My journey in the person and produce packed “Xela-Ju” chicken-bus from the city of Xela to the small rural location of Nuevo San Jose was abruptly delayed when our bus came across a fallen tree in the middle of the road. After craning my neck along with all the other passengers to see what the holdup was, I resigned myself to missing my first day of orientation at the mountain school and settled back into my bus seat, nestled between the other passengers. To my surprise, we were back on the road in less than half an hour after passengers on the bus and members of the neighboring village came out with hatchets and hacksaws to cut the tree into manageable pieces and haul it off the road. To me, this experience would come to symbolize how much of Guatamala’s desperately needed infrastructure development and day-to-day work is done, through the initiation and hard-work of the majority indigenous-population. In much of Guatemala, particularly in rural areas, there is little expectation that the government will provide needed resources and services, especially as revelations of corruption and inefficiencies at high-levels in the government continue to emerge in the run-up to the fall 2015 election.
I was in Guatemala because I had been accepted for a Taylor Changemaker Catalyst Award for the summer of 2015. For my engaged learning experience, I spent three weeks at the Proyecto Linguistica Quetzalteco de Espanol (PLQ) Spanish school in Guatemala. PLQ is a non-profit language school that uses some of its funds to support programs that address some of the social and economic problems in Guatemala. It is run as a cooperative and the majority of its teachers are community activists committed to social change. The school is unique because of its focus on social justice issues and its partnerships with local NGOs and other community organizations. Students are given the opportunity to engage with returned refugee communities, union organizations, human rights activists, and health workers, and volunteering with these local agencies is facilitated and encouraged by the school. As part of my engaged learning experience, I took the school’s ‘Spanish for Healthcare’ and ‘Spanish for Social Work’ courses. I spent one week at the school in Quetzaltenago (generally referred to as Xela, the indigenous name for the city), and two weeks at the mountain school, a school set up in the rural community of Nuevo San Jose, outside of the town of Colomba. One of the most valuable components of my experience in Guatemala was the opportunity to spend time in both urban and rural settings, each of which differently facilitated and impacted my feelings about social justice issues in Guatemala.
In Xela, I had the opportunity to live and share meals with a family, which not only instilled in me a deep and passionate love for corn tortillas, but also provided me with the chance to interact and practice my Spanish outside of the class setting. At the mountain school (called the mountain school because of its remote location nestled in the volcano-studded and coffee-growing mountain region), I lived at the school itself, as families in the communities near the school are often unable to provide the type of housing students are accustomed to in Xela. However, I was still able to eat my meals with two families that lived in nearby communities.
Though I have spoken and studied Spanish on and off for years, I still lacked some of the more advanced grammar (even after spending these three weeks in Guatemala, the subjunctive continues to plague me!), and a lot of the medical terminology that is required for addressing the reproductive and sexual health issues that are my passion. To achieve my long-term career goals, it is essential that I am able to speak Spanish fluently. As a current Ph.D. student, most of my research has focused on issues related to health inequalities, especially as they relate to injection drug users and to reproductive and sexual health issues. My goal is to continue working with Spanish-speaking immigrants, and other vulnerable populations, regarding these issues after I complete my Ph.D. I currently volunteer with an HIV service organization here in New Orleans. As part of my volunteer work, I help operate a needle exchange and conduct HIV and Hepatitis C tests. Throughout this work, however, I have been continually frustrated by my inability to communicate confidently with our Spanish-speaking clients.
My Spanish classes this summer provided me with the opportunity to conduct HIV testing sessions in Spanish. Additionally, I was able to build on the medical and social-justice related vocabulary that I will not only need to assist Spanish-speaking clients at the organization I volunteer for, but that I will also use as I continue my research on the health needs of vulnerable groups. Moreover, because of my passion for working on issues related to social justice and health inequalities, this school was ideal for giving me the opportunity to work with individuals trained in teaching social work and medical Spanish, and for giving me an opportunity to engage with social workers in Guatemala. This experience enhanced my concrete understanding of the Spanish language, but also assisted me in understanding some of the complicated social and political contexts of social justice issues in Latin America. I feel this learning opportunity was especially unique because of the emphasis the school placed on understanding the complex social, economic, and political context of Guatemala.
Too often, languages are taught in a vacuum with little focus on the greater cultural context. As someone who already had an intermediate level of Spanish, my goal during this experience was to develop language skills that would allow me to discuss the complex social justice issues facing countries like Guatemala in their native tongue. Thus, one of the most important parts of my Spanish classes was this ability to discuss social justice issues with my teachers. My teacher in Xela shared her experiences living through the civil war in Guatemala, a period of intense unrest that lasted over 36 years and resulted in the genocide of at least 200,000 indigenous persons. Despite having read about this conflict before, having a face-to-face discussion with someone who had lived through this period was an entirely different experience than simply reading statistical accounts of the events.
During the week the schools host different conferences and lectures on social issues impacting Guatemala. I learned as much from these events as I did from my 5 hours a day, one-on-one, Spanish classes. We had ex-guerrilla combatants come in and discuss their experiences being kidnapped and tortured by government forces, classes on the use of traditional medicine, and presentations from community activists about their struggle to reclaim land taken by the large coffee plantations owners. Additionally, we had conversations with local community health workers about their training, the medical services available for rural communities, and some of the continuing obstacles to providing health-care in remote areas.
On the weekends, trips were organized to visit communities of ex-refugees (many Guatemalans fled to Mexico during the civil war to escape persecution, yet some have been able to return following the peace accords in 1996), agriculture cooperatives, village midwives, the sites of guerrilla encampments, and community radio-stations. I believe the school’s approach to addressing both the need and desire for Spanish-language classes by international students, while also instilling knowledge of the political legacy of the United States in Guatemala and educating students about continued human rights and social justice issues in Guatemala is an innovative one. As a US citizen it is important to be aware of the United States’ role in funding and training the military generals that conducted some of the worst human rights atrocities in Guatemala, and in installing political leaders who were friendly to US companies, most notably, the United Fruit company. The experience left me with just as many questions as answers, and particularly has prompted me to think more critically about the role of foreign aid and interventions in developing countries. Just as important as the Spanish grammar I learned is the insight I gained into the current social and political environment of Guatemala.
