Reconnect Speech

Two months have passed since Reconnect, our meeting in the Peace Corps office. I’ve been meaning to put up some of my thoughts which I shared with the Volunteers on that day, but time has been very short, especially at night, so it’s been tough to update this blog.

As the designated speech-giver of our training class (class that arrived in August ’09), I was given the opportunity to share a few thoughts during Reconnect. Below you can find the text of my speech at swearing-in on October 29th, 2009, but this speech was a lot different. Very informal, just taking experiences that I’ve had and trying to make sense of them and give my fellow Volunteers a bit of a shot in the arm in a tough period of one’s service. These words are probably just as relevant or even more relevant now as the novelty of being a Peace Corps Volunteer has surely worn off and we are confronted with the daily reality of being a development professional in rural Guatemala while trying to integrate with the community.

The Municipal Development team! (We are all wearing ridiculous-looking T-shirts that we found in stores that sell used American clothes.)

I’ll just put these thoughts in a list:
1. Do a personal diagnostic. How do you feel on a scale of one to ten? (Most people responded that, quite well, thank you, 6-8.)
2. Congratulations for having made it to Reconnect. At the time of Reconnect, we were officially 6 months, 5 days in country – that is, 23% of our time in country complete. As Volunteers, we had completed only 14% of our service. In this moment, we are 8 months, 10 days in country; 5 months, 22 days in site; 31% done with our time in country and 24% done with our service as Volunteers in site. What could we realistically have hoped to accomplish in 14% of our time? Or even 24%? Even though it’s scary, and feels like it’s fading fast, there’s still 76% of our service left to try to make an impact if we feel like we haven’t made one so far. What was a realistic goal for the first quarter of service? Just integrate into the community. I know that personally, I was expecting to work on only integration in my first year of service.
3. If you can’t measure success in terms of projects accomplished, or lives changed, let’s look at ourselves.
a. Are you more patient than you were 8 months ago?
b. Are you less self-absorbed?
c. Do you appreciate the relationships you have?
d. Have you made any progress on the five value transitions I have been trying to cultivate: from self-centered to other-centered, from task-focused to relationship-focused, from dependence on material and physical pleasures to independence from them, from accomplishment-focused to being-focused, from independence to dependence on God.
Gandhi spent his early life mucking around as a mediocre lawyer in India, trying to study and integrate in England, but failing, and going to South Africa. Without much outward success, but upon further inspection, he was forming himself for the amazing things which would come afterward. If we mold ourselves into the people we want to be, hasn’t that made these two years worth it?
4. Nobody around us understands our philosophy of development, especially if you’re in a site, like me, that has had very few Peace Corps Volunteers, the last one having been in an outlying community of my municipio and having left in 2001. I’ve been asked many times to just send down $500 from my or my parents’ bank account to buy all the things that the office needs. But that’s not the way that we want to make our presence known as Peace Corps in Guatemala. We are not about showing up with tons of money, a.k.a. power, and starting to give things away to build for ourselves power and create dependence. It’s easy enough to be called creído (arrogant – I get this a lot, unfortunately), we don’t need to go around flaunting our own power. I already get called creído every time I refuse to pay for someone else’s snack, or telephone bill, etc.
5. Even though nobody else understands our philosophy of development, why we don’t just come in bearing our own very firm ideas of what we want to accomplish and with loads of money to accomplish it in foreign shores, we have powerful examples in world history of people who were with us. The example that I know best, and the example best-known in Guatemala (these thoughts surged in me as I was in a Posada, a reenactment of Mary and Joseph’s going to knock on the doors of the inns in Bethlehem), is that of Jesus. Jesus was born to a 14- or 15-year-old mother, who wasn’t married at the time of (immaculate) conception, who was forced by a foreign power to travel many hours at the time of her labor in order to complete some legal documents, who was denied room in the hotel for lack of money or social standing. Jesus was born in a pig’s feeding trough in the company of animals. Not suitable for a king, but suitable for him. He was executed as a criminal, in the style reserved for the worst criminals, humiliated, by the same foreign power. To be a change agent, as Jesus was, from a perspective of being with the people instead of above the people is a radical idea, but one that he lived out. Finally, on the same topic, there is a beautiful quote from the Tao Te Ching (the collected sayings of Taoism):
Go to the people.
Live with them,
Learn from them,
Love them.
Start with what they know.
Build with what they have.
But of the best leaders,
When the job is done,
The task accomplished,
The people will all say,
“We have done this ourselves.”
-Lao Tse, China, 700 B.C.