Confianza: Giving It and Receiving It

As many of my fellow Volunteers have mentioned, probably the central teaching of training was that one must gain confianza, or trust, in one’s community in order to be able to do anything. Peace Corps is about building capacities of people and organizations in host countries in order that they can meet their development needs. This means that host country people, service providers and organizations are indispensable to the work of Peace Corps. In the end, they are doing the work, not us. Therefore, anything that we do as PCV’s needs to be carried out within a relationship of trust with our host country agencies. Building that trust is an indispensable step to achieving any lasting change in country. And so I set my primary goal for the first year in site to be to build that trust, and to do that through integrating into my community. Cool, I’ve set about that task. But the practice of building trust brings with itself some additional issues which I’d like to comment on.

In Guatemala, so we were warned by our cultural adaptation handbooks, the personal comes before the professional – in other words, any work relationship has to be first founded on a personal relationship if it is going to lead to anything. Good, that goes along with the necessity to establish trust that Peace Corps is always talking about. At first, then, when I arrived at work, I set about getting to know my co-workers before anything else. But for me, work has picked up pretty fast, and that emphasis on getting to know co-workers has shifted to getting things done and transforming the time at work from relationship-building to action-based conversations (oriented toward a specific outcome). Others, however, spend more time in relationship, to put it nicely. There have been plenty of times when some people in the office sit around just looking at pictures or “molestando,” flirting/bothering our coworkers of the opposite sex, and I pass by walking quickly, because I’m working on something that is needed in a hurry. It makes me think – am I missing opportunities to gain confianza? Am I, in contrast with my original goals-values statement, privileging tasks over relationships? My initial reaction is yes; I’m not in keeping with my own goals. But then, sometimes, I think, “How better to gain trust than to do a good job?” If I work hard and get things done, then people in the office will know that they can count on me. That is the definition of trust in the work environment, isn’t it? And I know that my primary counterpart, the coordinator of the Municipal Planning Office, trusts me in large part because of the way I work and complete tasks that need to get done. In reality, it can rarely be a good idea to not work hard, and so I have sided more with the second option, to build trust in work through the work itself, leaving it to down moments, to weekends and special events to have pure relationship time. This, however, has led to the problem of being called “creído” – more about that later.

Another issue with gaining trust in the community is that some actions will gain you trust with some within the community and cause you to fall out of favor with others. The biggest example of this is drinking. The action of going out drinking with a few people across cultures tends to build relationships between those people if it’s done in a safe manner. Going out with a counterpart that drinks, with architecture interns, with directors of other offices in the muni, all of these things will help you become friends and, therefore, better co-workers with them. However, in this part of Guatemala opposition to drinking is very strong, especially among Evangelicals, who make up the majority of my town. (There are also Mormons who oppose drinking strongly, just as they do in the States.) Gaining a reputation as a drinker can be very damaging to one, I imagine, as I hear the way that people take a little breath before they say the word “drink” or the inflection in their voices when they say the same. This same divide could also be said for dancing, only that the Mormons would then fall on the side of those in favor of dancing. But the point is that differences within the society seriously hinder one’s ability to build trust with “the community” in general; in such situations, you have to think of getting in with one group or another.

There’s another side to the equation, too. We are concerned with gaining trust in our towns. But what is the role of giving trust, or trusting others? Surely, trusting others helps others to trust you. But does that mean that you can, or should trust everybody? I received the following advice from a friend from a church here in town: Don’t tell people the majority of things about yourself. People should have to earn the kind of trust with you that would allow you to tell stories about yourself.

This is hard for me; over the few years of college, I developed a lot of self-confidence and a real desire to share myself and my story with other people. And I wanted lots of people to know about me. I was proud about the things that made me different from other people, primarily my religion, and for me, all the better that other people know about my religion and religious journeys. My old host mother in Chile was one of those people who inspired me to be very open about myself; to her, not being honest or not being forthcoming with truths about oneself was a form of hypocrisy. Here, however, as recommends my friend, maybe it’s better that one not share that information. Gossip is one concern, another is this whole process of gaining confianza in community, and third is working for an organization that has a reputation to keep up. With confianza as the goal, sometimes you position yourself as something you’re not – or at least you play up some aspects of yourself and play down others. Or at least you should. For me, it is very hard to break this mold of speaking my mind, doing what I want to do or feel to be right, etc. We’ll see how it goes in the future.