How We Became Teachers

This week I gave the last test I'll give before I leave Guatemala.

When I arrived thirteen months ago, I'd never taught a class in my life. "I'm not qualified," I reasoned. And I wasn't. But that cut at the intersection of our most important principle: letting Chaquijyá dictate what kind of work we provide. It's critical that we're conscious of our skills and weaknesses, and our preference is to place Program Directors where they can leverage their expertise to positively impact the organizations alongside which they work.

Nevertheless, for much of the past year, that wasn't our most pressing concern. Doing what the community leaders asked of us took priority. So when they asked us to teach English in their elementary school, we agreed. They felt that English comprehension was essential to their children’s future opportunities. Our plans to launch a small business incubation program and an import/export cooperative took a back seat. And thus, I became an English teacher.

My first few classes were difficult; in a class of 38, it's hard to keep the boys from joking in Kaquikuel, and it's even harder to get the girls to volunteer a response. On the first test, which covered colors and numbers, the class average was a 29.5. But slowly, almost without notice, my teaching and the students’ retention improved. Now, on their most recent test, the class average was a 63. Thirty-one students have shown double-digit improvement on each exam. On the portion of the exam that covered complete sentences (such as They wear two red shoes and He is not tall and ugly), they averaged a score of 58.

These are students who, six months ago, didn't speak any English. These are my students. I'm not sure if English will ever benefit their future endeavors, and I'm confident that I'd improve as an educator with experience and training of my own, but they've worked incredibly hard. As I leave, I know I'm incredibly proud of these kids. And I know that, if you met them, you would be too.

Sunday Snapshot XXIV

Oh that ice cream?  Ya, you can get eight of those for a dollar.

Photo Credit: Jared Stepp

A Day Without

Today, Tom's is advertising their annual Day Without Shoes—an event designed to promote the company's one-for-one shoe program and to advocate for the plight of those around the world who don't have the luxury of shoes. Though it's a worthy cause, there are those who have reservations (or here) about the efficacy of Tom's shoe giveaways, ourselves included.

While, yes, we applaud Tom's for being an early promoter of the social entrepreneurship model and for encouraging people to "walk a mile in the soles" of the disenfranchised, giving people shoes emphasizes their material needs without remembering the broader context of poverty—the systemic, cultural, and legal barriers that also exist. Poverty doesn't mean you can't buy another pair of sneaks, it means chronic insecurity and lack of flexibility and opportunity. Sometimes, in our efforts to show off the good we do, an implicit message is pushed, one that oversimplifies complex problems and diminishes the value of the people who receive assistance. We want to direct the spotlight away from Western do-gooders and back to the recipients. That's where The Day Without Dignity comes in.

This year, there is a parallel movement that has mustered under the banner of Good Intentions Are Not Enough, an outspoken blog that advocates for "smart" aid. They’ve initiated "The Day Without Dignity" campaign, a day designed to accentuate the flip side of Western interventions and gifts-in-kind.

Too often in development, the "good intentions" of foreign aid workers gets publicized to the neglect of the hard working partners on the ground. Or for the Tom's campaign, the focus is on those choosing to walk barefoot today, and not on those who never had the choice.

We are guilty of this ourselves as we promote our work and leave out the invaluable contributions of our community partners. In our efforts to tell you about our success and struggles, it's easy to not mention the teachers we work alongside, the health promoters who mentored our health team, and the countless meetings with invested Guatemalans who are making strides to improve their own country.

Our work is important and appreciated, but the credit shouldn't go to us, and today we want to remind you again about the integral role of our local partners.

So, when someone says they're going barefoot today, ask them who it's for. And instead of joining, be proactive and swing by DoSomething.org for their suggestions on more direct ways to get involved in your community.

 This post written as a contribution to @Good_Intents counter-campaign to the TOMS A Day Without Shoes campaign, “A Day Without Dignity.“ Click here for a full listing of posts.

A Final Goodbye

The following is an excerpt from Kat Mueller and Hudson Baird's letter to the Vanderbilt Spring Break trip after they returned to the states.  To read more about their trip and see a video of the trashcans they installed, read their updates here.

A-Team,

As fun as the last three days have been, it was the first half of the trip that was the most meaningful for us, particularly getting to know you guys personally.  We want you to know how proud we are of each of you.  We couldn’t have asked for better people with whom to entrust our reputation in the community.  You guys did such an amazing job interacting with the students, teachers, and community leaders and it's exciting that your work and the moments you shared, specifically with the students, will remain long after Kat and I leave.  The feeling we got watching you guys in the community, especially during the presentation, was something we didn’t anticipate, you each did incredible.

As you get back into life at Vandy the feelings you have right now may fade, but there are three things we'd like to leave you with:


1.     Poverty is complicated.
2.     The world is a lot bigger than your backyard.
3.     Take care of others.

We hope you saw a glimpse this week of Kat and my belief in confronting injustice in the world, and we hope you saw how much of a difference you can make.  It can be by tutoring kids in Nashville, by advocating for environmental issues, or by starting a school in Africa - what matters to us is that you find time in your life to help people who haven't been given the same opportunities.  What matters to us is that you find ways to keep making a difference in whatever community you're most passionate about.

Lastly, we hope to see you guys here this summer.  If you want to follow, friend, like, or subscribe to Manna across the web, you can find us on Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, or on LinkedIn.  I'll send a follow up email tonight with info on getting everyone's pics in the same place.  Finally, add us on gchat - we want to hear about the rest of the year.

You guys were incredible.

Warmly,
 Hudson and Kat

Why Expertise Isn't Enough

Last year at Vanderbilt I lived off-campus, in a house about seven blocks from school.  There was one slow stoplight between class and home, and over the months I came to know the duration and frequency of this light exactly.  That's why, every time there was traffic, I knew the cause and exactly how many cars would make it through each cycle.

But what if someone who had never been to Nashville was stuck in the same traffic?  They might reasonably assume there was an accident, a parade, or another impediment to normal traffic flow.  If they determined the problem was a slow light, even if they were a stoplight technician, they still couldn’t know as well as I could how long the traffic would last.  That's the thing; in that case, my familiarity trumped any level of broader expertise.  Take me off that route though, and I bring very little to a traffic light discussion.

That distinction between expertise and familiarity is an important one for us in Guatemala.  While not experts in development or education, we offer a skill-set and knowledge base not commonly available where we work.  That’s an asset we bring to the table, yet it does little to make up for our lack of familiarity.

That's why we concentrate in one area; we hope to amass a measure of familiarity and rapport over time.  With each year in Guatemala we build confidence with the community and understanding about where we work, making us more effective over time.

More importantly, that’s why we emphasize working alongside partner organizations.  Our effectiveness depends on working alongside locals familiar with the community.  No matter how important malnutrition or economic development are, if we can’t find a partner to help us implement our ideas, then our work is better spent in areas where we know local actors can direct and benefit from our cooperation.  For us, collaborative development is the best way we know to help expand opportunity.

Glad to be Back,
  Hud and the Manna Team

Manna Resolutions

Fireworks are a daily treat in Solola.

Happy New Years!  We’re thrilled to be going back to Guatemala soon, and after a great break we wanted to share with you some of the resolutions we’ve made as we tackle the new year.  As always, we invite your feedback, questions, and requests in the comments below.

MPI Guatemala Resolutions:

• Increase our Sustainability: sustainability was a key topic of conversation in group meetings as we wrapped up the year.  We’re increasingly cognoscente of our program’s abilities to equip residents to continue what we start and we want this to be a central part of our program pre-audit.  In English, that means the teachers need to teach alongside us, and the curriculum needs to be one they can repeat.  In other programs, that means a renewed emphasis on partner orgs and community involvement.

• Get a community center: The week of Dec. 5 we had a promising meeting about a new room that could be converted for a meeting space and library.  We have another meeting coming up and hope to have this space ready to build out by the time Spring Break volunteers arrive.

Where our boss Dana is right now.  Jealous.

• Show our volunteers why we love our job: We’ll have three spring break trips and two rounds of summer volunteers.  One of Manna's pillars is volunteer development, and we hope to foster an interest in community service and international development.  We want the volunteers who come to have a fun and moving experience abroad, and that takes preparation on our part.

• See more of this beautiful country: We need to travel more.  Less weekends around the house, less holidays catching up on work.  The work will always be there, but if the next six months fly by anything like the first six, we won't have much time to fit everything in.  If you’re in the area, come along, there’s Semuc Champay, Rio Dulce, Tikal, and much more.

Hope you all had a wonderful holiday season, here's to an even better 2011.  All the best.

        -Hudson and the MPI-G team

Serendipity

As often as it feels like we’re living in the epicenter of “hurry up and wait,” from time to time the opposite happens and problems solve themselves overnight.  There’s that rare day when a week’s worth of frustrations are suddenly put in their proper perspective, and solutions materialize from the red clay of the Guatemalan countryside.  I’d like to share two such vignettes with you, to briefly illuminate a sliver of our good fortune.

Women’s Cooperative

                In the past month, I’ve grown increasingly interested with branding and selling Guatemalan artisan goods in the States. There are certain products that defy the cheap and touristy stereotype, products that could be marketable in the States.  But that conviction was as far as I got.  Then I caught a bus to Chichi (the largest market in Guatemala) on a whim to spend the afternoon taking photos.

After stopping for coffee, I was encouraged by the barista to visit a nearby fair-trade cooperative.  Getting there required you to walk through a hotel lobby, up a flight of stairs, and out onto their parking deck – not the kind of place you stumble into.  But there it was, my obscure vision actualized.  Here was my model.

                Later that week, some of my co-workers were having a meeting in a nearby middle school.  After they finished and just as they were leaving, two women stopped them, imploring their help in translating a business email.  The women who stopped them were members of a self-run artisan cooperative, only minutes from where I work.  What I wanted to incubate already exists.

The organization’s already there, a trail’s blazed for me to follow – and here, for two weeks, I thought the idea would only exist in my mind.  What follows remains to be seen, but unexpected doors continue to open.

Summer Enrichment Program

                We’ve been working for the past month to have a summer program ready to launch when the kids finish school in mid-October.  We had our itinerary and logistics decided, but couldn’t find a place to hold the camp.  There just aren’t buildings big enough where we work, and we understood that the local schools were not an option.  We were only a month from launch with no ideas what to do next.

Then, during the meeting mentioned above, our team inquired as to the availability of the middle school for our summer programs (keep in mind that this was only a meet-and-greet in a different neighborhood than the one we currently work in).  Still, they extended us their facilities. Later that afternoon, we found another space in a building we thought was abandoned that we can use for future programs –adult classes, library, after school program – everything, an ideal location.

Each of these experiences offered a needed dose of encouragement.  Often, as we're busy planning future programs or trying to teach English, it's possible to lose sight of why we're here.  Certainly my perspective becomes too narrow.  But then these warming moments occur, moments when the clouds clear and the view glistens in wide swathes all around, moments when I’m certain that I’m doing what I ought.  It's a bit like serendipity.

Warmly,

  Hudson

31 Flavors of Success

Kat explaining our first exercise.

Surprisingly, it went off without a hitch.  Teaching elementary school English wasn’t as daunting as I first imagined.   As I reflect, fresh from my second class in what will be an eight-week section in English, I’m torn in my appraisal of our success.

To bring you up to speed, I’m teaching 5^th graders with Kat and we’re thrilled by the voracity and joy they bring to the classroom.  In our first lesson on Tuesday we reviewed their names, identified colors, ran around the room labeling common objects, and divided into two teams (Messi y España) to test their recollection of the objects they just learned.  The kids were engaged and attentive, willingly bending their tongues to our strange pronunciation and transcribing everything we spoke into already crowded notebooks.  The experience was much the same for the other four PDs and the three classes they taught.  But did we meet our expectations?

In our lesson plan we hoped to measure their pronunciation, retention, and level of understanding.  However, as soon as the bell rang and class began that goal quickly became impossible.  My job of scribe morphed into chaperone and cheer leader, and the carefully planned activities changed with the drifting attention spans of the students.  The good, nay great news, is we adapted and kept the kids engaged.  They learned exactly what we hoped they would.  But, at the same time, we didn’t ascertain as much data as we hoped.

Checking the students' homework.

                The experience made me think there are two kinds of success, for on one level, we exceeded our expectations.  We proved ourselves able and engaging teachers.  We earned the respect of Willy, their daily teacher, who practiced the same material as the students from his desk in the back.  But still, on another level, we missed the mark.  None of the information we intended to gather was collected, nor was it in the two sections of 4th graders that Jared and Ginny taught.  Dana and Karen, teaching 6th grade English, had more luck by asking each student to repeat two short phrases, then tallying the number of correctly pronounced words to land upon a quantifiable percentage.  So while that didn’t work for us, it did for them.

Rigoberto sharing his excitement with the other 6th graders.

We agree as a team that we need to reevaluate our assessment methodsas we reevaluate this week.  Recording base measurements from which to compare our progress is vital to the measurability of the time we spend in our programs.  So we try again.  We dust off our caps, and come to terms with the fact that no matter how much time and energy we put into our lessons, flexibility is key.  Still encouraged by the positive reception, we want to meet a higher standard.

            The same could be said about the troop withdraw from Iraq as the sun set on Operation Iraqi Freedom.  Whatever your convictions, the goals we set for ourselves and the expectations we all held in our hearts at the beginning of the mission changed as the years wore on.  We had many praise-worthy successes, unexpected setbacks, and times of reflection where we asked ourselves, as a nation, what it was we wanted to achieve.  There's no question we succeeded, but what kind of success was it, and was it the success we intended? 

               This duality of expectation, rejoicing  yet ever striving, seems a fitting analogy for the year ahead.  Assuredly, in many areas, our best laid plans will dissolve in the midst of application.  But we will adapt, highlighting the small successes all the while continually working towards our long-term objectives.  While we want those objectives to be realistic, we expect excellence in our programs and approaches.

              Now, we need to work smart and work together.  We need your advice; we need the community.  We need two barometers for our own success – one in the moment, in the smiles, in the relationships.  And another in the legacy we leave behind, in the hard data and imparted knowledge.  Both must be at the forefront of our thoughts, both are of utmost importance.


Until next time,
Hudson