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
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.
Check out this video on the IHF Dartmouth chapter’s work in Yambiro, Ecuador. Our partner, the Ali Shungu Foundation, was so pleased with the work the chapter did, the community showed up in impressive numbers for the projects, and the IHF couldn’t be more proud of their work!
http://www.alishungufoundation.com/New/dartmouth/index.html
The IHF was founded more than five years ago to make a difference – but to do it differently. We saw ourselves as different in three ways:
- Focused on communities’ goals: we feel that putting communities in the lead on setting goals and executing projects would increase the sustainability of the IHF’s projects.
- Minimizing administration: we send donations directly to our partners abroad, and with volunteers contributing the vast majority of our labor, our administrative fees are lower than two cents per dollar – which means more resources for those who can best use them.
- Creating new leaders: by giving college students and young professionals experience with grassroots approaches to development, and giving them leadership opportunities within the IHF.
All of this sounded good on paper when the IHF got started. And it still sounds pretty good today. But how has this approach worked out on the ground?
What have we done well?
Reaching its fifth birthday is significant for any organization, but particularly for one that takes an innovative approach. The IHF’s continuous growth has been driven by three factors. First, all that we have accomplished is driven by the incredible hard work of our volunteers in the US and abroad. Second, our ability to learn and execute well has supported our ability to carry out an increasing number of increasingly complex projects. And throughout this, adherence to our model – what makes us different – has led to success on the ground.
Some numbers begin to tell this story – 300 families who don’t have to worry about indoor air pollution in India, two dozen Guatemalan kids who can attend school, a clinic in Costa Rica and dozens of graduates with exposure to grassroots development work. Working with the IHF has been genuinely life changing for many student volunteers who have gone on to focus on public health and economic development. We continue to influence students to take on the challenges of development in partnership with local communities through our work at Dartmouth and Haverford, and now at Brown.
So, there is much that we have done well. But where can we improve? More on that at the end of the week…
Working with partners is hard. It can be very difficult for a group of volunteers to find the time to come together, unite around a common vision and work effectively together. To have that group of people extend their work out and create a meaningful relationship with a whole other group of people adds on new layers of challenge and complexity. It can be tempting for organizations to say they can accomplish their goals on their own and think they can move forward faster if they don’t have to take the time to develop partnerships. However, despite the challenges, work in partnerships brings much more benefits than working alone if the time is taken to build strong, lasting relationships. This belief is a core foundation of the IHF model.
Can you imagine sitting in your house on a Saturday when you hear a knock on the door? You open the door and find someone who is obviously not from the community who is there to tell you that they can see a real problem in your community and they are here to solve it for you. They tell you to come to a meeting they are having about improving the hospital in town so you don’t have to wait as long to see the doctor. You go to the meeting and listen to all of the great things these people are going to do to improve the hospital. Things seem to get better in the hospital over the next couple of weeks, but then the strangers leave and things at the hospital go right back to the way they were before.
This scenario is often the case when groups of students travel to other countries to do projects. They come with really good intentions, and they may see some improvements for a little while, but without their continued presence, the improvements don’t last. However, if projects are done in partnership, the chances are better that improvements will last. Both because it is more likely that someone will be there to follow up and make sure the project continues, but also because it is more likely the project will be something the community actually wants and needs, making it more likely to be supported. The university students in IHF chapters only have a limited time available when they can be physically present in the communities they partner with, so in order to make sure the IHF projects are sustainable and have a lasting impact, it is essential that the work be done in partnership with a local organization.
The IHF was founded after a group of college students decided they wanted more out of the volunteer experiences they had abroad- they wanted to be able to continue the relationships they had established and the work they had started. They also didn’t want to be seen as people who were here today, gone tomorrow. From this foundation, the IHF has grown to have established partnerships with organizations in five countries. This growth and the benefits that have come with it are all the result of our firm belief in the power of partnerships and our willingness to nurture them.
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