When a few other members of Brown University and I started the IHF Brown chapter, we weren’t completely sure what we were getting ourselves into. What exactly was SYJAC and how did it affect the daily lives of its community members? What difference could we, a group of American students, do in the lives of the indigenous people of Chiapas, Mexico? Our winter break trip to San Cristobal de las Casas taught us all this, as we experienced firsthand and participated in the process of community building and international activism. Our main project while in San Cristobal was to paint the SYJAC community center, which was only being marginally used for a daycare center and was essentially a giant block of cement. The painting took about 7 days of full labor, and included numerous random tasks such as attempting to communicate in our stumbling Spanish with the paint shop workers, and helping the 3- to 5-year-old daycare members to slap their handprints all over the finished painted walls. It was exhausting work, but very satisfying to see the place brighten little by little. After a lot of sweat, perseverance, and paint smears, we completed the center and inaugurated it with a community party on our last weekend in Mexico. The party was a chance for us to connect our work to the people we were working for, and realize that just this simple act of painting a center would have lasting effects.Now that the center was painted, it would be used for a number of different local projects and fundraising efforts to provide sustainability and institutionalization for the community. Now that we are back in the US, we plan to keep in touch with SYJAC and the community’s progress. We will help in any way we can with local projects, and we are in the planning stages of beginning a letter exchange program with a local Chiapas youth group, in order to foster an interchange of cultural and societal ideals about our different societies and potential for positive change. Through these plans, we hope to keep the SYJAC spirit alive on Brown’s campus and continue to be promoters of social change.
The TED lecture linked below is fabulous. It has some of the better data visualization I have seen. And the story told by the data is narrated wonderfully by the speaker, statistician Hans Rosling.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html
Dr. Rosling’s story centers on two truths. First, his analysis demonstrates that the so-called ‘third world’ is anything but monolithic. Indeed, it is unrealistic to think of regions, or even of countries, possessing similar development characteristics. See Rosling’s demonstration of child mortality in South Africa, Uganda and Niger at about minute 14. This display really brings home that development is a community issue. Money quote – “the improvement of the world must be highly contextualized.”
The second truth that Dr. Rosling testifies is the importance of bringing this insight to students around the world. He states how excited his students become when faced with data that allow them to grapple with the enormous complexity of development in a focused, coherent manner.
These two truths connect deeply with the insight at the heart of the IHF’s mission – that communities must take the lead in their own development; and that immersion in community-led development, supported by leadership development and education, will produce the next generation of leaders for the development sector.
RSS
