place that’s comfortable for us with coworkers that we can get along with and a job that matches our skills.
We visited five Volunteers’ sites and passed through another one. Though they’re located in the same part of the country, they are all very different. They ranged from very hot to pretty cold, almost exclusively Ladino to a famous Mayan town, Todos Santos Cuchumatanes, which is the only town in the country where men still wear traditional dress. By the way, their traditional shirt and pants are awesome – I can see why they wear it there. If I lived there, I would definitely try to wear them too. Some of the sites were quite developed, communities with lots of remittance money or close to cities that generate jobs, and one was 5 hours from the nearest city, accessible only by very windy dirt roads, where you couldn’t buy purified water. Generally, though, living conditions were pretty nice. One volunteer even had an apartment that would be considered modern and good in America. The term “Posh Corps” is sometimes applied to places like Eastern Europe, where Volunteers live pretty well. The volunteers’ living arrangements weren’t Posh Corps (except for that one, maybe) but they were a far cry from the living in a hut without any kind of water or electricity that the name Peace Corps conjures. We Muni volunteers have it easier than others, too. We work in municipal offices, so we have to live in the municipal cabeceras, as they are called. Guatemalan municipalities are really more like American counties than cities (at least if you are from the West Coast, in New England there exist “towns” that are more like these municipalities) in that they cover large swaths of land and there are a number of distinct communities within them. Generally there is one large town, the cabecera, which is the municipal seat, and a bunch of aldeas, or villages up to three hours away from the cabecera. Volunteers in other programs, especially agricultural ones, often work and live in aldeas, which are generally poorer and more indigenous than the cabeceras. They also have many fewer amenities, generally.
Some of the more interesting projects we’ve heard about: starting a radio station and/or hosting a municipal radio show, building a library or getting it stocked with books, painting maps of the world/country/department/municipality on blank walls, improving municipal grant-writing, a million different types of trainings and guidance for women’s groups and community development councils, budgeting issues, conducting a census, doing serious GIS analysis in order to inform municipal decision-making and strengthen their project proposals.
The guessing game about who goes to what site has begun in earnest. Our APCD was always dropping hints and asking questions about what kinds of things we liked/didn’t like: hot/cold, Ladino/Maya, first volunteer in a site/second/third, women’s office/planning office, close to Antigua/close to a city/isolated, community participation work/planning office type work, etc. All of these questions and hints which were given out to some trainees pretty much put us into a frenzy toward the end of the week. Unfortunately, we won’t know anything more until October 8th, when they announce the sites where we’ll be placed.
This week we got to do a lot of the bonding which we would’ve done had we had the old setup of training – everybody lives in the capital city and meets up every day for class. That was nice. It was especially nice for me to spend more time with men, since I’m in a training site with only women and often times I spend more time with women anyway. I think we’ll have to wait to see where we are all placed until I find out who my closest friends are going to be, but now I have a much better base with a lot of the training class (and some of the current volunteers). Our hang out time was very American, going out to eat tacos, Domino’s, fried chicken, cake, etc. We even got to have some beers which is a luxury seldom afforded here, and got to dance in a bar once. Hooray for getting to have a little American bubble.
Monday, September 28, 2009
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Training Work Update
I feel like I should provide an update as well about my work as a Municipal Development Trainee 1 ½ months in to Peace Corps training. Training is hectic and busy, juggling a bunch of different calendars all at once. It will be quite a shock to get out to my site and not know what to do with myself in November. At least it’s still nowhere near as busy as college for me; if I didn’t have a 6- and 10-year-old to play with two or three hours a day, I would actually have a very nice schedule.
The Municipal Development Trainees meet up with the Food Security and Agriculture Marketing Trainees once a week to receive cultural, medical, security and historical training about Guatemala. Then us Municipal Development Trainees have an additional meeting or two per week to talk about our technical topics. What is our technical? Well, it consists of a couple of different things. Our main objective as Volunteers will be to strengthen municipal planning and women’s offices as institutions, and to work with citizens’ groups, strengthening them as well and encouraging healthy relationships between the groups and the offices. So we are talking a lot about organizational development and strategic planning. It isn’t learning water management in semitropical forests, but it is actually something which is probably going to help me a lot in whatever job I have in the future. With our offices and citizens’ groups, we will be primarily training them and guiding them in processes of establishing themselves, establishing strategic direction and plans, and project development, fundraising and management. I know it doesn’t exactly sound like what you think of as Peace Corps, but I actually am very excited to be learning about it and hopefully in the future I’ll be excited to do it.
All of the trainees are broken up into groups of four, approximately, based on their Spanish level. Each group lives in a separate town. This model of training is only used in some Peace Corps countries and is called Community Based Training. The idea is to not establish an American bubble during training, but get you more into the local culture in order to ease your transition into your site. I’m in the high Spanish level, so we are expected to accomplish something substantial during our training months. I’ve been working with one other trainee in our planning office on various things, but the most exciting is a citizen proposal to establish an ecological park in some mountains just outside the town. It’s supposed to protect mostly virgin forest (although some areas are farming, orchards, etc. in order to teach people about agriculture), Mayan culture in the area, which is tied to the land, and draw tourists to pay the bills. It’s a great idea, but my companion and I have some serious doubts about whether it is financially feasible. We’ve scaled the mountain in the park (which, trust me, was not at all easy. We went up in a big group, and the architects and the Americans struggled mightily, while the farmers sped up and down the steep, tiny paths like it was nothing.) and done various types of analyses of the project. It’s not either of our specialties, however, and we do wonder some of the time whether we are qualified to be the trainers in this case. In any case, it’s a very interesting project and we will try to help by training them how to develop their own citizen organization and improve their project proposal for grant writing.
As you read this I’ll be in the western highlands with the Municipal Development Trainees visiting Volunteers in the field. We’re hoping to learn directly from them and also get an idea of what our lives are going to be like in 1 ½ months when we’re out by ourselves in our sites. Stay tuned for an update on that experience.
The Municipal Development Trainees meet up with the Food Security and Agriculture Marketing Trainees once a week to receive cultural, medical, security and historical training about Guatemala. Then us Municipal Development Trainees have an additional meeting or two per week to talk about our technical topics. What is our technical? Well, it consists of a couple of different things. Our main objective as Volunteers will be to strengthen municipal planning and women’s offices as institutions, and to work with citizens’ groups, strengthening them as well and encouraging healthy relationships between the groups and the offices. So we are talking a lot about organizational development and strategic planning. It isn’t learning water management in semitropical forests, but it is actually something which is probably going to help me a lot in whatever job I have in the future. With our offices and citizens’ groups, we will be primarily training them and guiding them in processes of establishing themselves, establishing strategic direction and plans, and project development, fundraising and management. I know it doesn’t exactly sound like what you think of as Peace Corps, but I actually am very excited to be learning about it and hopefully in the future I’ll be excited to do it.
All of the trainees are broken up into groups of four, approximately, based on their Spanish level. Each group lives in a separate town. This model of training is only used in some Peace Corps countries and is called Community Based Training. The idea is to not establish an American bubble during training, but get you more into the local culture in order to ease your transition into your site. I’m in the high Spanish level, so we are expected to accomplish something substantial during our training months. I’ve been working with one other trainee in our planning office on various things, but the most exciting is a citizen proposal to establish an ecological park in some mountains just outside the town. It’s supposed to protect mostly virgin forest (although some areas are farming, orchards, etc. in order to teach people about agriculture), Mayan culture in the area, which is tied to the land, and draw tourists to pay the bills. It’s a great idea, but my companion and I have some serious doubts about whether it is financially feasible. We’ve scaled the mountain in the park (which, trust me, was not at all easy. We went up in a big group, and the architects and the Americans struggled mightily, while the farmers sped up and down the steep, tiny paths like it was nothing.) and done various types of analyses of the project. It’s not either of our specialties, however, and we do wonder some of the time whether we are qualified to be the trainers in this case. In any case, it’s a very interesting project and we will try to help by training them how to develop their own citizen organization and improve their project proposal for grant writing.
As you read this I’ll be in the western highlands with the Municipal Development Trainees visiting Volunteers in the field. We’re hoping to learn directly from them and also get an idea of what our lives are going to be like in 1 ½ months when we’re out by ourselves in our sites. Stay tuned for an update on that experience.
Gossip as a Means of Social Control
As I mentioned in a previous post, news travels fast in my training town. And I use the word ‘news’ broadly; anything from the doings of the mayor to the whereabouts of any member of the community to whose husband was seen with another woman is usually known within a matter of days, if not hours. A better term for this ‘news’ might be gossip. What is the difference between news and gossip anyway? Is it about public vs. private information? In this culture, like a lot of others around the world, I think, privacy is not a very important social value like it is in the U.S. Here they are pretty conscious about saving face and people don’t usually just blab out their life problems to acquaintances. At the same time, however, in order to get along with and work with another person, you have to know who they are in a holistic sense. There is no such thing as “just a work relationship.” You can’t be associated with someone’s public persona while distancing oneself privately. (At least that’s what I think now, but we’ll see.) Maybe the difference between news and gossip is whether it’s flattering or unflattering information. Gossip would be associated with the unflattering stuff.
In the sense that gossip is people talking about other people’s dirty laundry, it actually plays an important role in encouraging people to follow the right path in life here. The “right” path, of course, assumes that you’re making a pretty big value judgments about the way that people live. It’s a big change coming from Brown culture, where one had the idea more that people’s different behaviors were just different choices, different paths. Or at least the idea that people had differing worldviews which had them live in different ways. Here, though, a lot of the values behind gossiping about another person have wide consensus. And it makes sense – it could be that I’m around children more now than I have been in a long time, but so many of the things I find myself talking about or hearing about in others seem like relatively clear-cut choices between good and bad: kids going to elementary school, staying faithful to your spouse, not getting pregnant as an unwed teenager. Surely there are still tough moral dilemmas and hot-button moral issues: drinking and migration to the United States (when you have dependents) are among the biggest. But it is interesting to be in a more homogeneous culture where people are going to be duly warned when they start going down a path deemed bad by the majority of the town. This can work very well, I think. I spent a little time earlier in my stay talking to people whom the community deemed unfit for me. Other people noticed and through the grapevine, the word came to me that I should not be spending any more time with said people. I felt a little violated to have my casual conversations scrutinized so much; it seriously violated my notions of privacy and personal freedom. But actually it was very helpful – those people actually wouldn’t have been good people to spend more time with – and the gossip stopped any further involvement which might have affected my reputation and ability to work in town. It was a very effective means of social control on me. I don’t use that term in any kind of negative way. People who studied sociology will know that all societies have some kind of social control, and a healthy amount of social control is necessary to any group. I also don’t find it so bad when people talk about more serious and more cut-and-dry issues than mine such as the three I mentioned earlier. And with regard to those topics, it sometimes definitely seems that gossip is a weapon for good in the fight against wrong ways of living in town.
A side note to that: I’ve had a grand total of three beers in Guatemala and no other alcohol. Drinking is generally seen as OK by Catholics and as a sin by Evangelicals, so I’ve had to steer clear in order to keep my name clean and keep myself in the culture, especially since I’ve been going to an Evangelical church. On the one occasion when I had to drink a beer in town, I went as far as humanly possible away from my house to buy it in hopes of diffusing the talk. So to you friends who said that I wouldn’t ever have to give up drinking here, I think I really may be moving toward having to do it and not drink at all once I’m at my real site.
The third distinction between news and gossip, however, is its veracity. And that’s the problem with gossip as a means of social control; you never know if it’s accurate or not and if you’re blaming an innocent person. People can be very self-serving beneath a thin veneer, and it’s probable that some rumors are made up by those with something to gain from them. But nevertheless they often catch on and become common knowledge in town. And then it becomes a matter of whose word do you trust? Many of your friends and neighbors or the subject of the rumor, be it your husband, child, etc.? Tough distinction. There are no courts of law to settle such disputes. Few paternity tests to determine who fathered a child. So it can certainly be very unjust.
Also, gossip is not very forgiving, and for this it has earned the ire of (at least) the evangelical church. A central tenet of Christianity is that God “forgets” or “buries” our prior sins when we come to God, and likewise we should forget the sins and shortcomings of those around us. But the point of gossip is often to scandalize and isolate bad people to protect the good ones. Once someone is scandalized, it is hard to become clean. And this is certainly an anti-Christian aspect of Guatemalan culture. Jesus sought to bring out the best in people, sometimes through miracles, sometimes affirmation, sometimes harsh criticism, but many of his works were reserved for people who were social outcasts and victims of others talking bad about them. I recently read a biography of Gandhi, and the characteristic of his which struck me most was how much he always assumed the best about people. As someone striving to live the example of those two figures, it brings up an interesting dilemma. Affirming the down and out in rural Guatemalan communities would be a serious manifestation of the Gospel in today’s world, yet my ability to contribute to Guatemalan communities in general (a.k.a. the down-and-out globally speaking) depends on my being respected by them and associated with the right people.
The social pressure to “conform” (I guess that’s how we’d say it in America) makes it so that people who want to live alternative lifestyles usually geographically resituate as well. The two big magnets are Guate, the capital, and the United States. Some people want to move north just as much for the adventure and the freedom to explore life in a less restrained fashion than for the money. At some point, I’m going to write an entry all about the U.S. here. Our country is ever-present in the minds of people here in Guatemala.
Having people know about all your business is kind of fun, though, too, at least when you’re staying within the boundaries of the community. The mayor, for instance, knew that my fellow trainees and I were going on a hike in the local mountains, so he sent a guide from City Hall with us and then arranged to have a segment of a cable TV show taped in the mountains while we were there. This led to my being interviewed on TV for about five to ten minutes in muddy clothes. Second, we just finished the national holidays, which were great fun. The highlight of the holidays, at least in this town, is the election and crowning of the town queen. For those from Pasadena, it’s pretty similar to being crowned Rose Queen. There’s a pretty serious beauty pageant element, but the cultural element is all about promoting Mayan traditions and culture. Each of the candidates gave a speech in Spanish and Ka’chiquel (the area’s native language) about Mayan traditions, prophecies (2012!), the need to preserve the Mayan languages, the oppression of the indigenous woman, etc. I came away very impressed with the girls, especially given that they were on showcase in front of thousands of people in a culture where women rarely take leadership roles or speak up in any kind of mixed group setting. Anyway, the night of the coronation a well-known ranchera band came to play after the ceremony. For the first few songs, the queen and her court, for lack of a better term, dance with local dignitaries. I was invited to be one of those dignitaries and had a great time dancing on stage in front of thousands of people and on TV! I had never danced to ranchera music before, so I have no idea how I looked, but I feel pretty comfortable with it. Then I got invited to the mayor’s VIP party following the dances. It was very strange, but at least it kept stroking my ego :/
In the sense that gossip is people talking about other people’s dirty laundry, it actually plays an important role in encouraging people to follow the right path in life here. The “right” path, of course, assumes that you’re making a pretty big value judgments about the way that people live. It’s a big change coming from Brown culture, where one had the idea more that people’s different behaviors were just different choices, different paths. Or at least the idea that people had differing worldviews which had them live in different ways. Here, though, a lot of the values behind gossiping about another person have wide consensus. And it makes sense – it could be that I’m around children more now than I have been in a long time, but so many of the things I find myself talking about or hearing about in others seem like relatively clear-cut choices between good and bad: kids going to elementary school, staying faithful to your spouse, not getting pregnant as an unwed teenager. Surely there are still tough moral dilemmas and hot-button moral issues: drinking and migration to the United States (when you have dependents) are among the biggest. But it is interesting to be in a more homogeneous culture where people are going to be duly warned when they start going down a path deemed bad by the majority of the town. This can work very well, I think. I spent a little time earlier in my stay talking to people whom the community deemed unfit for me. Other people noticed and through the grapevine, the word came to me that I should not be spending any more time with said people. I felt a little violated to have my casual conversations scrutinized so much; it seriously violated my notions of privacy and personal freedom. But actually it was very helpful – those people actually wouldn’t have been good people to spend more time with – and the gossip stopped any further involvement which might have affected my reputation and ability to work in town. It was a very effective means of social control on me. I don’t use that term in any kind of negative way. People who studied sociology will know that all societies have some kind of social control, and a healthy amount of social control is necessary to any group. I also don’t find it so bad when people talk about more serious and more cut-and-dry issues than mine such as the three I mentioned earlier. And with regard to those topics, it sometimes definitely seems that gossip is a weapon for good in the fight against wrong ways of living in town.
A side note to that: I’ve had a grand total of three beers in Guatemala and no other alcohol. Drinking is generally seen as OK by Catholics and as a sin by Evangelicals, so I’ve had to steer clear in order to keep my name clean and keep myself in the culture, especially since I’ve been going to an Evangelical church. On the one occasion when I had to drink a beer in town, I went as far as humanly possible away from my house to buy it in hopes of diffusing the talk. So to you friends who said that I wouldn’t ever have to give up drinking here, I think I really may be moving toward having to do it and not drink at all once I’m at my real site.
The third distinction between news and gossip, however, is its veracity. And that’s the problem with gossip as a means of social control; you never know if it’s accurate or not and if you’re blaming an innocent person. People can be very self-serving beneath a thin veneer, and it’s probable that some rumors are made up by those with something to gain from them. But nevertheless they often catch on and become common knowledge in town. And then it becomes a matter of whose word do you trust? Many of your friends and neighbors or the subject of the rumor, be it your husband, child, etc.? Tough distinction. There are no courts of law to settle such disputes. Few paternity tests to determine who fathered a child. So it can certainly be very unjust.
Also, gossip is not very forgiving, and for this it has earned the ire of (at least) the evangelical church. A central tenet of Christianity is that God “forgets” or “buries” our prior sins when we come to God, and likewise we should forget the sins and shortcomings of those around us. But the point of gossip is often to scandalize and isolate bad people to protect the good ones. Once someone is scandalized, it is hard to become clean. And this is certainly an anti-Christian aspect of Guatemalan culture. Jesus sought to bring out the best in people, sometimes through miracles, sometimes affirmation, sometimes harsh criticism, but many of his works were reserved for people who were social outcasts and victims of others talking bad about them. I recently read a biography of Gandhi, and the characteristic of his which struck me most was how much he always assumed the best about people. As someone striving to live the example of those two figures, it brings up an interesting dilemma. Affirming the down and out in rural Guatemalan communities would be a serious manifestation of the Gospel in today’s world, yet my ability to contribute to Guatemalan communities in general (a.k.a. the down-and-out globally speaking) depends on my being respected by them and associated with the right people.
The social pressure to “conform” (I guess that’s how we’d say it in America) makes it so that people who want to live alternative lifestyles usually geographically resituate as well. The two big magnets are Guate, the capital, and the United States. Some people want to move north just as much for the adventure and the freedom to explore life in a less restrained fashion than for the money. At some point, I’m going to write an entry all about the U.S. here. Our country is ever-present in the minds of people here in Guatemala.
Having people know about all your business is kind of fun, though, too, at least when you’re staying within the boundaries of the community. The mayor, for instance, knew that my fellow trainees and I were going on a hike in the local mountains, so he sent a guide from City Hall with us and then arranged to have a segment of a cable TV show taped in the mountains while we were there. This led to my being interviewed on TV for about five to ten minutes in muddy clothes. Second, we just finished the national holidays, which were great fun. The highlight of the holidays, at least in this town, is the election and crowning of the town queen. For those from Pasadena, it’s pretty similar to being crowned Rose Queen. There’s a pretty serious beauty pageant element, but the cultural element is all about promoting Mayan traditions and culture. Each of the candidates gave a speech in Spanish and Ka’chiquel (the area’s native language) about Mayan traditions, prophecies (2012!), the need to preserve the Mayan languages, the oppression of the indigenous woman, etc. I came away very impressed with the girls, especially given that they were on showcase in front of thousands of people in a culture where women rarely take leadership roles or speak up in any kind of mixed group setting. Anyway, the night of the coronation a well-known ranchera band came to play after the ceremony. For the first few songs, the queen and her court, for lack of a better term, dance with local dignitaries. I was invited to be one of those dignitaries and had a great time dancing on stage in front of thousands of people and on TV! I had never danced to ranchera music before, so I have no idea how I looked, but I feel pretty comfortable with it. Then I got invited to the mayor’s VIP party following the dances. It was very strange, but at least it kept stroking my ego :/
Saturday, September 5, 2009
Prayer Requests: September 5, 2009
Thank you for being a part of my support community in the United States and Chile (shout out to Alexis, Pato and María!) I am far away from home, but I know that I am not alone. God is with me, and I need you with me as well. From now until October 2011, there are going to be a lot of ups and downs. Right now I’m feeling pretty good about everything, but there has already been a down moment (when I got sick) and there are certain to be more, especially when I lose the support group of other Americans at the end of October. So I would really appreciate it if you could support me with your comments, letters and e-mails. I don’t want to lose touch with the life I was/will be blessed to have in the U.S., and it’s important to me to know what’s going on in your lives. My contact info should be visible on this blog.
A big way to support me is to pray for me. I’m going to list prayer requests on this page quite frequently, and I would love it if you did support me in this way. I’m glad to return the favor, or to pray for you even if you don’t pray for me J. For the first time in my life, I’m having some measure of success with daily devotionals and am praying a little bit every day, and so I can remember you in that.
My prayer requests:
1. Thanking God for leading me here and for the standing in the town which I enjoy
2. That I resist temptations of any kind
3. For meaningful connections with other PCT’s/PCV’s
4. To have the strength and patience to be outgoing and social every day
5. For the two girls and the elderly man I mentioned in the post “Wrestling with my Limits”
6. Also, remember my brothers and sisters in Christ at Brown as they start a new school year
Thank you very much!
A big way to support me is to pray for me. I’m going to list prayer requests on this page quite frequently, and I would love it if you did support me in this way. I’m glad to return the favor, or to pray for you even if you don’t pray for me J. For the first time in my life, I’m having some measure of success with daily devotionals and am praying a little bit every day, and so I can remember you in that.
My prayer requests:
1. Thanking God for leading me here and for the standing in the town which I enjoy
2. That I resist temptations of any kind
3. For meaningful connections with other PCT’s/PCV’s
4. To have the strength and patience to be outgoing and social every day
5. For the two girls and the elderly man I mentioned in the post “Wrestling with my Limits”
6. Also, remember my brothers and sisters in Christ at Brown as they start a new school year
Thank you very much!
Age and Gender: First of Many Reflections
My first day in my training site I found myself singing that blink 182 song “What’s My Age Again?” I already know that I’m young. Out of 33 Peace Corps Trainees in my group, I’m the second youngest (I’ll turn 23 later this month.) Most of my fellow trainees have Master’s degrees. Even though that makes me feel young, it’s nothing compared to living in my training site. I first met my host family, including my six- and nine-year-old host brothers and was struck by how young my host mother looked. I then found out that she is 25, only quite marginally older than me. But age is just a number. How old, how mature is she really? At age 7 she left her family to work and at age 14 she got married. At age 25, she’s got two school-aged children and helps to run a bakery and shop with her husband. It’s interesting, because she often has a childish personality and loves to joke around, but she at the same time handles a ton of work and responsibility between the family business and the household. And then you ask her what she has been through, and it is impressive. It’s no wonder that they call me a nene, or baby/kid. They automatically assumed that my peer would be the 14-year-old girl who works in the bakery, not the mother or her 26-year-old husband, even though my age is much closer to them than to her. When I referred to my popularity with the women in town two weeks ago, those women were all teenagers. It seems very weird to Americans. But on the other hand, I only know one woman my age in town who is still single, and she has an 8-year-old son. So how old am I, really, in this town? Perhaps this perception that I am young (being half Asian, I do probably look younger than my years too) helps fuel many people’s perceptions that I am studying Spanish or something else in Guatemala. Of course, I am learning, but I’m doing that by working in the field of international development. If I was married, I might be taken more seriously. But I have to be thankful – my 28- and 29-year-old female companions have it a lot worse than me. And among well-educated people, there seems to be less of this attitude. I’ve made good friends with the two architects in my office, who at 28 and 32, are married (to each other) but have no children. People I’ve met in City Hall or in other places related to work haven’t had this confusion.
Gender is a big topic in Peace Corps Guatemala. Across the country, men are without a doubt those who have the power. However, the relationship between men and women is different in Ladino and Maya communities. In Ladino (what you would probably normally think of Latino) communities, men are more stereotypically machista (macho): they carry around guns, they are strong and dress like cowboys, they defend their women and try to keep them away from the grime of life (which includes sometimes the “dirty girls” who are their mistresses), and they also demand that their women run the house. In Maya communities, men are not as brash and aggressive (possibly not as unfaithful?), but they do seem to have a quiet superiority over their wives. They make decisions. Women do all the housework, period. Including when the men make a mess, it’s going to be the woman who cleans it up. Of course, men are supposed to support the family financially, but since so many people are self-employed, women and children usually help out with that too. In Ladino communities, it seems like a lot of women despite the machismo make it through school and into professional jobs, but among the Maya the majority of women are illiterate. I live in a Maya community, and right now I’m the only male Municipal Development trainee here. All of us have a good relationship with the mayor, but I’ve got it by far the best. He always remembers my name, and got me an interview on cable TV. This is really nice for me, of course, but is very frustrating for my colleagues.
It’s largely about power, but it’s also about ideas about gender roles. Lots of women say that they don’t want the “liberation” of American or European women. And that’s their prerogative. Under the Peace Corps methodology, we should to some extent accept that and work with it. However, if there is any value that Peace Corps is going to paternalistically push on Guatemalans, women’s rights seems to be the one (so far). As you might expect, I’m less worked up about it than most of the women. But still, I’m starting to ask how I can promote women’s rights here. As for now, I’m starting small. Yesterday in the central plaza, I was playing freeze tag with my host brothers and some other boys from the town. We had finished and were tired, but some girls sitting on a bench asked if they could play too. I told the boys that we’d play another game of tag with the girls. They said one after another, “If they’re playing, I’m not playing.” But then I said that I was going to play with the girls regardless of them, and they then said one by one, “I’m with Felipe (me).” So we all played together, and after a little bit of coaching to each side, they were playing just like it was normal. Today we played soccer with my gringa companions and another girl from the town, and there was almost no resistance from the boys. We actually played the boys against the girls and me, and the 10-year-old girl from the community led us to a big victory. Maybe it’s little moments like that which are the measure of change. I hope so.
Gender is a big topic in Peace Corps Guatemala. Across the country, men are without a doubt those who have the power. However, the relationship between men and women is different in Ladino and Maya communities. In Ladino (what you would probably normally think of Latino) communities, men are more stereotypically machista (macho): they carry around guns, they are strong and dress like cowboys, they defend their women and try to keep them away from the grime of life (which includes sometimes the “dirty girls” who are their mistresses), and they also demand that their women run the house. In Maya communities, men are not as brash and aggressive (possibly not as unfaithful?), but they do seem to have a quiet superiority over their wives. They make decisions. Women do all the housework, period. Including when the men make a mess, it’s going to be the woman who cleans it up. Of course, men are supposed to support the family financially, but since so many people are self-employed, women and children usually help out with that too. In Ladino communities, it seems like a lot of women despite the machismo make it through school and into professional jobs, but among the Maya the majority of women are illiterate. I live in a Maya community, and right now I’m the only male Municipal Development trainee here. All of us have a good relationship with the mayor, but I’ve got it by far the best. He always remembers my name, and got me an interview on cable TV. This is really nice for me, of course, but is very frustrating for my colleagues.
It’s largely about power, but it’s also about ideas about gender roles. Lots of women say that they don’t want the “liberation” of American or European women. And that’s their prerogative. Under the Peace Corps methodology, we should to some extent accept that and work with it. However, if there is any value that Peace Corps is going to paternalistically push on Guatemalans, women’s rights seems to be the one (so far). As you might expect, I’m less worked up about it than most of the women. But still, I’m starting to ask how I can promote women’s rights here. As for now, I’m starting small. Yesterday in the central plaza, I was playing freeze tag with my host brothers and some other boys from the town. We had finished and were tired, but some girls sitting on a bench asked if they could play too. I told the boys that we’d play another game of tag with the girls. They said one after another, “If they’re playing, I’m not playing.” But then I said that I was going to play with the girls regardless of them, and they then said one by one, “I’m with Felipe (me).” So we all played together, and after a little bit of coaching to each side, they were playing just like it was normal. Today we played soccer with my gringa companions and another girl from the town, and there was almost no resistance from the boys. We actually played the boys against the girls and me, and the 10-year-old girl from the community led us to a big victory. Maybe it’s little moments like that which are the measure of change. I hope so.
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.”
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.”
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