Thursday, November 23, 2017

Tom's Visit Part 3 of 4: Cultural (In)competency

Text by Tom Kemple

Tom Kemple is a sociology professor at the University of British Columbia and a long-time friend of Pop Wuj. With his colleague Sylvia Berryman in Philosophy, he has been bringing groups of students to study in Guatemala since the summer of 2010. In November and December, 2016 he spent five weeks studying Spanish, building stoves, helping out in the clinic and Nutrition Program, and having fun at the Family Support Center. What follows are some of his fieldnotes from his trip for his research project on university fieldschools and study abroad programs, titled “Global Citizenship at Home and Abroad.”  We hope you enjoy Tom's stories and insights as much as we enjoyed having him back at Pop Wuj. 

One of my aims in returning to Pop Wuj has been to learn more about the school’s largest and most complex program — Medical Spanish combined with the Clinic downstairs. So I’ve started attending the ‘Competencia Cultural’ lectures given by Roney Alvarado, one of the founders of the school in 1992 and a professor of Anthropology at nearby San Carlos University.

Many of the students who have come here with me in the past remember Roney as the brilliant ‘organic intellectual’ who challenged us through three long sweaty sessions to ask a simple question: "Why am I here?” As students often say in pre-program interviews, they’re here for the courses and the credit, with some adventure and new experiences thrown in as an added bonus. Like the three medical students sitting with me the other day, my passage here has mostly been paid out of someone else’s pocket – my university’s Arts Research Abroad fund or a Research Stipend. For Roney, the question “why am I here?” cannot be reduced to the commercial service provided by the school, and so he invites us to think about the meaning and value of volunteer work. As he explained in our first session, the Pop Wuj philosophy turns the practice of other language schools on its head: rather than take a percentage of tuition fees and invest them into development projects undertaken by other organizations, Pop Wuj coordinates its own social and medical projects by offering services for fees (Spanish classes) that finance those projects. For that reason, it’s often impossible to fix an exact monetary relationship between tuition paid and projects delivered, as one would in a financial report.

The money we pay for classes and the muscle we put into volunteering are not simply economic resources but also ethical expressions of our social solidarity with the people and projects that are the heart and soul of this organization.

Although this is my fourth time attending Roney's lectures, he always seems to find new ways of connecting my personal experiences with larger questions about capitalism and colonialism. Listening to him shatters my assumptions about the place of intellectuals in the world, and undermines many of the liberal-philanthropic impulses that I bring with me here.


Roney Alvarado discusses the Safe Stove and Reforestation projects with families from Llanos del Pinal
After Tuesday's cultural competency session, he came by to chat and noticed the book I was reading. The book was by Irma Alicia Valáquez Nimatuj, an indigenous woman who grew up who grew up in a middle class family in Xela, and has the daunting title La Pequeña Burguesía Indïgena Commercial de Guatemala: Desigualdades de Clasa, Raza y Genero (The Indigenous and Commercial Petit Bourgeoisie of Guatemala: Inequalities of Class, Race and Gender). He told me he appreciated the rich descriptions of everyday life in Velásquez’s study, but thought she sometimes used rigid racial categories without reflecting critically on them. In particular, he argued, the social meanings of ‘Mestizo, Criollo, Ladino, and Indigenous’ change in various contexts, each taking on distinctive significance according to the historical and cultural complexities of Guatemala.

When I asked him to say a bit more, he elaborated on the meaning of ‘Ladino,’ the racial group that he himself identifies with and that is often the target of stereotypes. Roney pointed out that the term in colonial times referred to baptized or Hispaniciazed Indians, although later came to have class connotations that included poor non-indigenous peasants and urban workers. As I’ve been reading in other books, Ladino in Guatemala is different from what in Mexico or Nicaragua is referred to as Mestizo, which is understood more as a self-consciously ‘mixed’ (European and indigenous) identity. As Roney stressed, the process of so-called ‘ladinoized’ identity-formation cuts in many directions, and cannot refer only to the ‘Europeanization’ of rising economic classes or political elites, since it is also evident in many other alliances of solidarity between social groups, and in movements toward ‘indigenization’ as well.

I have noted some of these cross-currents here at the school, beginning with its Mayan name, and in the commitment of both ‘Ladino’ and self-identified ‘indigenous’ teachers to work with poor indigenous communities. I also found Roney’s remarks helpful in understanding the coffee finca near Reu which our group has visited on previous trips, where the poverty so evident among Ladino peasants is in many ways similar to the conditions of indigenous communities such as Llano del Pinal.

In that morning’s lecture Roney placed a lot of emphasis on commonplace stereotypes of the culturally incompetent ‘do-gooding gringo,’ often with a touch of anger and cynicism, but always with good humour and penetrating insight. He pointed out that the families who come to the clinic or who benefit from the social projects often hold many of these same stereotypes, as do some of the Guatemalan doctors, and for that reason he holds cultural competency discussions with them as well (see the photo above of the Safe Stove group meeting).  

Tuesday, November 14, 2017

Tom's Visit, Part 2 of 4: Classrooms Off Campus


Text by Tom Kemple

Tom Kemple is a sociology professor at the University of British Columbia and a long-term friend of Pop Wuj. With his colleague Sylvia Berryman in Philosophy, he has been bringing groups of students to study in Guatemala since the summer of 2010. In November and December of 2017 he spent five weeks studying Spanish, building stoves, helping out in the Pop Wuj Clinic and Nutrition Program, and having fun at the Family Support Center. What follows are some writings from his trip created in the course of his research project on university fieldschools and study abroad programs, titled “Global Citizenship at Home and Abroad.” We hope you enjoy Tom's stories and insights as much as we enjoyed having him back at Pop Wuj.


My daily rhythms give me a certain confidence and security in being here: Isabel and the Mayan Cosmovision symbol behind her greet me as I enter the school; I immerse myself in Spanish classes every day; watch a film in the evening (“Men With Guns” and “Ixcanul: The Volcano” are well worth it); attend Luis’s roundtable on justice for indigenous people; help out in buying and delivering materials for safe stoves; attend a birthday party at the Family Support Center; help make a fruit salad for our weekly Thursday dinner; or go on a long weekend hike to Lake Chicabal with Alberto and some other students. 


Pop Wuj Entryway

I am slowly getting used to the confusions and irritating inconveniences at my homestay as well: the door to the bedroom only closes after a struggle; the electric heating unit in the shower seems permanently set to tepid, and always hits me in the head; and my housemate and I were locked out of the bathroom for several days when I closed the door behind me. The two-block walk to and from school is an obstacle course of broken sidewalks, dog doo, and unpredictable traffic, which is especially hazardous in the dark.

As I learn to modify my ordinary assumptions and everyday habits, I also come to understand something about myself as a citizen of a supposedly more developed and civilized world. Everyday I have to unlearn things that had always seemed normal and natural to me, and I retrain myself to see my habits and assumptions as products of a long history that I otherwise take for granted.

As many of the students we’ve brought here have said over the years, Pop Wuj’s Safe Stove Project in the poor indigenous village of Llano del Pinal just outside of town is among the most challenging and moving experiences one can have in a lifetime. I spent last Tuesday (election day in the U.S.) helping Carmelina, Benedicto, and another student, Alison, to sift, measure, and mix sand, cement and water for the last of the three stages involved in building a ‘safe stove’ (estufa segura).

A Completed Safe Stove

Doña Maria, the old woman in the blue blouse in the photo, is almost blind from cooking over an open fire over a lifetime in this tiny shack, which I could hardly bear being in for more than 10 minutes at a time (and I live with a chain smoker!). As my Spanish teacher Gerson pointed out to me, the main incentive for people like Doña Maria in having a stove built is the economic saving rather than the health or environmental benefits: 5-6 bags of firewood per month at 30 Quetzales each (about $4US) can be reduced to 3-4 bags with the new stove.

These savings seem to be offset by the large concrete house which is also being built on the plot, presumably from remittances in US dollars sent by relatives working in the States. Despite these improvements, Doña Maria tells us she plans to continue cooking in the shack and living in the wood and straw hut located just behind it.

The afternoon unfolded without a hitch, with our leader Carmelina, who lives in this community (and who took the photo of us), giving us very clear instructions, all the while chatting in K'iché and Spanish with Doña Maria and some neighbors who stopped by.

The next day Carmelina led me, Mynor, Elizabeth, and Carmen, along with 14 members from the families who would be receiving stoves in the coming months, to buy and distribute the stove materials. This time things did not come off so smoothly: the hardware store opened late; we had a hard time organizing a human chain to get 800 bricks loaded onto our truck at the factory; the store that supplied the cement was no longer there; the people delivering the blocks seemed to be lost for the first couple hours; and the caravan of trucks could only barely maneuver in and out of the narrow dirt roads of the village.

Each of these expenditures of muscle and money made me think about the meaning and value we might take from coordinating our efforts for a task that each of us benefits from differently. Or as the sociologist in me would put it, the day reminded me how the material division of labour is infused with a moral spirit of solidarity that each of us experiences in our own way.