We were home for five days before leaving for In Service Training, the AIDS seminar, and the Medical Jornadad, but that was long enough to receive a big set back. One of the projects I’ve been working on is getting scholarships for Elisea, 18, and Maricela, 16. They came to us shortly after we arrived on behalf of their Father/Uncle respectively, to invite us to their community to give health talks. They’re both energetic and really open in comparison to many of the girls we’ve met here. I liked them instantly. On our second meeting with them they’d plucked up enough courage to ask us to help them find scholarships. They told us they wanted to study nursing. I thought, this is a fantastic opportunity to mentor these girls and help them get into school; we totally have to do this. They’ve been translating the health talks in their village with us from beginning, learning and doing all at once. I set to work digging up resources and found I could apply through FOG, Friends of Guatemala, an organization founded by RPCVs (returned peace corps volunteers), to provide scholarships for Guatemalan children. I got the forms, I got the girls excited. We started gathering all the necessary information to fill out the applications. The deadline came up fast, and at one point the girls had to come over to our house before 6 am one morning to give us the last of the information we requested, before we had to take off for a trip south, so I could get the forms in on time. Here we are together when the girls dressed me up in traje for the video they sent home to our parents at Christmas; Maricela in on R, Elisea on L.

I felt and for months continued to feel really jazzed about this project. Getting these girls to school has so many advantages: they will have a paying profession in health; they will earn a steady wage; they will contribute to a field desperately in need of employees especially with Mayan language skills; they can help provide the family with enough money to get their younger siblings through school; they will be positive examples to others in their village who are struggling to educate themselves and find a viable career. This is an all around great project! And the girls were wide-eyed with anticipation for months. Would they get the money, or wouldn’t they? I reminded them that this was not a last ditch effort, but our first attempt. They would ask me if I’d heard anything every time they saw me. Their father/uncle came to talk to me about whether or not I’d heard anything as soon as we got back from the states mid-January, then a week later the girls came to ask. I was waiting for information myself. FINALLY I heard back from FOG. They awarded the girls as much as they could, which was less than 1/3 of what the girls would need. It was something, anyway. I started looking for ways to do supplimentary funding, and I called the girls over to tell them the news. Then a bomb was dropped on this project before they even arrived, and made worse with their arrival. The local nurse informed me that all programs to study nursing required that students be 18 to study. That knocked out Maricela, which was a total bummer. But when I called the girls over, I was really rather annoyed that they hadn’t informed me of this earlier. I asked them why they never bothered to tell me. “Well, señor, (they suddenly began addressing me like a teacher/strict authority figure rather than just using my first name like they’d always done before), we just never had time. You went to the states, and when you came back we never had money on our phone. And then we never had time to come visit you.” Excuses, excuses. These were all lies. They just hadn’t bothered to tell me. They’d come and visited us a million times, and sent me text messages to call them for other things. Never once did they mention, “oh, hey, you know we got word that now they’ve made the 18 year old age limit a requirement”! I was so frustrated. I thought I explained all of these things to them, and there was no point in chiding them about making up excuses because I would have had to listen to MORE excuses, which would have just made me madder. I told Maricela that she wouldn’t be old enough to do the one year program while we were here so we couldn’t sponsor her. I told her this didn’t mean she could not do the program, as there will always be other volunteers and there are various scholarship programs she could still look into. Elisea was the remaining hope, as she is already 18. But she took this time to tell me that she found out in December she didn’t pass last year’s classes, which meant she had to retake them, then finish her last year of high school after that. This means we’ll be gone by the time she’s ready to start the nursing program also. The final kicker, however, is that after she learned she needed to retake last years courses, she was so busy working on an adult literacy program (and that is good) she didn’t bother to sign up for classes this year, AT ALL.

People here, more often than not, seem to evade responsibility for things. It’s worked into their phrasing. One example, no one says, “I forgot” they say, “It was forgotten” as though it was beyond them to remember it. Another stronger force caused the forgetting. It drives me insane! It’s like leaving EVERYTHING to the voluntad de dios, the will of God, when it’s clearly something we should be taking responsibility for ourselves.

Anyway, I didn’t want to get so mad as to scare them off forever, or completely discourage them from trying, though I certainly felt that angry with them. I felt completely used. I had to thoroughly, sternly explain to them all the ways what they did was irresponsible and wasteful. They wasted not just A LOT of my time, but more importantly, they wasted both Fletch’s and my one opportunity as volunteers to sponsor a scholarship for anyone here in all the valley during our service. Additionally, I already have the money deposited in my personal bank account, so now I have to call the FOG coordinator (a very busy guy who’s not always easy to get a hold of), explain the situation and ask how I should handle the money. I think the only option is to return it to him, but I will tell him about other projects and see if he wants us to put the money into other educational endeavors, if that’s easier. I don’t know. It’s SO FRUSTRATING. I really thought these girls “got it” about the importance of education. I believed in them and their need. Now I just feel like an idiot.

My biggest fear is now that Elisea hasn’t bothered to sign up for school this year, she’ll just quit and be done forever. That really kills me. At least Maricela is still studying. We’d already invited Elisea to the AIDS seminar, and would’ve invited both the girls if we’d been allowed to bring one more person. Thus, I chose to end the lecture on a more positive note, talking about the seminar and the work we have coming up in their village, what we needed from them in regards to the work. They seemed to relax a bit. But really, I was so mad at them, I just wanted them to leave. I think I did a fair job of hiding the full extent of my anger until they left.

Once they were gone, I just felt like, surely I must have failed here somewhere too. I feel like I was probably too eager to help these girls. To some extent, I failed to gather enough of my own information and lept before looking. It’s just so hard to get the facts from anyone here that I thought the girls would be effective at getting it because they probably understood how things work better than I do. I also trust people a lot (too much?), but my instinct to trust people is based on my own cultural norm of people being responsible. Even in the US I’m somtimes let down, but here the chances are oh so much greater for things to go wrong. And they did. I also can’t just give up and walk away. I can still be a positive force in their lives, a good mentor for them. It’s not unreasonable to think when I return to the US I could earn the money to send them to nursing school myself. By then I’d have a much better read on the situation to determine if that was really a good idea or not. Though at the moment that’s a very distant possibility. Once they’d been gone for a while and I’d been going over the situation in my head, I had this strong sense of, “This is what it must be like to be a parent.” Obviously I’m not one, nor have ever been, but I imagine that if I had kids they would probably manage to piss me off that badly too, and I’d have to be awfully careful about how I reproached and disciplined them. It was weird, as I think almost on a daily basis, I’m not ready to have kids or that I don’t want to have kids for a long while. And here I am, I thought, acting like somebodies mother.

That’s one project down. Though I still do have to figure out how to return the money, so I guess it’s not all the way over until the money is no longer in my account. Bummer, to say the least.