Yesterday we had a visit form our boss, Basilio. He’s a pretty cool guy who I respect a lot: he’s been working for Peace Corps for about 30 years (ask Miguel Bosio!), striving tirelessly and sometimes thanklessly to make his country a better place for everyone. Basilio has the tricky job of bridging the gap between Guatemalans and Americans, and the language is the least of his concerns. He has to explain to Guatemalans what makes Americans tick, and has to teach Americans about why Guatemalans do what they do. Despite these challenges, he’s always positive and upbeat, while maintaing a practical sense of reality.
But all that doesn’t really do the guy justice. He is patient, kind, insightful, and looks after all of his volunteers –about thirty at any given time– like they were his children. When he got here, he asked after Emily’s health, not because he heard from the nurses that she was sick last week and it’s his job to do so, but because he was legitimately concerned. That’s the kind of guy he is.
Basilio and Aurelio spent a few hours with us in our kitchen, discussing plans for the future of our village, as well as that of Santa Eulalia in general. The Peace Corps is beginning to implement President Obama’s pledge to double the amount of volunteers on station by 2011, and our program, now renamed Healthy Homes, has been identified as the high priority item by both PC Guatemala and the Guatemalan government. This means that Basilio has to field twice as many volunteers as normal come July, and Santa Eulalia is going to get a lot of them… maybe as many as eight.
When we first heard rumor of this, we were blown away. Niko and Katal (the other two volunteers in our municipality) heard it through the extremely fast Peace Corps Grapevine, and immediately came over to our clubhouse to discuss what we should do. All four of us love the remoteness and isolation, the “real Peace Corps experience” of our sites. Eight volunteers in the same municipality? That would destroy everything. After coming to an agreement, we decided that we’d each try to discourage Basilio from his plan. Volunteers would be tripping over each other, the Sunday market would be full of gringos, and the locals would all get us confused with each other.
Basilio and Aurelio, however, had a different take. By putting more volunteers here, we can better serve the communities and families that are close to us. A volunteer that runs around serving four communities is far less effective than a volunteer that serves only one community, but four times as thoroughly. In a very un-Guatemalan style, Basilio favors quality over quantity. And there are a TON of villages in Santa Eulalia, 84 to be exact. That’s plenty of space for a great many volunteers to work without stepping on each other’s toes.
Unlike most aid organizations that come to bring superficial change to a large number of homes, Peace Corps is about making small-scale, lasting change that can continue in the long term and spread by itself. We spoke of an example. There’s an NGO (which will remain nameless) that distributes thousands of water filters a year all over Guatemala. They show up for a few days, hand them out, then go home. The filters make families happy for a few months, then they find their way into the attic as they fall into disrepair, or the family gets tired of using and maintaining them. The Peace Corps is the opposite: we live with families and communities for two years, and there are usually no hard data to show that we’ve done a thing. But if we did our job right, the families that got to know us, exchange views with us, and learn from us will be changed for the better: they will organize themselves for community action, look after their own health, and encourage their children to get educations.
Emily then piped in, explaining that we had offered to work in a few different surrounding villages (like Pett) and they had never taken us up on the offer, so why should they get their own volunteer?
“There is something you still don’t understand about Guatemala,” Basilio sighed. He then explained that every town, every village, every FAMILY is very insular. They don’t like to share, and they have a lot of pride in self. Having their own volunteer is like having their own soccer team, their own school, their own church. It’s sortof like the American idea of “friendly rivalry”, Purdue vs. Indiana University, but it’s not so friendly. “I don’t like this aspect of how we are,” he continued, “but it’s not going to change overnight or in a few years. We have to work with and around it.” He went on to explain that the sociological reason for this is that in most cases, towns start because a family had a big rift, and the disgruntled parties left to start their own village or were exiled. The culture’s memory is generations long here, and those old grudges never die.
From our disaster with the Yulais girls, we are well aware of how overwhelming these inter-village jealousies can be, but that doesn’t mean that we want to support it with timid acceptance. It will be the challenge of future volunteers to travel to other villages, help each other with presentations and lectures, show the Guatemalans that it’s OK to share resources, information, knowledge.
“Some towns just want a volunteer because the neighboring village has one, but they don’t realize how serious a commitment it is,” I said.
Basilio and Aurelio agreed this needed to be addressed, but they’d just come from a several-hour meeting with the leaders of Pett, and they were well-briefed about their responsibilities. “Any you should know,” Aurelio continued, “that the leaders in Pett gushed about all the good things they’d heard you are doing here in your own village. They are eager to reap these benefits themselves.” As Emily later said, our village is like a mother that criticizes you to your face, but tells all her friends how wonderful you are.
As the discussion progressed, Basilio slowly won me over to his way of thinking. Although I was never as against it as the others, I think that much of my opposition to the influx of volunteers is personal, not about the good of Santa Eulalia. I like my village the way it is, I like being “the gringo”, being a pioneer in a completely alien environment. But the next volunteers aren’t going to be like me. They will have different needs, hopes, aspirations. And I am sure Basilio will match the appropriate volunteers to this “new Santa Eulaia”. Back when Emily and I were camp counsellors, we had this realization that every camp is a special meeting of people, unique in both space and time, never to be repeated. It must be cherished for what it is, and let go when it’s done. Peace Corps, our village, our experience… is just that. To try to freeze it in time would be wrong, and impossible.