Fantastic Article on Education!

I just found this article on the New York Times website this morning and felt that it fit perfectly into my topic from yesterday. It's fantastic and most definitely worth a good read...

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/02/opinion/02engel.html?_r=1&em

A Resurrected Blog...

So I should probably start out by apologizing for the obnoxious amount of time that has passed since my last post. My inability to keep up on this frustrates me. I think I am going to try to bring you all up to speed with a series of smaller installments.

Regarding comments made on my last post, I think we should all observe a moment of silence for the Twins disappointing series against the Boston Red Sox. Darn MassHoles! Oh well, I have complete confidence in the Twins for next season…we’ll blame these losses on the Metrodome for the last time and look forward to a brighter future next year in a new stadium.

To give a preview for the topics I want to write about hopefully in the next several days, I’ve just included a short list of what I’ve been up to and what’s on my mind…

      1.)  Education. The Guatemalan school system is very different than that of the US and I have really been noticing that so much depends on education. I’ll go into greater detail on it more later, but I have been noticing how important it is for the development of critical thinking, voice, and argumentation.

      2.)  Pastor’s Conference and umpteen church events…these have really got me thinking about the Latin American Church.

      3.)  More meetings with community groups…I have really been enjoying my meetings with Rural Health Promoters and might try to do some significant work supporting their work and political efforts.

      4.)  Frustrations with the lack of a developed Guatemalan postal service.

      5.)  I’ve tried to make a lot of observations with respect to the Mayan culture down here…interactions with Mestizo people…how American/modern culture has affected it...etc.

      6.)  The more I get to know people down here, and the more time I spend just having fun with them, the more I am loving the friends I am making.

      7.)  Many Guatemalans, as I know is the case with other countries as well, totally idolize America while others can be very critical of it. Sometimes, hearing people talk about the US really makes me feel awkward.

      8.)  Two absolutely wonderful Americans came down to the clinic last week to bring some medical equipment down for our lab. The medical equipment will be excellent for us to have, but I was especially grateful for the encouragement they provided me. It was very special to be able to share my experiences here with some other Americans—especially Americans who were so eager to just soak it all in.

      9.)  I’ve been doing a little bit more traveling around Guatemala recently, but it is always good to get back to Patzun.

All that to say, there’s good stuff on the horizon. Don’t take my silence these past few weeks to mean that nothing worth writing about has happened.

So thoughts for today…

Part of what we do down here involves organizing a lot of workshops for members of the community. These could be with community leaders, health promoters and midwives, church leaders, or a group of random women from the rural communities. The main goals of these meetings are to facilitate political organization and empower them to participate.

The first meeting I attended was a workshop for women from the rural communities of Tecpán (we work both in Tecpán and Patzún). Especially in the rural communities, women tend to be pretty quiet and reserved. Their role is pretty much to be the homemaker; raise children, which is a fulltime job when the average family is like 5+ kids; or, if they are working, to be a teacher. And roles tend to be pretty set in stone. Women don’t challenge the system, they don’t participate in politics, and they aren’t used to speaking up or speaking out. So our first activity was simply an icebreaker activity, the human knot, to get them to come out of their shell a little bit. After a short intro to the workshop, we split them up into groups of about 5 people and asked them to brainstorm responses to a few questions:

      1.)  Are you content with your life right now? Why or why not?

      2.)  What kind of future do you want to pass on to your children?

      3.)  Whose responsibility is it to create that future?

While I was really eager to see the results of this exercise, the thing that struck me most was that no one really wrote anything down at all. And I couldn’t figure out why until Mardoqueo, AV’s director of community and political development, explained a little bit about the education system down here. Actually, first off, several of these women were uneducated and illiterate. But even for those who had gone to school, the general style is that the teacher stands at the blackboard and writes things down while you as the student copy. The teacher knows everything and you know nothing. It’s not a question of the student’s ability to understand, it’s a matter of their ability to practice rote memorization and learn “the right answer.” Just as a side note, and this is another topic I want to spend more time thinking about later on, but these workshops have really taught me just how much of public health work demands an ability to be an effective teacher.

Anyway, back to this particular workshop…for students, there’s always a fear of not getting the right answer. And I think it is this same fear that keeps people from speaking out and participating in the government. I think it’s the same reason we had a hard time getting these women to brainstorm for our activities. They’re not used to generating their own answers; so when we asked them their opinions, they were trying to figure out what we wanted them to say. For many of these women, when we asked them if they were content with their lives, they just gave a casual nod of assent—almost as if it were a reflex, without even really considering it. However, it was encouraging to see that, slowly by slowly, some of the women who come to these exercises regularly are learning how to voice their opinions and I think some of the newer women are looking up to them and trying to learn from them.

A successful democracy unquestionably needs confident citizens who are able to think for themselves, think critically, and form arguments. And, as I’ve already mentioned, this is inextricably linked to a solid school system. But another reason a successful democracy needs an educated population is simply that the people need to know what the law says.

One thing I need to keep in mind is that these realities aren’t like chemistry problems. I am used to approaching a problem, studying, designing a small research project, and writing a paper/taking a test, and then moving on. I am used to packing things up neatly at the end of the scholastic year. These problems are long-term problems, they have overwhelmingly deep roots, and it is an uphill battle on every side. But the people I have met here who are working at AV have given me reason to be hopeful. I will look forward to telling you about all of them next time…

Prayer Requests:

      1.)  I am trying to do a lot of writing down here to process what I see, but usually I get home at the end of the day and just collapse. I really want to get some good writing done, so pray for energy and clear thinking.

      2.)  Pray for the situation with education here. Guatemala needs teachers who understand the value of critical thinking rather than rote memorization, who understand that the voice and opinions of their students are valuable and not something to be silenced, and who encourage their students to be confident and benevolent leaders in their communities.

      3.)  Pray that the people of Guatemala would learn the laws of their government and seek to become honest, active participants. And pray that God would work in the hearts of corrupt politicians to inspire them to serve their country rather than serve themselves at the expense of poor people.

      4.)  Last week there were elections for municipality representatives and it appears as though the mayor rigged the elections to put people in office who would bolster his power. There are some things we are trying with other community leaders to negate the results of the election, but we’ve got a long way to go on that.

      5.)  While I try to maintain a spirit of hope in spite of all the uphill battles that Guatemala faces, it is sometimes easy to be disparaging about the situation. Pray that I would keep my spirits up and be meditating on Colossians 1:17, that “[Christ] is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”

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