Reflection from the Most Comfortable Couch in the World

Posted on June 29, 2011 by OB Volunteer Leave a comment

Only in Guatemala would I spend six hours on a couch doing absolutely nothing, and not feel like I was missing out on life. Granted, this is not any ordinary couch- it has been deemed by Eddie Branchaud to be the most comfortable couch in the world. I agree, but that’s not why I sat there for so long last Saturday. This couch rests ten feet away from the shore of Lake Atitlan, giving its occupants miles of glassy water, three volcanoes, endless sky and multi-colored clouds to ponder. In the midst of all that is happening down here, all the exciting but exhausting adventures we’re having, the endlessly stimulating but circular conversations about development and microfinance, I desperately needed a day to sort out my thoughts. So I take back the assertion that I was doing absolutely nothing- I really spent six hours attempting the impossible task of making sense of this place.

Oxlajuj B'atz
If I had seven years, or ten, or fifty, Guatemala would continue to surprise me. My aunt, (of a connection too complicated to mention here,) came to Panajachel about 30 years ago and never left. That seems to be the trend here- people come from America, Europe Asia to travel or work with an NGO, and unexpectedly fall in love. Not necessarily with one person. I have fallen fast and hard for everything about this country: the tenacity and drive that women we work with demonstrate by commuting two hours both ways to a more than 9 to 5 job; the energy of grassroots change evident in a newly-stamped Wesleyan sticker on a local restaurant window; the respect that locals and expats alike have for one another and for the beautiful place they live in. Guatemala stuns me, enraptures me, intimidates me, and amazes me at the same time. Deciding on one emotion at any moment is a difficult task, and this weekend I finally had time to allow myself to think about the roots of all these feelings.

When I think about why I admire the women we work with so much, a couple moments from the past two weeks come to mind. First a little bit about how OB’s work: the staff includes four community facilitators and two interns, all of whom are indigenous women and speak Spanish and either Kakchiquel or Tzu’tujil. Most of them have earned or are working towards degrees in social work, and are incredibly innovative and dedicated. They each are responsible to facilitate OB’s work with a number of our 20 communities, designing and teaching workshops about business, health, art, and democracy. Last week we accompanied one facilitator Letty and an intern Veronica to three different communities. The visit was supposed to be a follow-up on a medicinal plant workshop Letty had taught the women last month, but when we arrived in one community we discovered the women had not prepared their gardens for planting like they were supposed to. Letty is an educated young women with a complex, high-paying job; but the goal of that day was to get the plants in the ground, so Letty spent six hours in the hot sun, wearing her long traditional wipil, digging up stones and tilling soil. There is nothing she wouldn’t do to help the women in her communities, as every facilitator here would do for theirs.

OB Blog

Veronica preparing a garden

Sometime in the midst of planting six gardens a day Letty still found time to coordinate interviews between Nikki and me and the women, and to sit down with us to translate between Spanish and Kakchiquel. The facilitators here have all taken our project seriously, and have gone out of their way to help us in any way they can. Whether through bonding in the gardens or laughing over chile rellenos at a staff lunch, Nikki and I have somehow ceased to be the foreign interns and have become part of the team. We were invited to sit in on their meeting to develop the next workshop, the goal of which will be to teach the women artisans about the importance of a catalog. Growing up in the Western commercial culture, Nikki and I have more knowledge about what makes a good catalog and how to design one. Knowing this, the facilitators integrated us into the workshop, asking our opinions, listening to our answers. We gave them the help that we could, and in turn they showed us the process they go through every time they develop a workshop.

OB Blog

Letty translating in an interview

Helping out in a developing country is a difficult balance of giving enough and yet not imposing lofty ideas that fall apart on the ground. OB’s mission is not to hand indigenous women a better life, but to give them the tools necessary to make it themselves. Nikki and I and Ramona and Andrea have valuable skills that we can teach our community facilitators; but they themselves are the heart of OB, and they carry energy that makes the organization successful. In the catalog meeting it was clear that Lucia, the field supervisor, has not only had years upon years of experience teaching indigenous women about new concepts and but is also extremely good at it. Nikki and I might know how to design a catalog, but Lucia knows exactly how to explain things in terms the indigenous women, who have never seen or heard of a catalog before, can understand. In that meeting I glimpsed the energy of grassroots change that subtely drives Pana forward, embodied in the beautiful women like Lucia and Letty that we are fortunate enough to work with every day.

Sometime during those six hours of reflection, sitting on the most comfortable couch looking out at the most spectacular view in the world, I realized that the key to developing Guatemala is not to get a thousand or even a million volunteer workers to come build hospitals and schools. As Lucia always says, the change must come from within. If I can pass on the skills I learned in 14 years of schooling in the US to young women like Letty, it can only help her mission of educating the women in her communities. But she will be the one they will lean on when they emotional or financial support, and she will change Guatemala one community at a time in a way an outsider cannot.

Darcy Andrews, 2011 Nest/Oxlajuj B’atz’ Summer Fell0w

Build a Nest, OB Blog

Patience, Flexibility, and Preparation

Posted on June 17, 2011 by OB Volunteer Leave a comment

Patience, flexibility, and preparation – in my two weeks working with Nest and Oxlajuj B’atz’ so far this summer, these are a few things that I’ve learned are always critical when working with any NGO. To gather the information for a production guide, look book, and marketing collateral for Nest and Oxlajuj B’atz’, Darcy and I are hoping to visit each of the 20 artisan communities that OB works with – but scheduling these visits has been much harder than we anticipated.

OB visits each community no more than once per month, and the artisans in each community have so many other obligations that scheduling extra time to meet with Darcy and I has been extremely difficult. The language barrier adds another layer of difficulty to our projects, as most of the women speak predominantly their indigenous languages and very little Spanish. This means that in order to conduct our interviews, we will usually need help with translation from one of the community facilitators, assuming that they have time or are not working on another project. Moreover, we were warned that even when we are able to arrange interviews with the women, we may not be able to obtain all of the answers that we want, as the women work with so many different organizations and NGOs that identifying their relationship with one specific group – like Nest or OB – could be difficult.

So Darcy and I have been patient. Though we had originally hoped to begin our community visits at the end of last week, we have instead spent the past week honing our interview questions, compiling background information, and working on various other projects for Nest and OB, as we wait for our visits to be arranged. Yesterday morning, however, as two women from the San Juan la Laguna cooperative came in to the office for a meeting, we found ourselves scrambling to gather our materials for interviews that we had definitely not anticipated conducting.

These first interviews were a definite learning experience for both of us. Though the women were open to talking with us about their lives and their products, both expressed concern that they wouldn’t be able to answer the questions correctly, and were shy and quiet with their responses. And while both women did speak Spanish, their command of the language was somewhat limited, making it difficult for Darcy and I to understand some of their answers. Finally, we realized that while many of our questions made sense on paper, they were more difficult to comprehend when asked out loud in an interview setting, and their answers to the questions didn’t always yield the type of information we were expecting. After we thanked the women for their time, Darcy and I spent the rest of the afternoon poring over our questionnaires, asking ourselves which questions we could remove, what questions we were leaving out, and what modifications we could make to the questions to make them easier to understand, less formal, and more conducive to conversation and open answers.

Now, though we still haven’t officially scheduled any of our community visits, Darcy and I know to be ready and prepared for anything, on any given day, at any time. Though two months initially felt like a long time to finish all of the projects in our work plan, we’ve realized that amidst all of the daily interruptions, changes in plans, and day-to-day complications of working with an NGO like Oxlajuj B’atz’, patience, flexibility, and preparation are going to be critical in accomplishing all that we are hoping to do, and that inevitably, things won’t always go exactly as we have planned.

-Nikki Brand, 2011 Nest/Oxlajuj B’atz’ Summer Fell0w

Build a Nest, Guatemala, OB Blog, Panajachel, Solola , , ,

Working through the construction

Posted on June 10, 2011 by OB Volunteer Leave a comment

The Casa Kakchiquel is under construction. The sounds of drills and hammers mix with the roar of tuc-tucs driving by outside, giving one a sense of continuous motion, continuous improvement. Sitting in the shared common room in the middle of the house, where Nikki and I have set up camp, I can see wood planks being put together outside one by one, and I see every OB employee pass by on their way to and from the communities. Sometimes Oxlajuj B’atz seems to embody the space we are located in; the organization is still in the process of constructing itself, continuously moving forward with the implementation of every grass-root project that will hopefully contribute to our overall goals of development. However unlike the Casa Kakchiquel, our construction will not be completed in a couple months, or even a couple of years. Our mission will not be complete until the women’s cooperatives are self-sufficient and the education we are teaching them is self-perpetuating, but even then the women themselves will hopefully continue to evolve. For the past couple weeks I have become familiar with all of the different building blocks that make up Oxlajuj B’atz and looking for ways to continue developing them.

For example, the women recently started a new project along with Minneapolis artisan Mary Anne Wise where they were taught the art of rug-hooking, a skill previously foreign to them. By giving the women this skill not only are they receiving a new outlet for creativity, but they are also now able to increase the diversity of their projects and compete in a wider range of markets. Mary Anne Wise is holding an artisan show in Minneapolis in September, and invited two women, Rosa and Yolanda, as well as their mentor Lucia to join her. When I heard the news from Andrea that they all received visas, which for indigenous women in Guatemala can be a great challenge, I was extremely happy for them. However I did not fully feel the importance of this development until the next morning at our first staff meeting, when Lucia announced that she will officially be going to the United States for the first time in her life.

OB Photo

Darcy, Lucia, Nikki, Nancy, Andrea

Watching Lucia struggle to get the words out, I had to bite back tears. Numerous times she almost became overwhelmed by the intense emotion she clearly felt. She kept saying that she could not find a name for the emotion she was feeling, but that she felt extremely happy and extremely sad at the same time. Lucia was overjoyed because she has wanted to go to the United States ever since she was a girl, but in the midst of such an accomplishment she was crying for all “los mojados,” the Guatemalans that have suffered and died while trying to cross the border. She could not simply move forward on such a big step without reflecting on the miles that this country still needs to go so that people will not have to die while trying to attain a better life, a reminder for me of the humbling amount of work still to do here. Every aspect of our development goals at OB, including health improvement, business development, and women empowerment may be achieved for the 20 women’s cooperatives we work with because of the projects we are working on now. That is a great feeling- however it is not nearly enough. I might not be around in 5, 50, or 100 years to continue developing this community. But the young women we work with will hopefully be, as Andrea says, “the new face of Guatemala,” and the responsibility will be theirs to take what they have learned from Oxlajuj B’atz and apply it to even larger communities, maybe one day to the whole country. Only then will Lucia truly be able to be happy for achieving her life goals, without crying for those left behind.

- Darcy Andrews, 2011 Nest/Oxlajuj B’atz’ Summer Fell0w

Build a Nest, Guatemala, OB Blog

Yolanda and Rosa, Part 1: From volunteer Diane Dreyfus

Posted on June 3, 2011 by OB Volunteer Leave a comment

The following is taken from a series of blog posts from OB volunteer Diane Dreyfus, who is donating her time teaching English to two selected members, Yolanda Calgua and Rosa F. Garcia, who will travel to the U.S. in September for a rug-hooking exhibition. Read along below and follow their journey preparing for their trip on Diane’s blog, Dragoness’ Utterances, here.

Yolanda Calgua and Rosa F. Garcia are K’iche speaking Mayans. They have been selected to appear in a show called “Mary Anne Wise and Friends” opening in Minnesota’s Anderson Center.

I had volunteered with Oxlajuj B’atz’ (an educational foundation) and was delighted to learn that one of my jobs would be to teach these ladies the basics of N. American cocktail chatter.

But, wait, wait, first, they must learn to say “Hello.”

With lessons spread over 2-3 months, for Yo-Ro “success” would be if they are able to navigate public spaces, greet people and minimally discuss their work and families… Much of this instruction is done through ROTE memorization and DRILLING phrases from musicals like: “Hi my name is Rosa, what’s yours?” and “This rug is ‘Lovely absolutely Lovely.’” Read on here.

OB Blog

Xeabaj II: From Madeline Kreider Carlson

Posted on June 3, 2011 by OB Volunteer Leave a comment

The following is one in a series of posts from 2010-2011 Watson Fellow Madeline Kreider Carlson, who worked with Oxlajuj B’atz’ on an asset-mapping project in Xeabaj II. You may read her entire blog, Wanderlust: A Watson Year, here.

A couple entries ago, I mentioned that I’m working on an asset mapping project for OB. I’m still living in Panajachel, but I’ve been traveling to Xeabaj II every week to work on this project, which is part of OB’s integrative development strategy for this group. So far I’ve interviewed seven of the fourteen women in the group, using a survey that I developed that includes questions about their hopes and goals for the future, their assessment of their own skills and interests, and thoughts about the community in general. The goal, eventually, is to bolster their sense of empowerment as a group, clarify their priorities, and help them find the path toward economic independence. Read on here.

OB Blog

Rainy Pana

Posted on March 31, 2011 by OB Administrator Leave a comment

Dear friends,

I really love my 60 quetzal rubber mud sluggers from the market. I am surer of that every day now, as September showers down upon us with unprecedented ferociousness. If nature has emotions, then this must be fierce, wild anger.

It’s been raining now, well, pretty much since May. Tropical Storm Agatha flew into town then, taking with her bridges, houses and several precious, precious lives. Months later, we’re just putting the finishing touches on the Amistad bridge in the rare moments of morning sunshine. But the rain is heavier now every day, and chipping away at what the construction workers, the tuc-tuc drivers and community women’s groups have been able to put back together.

The lake has risen over 2.5 meters this year alone, covering most of the boat docks and making daily commuting all the more challenging. Two weeks ago the water at the Santiago Atitlan dock was creeping towards the park, and into the front steps of the nearby tiendas. A storeowner shoveling mud out of his patio told us that he’d continue to dig until God decides he shouldn’t anymore. I think of him now, two weeks and tons of water later, as images of the lakefront park and all its surrounding tiendas sit eerily below the water.

I laugh now when people think I’m living in a tropical paradise, escaping the frigid Boston winter snows for perfect weather and its corresponding perfect attitude. I am embarrassed to say that every time it rains now, I get a little nervous. The dangers of mudslides and rushing floods are new to me, and we, here, nestled in the western highlands, are not immune to their casualties. Last week’s encounter with another tropical storm left the country paralyzed with fear. The Inter-American Highway suffered over a dozen blockages – some nearly a half a mile long – from mud, rocks and crashing trees. Over 50 individuals – laborers, mothers, university students and so many hardworking, important people – lost their lives, buried in buses or trying heroically to save those in danger.

And people keep going. They keep digging out mud, they return to their homes, some sitting dangerously in the hillsides, and some shoveling sand for money from the raging Rio San Francisco. At work especially I am astounded by the resilience. I’ve always known that I love my job at Oxlajuj B’atz’. After leaving a high-stress, cutthroat New York City job for greener pastures in Panajachel, I have been delightfully, consistently engaged in the work we do here. Being here through Agatha and now these unbelievable storms, mudslides and rains have shown me the depth and character of our amazing team. Many of them live hours away, traveling every day by numerous buses, boats and tuc-tucs, even in the downpour and in the sludge. They leave behind families with young children and still come to work, still come to check on the groups of women we work with, to continue the workshops, to continue to strategize for their development. They sit around our kitchen table thinking of ways to teach product costing to illiterate women. They coordinate for hours to bring naturally dyed scarves to the office from faraway communities because there is a chance that they will sell at the local tabling event. That money would be real – real income, real difference. They work, and work, and work, because, as Lucia says “the women still need our help.” All the while, Mother Nature continues to spit barriers at them. And at the end of the day – when the afternoon rain is the heaviest, and we’ve tripled checked which roads are open, and whether the boats will still be running across the lake – they set out for the long trip home, always insisting that they will be back in the morning, rain or shine. And they always come. I am mesmerized by their spirit, and grateful to be here. Even more grateful for this than for my black rubber boots.

OB Blog