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.
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.
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.
Here is a wonderful video on a spring break trip Haverford College students took as part of a class taught by Political Science Professor Anita Isaacs. Many of the trip’s participants are now part of the IHF Haverford chapter. Four years ago, I participated in a similar trip and months later founded the IHF Haverford chapter as a response. This video does an incredible job of explaining the complexities of Guatemalan society, its history, and how this class trip inspires young people to live in solidarity and work for change. Some images in the video might be disturbing.
Check it out: http://www.haverford.edu/multimedia/video/2008June/digging/
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
On a public health mission I went to the town market with two municipality officials and one of the centro de salud staff to see what recommendations we could make. Santiago´s market appeared to me fairly typical for a market in Central America. Crowded, full of people sitting on the floor selling fruits, nuts, crabs, fish, fish heads, and pretty much anything else that you could need. 
But on this trip, we focused on the stands that sell food. Picture a booth at a carnival or farmer´s market where you can buy a plate of tortillas, beans and rice. Or soup and a soda.
The town of Santiago is starting a new program in improve the sanitation of the market so our task was to go from stand to stand and make suggestions to them about how they could prepare food more safely. At every stand we asked to see their official permit allowing them to sell food, and the ‘Tarjetas de Salud’ (health cards) which every employee is supposed to carry stating that they have tested negative for TB. And at almost every stand people told us ‘Oh yes, we have those, but we keep them at home.’ I was actually surprised at how many store owners told us honestly ‘No, we don’t have those.’
The other recommendations were pretty basic. My major contribution was to point out that no one had any real way to wash their hands (definitely needed my master’s to notice that one) and that maybe the best place to store the vegetables wasn’t on the ground.
But here is the really funny thing: When I got back home I realized that the stands we visited probably weren’t the main threat to public health in the market. A much greater nidus for infection and vermin is probably the unrefrigerated fish, fruits and vegetables sitting on the ground. And those are the poorest vendors, who don’t pay license fees and who couldn’t afford to if they were charged. So I wrote my notes up for the centro de salud and in it I explained this, but it is a hard line to walk because on the one hand I don’t want suggest taking away the livelihood of the poorest people in the market, but reforming the rules for who can sit on the floor and sell without doing so would require money from somewhere.
Ma’jo’n is the Tzutujil word for ‘there isn’t any’ and this week it’s been the most common word I’ve heard at the centro de salud.
Coming from the US there are things that I don’t understand immediately about health care here. The centro de salud is a government run organization, and every week sends its requisition forms in requesting the medicines that they need. But they don’t actually always get them. In fact, a good percentage of the common medicines we give out daily we are currently out of. We have been out of albendazol syrup (for treating parasites in kids too little to take pills) since I arrived. This week we ran out of amoxicilin pills, trimethoprim pills and syrup. In fact the only antibiotics we have are donated amoxicilin syrup, donated cipro, and a few courses of a cephalosporin. We ran out of folic acid last week (which we need to give to every pregnant woman) but were luckily able to get some donated.
The donations come from private organizations such as Save the Children, and I honestly don’t know what the centro de salud would do without such donations. But running a clinic with donated medicines has its problems. For one thing, the doctors never know what they have to offer. For another, there coordination between supply and demand is far from perfect. While we have very little in the way of antibiotics we have quite a lot of alka selzer, zyrtec and osteo bi flex.
So after 10 houses and 3 kids vaccinated it almost time to return to the centro de salud. We stop at one more house and a woman standing nearby sees us, takes off running and returns running, pulling behind her a very reluctant 4 year old. He digs his heels in, but his mother prevails delivering him and his vaccination card to us with a flourish. The nurse takes care of him and then does something remarkably resourceful. Frequently after they get a vaccine kids will have a slight temperature, part of the body developing an immune response as it is supposed to. But to keep them comfortable its generally recommended that they can have tylenol. Now this mother did not have any tylenol so the nurse I was with took the sterile wrapper from the syringe she had just used, dropped 2 tablets in it, folded it over and had a clean bag of tylenol to give the mother. I was impressed.
So as we head from house to house spreading the joy of vaccines to the small children I learn a few things about the public health system here in Guatemala.
First off, unlike in the US, vaccination here is not an obligation. Rates of vaccination for polio and measles are in the 50-60 percent range in this district. (The WHO estimates that for all of Guatemala the numbers are closer to 91 percent for measles and 85 for polio). In contrast, in the US rates are around 92 or 93 percent.
So in a country where the government sends people door to door to give vaccines and balloons out I am surprised when a few of the households we stop at state that they do not want the vaccine. I ask why expecting an answer that involves government conspiracy, or as at home, fear of long range developmental side effects. But the nurse I am with says that no, the families just think the vaccines cause fevers and they do not want them.
This, she says, is a population we need to work more with.
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