I have found that by the time these trips are nearly over, I am ready to return home to the comforts of home.  There is a certain level of stress that accompanies going on volunteer and cultural exchange trips, at least for me.  There is the stress of adjusting to a lifestyle that is so different from what I am used to.  There is the stress of worrying about where my passport is.  There is the stress of worrying about the safety of the food I eat and the water I drink.  There is the stress of finding toilets that have seats on them.  On top of all that, there is the stress of air travel itself, from the cramped airplane seats to the rude TSA agents barking orders at you.

You might wonder, with all that stress, what are the rewards in going on trips like these.   But in fact the rewards are many, and so profound that they make it worth all the stress that I endure.

On the trip to Guatemala, I probably did the least amount of what might be called “volunteer work” of any volunteer trip I have done.  And I was okay with that.  Global Citizens Network describes its trips in terms of cultural exchange, with a view towards partnering with a local community.  The volunteer project serves the goal of cultural exchange, rather than being the goal in and of itself.  On this trip, I spent a lot of time with many Mayans in a village in the Western Highlands, and supported in some small way the work of the Mayan Center for Peace.  I got to know several people who came to feel like family.

The GCN delegation heads back from the market with some members of the host community

One of the most remarkable people I met during the trip was Marta, whose family had been persecuted by the military during the civil war, who had fled much of her life from government repression.  She now has settled down into a home, and has committed her self to helping Mayan women in her community.  She heads up a women’s cooperative that is involved with teaching women the craft of traditional Mayan weaving, as well as teaching illiterate women to read and write. The people of this community are taking matters into their own hands to try to build a better life.  I was deeply touched when our delegation met women from that cooperative.  They pleaded with our delegation to help them.   I nearly cried.

Guatemala is a country that has suffered a terrible history, and much of that can be laid at the feet of the United States government.  The 1954 coup, engineered by the CIA, overthrew a democratically elected government and set the stage for decades of military lawlessness, the legacy of which remains even to this day.  The brutal civil war of the 1980s brought untold atrocities by the right wing backed military that had the support of the Reagan administration, and much of the violence and atrocities were directed against indigenous people.  And, unfortunately, one of the war criminals from that time, a retired general named Oscar Perez Molina (who has also been linked to narcotics trafficking), is the favorite to win the Presidential election this year.  Guatemala is ostensibly a democracy, and its electoral process seems vibrant, with many political parties and with billboards and signs and trucks with bullhorns everywhere.  However, in a country where an oligarchy of several families controls the vast majority of the land and wealth, money plays a significant role the electoral process.  The Broad Front of the Left, for example, lacks the financial resources to compete against these well-financed forces.  That being said, the people do take their politics seriously.  The day our delegation arrived at the Mayan Center for Peace, we watched a forum in which eight candidates for the mayor of Cantel answered questions and presented their views on women’s health issues.  The room was filled with people who were very interested in the political process.

There is no easy solution to the problems that Guatemala faces, and our job as a cultural exchange delegation was certainly not to fix them or to take sides in the elections.  Our relationship was not based on dependence, but instead was one of partnership.  The Mayan Center for Peace is part of an effort for the people of the Cantel community to self-organize and take steps towards promoting Mayan culture and helping people improve their lives.  The  executive director of the center, Arcadio, is a man with incredible energy, charm, and vision.  We supplied video equipment and external hard drives to the center that the Center could embark on a project of  recording traditional Mayan weaving practices, and we also supplied yarn so that looms in the Center could be used towards expanding the weaving  as an economic project.

A Mayan woman demonstrates the weaving process

There was a bit of irony in this.  One day, we went on a trip to the nearby city of Xela (Quetzaltenango) to make some purchases for the Center.  We needed to buy a lock box so that the hard drives and video equipment could be safely stored.   Where did we go to make this purchase?  The answer, I am afraid, is that we went to Wal*Mart, a symbol as great as any of the extensive reach of multi-national corporations, and an inescapable part of life in the developing world.

Throughout this experience, what really moved me was the hospitality of the people we met.  Manuel was kind enough to perform a special Mayan ceremony just for our delegation.  Most of the ceremony was in the K’iche’ language, which of course we did not understand, but like many religious ceremonies that are about sights and smells and sensations, it wasn’t really necessary to know what he was saying.

Manuel performs a special Mayan ceremony just for the GCN delegation

We experienced hospitality and generosity many times during this trip.  It was very common for people we visited to offer us bread with tea or coffee, or to offer us some gift.  I found the hospitality of the people very touching, and it was one of the things that inspired me to feel such affection for the people of that community.

A Mayan family in their home

After spending time with a people you care about who are struggling to make their lives better in the face of such difficult odds, the return home forces you to deal with a lot of difficult feelings.  You want to make a difference, and your everyday life may be comfortable in certain ways, but there is also the tremendous discomfort and wistful sadness that the world is so screwed up.  You wonder if you are doing all you can.

I have a high tech job that may be interesting and economically useful, but it is also provides no profound emotional satisfaction.  And yet it is my high-tech job that affords me the resources and vacation time to take trips like these.  Ultimately, eventually, I will settle back into the routine life that I had before I took this trip, and the reverse cultural shock I am experiencing will fade away, but there is a part of me that doesn’t want to lose what I am feeling now.  I want to be spurred on to make more of a difference.  The only question is what can I do that I am not already doing?

There were several excellent comments in response to what he wrote that probably address the issue better than I can.  I responded to these criticisms not directly in his blog, but rather in comments in another blog, but I think what I had to say is worth repeating here as well, because while I think that Gilmore’s criticisms could have validity depending on the type of voluntourism that is on offer, I also think he to a great extent misses the point of what legitimate voluntourism is or should be about.  More specifically, my experiences with Global Citizens Network and El Porvenir really do not jibe with his criticisms.  I think it is unfortunate that a lot of misconceptions about voluntourism get bandied about, based on generalizations and misunderstandings.

Here is what I wrote:

The reputable non-profit voluntourism organizations have a philosophy that understands the issues involved with professional work versus unskilled volunteer labor. When I went down to Nicaragua with an organization that does water sanitation projects, the project was really managed by professional labor. Our role as volunteers was subsidiary and carefully supervised, and more importantly, our role was as much or more about community partnership. When voluntourism operators are focused on cultural exchange, bridging international differences, and partnership, a lot of those objections that you cited go away.

It’s great if people want to go off on their own to a foreign land and volunteer directly at a site, but that kind of volunteer work is different than that offered by reputable voluntourism organizations. It’s a different kind of focus that is not just about the labor–the labor is really part of a complete package that focuses on community issues.

And for many people, traveling overseas to another country, where one speaks the language poorly if at all, where crime rates are high and the infrastructure is poor, there is value added in being part of a group of people who travel there together, where personal safety is paramount, where translation services are available, and where community exchange and learning activities can be incorporated into the overall schedule of activities.

I think both kinds of volunteering–the group and community focused, and the individual traveling on their own to donate their labor–have their place.

I also like what a commenter named Sinead had to say in response to this issue.  I will repeat part of it here:

With these projects and interactions, friendships are built, skills and knowledge shared and most importantly, solidarity, a sign that they’ve not been forgotten. The volunteers work and live in the community, spend there money at local venders, walk the streets and talk with the community. I spent 13 months in Haiti over 2 projects and the chances are the “blanc” walking the streets, hanging out at local venders are volunteers working for small grassroots organisations, and although the budgets might be small the impact they have on the community is large. The org I worked with is based in Leogane, the epicentre of the Haiti earthquake, and well known and respected amongst the local community although maybe not so much amongst the larger NGO’s (I am guessing thats because there may be some with similar views to Scott). Because of the relationship which the volunteers built up with the community, they were the only org invited by the mayor to attend the 1st year memorial, which was a huge honour.

Volunteering is much more than the end product, a school , a shelter, a cleared foundation. They boost the local economy by supporting small businesses, they build relationships, support local communities, fund raise and advocate and share their stories so that those effected by disaster and poverty are not forgotten.  (emphasis added)

Rick Steves has posted to his blog a description of his celebration of Christmas mass in Managua, Nicaragua.  Of course, I found this interesting because I have recently traveled to Nicaragua, but I also appreciated the sentiment that infused his posting.  Steves is most famous for his books and TV shows about travel to Europe, but it seems to me that he has lately been taking up the cause of travel as expression of social justice, which inevitably takes him to places much more impoverished than Europe.

I especially appreciated his discussion of meeting with Fernando Cardenal, who incorporated social justice teachings into his vision of Christianity.  As Rick Steves put it, “Christians are to be more than charitable. They are to ask why there is poverty and to organize to work for economic justice and dignity in the face of hunger and suffering.”

Whether one is a Christian or not, I think this is a good thing to remember.  Volunteering abroad is not a solution to the problem of poverty.  It is necessary that we do what we can to help others, of course,and that is what inspires us to volunteer; but I think it is important to never stop “asking why”, and working to change the root causes of poverty and injustice.  As the Brazilian Catholic Archbishop Hélder Camara famously once said, “When I gave food to the poor, they called me a saint. When I asked why the poor were hungry, they called me a communist.”

I found an interesting article with the provocative title “Suicides in India Revealing How Men Made a Mess of Microcredit”.  It turns out that many impoverished recipients of microcredit loans in India have become so saddled with debt that they have been driven to kill themselves:

As India struggles to provide decent education, health care and jobs to millions still locked in poverty, microlending — the loaning of small sums to the world’s neediest people to help them earn a living — has taken a perverse turn.

Microcredit has become “Walmartized” by unrestrained selling of cheap products to the poor, says Malcolm Harper, chairman of ratings company Micro-Credit Ratings International Ltd. in Gurgaon, India.

“Selling debt is like selling drugs,” says Harper, 75, the author of more than 20 books on microfinance and other topics. “Selling debt to illiterate women in Andhra Pradesh, you’ve got to be a lot more responsible.”

When a charitable project becomes sullied by naked  profiteering, the results are, unfortunately, foreseeable, especially when such profiteering is directed at a society’s most vulnerable segment.

When I returned about a month ago from spending some time in the second poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, I was emotionally drained.  I had only spent a little over a week in Nicaragua, but that experience was deeply affecting.  I felt a measure of sadness about the poverty I witnessed, along with a deep affection for the people I spent time with.  I spent the first few days after my return looking up Nicaraguan charities that I could give money to.  I just wanted to help more, to make more of  a difference.

After a while, of course, as the everyday, mundane details of life here in the US begin to occupy my mind, I slowly but inevitably returned to something akin to my  pre-trip  emotional stasis.  I am not sure if that is a good thing or a bad thing.

The thing about short-term voluntourism trips is that one’s contribution tends to be rather limited.  We worked on a project that was mostly managed by professional masons.  We did help in ways whatever that we could–hauling bricks, helping with the laying of bricks–but a lot of the serious  work was done by professionals who were hired for the project.

In some ways, our assistance was more about emotional support and making connections.  Some of my most memorable moments include the conversations I had with the people of the village.  For example, there were the brother and sister, ages seven and nine, who seemed tickled to death to converse with strange foreigners from a land far away.   They knew their own ages but not their birthdays–a jarring bit of cultural shock as I came to learn that in poor communities there,  people often didn’t know the day they were born.

There was Fabio, the mason who three of us volunteers worked with over a few days, who would address Phil, a fellow voluntourist, as “Fili”.  There was Ofilio, an older man with a leathery tan who wore shoes with holes in them, but managed to dress up a little more for the final fiesta before we parted.  Ofilio asked me at that fiesta if my camera was expensive.  It pained me and embarrassed me to realize that I was holding in my hand a device that would cost most of those people several months’ salary.

I was as affected by the poverty these people lived in, with unsanitary water and in many cases without even an outhouse, as I was moved by the gentle and kind spirit they exhibited.

Spending time, even a short period of time, in a developing country in the tropics is a trying experience that affects you in significant ways.  The time has passed now since I came back, and I am settling into my routine as a more privileged citizen of a developed country.   Of course, even in the US, privileges and wealth are not equitably distributed, and in many ways the inequality here is getting worse.  Poverty is a problem that plagues all present and past human societies, and it is one that should not exist if we had the will power to address it.

I said earlier that I am not sure if it is a good thing or a bad thing that I settled back into my routine.  On the one hand, I think it is pretty hard to go on perpetually in the sort of emotionally affected state that I was in when I came back.  Life does go on, after all.  On the other hand, maybe we who are more privileged should be a little more plagued by the suffering of others, maybe we need not to compartmentalize things so much, and maybe we need to be prodded and inspired to do more than we do.

I was there with a group of people for a voluntourism project, and early in the trip the group was treated to a Nicaraguan history lesson from a university professor.  I enjoyed a great deal what she had to say, but she did make one comment that I had a problem with.  Referring to the Sandinistas of the 1980s as poets rather than economists, she blamed them for incompetence in economic management and asserted that it was their fault that the Nicaraguan economy was in such bad shape during that time.  Even as she said that, I was thinking to myself that it seemed unfair to blame the Sandinistas for economic problems suffered at a time when the United States was launching a full scale terrorist assault against the nation, not to mention illegally mining Nicaragua’s harbors.  (The United States was found guilty of violating international law by the International Court of Justice.)  It is hard to see how anyone can expect a small country, especially one that was attempting to recovery from an earlier civil war, to do well economically under such horrific conditions.

Shortly after returning to the USA, I picked up the current issue of the NACLA journal, which coincidentally contains an article about the ideology of neoliberalism in Latin America.  The article mentions the Sandinistas:

In the 1980s, throughout their decade-long support for Washington’s illegal Contra war against Nicaragua, U.S. media outlets…implied that “economic mismanagement” was most to blame for the Nicaraguan economic crisis.  The title of a typical 1985 column in the Washington Post proclaimed that “the Sandinistas are allowing the economy to collapse.”  Three years later, after the Sandinista government had been forced to adopt a series of neoliberal reforms, The New York Times‘ Flora Lewis wrote that “the civil war has hurt Nicaragua’s economy, but not nearly so much as the Sandinistas’ own mismanagement and terrible policy.

The reality, again, was quite different, and very seldom given much serious attention.  Although the Sandinista government was guilty of a fair amount of incompetence, dogmatism, and even corruption at times, the primary cause of Nicaragua’s economic crisis was the brutal U.S.-funded war that killed 30,000 people, devastated much of the rural infrastructure, and forced the Sandinista government to prioritize military spending over health care and education.  In 1980 the Sandinistas spent about half of the national budget on health care and education and 18% on defense; seven years later, the figures had reversed.

The sad truth is that, not only did the Sandinistas end up adopting neoliberal policies at the end of the revolutionary period, but now that the Sandinistas are back in power in these post-revolutionary times, neoliberalism continues to be the foundation of their policies.  The old ideals are gone.  Reagan’s illegal actions against the revolution ultimately succeeded.  No matter who is in power now in Nicaragua.  A revolution that inspired so many around the world has ended up adopting economic policies that embrace the neoliberal, free market ideology that Reagan sought to impose.  And the massive poverty that we find in Nicaragua continues.  As the Who once sang, “Meet the new boss–same as the old boss.”

This gives me a chance to put in a plug for an organization that works on water sanitation issues in Nicaragua, called El Porvenir.  This organization organizes educational and work trips to Nicaragua where it is possible for individuals travel there and experience first hand the issues that El Porvenir deals with.

Jim Keady of Educating for Justice has posted an article explaining why we should not be honoring Christopher Columbus.  Quoting from Columbus’s journal and from Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States”, he makes the point that Columbus’s “discovery” of American served as the platform from which he carried out acts of genocide against indigenous peoples.

And here is a video that argues passionately that we should reconsider Columbus Day:

I think that the punchline addresses the very sorts of existential questions that my impending death leads me to ask, and which also serves as the basis for my need to inquire on how I can make my life more meaningful. If I had eons to live, I might not feel such a pressing need to make an impact. Ironically, perhaps it is the very tragedy of the shortness of our lives that can make it possible for life to have more significance.