I wanted to write one blog entry about one of the values which I have been seeking to cultivate: other-centeredness. At Brown, I sometimes was a little frustrated by the underlying self-centeredness of the experience. Despite the students’ dedication to causes, student groups or what have you, in the end, you’re there to get a degree to get you where you want to go. Or you’re there to have experiences and build yourself up for the future world. Sometimes I thought that this underlying self-centeredness prevented true community life from really growing up. In Peace Corps, on the other hand, we are charged with the development of others. (Depending on your motives, you’re also here to develop yourself, like I am.) Part of being a PCV, in any case, should be holding the interests of others to be paramount.
In what does other-centeredness consist? One part, certainly, is working for the development of others, directing one’s energies toward others. Another part is when an opportunity comes up in everyday life to serve others, you take it. This would include common courtesies, giving little gifts, accompanying people when they have to go somewhere, etc. The third part, I think, surpasses the level of action and gets to the level of consciousness. This is actually having your thoughts centered on other people. And not in the way which someone who is in love has his thoughts centered on the object of his desire. But if one is other-centered in this way, he lives in a world which is not dominated by him, which does not revolve around him, but rather around others.
Over the last four years, I too have been quite self-centered: in the first aspect, to a certain extent. I lacked will to invest heavily in a lot of relationships. But at least during college I usually made the decisions to serve the Christian fellowship despite what other opportunities there might have been. And I took steps toward orienting my life toward vocations of service. With the second and third aspects of other-centeredness, I wasn’t too good. These aspects have to do with one’s disposition, and I was busy and therefore self-involved.
So how am I doing up until now? Well, on the first count, good. Since leaving training, I’ve been working in the muni for the development of my municipio. And that’s pretty much a given in Peace Corps. As long as you get here, try hard and orient your activities toward things the people want (OK, it’s not that easy!), you’ll be fulfilling that goal. On the second count, taking up random opportunities to serve people, I’m accompanying people when they need to go somewhere, for instance, but it’s hard to overcome two self-imposed limits: my schedule (though I’m not as busy as in college, I’m still fairly busy, and I always feel the need to get home by 7:30 or 8:00 to eat dinner, or though you may not believe it, write e-mails or blog entries) and money, not because I’m struggling for money, but more for how to spend it.
Here I’ll permit myself a small detour to talk a little bit about spending money: Peace Corps gives me a living allowance to pay for my food, rent, vacations, transport, incidentals, etc. I’m currently living with a host family and am paying them for my food and rent, which comes to only about 40% of that living allowance. So I’m not scraping by, I have enough money to pay my expenses. The people I know best here in site are not extremely poor either, especially in comparison to the overall population (in 2001, the poverty rate in our municipio was 94% and the extreme poverty rate 57%). Most are muni workers, professionals though they lack college degrees, and make about the same amount as I do. Others are young people from in town, who may not have any money but certainly aren’t starving. On the other hand, those who have jobs aren’t just providing for themselves, generally. One of my co-workers’ fathers passed away two years ago when a tree he was cutting down fell on him, leaving his wife and nine children without any income. Now my co-worker, who is 21, and his sister, 19, work to cover the family’s expenses. Anyway, all of this is to say that I still have somewhat more money than the majority of people I spend time with, even though they’re not extremely poor.
In Guatemala, property is not really private in the way it is in the U.S. People who have money are to some extent expected to buy things for other people. A simple example is cell phone calls. Cell phone service is done here by buying minutes (prepaid), and a lot of people are usually without minutes on their phone. So they are always asking for you to lend them their phone to make a few calls. And the question people ask is not, “Would you be willing to lend me your phone?” but rather, “Do you have minutes?” as if one’s having minutes obligates them to give up their phone. Another example would be people who have gone to the U.S. – they always come back from El norte (the north) bearing many gifts for family and friends. They like to share their new riches. A final example might be buying food, especially the customary midmorning snack. It is rare that each person goes to buy their own snack. One person generally has to invite and pay for everybody else’s snack, and that will more than likely be the person who has the most money at the time. As I’ve explained above, that person often is me. But it’s not fun to buy snack for everybody every day, so I rarely do it. Though I’ve spouted a lot of rhetoric about communal ownership and sharing of resources, I find it very hard to actually do it – to buy things for people once is fine, but establishing the pattern of buying people things, I feel, will just lead them to take advantage of me a lot. And for that thought pattern, possibly others feel like I am hoarding money and I am selfish, so maybe in this way I’m not fulfilling the second facet of other-centeredness.
The level of consciousness is the most difficult level to achieve other-centeredness, I think, perhaps unless you were raised in a culture which seriously cultivated other-centeredness. And unfortunately in the majority of situations where a culture encourages a certain group of people to be other-centered (think women), it follows that that group is forced into servant status in the society. So how do you cultivate other-centeredness, in which the joys of servanthood, or better said, servant leadership, are experienced, but without being socially excluded?
In training, I actually reached a high level of other-centeredness in my consciousness for me. I was spending so much time with my host family, and was so wrapped up in their issues, that my life actually began to revolve around them, possibly more than around me. I actually wanted to orient all of my activities toward them, and I primarily thought about how my activities would affect them, how they would perceive my actions. In contrast to today, my journal entries from that period primarily describe their lives and the issues they faced. And the period was very intense – it was very fulfilling to reach that level of other-centeredness, but the part of me that was self-focused got pretty tired at times. There were many times when I really didn’t want to go play with the kids and I just wanted to sit by myself, but I went with them. And it was rewarding and those kids love me dearly for it, but at the same time it was very tiring.
And so getting to site, I’ve become more self-centered again in this aspect. My family life is great, but not consuming. My work is focused on building others up, but in no way do I know the people I’m serving in the COCODES of my town as well as I knew my old host family. And it’s very hard to be other-conscious of people with whom you don’t have an intimate relationship. Also, I’ve been mostly focusing on myself trying to best position myself for life and work in site for the next two years. Though it seems that much has happened, I’m still only about 10% into my service as a full-blown Peace Corps Volunteer. I’ve felt that it’s more important to discover on who I’m going to be in site right now so that in the future I can help others. And maybe in that future, I can reach this level of other-consciousness again.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
A Beautiful End to Training
This has been a blog entry that is a long time in coming, and I apologize to all the readers that it is so late. I have wanted to relate the events that happened at the end of my pre-service training during the month of October, 2009. Training, though meant to ease the transition between life in America and life in rural Guatemala, is still always a difficult time in many ways; many volunteers who finish their service say that training was more difficult than any other stage of the process. It is the beginning of the cultural adjustment, when the culture shock is strongest, a stage with a very hectic schedule, a very integrated family living situation, and a tight leash from the administration. All of these challenges did make training very hard for me, but I’d like to present the following vignettes which made me feel like it was all worth it. Few and far between as they may be, the following are the wages of the Peace Corps Volunteer:
1. In the post of September 19, 2009 I mentioned that during training one other trainee and I were working with a COCODE (community development council) on an ecological park in the training town. We had three meetings with the COCODE: in the first, we tried to assign each member of the COCODE a specific area of responsibility based on the group’s needs and the individual’s interests and talents; second, we tried to define a short-term work plan for the group; and third, we accompanied the group in a meeting following up on the work plan. The group had had a 50-page strategic plan for the park done by the group Asociación Sotz’il, an indigenous-rights group, but Don Edy, president of the group, remarked at the end of our final meeting, “Asociación Sotz’il came and wrote us a plan. But they never sat at the table with us to plan together. And that’s why I think that your presence has been more helpful for us than theirs.” There, I hope, is the essence of Peace Corps – not doing work for others, but sitting down with others to work together toward development.
2. My swearing-in speech was very well-received, by Peace Corps and Embassy administration, by my fellow Volunteers, and by the Guatemalan families present. The speech brought me a little bit of fame, and it was fun to be the center of attention for a while.
3. Despite often not wanting to, I spent a lot of time during training playing with the two boys of the house, aged six and ten. I established a lot of trust with them, always tried to give them advice and even scolded them occasionally. On the last day, the ten-year-old gave me a card in which he apologized for doing all the things which I had scolded him for, proclaimed his brotherly love for me and told me that I was his best friend.
4. My host father, with whom I spoke very little, on my last night in the house knocked my socks off when he came up to me asking forgiveness for not pursuing a better relationship with me (at which time I also asked forgiveness from him for at times not wanting to speak to him), and then thanked me for all the time I spent with his kids.
1. In the post of September 19, 2009 I mentioned that during training one other trainee and I were working with a COCODE (community development council) on an ecological park in the training town. We had three meetings with the COCODE: in the first, we tried to assign each member of the COCODE a specific area of responsibility based on the group’s needs and the individual’s interests and talents; second, we tried to define a short-term work plan for the group; and third, we accompanied the group in a meeting following up on the work plan. The group had had a 50-page strategic plan for the park done by the group Asociación Sotz’il, an indigenous-rights group, but Don Edy, president of the group, remarked at the end of our final meeting, “Asociación Sotz’il came and wrote us a plan. But they never sat at the table with us to plan together. And that’s why I think that your presence has been more helpful for us than theirs.” There, I hope, is the essence of Peace Corps – not doing work for others, but sitting down with others to work together toward development.
2. My swearing-in speech was very well-received, by Peace Corps and Embassy administration, by my fellow Volunteers, and by the Guatemalan families present. The speech brought me a little bit of fame, and it was fun to be the center of attention for a while.
3. Despite often not wanting to, I spent a lot of time during training playing with the two boys of the house, aged six and ten. I established a lot of trust with them, always tried to give them advice and even scolded them occasionally. On the last day, the ten-year-old gave me a card in which he apologized for doing all the things which I had scolded him for, proclaimed his brotherly love for me and told me that I was his best friend.
4. My host father, with whom I spoke very little, on my last night in the house knocked my socks off when he came up to me asking forgiveness for not pursuing a better relationship with me (at which time I also asked forgiveness from him for at times not wanting to speak to him), and then thanked me for all the time I spent with his kids.
Sunday, January 10, 2010
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.
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.
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