Sarah Mawhorter is a volunteer graphic designer for the IHF. She has designed, among other things, JustApparel.org and the IHF’s 2008 and 2009 Catalogs for Change.
I recently became a graduate student, and my life became (if it’s even possible) busier than when I had a full-time job. I seriously considered cutting out my work for the IHF. For a moment. Volunteering means giving, and often giving up, but I volunteer very selfishly. I feel a tinge of shame accepting thanks for my work, because I know I’m not making the sacrifice that generally accompanies volunteering. The IHF gives me more than I give it, and not in some wishy-washy esoteric way.
The IHF brings me comradeship with a woman I’ve met on only three occasions, someone who gets up every day and works constantly so that women in Guatemala can support their families under fair labor standards (one of Heidi’s many goals). We can only be glad that she doesn’t follow the same labor standards she champions. Our friendship has grown out of hard work, and I would hazard that we trust each other more than friends who have spent years in the same place.What’s more, I’ve found it freeing to work for free. The only thing that matters is the results, not what someone else thinks of my work. I can be adventurous, I can make mistakes, I can be exactly who I am with all my talents and deficiencies, and I’m still the best person for the job because I’m doing it. In this aspect of my life, I always measure up, and no one else measures me.
Incidentally, this is one of the drawbacks of volunteers: we’re notoriously difficult to manage. I am just now not-quite-meeting a deadline for the design of the IHF catalog (coming soon!). Tomorrow morning I’m definitely not going to go feed the homeless in downtown Los Angeles at 5:45 am, and I don’t feel much compunction. You see, the more responsibility I have for results, the easier it is for me to meet those ‘optional’ deadlines. The IHF is brilliantly set up to delegate real responsibility rather than merely offer pre-packaged, simplified activities.The IHF gives me true friendship, fun design and writing work, and the feeling that I am good at what I do. It’s the type of thing I might do regardless of its purpose.
I’m also highly separated from the purpose and the people I am supporting. I don’t speak their languages, and in most cases I’ve never crossed paths with them. The work I do supports the people who support the people in the field. Consequently, I don’t have many of the traditional satisfactions of those volunteering in developing nations; I am the opposite of the ‘volunteer tourist’. Another trip to Guatemala is definitely in store for me, but realistically I can be more useful from my computer in Los Angeles than in Santiago Atitlan.Still, the only reason that I am still spending my time with the IHF is the reality of people in need, the reality of the problems they face.
To me, the IHF is distinguished by how realistically it confronts the world. I don’t have a personal connection with the people I’m supporting, and that’s just fine. What I do have is time and the resources to be of service, and a job that needs to be done.I’m curious about other volunteers’ experiences with the IHF. What unexpected aspects make it worth your time? If you’re not an IHF volunteer, what types of work might make you happy, and what have been some of your best experiences volunteering for other organizations?
Greetings from the Tufts IHF Chapter! After establishing ourselves last January, we are excited about getting the ball rolling again this fall!
Last semester, we kept ourselves busy with weekly meetings and spreading the word about IHF. In April, we organized a Public Health Career Panel for Tufts students, which ended up being our biggest event of the semester. The turnout to the event was great, and definitely helped get IHF’s name out at Tufts!
This semester, we are continuing to meet weekly to discuss a variety of topics for our chapter, including our mission focus, plans to collaborate with other campus organizations, and organizing more IHF events.
As we continue to work on our own chapter’s mission, we are looking forward to hosting a big event here at Tufts: the first all-chapter IHF conference! Lead by IHF’s Vice President of Fund Development Rebecca Perkins, college students from the Brown, Tufts, and Haverford IHF chapters will attend this first weekend-long chapter conference. The conference will take place on Tufts’ Somerville campus from Friday, October 23 to Saturday, October 24th. If you are interested in attending the conference, please post a reply, message the IHF on Facebook, or shoot us a Tweet @theIHF.
We look forward to keeping you updated on the Tufts chapter’s progress!
Summer time at the IHF means travel - many IHFers have been working hand in hand with partner communities. You can read about their work and experiences in some of the other postings on this blog. As the days start to get shorter and we enter into September, many of us are starting back to school, which means starting back to regular IHF chapter meetings and activities on campus. This year promises to bring a lot of excitement - the Tufts chapter will become a formally recognized campus organization, and the IHF will hold it’s first ever All-IHF Conference later this fall. Stay tuned to the blog, website, Facebook and Twitter to make sure you get all the updates.
The start of the semester provides chapters with an opportunity to recruit new members. New members help bring in new energy and ideas, as well as keeping the chapter going as members graduate and leave to study abroad. Student fairs provide a great place to get the word out about your IHF chapter on campus, so don’t forget to book a table! Many campuses also allow groups to present at floor meetings in freshman dorms. This is another opportunity to get the word out and also educate people about the issues that are important to the IHF: empowerment, partnership, and grassroots development. It’s a good idea to meet before the semester starts in earnest - even if it’s over the phone to discuss how you are going to recruit new members. You could also start brainstorming ideas for events and activities for the fall semester. It can be a challenge to stay connected to partner organizations during the school year. If you have any ideas for things your chapter is doing, tell us about it here or on our page on Facebook. Have a great fall!
Note: IHF supporter and volunteer Jenica Wozniak recently spent a week at our partner site in Santiago Atitlan, Guatemala. We will be posting a few of her observations and thoughts here over the coming week or two. This first piece reflects on her experience working with students in the IHF’s secondary school scholarship program.
A teacher myself, I was eager to work with the scholarship students here in Guatemala and do whatever I could to lend a hand. I tutored a couple of students one morning, and left the library with a web of tangled observations and questions.
Most kids here go to elementary school, though not all of them graduate from 6th grade. I don’t have any data, but one estimate is that about a quarter to a third of them go on to secondary school.
I worked with two kids that morning. Rebeca arrived first and she is sobresaliente en todo (outstanding at everything). Then Francisco arrived, and he needed a bit more help. He didn’t understand everything I said, so Rebeca helped us out by translating into Tz’utujil, the local Mayan language. And he can’t express himself very well in Spanish, so I’m beginning to understand why school is hard for him.
We started with math, which he seemed to understand pretty well. Then came an art-like class, which I didn’t really comprehend. He wasn’t really drawing anything himself, but rather learning about different art terms. We talked about perspective and things like that. And then came the list of vocab words. He had no textbook to reference, just a notebook filled with definitions that included some very tricky technical vocabulary. It looked like Francisco had copied down the definitions from somewhere without bothering to get the spelling right. And he clearly didn’t understand what the definitions meant because they were too complicated. Think college-level terminology and grammar. As we struggled through the exercises, I couldn’t help but wonder how in the world it was supposed to be helpful to Francisco and productive for his education.
In light of that experience with Francisco, I came up with a few thoughts for how towns like Santiago Atitlán might go about improving their educational systems. I’m not an expert in Guatemalan education policy, of course, but here’s what my experience as a teacher leads me to suggest.
First, all of the children need to complete at least the first half of secondary school. Those three extra years beyond primary school provide an immense boost to the array of career possibilities open to a student. The value of education must be recognized and taught. And the school day needs to be extended so that children are receiving instruction for more than four hours a day.
Next, the education must be available. The Guatemalan government must put forth the money so that the children are able to go to school and have the materials necessary to do their work. This is a tough one given Guatemala’s relatively poor economy and the fact that, according to the Heritage Foundation, government tax revenues account for only 11.9% of GDP (by way of comparison, Uganda is at 12.6%, India is at 17.7%, and the US is at 28.2%). But a situation where secondary education costs at least $150 a year in towns like Santiago, where many families scrape by on about $3 a day, clearly calls for some solution.
Finally, the teachers need to learn better strategies so that they can more effectively instruct the students that come to them. They need to simplify the concepts and use vocabulary the students understand. They need to provide activities that allow students to interact with the material. They need to use formative assessment to more frequently monitor student achievement. And they need to provide more individualized assistance for the students who struggle. All these changes are, clearly, difficult to enact, because teachers themselves need training. They are, nevertheless, necessary.
I believe that the well-being of a society depends on the education of its youth, and Santiago Atitlán concerns me. Is this the best we can do? While I don’t imagine I’ll ever make much of a difference in Guatemalan education policy, I am doing what I can by sponsoring a scholarship for one student in Santiago. More on that next time I post.
- Jenica
In quite a few circles, trickle-down economics has something of a bad rep - and deservedly so. The theory that cutting taxes on the wealthy is a sure-fire way to improve life for everyone has not fared particularly well in its confrontation with economic reality. They’re not new, but these two articles, from TPM and Robert Frank, do a pretty solid job of running through the empirical evidence that trickle-down theory is about as accurate as a two-buck psychic. Recent events, however, lead me to wonder whether its critics are being too harsh on trickle-down economics. My current visit to IHF partner site in Santiago Atitlan, Guatemala, has driven home that there is, indeed, at least one context in which trickle-down theory has something valuable to offer, namely, an economic crisis. A story from that visit will, I think, do the best job of clarifying what I mean.
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| Candelaria at Biblioteca Puerta Abierta |
Last night, I had dinner with Heidi, the Executive Director of the IHF; Jenica, a Spanish teacher who is volunteering with IHF’s scholarship program; and Candelaria, the 19-year-old tutor and teacher who supervises the scholarship program and provides study hours for the students. We sat at the corner table of the Posada de Santiago - a table with quite a bit of history for the IHF - and talked about the state of the scholarship program, Candelaria’s various educational jobs, and life in Santiago. After a while, the conversation turned to the subject of Candelaria’s family, specifically her five younger siblings. All but the youngest are in school, and the income from Candelaria, her mom, and her dad barely pays the bills, especially since one sister lost her scholarship due to lack of funding for the sponsoring organization. The entire program had folded because donors didn’t have as much to give as in the past. While the IHF’s program continues, we had to cut its size by 64 percent between 2008 and 2009 to keep it afloat. Here, it occurred to me, was a concrete example of trickle-down economics!
The current economic crisis started at the very top, with investment bankers and other financial professionals making egregiously irresponsible bets on the mortgages of people who, in great part, had been pressured or enticed into thinking they could afford to borrow hundreds of thousands of dollars that they, frankly, could not. When the bets started going bad, those i-bankers lost big. But the losses didn’t stop with them. Of course, they hit the people who’s money the professionals were managing. But then, the effects trickled-down. From i-bankers to IndyMac employees to factory workers and every tax-payer in the United States.
The trickle-down effect of the crisis did not, however, respect national borders. Money flows freely from country to country these days (not in itself a bad thing), so there is hardly a community in the world that doesn’t somehow feel the effects of a crisis originating in the rarefied atmosphere of the US financial system, whether in the form of lost jobs or, as in the case of Candelaria’s sister, lower budgets for development organizations. The end result is that when American investment bankers make bad moves, kids in Guatemala lose their scholarships, and more families get closer to the brink of having to decide between education and sufficient food. The trickle, it seems, only flows when things are falling apart.
P.S. Be on the lookout for a video profile of Candelaria and her incredible educational work soon. It’ll be posted here and on the IHF’s main site, internationalhf.org.
With the growing threat of global warming and health concerns due to harmful emissions, the public may want to consider seeing what Bogota, Columbia is up to, as outlined in this New York Times article from a little while back.
As the article points out, one popular street, Seventh Avenue, illustrates a polluted, loud, and unhealthy approach to travel. We see this sort of image all over the world in major metropolitan areas. But less than a few miles away from Seventh Avenue, there is an example of a dramatically different way of dealing with traffic flow, noise pollution, and contaminated air. On the four center lanes of Avenida de las Américas, there are large red buses operating on a new transit system called B.R.T. (Bus Rapid Transit). Similar to a subway system that operates above ground, these buses are efficient, clean, and have low emissions.
Bogota’s B.R.T. (called TransMilenio) is less expensive than building an entire underground subway system, and is an indicative point that the country is moving in the right direction towards environmentalism and public health. TransMilenio averages 1.6 million trips a day, and has been the leading reason why over 7,000 private buses have been removed from the roads. Emissions from buses have been reduced by close to 59% since the opening of TransMilenio in 2001, according to this NY Times article. Following in similar steps, communities in
This got me thinking…we hear a lot about developing countries not wanting to reduce CO2 emissions, but here’s an example of an emissions-reducing, money-saving, growth-promoting move. Perhaps the work of grassroots advocacy is to identify opportunities like this and push for them. Although not as effective as an underground subway system, the B.R.T. is a climb in the right direction and much cheaper—and anything can help. It seems to me that this underscores that as responsible citizens, we need to be proactive and, especially, realistic in regards to environmental initiatives.
I just stumbled across this post at Slate. The basic idea is pretty straightforward: clean water is important, water projects are a good investment, and there are plenty of ways to get involved in bringing potable water to people in marginalized communities. The most interesting point, however, is the nod to the importance of having the community “deeply involved” in the process. Without local buy-in, you end up with broken wells and unused latrines.
This recognition got me thinking about a couple of stories from places the IHF has worked: Guatemala and India. The town of Santiago Atitlan, Guatemala - home of Just Apparel and a number of other IHF partners - gets its water directly from Lake Atitlan. Apart from being stressed by the growing human population and completely over-fished, the lake is also far from pure, especially around the lakeside towns like Santiago. The lake is not only the source of drinking water, but also the site of clothes washing and bathing and the recipient of sewage and terrifyingly dirty run-off. Consequently, Petri dishes with samples of the bacterial concentration from close to the shore (which happens to be about where the town’s water pump is situated) are truly a sight to behold.
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| Women washing clothing in Lake Atitlan, Guatemala |
Now, a few years ago, after the mudslide that destroyed much of one neighborhood of Santiago, one of the myriad aid and government organizations that came to town decided to treat the Santiago’s water supply with chlorine in order to combat the spread of disease - especially crucial given the large amount of mud and other material that entered the lake as a result of the slide.
To their shock, the people of Santiago responded aggressively against the introduction of treated water. It tasted contaminated to them, and stories even began circulating that the government was trying to poison people with the water. While the move to purify drinking water was a good one - and the end goal of pure water for Santiago is vitally important - the people who implemented the plan hadn’t succeeded in talking with community members and spreading the word about what to expect. As a result, the people rejected the project. The water in Santiago today is no cleaner than it was before the mudslide.
The water experience in Santiago is indicative of a larger issue for development organizations: how best to interact with the populations we’re trying to serve. At the IHF, we’ve decided that it’s always best to err on the side of too much deliberation and consultation. Sure, it can slow the process down. But it can also lead to highly successful interventions like the IHF cookstove project. By working with community members to identify what kind of stove would be satisfactory (that is, what kind of stove they would actually use), we managed to come up with a design that worked not only in theory, but also in practice. The same sort of principles are extremely important as the world tries to address the issue of access to safe drinking water.
So, by all means, contribute to the organizations that the folks at Slate recommend. Send letters to your representatives about the Water for the World Act. But make it known that you want results, and that means you want projects built on dialogue, local involvement, and flexibility to a variety of contexts. Water may be the same the world over, but that doesn’t mean the way we provide it has to be too.
The IHF just launched its $20.09 Stimulus Campaign, an effort to stimulate sustainable development by investing where it matters most: at the grassroots in developing communities around the world. As the IHF team has talked over this campaign, we’ve gotten to thinking a lot about what makes $20.09 so much more than just a catchy idea. Everyone from Domino’s to your local car dealer has played on the stimulus theme, but the IHF $20.09 Campaign does more than just riff on a popular concept - it actually does some good in the world economy. As we move ahead with the campaign - and as you consider joining our facebook group, following us on Twitter, or donating - here are a few thoughts about what takes this effort beyond gimmicky to dynamic and life-changing.
1. Economists emphasize the importance of investment for long-term growth and economic prosperity. Investment, of course, can take a lot of forms. It can be, say, the purchase of a new machine at a factory - investment in physical capital. But at least as important is investment in human capital, the skills that people have at their disposal to use for the benefit (or detriment…I’m looking at you, Bernie Madoff) of the world around them.
You can think of it like this. All economic products are made up of “stuff” and “ideas” (or particular ways of using “stuff”). A table, for example, is made of wood (its “stuff”) cut and put together in such a way that you can put a fruit bowl on top without it falling off and sit around it comfortably (the “idea” of a chair). Since there is only so much “stuff” in the universe, economic growth depends on the production of new ideas that make possible more or better uses of stuff. Investing in physical capital is using an idea to turn stuff into desireable things. Investing in human capital is creating the conditions necessary for new ideas and new uses of things. In the long-run, all economic growth depends on the growth of human capital.
The IHF invests in human capital in our partner communities by supporting early childhood education in Mexico, helping young people earn secondary school diplomas in Guatemala, training Indian craftsmen to make health-enhancing ventilated cookstoves, and more. In the short-run, these investments benefit the people who receive them directly, but in the long-run, the skills that those people gain improve the lives of their entire communities and make an impact on the world as a whole. Where once it was impossible to build a ventilated cookstove, it now becomes possible. The people who live healthier lives because of that stove can now devote themselves more fully to improving the conditions in which they and their community live. The community as a whole can contribute new skills and ideas to the broader world. And…you see how it goes.
2. This all seems well and good, right? But, I can imagine someone asking, since this is a down time in our country, shouldn’t we keep as many resources here as we can? Now, I’m inclined to make the moral argument for why that’s not the case. And I hesitate to make the case for why it’s in the best interest of Americans to contribute money to projects for people in other countries, because I think we should do it regardless of whether it’s to our advantage. But with that caveat, let me briefly suggest why, in the end, it might work out better for all of us if those of us in more prosperous countries keep giving to projects like the IHF’s even when we’re down.
First, the long-run growth of economies in the Global South is important for the health of wealthier economies like America’s because the latter produce primarily complicated products and services that are relatively high-cost. If people in, say, Nicaragua can’t afford anything that the American economy has to offer, the US loses out on export possibilities. So, when developing economies grow, so do markets for American goods and services.
Second, improving living conditions in the Global South, like the IHF’s projects do, will speed up the adoption of environmentally friendly technologies and reduce many types of environmental degradation, such as deforestation for the collection of wood for heating and cooking, which removes carbon-cleaning trees and increases the risk of natural disasters like the 2005 mudslide in Santiago Atitlan, Guatemala.
So, there you have my thoughts about why the IHF $20.09 Stimulus Campaign makes sense. I’d love to hear what you think. Do you have questions? doubts? other ideas? Stick them in the comments below.
The Brown IHF members who hosted an inaugural party at the SYJAC community center January 17, 2009 were essentially different from the group of students who walked dazedly through the Mexico City airport on January 5. Not only were we a bit more tanned (or sunburned in my case), but we had each learned a great deal about ourselves, the world, and the connections across the global community. While we all had prepared ourselves for this trip as best we could by reading up on the political, social, and historical situations in Chiapas, researching the cultural roots of the local Mayan community, and browsing through travel sites, there was no way we could have readied ourselves for the full impact this trip would have on our studies, our world views, and even our own personal identities and values.
On the trip we faced challenges and gained critical knowledge about the developing world and our own capabilities and limitations in driving change. The significance of our presence at SYJAC went much further than the tangible effects of a new paint job for their daycare center; rather, our impact was in the symbolism that our trip held for the local community. Our trip demonstrated that there is a larger world community invested in the welfare of the community SYJAC serves, and this global interest legitimizes and reinforces the work of the community center. While initially this role felt uncomfortable for our group, we grew to realize that the greatest asset we can offer to SYJAC and the local San Cristóbal community is through our identities as American university students. Furthermore, the significance of our interest in their situation is that we have the networks and resources to connect them to the solutions that they as a community need.
While we are still struggling to understand our own utility for the purposes of a community center and grappling with the role we should play as outsiders to a community organization, we have come to realize that our impact went much further than the sunny walls we painted and continues to have a lasting effect through our maintained connections with the people we met and friendships we made while working at SYJAC.
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