"History is a race between education and catastrophe."
~ H.G. Wells
Here we go again, long time no speak. You might want to make sure you are in a comfortable chair, turn off your cell phone and put some popcorn on, because I have a lot to tell you about.
Let’s first flash back to mid-February. Peace Corps decided that I might have a thing or two to teach the trainees, so they brought all the new Sustainable Community Tourism volunteers up to Chilascó for a visit. We actually got to spend Valentine’s Day together, which was anything but romantic, but nevertheless a good time. Honestly, I don’t know if they learned anything from me or not, but as I told them: Peace Corps service is what you make of it. Everyone’s experience can be completely different and you have to find out how to make the best of yours. All I could do was speak from my experience thus far, and I tried to provide concrete and practical examples of things that have worked and things that have failed. Peace Corps, like life, is a continuous learning process. Trial and error and a lot of patience is the recipe for success.
A couple days after the trainees left so did I. I took a week of vacation to do some hiking in the jungle. With a wonderfully eclectic group of volunteers, ex-volunteers, Guatemalans and Graces, with an age range of “barely legal” to “do you offer a senior’s discount?”, we headed up to the northernmost part of the country to hike to “El Mirador”. The hike was two days in, one day of exploration and two days out through pure sub-tropical jungle. We covered about 150 Km in the five days, and if we didn’t burn enough calories walking then all the laughing we did at night made up for it.
El Mirador is an archaeological site of the ruins of an ancient Mayan civilization. It is exciting to go to because of its isolation, but impressive to be at because of the sheer grandiosity of it. Most consider it to be the largest Mayan ruin site on the planet, and its largest structure, “La Danta”, is considered to be the largest construction from the ancient world (including the pyramids in Egypt!) I have been to Tikal and was awestruck, but El Mirador dwarfs this more accessible site. And because it is less accessible, and not as “tourist friendly”, El Mirador really allows you to make the mental journey back to the 6th Century BC when the mysterious Mayans lived there.
Thanks to Oliver we had an excellent guide; Walfred. He was attentive and knowledgeable, he caught on to our senses of humor fast, and he got us hooked up with the local park guards allowing us to see some really cool stuff that most people don’t. We actually got to enter one of the pyramids and explore its inner workings; something that very few people have ever done or ever will do. I will let the pictures speak for themselves to explain the rest of the trip, but it can be summed up like this (please excuse the inside joke): “My Big Blue Moon played Catch Phrases in Spanglish, ate pancakes that tasted like rubber for breakfast and cucumber sandwiches for lunch, and had an unforgettable trip through the jungle to experience the past while forging friendships with a bright future.
Now, back in Chilascó, things could not be better. My first year is behind me and I am switching my focus slightly. For the first year in site the majority of my time was spent strengthening the administration practices of my host country association: ADESOCHI – The Association for the Sustainable Development of Chilascó. At the end of January we finally put the last piece to our accounting system in place by voting our yearly budget into law. We have certainly come a long way from not even knowing if we were making or losing money every month. I am happy to report that in the first month under the new budget, we were able to achieve a profit of Q. 2,000 (compared to an average monthly loss of Q. 1,900 for the past year plus.) So, while I will still continue to work steadily on improving ADESOCHI’s administration, I am now switching my focus toward using the association as a vehicle for change in the community. Primarily, I want to concentrate on education.
I feel that the only true path to development is through the education of the country’s youth. Any case study where a country has gone from receiving to giving international aid (South Korea and Costa Rica are astounding examples) has one major component in common: their primary focus, where they invested the majority of their resources, was in education. In this way the development is home grown. It is not so much about teaching them what we know from the outside or the top-down, it’s about providing them with the opportunities and resources they deserve to obtain an education and grow from the inside-out, from the bottom-up. Education is the life-blood of sustainability (feel free to quote me here.) And if you won't take my word for it then listen to John Dewey:
"I believe that education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform. All reforms which rest simply upon the law, or the threatening of certain penalties, or upon changes in mechanical or outward arrangements, are transitory and futile.... But through education society can formulate its own purposes, can organize its own means and resources, and thus shape itself with definiteness and economy in the direction in which it wishes to move.... Education thus conceived marks the most perfect and intimate union of science and art conceivable in human experience...The aim of education is to enable individuals to continue their education ... (and) the object and reward of learning is continued capacity for growth. Now this idea cannot be applied to all the members of a society except where intercourse of man with man is mutual, and except where there is adequate provision for the reconstruction of social habits and institutions by means of wide stimulation arising from equitably distributed interests."
With this in mind the association and I have chosen three projects we want to focus on in this next year. The first is one that I have already mentioned several times in this blog, the bottle schools. However, we have expanded it slightly. Where originally we were only going to build one, it has come to our attention that there is a serious need in the elementary school as well as the middle school. The teachers there approached me and explained that there are currently three teachers that do not even have their own classrooms; they are cramming 70 students into rooms made for 25. So, what could I say? We are now going to attempt to build two buildings: one for the elementary school and one for the middle school. Infrastructure is the buzzword for the first project. The second project will be aimed at providing opportunities for the youth of Chilascó to continue their educations past the middle school level through scholarships (more on this to come.) The third project will be to open a community library and computer lab (with internet access.) There is a serious bottle neck in the learning process here, because the resources and the access to information, are limited and not easily accessible to the population at large.
Bottle school update: We are full steam ahead on this project. Garbage is a HUGE problem here, but the entire community has got involved, as well as several other neighboring villages and a school in the capital, and we are already seeing major changes. I recently held a community clean-up day with the middle-schoolers, and someone from back home asked me: “why do they need someone to come and tell them to clean up their town? Shouldn’t they want to do this on their own?” I thought about this and talked with some of the community leaders I am working with about the question. This is the answer I came up with:
The last several generations in this small and isolated town grew up in conditions of poverty. Many of them never finished elementary school nor had many opportunities to venture outside of the village. When you are living hand-to-mouth like this the aesthetics of your environment are not a luxury you can afford to worry about. That combined with a serious lack of education (especially about the effects of contamination on the environment) lead to a sentiment that it does not matter where you throw your garbage. Furthermore, there is no system to control the garbage here. No garbage truck comes by to pick up their trash, nobody has garbage cans. So the options are either burn it or find a place to throw it. And, just like a wall that has a little spray-paint attracts more spray painters, once someone starts throwing trash in the street everyone else feels they have the right to do it as well. I am trying to teach them that there are other options. The word recycling is a foreign term here, so we are just now learning ways in which we can re-use this garbage. Mainly, we are going to build 2 school buildings with walls made of plastic bottles, filled with inorganic garbage, and covered with cement. The buildings end up just like any old concrete building, but are only a third of the cost and help to clean thousands of pounds of garbage out of a community that has nothing else to do with this waste. We don't realize how lucky we are.
I recently took the first steps towards realizing our second project. I took a trip to what is known as the "Zona Reyna"; one of the most isolated areas in Guatemala, with about 93 aldeas (little villages) all without power or water and very damaged from the Civil War. I was hosted by my friend Laura and her association. That have been administering a very successful scholarship project for several years now, “Becas Especiales Uspantan”:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Becas-Especiales-Uspantan/143756852253?ref=ts.
The idea was to learn from them and create contacts so that they will be able to help us as we try to replicate the project here. We went to visit some of the students that they are providing scholarships for up in the most isolated areas of the Zona. We wanted to talk to them and their families and teachers to learn how things are working and what else can be done to help. The stories were almost overwhelmingly heartbreaking, but at the same time incredibly inspirational. The people in this region are a testament to the power of the human spirit. And man is it ever GORGEOUS up there. It is true primary forest, completely untouched, and we had the opportunity to do some camping as the first visitors to an ecotourism site in the community of “La Gloria”. I'm a huge sucker for such natural beauty; I was ready to move there. As I said, the eventual goal is to replicate the scholarship project here in my community... so if you ever feel like sending a Guatemalan kid to school you let me know. It only costs $100 bucks a year, but most of the children don't ever go past elementary school, because even that is too expensive for their families. Sad, right? Imagine, for the price of a flat screen TV you could put five students through all three years of middle school! We don’t realize how lucky we are.
In regards to the third project, the library/computer lab, we are also in our first steps. Through Peace Corps and USAID each volunteer can receive a grant of up to $3,000 during their service for Small Project Assistance (SPA). Now, while I see this idea as anything but “small”, we are currently filling out the paperwork to receive this grant. We already have the space for this community education center, but the shelves are empty and the computers are non-existent. Knowledge is power, and between a good collection of books and the miracle of the internet, we hope to provide the community with unlimited access to this power. Anyone interested in helping in any way here should let me know. Maybe your company or your home has an extra computer lying around, maybe you have a contact at an NGO that provides used books, or maybe you want to sponsor a year of internet access for $200 dollars. Even if you just want to share this information with your friends and family we will appreciate it here. A lot of us take our education and unhindered access to information for granted, but the truth is we don’t realize how lucky we are.
So, congratulations, you have reached the last paragraph. Thanks for sticking with us. I just want to let you all know that life is GREAT here. In 2009, despite all the challenges it faces, Guatemala came in fourth place in the “World Happiness Index.” As hard as this may be to believe, living here I can see why. After a year here just about every last person in the community knows me. I cannot walk down the street without hearing “Tony” or “hello Professor” (probably because of the new glasses) or “good morning” (whether its morning or not) yelled out about 20 times, stopping to chat about 5 times about everything from the weather to the fact that we are running out of garbage in the streets, and usually getting invited to do something fun. You can just feel the warmth and friendliness of everyone and it is contagious. Enjoy the pictures!
