A fellow YASCer just wrote a wonderful piece about humility - she's living in S. Korea, dealing with an entirely different language and culture. Though I'm on the other side of the world, living in a country where I stand a much butter chance of understanding and being understood, and where people greet each other with "amor!" and buseros (bus drivers) poster their private microbuses with enormous, graffiti'd banners with their girlfriends' names on them... I get lonely sometimes. And I figure if you can't mention it on your blog, well bottling it up inside isn't a great alternative.
My first week at work has been a rollercoaster with the requisite incredible highs. And to be honest, not so many lows. My first day we took a round-about hop-along bus ride, jumping from one to the next, to visit the community of Las Anemonas. They're a group of about 200 families that used to live in the mountains of El Salvador, but after a hurricane in 2009, they've been relegated to temporary shacks with tin roofs off the main highway. I visited the neighborhood with Kenia, Cristosal's resident lawyer in training, because... get this... the kids want to have a workshop on breakdancing.
Now I had a whole bunch of thoughts about this. Is that really how we want to spend our efforts? I thought this was a serious development organization, focused on healthcare, education, all that social services mumbo jumbo you see on fliers or hear in the ads where they zoom in on some adorable child with puppy dog eyes. And then I gave myself a little smackdown. Here I am, yelling to the world how capoeira has changed my life, challenged me, given me community, family, and confidence... and these kids want to learn to break dance. Can somebody give me a Hallelujah!
Since coming to work with Cristosal, I've got a whole bunch of thoughts about development should work. Why are we trying to bring people out of poverty when it seems that wealth accumulation is the problem? Isn't that when people get corrupt, dissatisfied, jaded? We don't live on a planet where everyone can live like a middle class American, so how is the work I'm doing, in the long long long term, sustainable in any way? Not to sound cliche, but this linear development scheme ain't gonna work unless we finagle ourselves a new world order. Not that I know what that looks like, but it doesn't look like the United States. Pretending we know what we're doing only goes so far... actually I think that cover was blown decades ago, we just haven't realized it yet.
Noah and I grabbed lunch this afternoon (chicken soup, bottled water, tortillas, extra veggies for $3) and proceeded to go more in depth into development theory than any of my classes at Columbia ever did (or perhaps I was just 1000% more attentive with tortillas at my fingertips). And he cut my internal debate off at the knees. We're not trying to eradicate poverty. That doesn't make you happy, it's impossible to do it for everyone and still have enough resources, and it's just a distraction. Nice idea, but no.
We're working towards something else, something that only recently people have started to measure. The complete recognition, acknowledgement, and respect of people's fundamental human rights (flashing lights - this is gonna be a theme over the next year). Folks are guaranteed the right to shelter, food, all that good stuff... but fundamentally they are guaranteed a voice. Which means most of the time we need to just shut up. But over decades of historical interventions, coups, and generally being ignored by the local, national and international judicial community (including the good old US of A... all those history classes I didn't take would have been real handy right about now), it makes sense that folks get resigned. I saw a moment of it in El Carmen... These are folks who fought as guerrillas in the Civil War - every last one of them - and then when the government they fought for (and lost limbs and family members for) finally came to power, they were given crap land to squat on to make sure the other side couldn't come back and take it freely. I don't know what that's like. But at the very least I can imagine that it's gonna take something to believe in a utopia again.
I don't have answers, far from it. I got a whole bunch of questions, a lot of books Noah gave me to read to make up for the years I spent studying geochemistry instead of Latin American history, journalism, and human rights theory... and luckily a bunch of broccoli, a beer, and some chick flicks to drain my brain at the end of the day. I miss you all, but I wouldn't trade this experience for the world. Sometimes I just want my mom, or to walk around at night without worrying, or just to be in capoeira class again with my mestre. And that's ok. Because for now I'm here, and it's gonna work out, and most of the time, my brain is on fire, my belly isn't nauseous, and I'm surrounded by incredible people who have my back. And that's pretty good.
My first week at work has been a rollercoaster with the requisite incredible highs. And to be honest, not so many lows. My first day we took a round-about hop-along bus ride, jumping from one to the next, to visit the community of Las Anemonas. They're a group of about 200 families that used to live in the mountains of El Salvador, but after a hurricane in 2009, they've been relegated to temporary shacks with tin roofs off the main highway. I visited the neighborhood with Kenia, Cristosal's resident lawyer in training, because... get this... the kids want to have a workshop on breakdancing.
Now I had a whole bunch of thoughts about this. Is that really how we want to spend our efforts? I thought this was a serious development organization, focused on healthcare, education, all that social services mumbo jumbo you see on fliers or hear in the ads where they zoom in on some adorable child with puppy dog eyes. And then I gave myself a little smackdown. Here I am, yelling to the world how capoeira has changed my life, challenged me, given me community, family, and confidence... and these kids want to learn to break dance. Can somebody give me a Hallelujah!
Since coming to work with Cristosal, I've got a whole bunch of thoughts about development should work. Why are we trying to bring people out of poverty when it seems that wealth accumulation is the problem? Isn't that when people get corrupt, dissatisfied, jaded? We don't live on a planet where everyone can live like a middle class American, so how is the work I'm doing, in the long long long term, sustainable in any way? Not to sound cliche, but this linear development scheme ain't gonna work unless we finagle ourselves a new world order. Not that I know what that looks like, but it doesn't look like the United States. Pretending we know what we're doing only goes so far... actually I think that cover was blown decades ago, we just haven't realized it yet.
Noah and I grabbed lunch this afternoon (chicken soup, bottled water, tortillas, extra veggies for $3) and proceeded to go more in depth into development theory than any of my classes at Columbia ever did (or perhaps I was just 1000% more attentive with tortillas at my fingertips). And he cut my internal debate off at the knees. We're not trying to eradicate poverty. That doesn't make you happy, it's impossible to do it for everyone and still have enough resources, and it's just a distraction. Nice idea, but no.
We're working towards something else, something that only recently people have started to measure. The complete recognition, acknowledgement, and respect of people's fundamental human rights (flashing lights - this is gonna be a theme over the next year). Folks are guaranteed the right to shelter, food, all that good stuff... but fundamentally they are guaranteed a voice. Which means most of the time we need to just shut up. But over decades of historical interventions, coups, and generally being ignored by the local, national and international judicial community (including the good old US of A... all those history classes I didn't take would have been real handy right about now), it makes sense that folks get resigned. I saw a moment of it in El Carmen... These are folks who fought as guerrillas in the Civil War - every last one of them - and then when the government they fought for (and lost limbs and family members for) finally came to power, they were given crap land to squat on to make sure the other side couldn't come back and take it freely. I don't know what that's like. But at the very least I can imagine that it's gonna take something to believe in a utopia again.
I don't have answers, far from it. I got a whole bunch of questions, a lot of books Noah gave me to read to make up for the years I spent studying geochemistry instead of Latin American history, journalism, and human rights theory... and luckily a bunch of broccoli, a beer, and some chick flicks to drain my brain at the end of the day. I miss you all, but I wouldn't trade this experience for the world. Sometimes I just want my mom, or to walk around at night without worrying, or just to be in capoeira class again with my mestre. And that's ok. Because for now I'm here, and it's gonna work out, and most of the time, my brain is on fire, my belly isn't nauseous, and I'm surrounded by incredible people who have my back. And that's pretty good.
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