What are we doing here?

I’m feeling disappointed and unsure about what exactly we’re doing here. What are we doing here? We’ve been in San Lucas for three weeks, and so far what we’ve learned about the parish has been discouraging, to say the least.

Sometimes it feels like the parish’s role here is to let gringos come for a few weeks and feel good about the work that they are doing for poor Guatemalans, without focusing on or facilitating efforts to do anything substantial to empower people.

One of the long-term volunteers who has been involved in coordinating the activities of short-term volunteer groups has told us that he has noticed, on several occasions, groups being instructed to move bags of dirt or rubble back to the location from which they had been moved by another group just the week before. (If you’ve ever been on a community service trip that involved construction work or other physical labor, you know how disappointing—and maddening—it would be to discover such a sham.)

In our case, the parish’s vacation-volunteerism system has created a situation where we live alone in a huge house in downtown San Lucas, and, as a result, we have little access to more rural, impoverished communities and indigenous households, making it difficult to get to know people on a day-to-day basis. There are plenty of opportunities to get to know Ladinos who live relatively comfortably in downtown San Lucas, but almost no opportunities to get to know indigenous people, besides the few health promoters we’ve been introduced to. I thought I was coming here to live with people and to walk with people, not to live and walk in a parallel world and make myself feel good at the same time.

A lot of money is being poured into the ideas (or pockets) of a few people, and the suffering of the great majority goes mostly ignored. For instance, the heads of all the major parish projects have risen in socioeconomic status from humble, impoverished backgrounds to very comfortable lifestyles. It is confusing and frustrating that the parish can find the money to pay a few people such generous salaries and yet, the community health promoters, who are essentially the first-responders and the only primary healthcare providers for many people, are not paid. This really limits what they can achieve because they themselves are living in the same impoverished situation as their neighbors. Since they are not remunerated for their activities, they cannot do much as health promoters because most of their time and energy is taken up trying to find scarce day labor positions to feed and house their own families. These well-trained health promoters and community organizers would find it almost impossible to take time off from work in order to fully implement any project that we could potentially help them develop. Community service is fine and dandy for people who have a steady income, but it is foolish to expect people who are struggling to survive below the poverty line to take time away from jobs that pay $4 per day (for 8 or more hours of physically grueling agricultural work) to “volunteer” or “give back” to their communities in any substantial way.

Right now, it feels like the options are: A. to go back home; B. to move to another house with a host family; or C. just take things as they are and just have a good time, just try to enjoy a year off here. The problem with A is that we’ve only been here a month—not quite enough time to know if things will get better—and we’ve already invested so much time and effort into this year. The logistics of going back would be difficult, too, about as complicated as the logistics of coming down here. I would probably have to start school again, Elena would have to get a job, we’d have to find an apartment. It would also be giving up on something too easily, on something that was so important to us, instead of trying to problem solve and figure out how to make things work.

The problem with B is that we are here under the auspices of the parish, and we’ve already paid for our housing for the year. So we run risk of kicking off another flurry of parish politics and petty dispute, not to mention spending more money that we don’t really have.

The problem with C is that we would feel completely useless – as we do now – if not feeling like bad people. We came down here to do something meaningful and that’s not what we’re doing right now. We could be traveling every weekend or going away, or we could be going out and partying, but then in a couple of months we would probably find ourselves in the same situation, asking, “What are we doing here?”

Ultimately maybe the solution is to focus less on ourselves and our own subjective experience here, and to remind ourselves that other people are suffering and that was why we came here. Hopefully, thinking like this will force us to try to find a way to alleviate that suffering, instead of just feeling disappointed or sad because our experience here is not what we had expected it to be.