Day 343: Bureaucracy

"Whether the mask is labeled fascism, democracy, or dictatorship of the proletariat, our great adversary remains the apparatus—the bureaucracy, the police, the military."                                                                           - Simone Weil

After a celebratory glass of wine toasting Guatemalan youth, I entered a sort of post-GLOW/BRO hibernation/recovery period.  I spent a lot of time thinking about my service: what I've accomplished so far, what I still want to accomplish, whether my work here is making me happy.  Despite my conclusion that, yes, I am beginning to feel fulfilled in my Peace Corps work, my contemplations were darkened by a serious security incident and subsequent changes to Peace Corps Guatemala security policies.  I was not involved in the security incident, and will not go into details.  Suffice it to say that under the new policies, it is much more difficult for volunteers to spend time away from their sites.

Coming into Peace Corps, you know you're signing up for a challenging experience (Peace Corps staff love to quote the Core Expectation that you will "serve where the Peace Corps asks you to go, under conditions of hardship, if necessary").  You know you're on the job 24/7, because you are a constant representation of 'Murica.  But you also expect some time off—for instance, weekends in the city.  It's a mental health thing: getting out of your rural village, eating American-ish food at an actual restaurant, and spending time with other volunteers in a place where no one recognizes you.  I recognize that this last sounds creepy—why do I need to go incognito?  But imagine if everywhere you went, you ran into a neighbor or distant relative, who acknowledged you with a hug and a kiss and questions about your well-being ("Do you feel sad today?").  It's kind of nice in the short-term, but it can get very overwhelming very quickly.

That being said, for most of my Peace Corps service, I've felt very comfortable with the travel restrictions.  I've never used the maximum allotted time-away-from-site days per month, and I'm rarely out of site overnight.  And yet, with the announcement of the new policies, I suddenly felt completely claustrophobic in San José Chacayá.  Maybe this is why I jumped at the opportunity to participate in Peace Corps Guatemala's Training Design and Evaluation Workshop.

Google Maps' faithful depiction of my sprawling town

Training Design and Evaluation, or TDE for short (I sometimes think Peace Corps loves acronyms even more than it loves team-building activities and global development work), was a two-day conference meant to examine and redesign the Peace Corps Guatemala training process.  I was invited to participate because I serve on the the Gender Equality Committee, and Peace Corps is trying to improve gender development integration in its projects worldwide.

The conference was eye-opening, to say the least.  I honestly hadn't realized how much thought went into Peace Corps training sessions, each of which is designed to deliver specific knowledge, skills, and attitudes to trainees.  The complicated design mechanism behind trainings, however, means that changing trainings, or cutting them out, or adding new trainings, is quite a process.

For me, this red tape was most evident/bothersome when each Peace Corps project team made a list of the specific trainings useful to their project (for instance, my project, Maternal and Child Health, made a list of all the trainings that help improve momma/baby health in rural communities).  The idea behind this activity was that any training not useful to any project could be eliminated.  But, there are some really important trainings that aren't project-specific, such as the training on what Peace Corps is and how it differs from other international development organizations.  At the end of the list-making activity, I found myself debating this conundrum with Peace Corps staff.  I told staff that it was really useful to me to know who I was working for; they countered that if the training wasn't useful to any specific project objectives, how could it be useful at all?

I have a lot of respect and admiration for the ideas and ideals behind Peace Corps.  But, as with most bureaucratic organizations, putting these ideas and ideals into practice is not so easy.  I sometimes wonder if the limited work Peace Corps does justifies the approximately $50,000 annual cost per volunteer.*  And then I remember that, of the FY2015 United States federal budget, $609.3 billion, or 15.88%, went to the military.**  The Peace Corps budget of $380 million (0.01%) seems pretty small by comparison.  And maybe, if our country dedicated a little more funding to peaceful operations, and a little (or a lot) less to the military, we would have more success in our international development efforts.

*http://www.peacecorpsconnect.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/PC_funding_issue_brief.pdf

**https://www.nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal-budget-101/spending/

***http://files.peacecorps.gov/manuals/peacecorps_cbj_2015.pdf

Day 333: GLOW

"The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts."                                                                                                    - C. S. Lewis

One of Peace Corps Guatemala's cornerstone activities is the GLOW/BRO camp.  GLOW stands for Girls Leading Our World; BRO for Boys Respecting Others, or Boys Reaching Out (depending on how high your expectations are, I guess--doesn't "Boys Respecting Others" seem like a depressingly low bar?).  GLOW/BRO camps usually comprise one or two days of self-esteem and sexual/reproductive health lessons, complemented by team-building exercises and classic camping hijinks (read: s'mores-making).  The camps are a really great way for Guatemalan kids to get out of their small towns, meet other kids, and have fun while learning about condoms and IUDs.*

Yes, that is a huge penis poster.

Since early February, eight other volunteers and I have been working to plan a department-wide, co-ed GLOW/BRO camp.  This is no easy feat.  It requires drafting a budget and applying for a grant; looking for sources of local funding in the name of sustainability; writing interactive lesson plans; rustling up enthusiastic Guatemalan coworkers to co-facilitate said lessons; finding an appropriate overnight venue for a bunch of hormonal teenagers; obtaining cheap but nutritious meals for a bunch of hormonal teenagers; sorting through the applications of a bunch of hormonal teenagers; organizing transport from at least six different municipalities; and frantically brainstorming bonding activities.

Ours was a macro-GLOW/BRO camp, with about 100 kids and 25 adults attending.  To allow for more individualized attention, we divided the students into groups of 18-ish, by gender and age.  (The gender division is especially important.  In co-ed settings, Guatemalan boys tend to get very loud, rambunctious, and just generally testosterone-y; Guatemalan girls tend to lapse into shy silence.)  Each group of students then rotated through all the lesson stations, with the result that each lesson facilitator had to give their lesson six times.  It is really amazing how differently the same material comes out of your mouth when you're presenting to 11-year-old girls versus 18-year-old boys.

On the first day of the camp, I was in charge of the fun-and-games station, meant as a break from the strain of too much sex ed.  I forced tens of children into wheelbarrow races,

This poor girl, carting around about 60 extra pounds of pure gringa

harrowing trust falls (in retrospect, probably not a good idea to introduce trust falls by dropping my partner),

0.25 milliseconds before disaster

and whatever is going on here:

Das ass crawl

I tried to participate as much as possible, although I quickly learned that Guatemalan children, especially male Guatemalan children, are very willing to chastise you when you're not up to par.  After a hard-fought wheelbarrow race, as I lay on the rocky ground contemplating my bleeding palms, my partner told me, "You really should have gone faster."  Jeez, Estuardo.  Sorry we got second place.

The day ended with a dangerously large bonfire for the kids.  In the meantime, the Guatemalan coworkers helping with the camp got to learn about proper condom use, and I got to comb the surrounding woods for hormonal teenage shenanigans.  I didn't find anything, although I did hear some very suspicious rustling.

The next day, I led the birth control lesson.  My Guatemalan co-facilitator unfortunately had some sort of emergency at home, which meant that I was leading the lesson alone.  Despite my love for all things female empowerment/birth control/sex ed, I felt decidedly nervous about broaching the subject with teenage boys, in my second language, without a Guatemalan actually trained in birth control at my side.  I needn't have worried.  The girls' groups were a little tough to crack, just due to overwhelming shyness and the female Guatemalan habit of non-participation; the boys, especially the 18-year-olds, were engaged and respectful the whole time.

And let me tell you, it was a pretty cool lesson.  I drew the female anatomy on the ground with masking tape, using two giant bags of pine needles as ovaries and a huge vase of flowers to mark the location of the uterus.  Then I called for volunteers to serve as key actors in the sexy sex: the volunteer egg held a plastic ball with a hole in it, and slowly meandered down the Fallopian tube; the sperm cells each got a lollipop that they tried to force into the egg's plastic ball; the condom volunteers linked arms so as to prevent the sperm from entering the body; and so on and so forth.  There was much laughter and learning (I hope).

The day ended with an awkward talent show featuring rather racy dances and rather racist standup comedy.  Before going to bed, I promised a couple girls from my town that I would go hiking with them in the morning.  These girls then woke up my poor dorm-mates at 5:45 am, when they knocked on our door to make sure I hadn't left without them (let's be real: I was so jazzed about the affection that I didn't care about my poor dorm-mates' disrupted REM cycles).  And despite losing a few Guatemalan children in the woods (actually), the hike was really beautiful.**

Before closing the camp with a tedious high-fiving ceremony (inexplicably popular in this country), the other Peace Corps Volunteers and I led review sessions with each student group.  I volunteered to take the 18-year-old boys, since they had been such superstars at my lesson the day before.  The review session showed that the kids had learned and retained a good amount; it also led to what may have been my greatest moment in Guatemala so far.

In an attempt to get the kids to use a bit of higher reasoning, I asked them to give me a similarity between gay and straight people.  Their immediate response was to recite the definitions of "homosexual" and "heterosexual."  No, I told them, I wanted to know how these two groups of people are similar.  They all sat around looking constipated for a little while, until one boy tentatively raised his hand, and offered, "They both...have the right...to love...whoever they want?"

My heart basically exploded.  I do have a purpose in Guatemala, I thought, and it's advancing the gay agenda!  Just kidding.  Kind of.  My purpose here is of course vast and varied, and impossible to capture in one measly blog post.  But moments like these remind me that what I'm doing here has value, that Guatemala is changing, and that all the cold showers and damp clothes and social faux-pas are worth it.

*Although many Peace Corps Volunteers around the world teach youth how to use condoms (we're talking the classic banana-as-penis demonstration), these lessons are strongly discouraged in Peace Corps Guatemala, due to the cultural constraints of religion and tradition.  Most parents would not allow their children to attend GLOW/BRO camps if they knew their children would be learning how to use condoms.  So, out of respect for the culture in which we work, we Guatemalan PCVs teach kids what condoms are, where they can find them, and how important they are in preventing the spread of STDs.  No bananas allowed.

**All lost children reappeared at breakfast.  Where they went and what they did in the intervening time, I have no idea.  Now accepting babysitting gigs, btw.