Greetings from Uganda!
I’m
realizing that it’s been nearly a year since I wrote on this blog—yikes! That
is quite unfortunate given the fact that there were countless stories to share
in my final 8 months in El Salvador. I got caught up working on the publication
of two books of poetry/artwork by the incarcerated youth I was working with,
and didn’t keep up on the blogging end of things. In any event, I will try to
be better about it this year in Uganda, as it is entirely selfish and a
disservice so many who share their stories and lives with me to keep them all
to myself.
Before delving into my first few weeks here
in Uganda, I want to share a reflection I wrote for CRISPAZ, the organization
that supported me as a long-term volunteer in El Salvador for the past 3 years.
While I generally failed at writing regularly, this gives a bit of an
inadequate summary of some of the lessons I learned in my time there. Read
ahead if you wish!
CRISPAZ
(Christians for Peace in El Salvador) Long-Term Volunteer Reflection
I hesitate to
begin to write this article, because there is simply no way I can adequately sum
up three years of insights, heartbreak, relationships, and stories from my time
in El Salvador. I will give it a shot, however, with the hope that in a later
update I can post the link to the books of poetry by imprisoned youth that I am
currently working to translate. The books will provide a much more complete
picture of the lives of the youth I’ve spent the past three years accompanying.
Jovenes
Constructores
Having spent time
in El Salvador as a high school and college student, I knew that I would want
to end up there after graduation. With a Fulbright scholarship and a subsequent
Crispaz long-term volunteer position, I began a three-year part-time internship
with Fundación Quetzalcoatl: Ideas y Acciones para la Paz, an associate of
Catholic Relief Services (CRS).
Throughout the
majority of the internship I worked alongside program facilitators leading
youth groups in communities controlled by gangs and facilitating life
skills/violence prevention workshops through the Jóvenes Constructores (Youth
Build) program. This program began in the United States in 1978 and has since
spread to 20 countries world-over. The program focuses on training vulnerable
youth to become leaders in their communities through life skills and vocational
skills training. At Quetzalcoatl I, too,
received training in various educational pedagogies that we utilized in our
workshops including movement-based education, popular education,
constructivism, and solutions-based systemic education. I also received
training in HATCH Teaching Methods for Opportunity Youth through Mockingbird
Education, which focuses on the importance of understanding cognition and
memory in order to design effective teaching methods.
In three years time I was able to accompany
over 300 youth through their six-month learning experiences. I learned an
incredible amount about the challenges that youth face in El Salvador because
of the layers of structural violence at play, which limit their opportunities
long before they are born. I witnessed
the many ways in which the capitalist system and US influence in El Salvador
continue to exacerbate poverty and violence in a multitude of both visible and
invisible ways. Additionally, I learned a great deal about the workings of
non-profits that depend on international donor agencies for funding.
Our organization,
Fundación Quetzalcoatl, was funded by Catholic Relief Services, and the
relationship was rocky, to say the very least, between CRS and our
under-staffed and over-worked team of inspiring individuals who were hired to
carry out the Jovenes Constructores project.
Throughout my time with Quetzalcoatl, I gained first hand insight into
the unrealistic demands of donor agencies, whose standards often come from
different countries and contexts and have not been appropriately adjusted to
the Salvadoran reality. I also witnessed a great deal of the corruption that
results when donor funds reach the hands of the desperately impoverished as
well the self-righteous and greedy.
Proyecto
Cuentame
While with
Quetzalcoatl, I became acutely aware of the lack of opportunities for
incarcerated, and formally incarcerated youth. USAID restrictions on donor
funds prohibits that formally incarcerated youth participate in our violence
prevention/vocational skills training programs. This policy is
counter-intuitive, to say the least, but goes to show the ways in which youth
caught up in the justice system have even fewer chances for success in a
country that marginalizes and fears them (as do its “peacebuilding” donors).
Having glimpsed
the ways in which incarcerated youth are stereotyped, misunderstood, and
generally abandoned, I decided to co-found Proyecto Cuentame, a creative
writing initiative based on self-exploration, critical thinking, and
humanization of the incarcerated population. I co-founded the initiative with
fellow Crispaz volunteer, Maria Hoisington.
In essence, through
Proyecto Cuentame, I spent two and a half years in two juvenile detention
centers practicing empathetic listening and creating space in my heart for over
100 young people’s stories and confessions, long silenced by fear and rejection.
Through this process of accompaniment and documentation, I learned more about
the complexity of gang culture, violent trauma, and redemptive love than I had
ever imagined. I co-published two
volumes of the incarcerated young men and women’s writings and artwork, which
have been made available to youth, schoolteachers, government officials, NGOs,
and judges alike. They serve as tools for violence prevention and relay a cry
for a deeper understanding of the “delinquent” youth whom the current justice
system dehumanizes and re-victimizes. They are the building blocks for the
restorative justice program I hope to start one day.
As I stayed in
touch with youth who had been released from prisons, I merely waited for all
too familiar patterns as their fear-filled, liminal existence so often ended in
either their violent deaths or their abrupt, unfounded arrests. It is
ultimately for these youth that I plan to pursue a Master’s degree in Peace
Studies with a focus on conflict analysis and transformation in order to expand
my knowledge of this field. After all, in countries like El Salvador,
characterized by decades of polarization and accumulated social trauma, unless
there is a dramatic shift towards restoration of right relationship, youth’s
lives will continue to be defined by violent crime and tragic deaths long after
“peace treaties” have been signed.
Colonia
Dolores Medina
Throughout
my three years in El Salvador, my lifeline was undoubtedly the community,
Dolores Medina, in which I lived and shared every night after long, exhausting
days. I lived with two remarkable women and their three children and became
close to every one of the 40 families that make up the former refugee
community. As a member of this community, I was exposed to the reality of
abject poverty, when dollars simply don’t add up to put food on the table. I
bore witness to the machismo that
plays out inter-generationally, the failure of the healthcare system to attend
to sick children and adults, the violent deaths of ostracized youth… the list
goes on and on. I also experienced the daily joys of still being alive... of playing soccer with a women’s team, attending
prayer services with relentlessly faithful women, putting on community
celebrations with our youth group for Mother’s Day, Christmas….. this list,
too, goes on and on.
Just as I was preparing to leave El
Salvador, grace worked in such a way that I was able to start a college
scholarship program for youth in Dolores Medina, thanks to generous donors of
both money and time in the US and El Salvador. This program, Nueva Esperanza
will begin in January, 2014 with its first 4 students, who will be pursuing
technical degrees in various fields. The
program couples supporting youth in one’s home community with the pursuit of
higher education. Ideally it will be a pilot program that expands to include
more aspiring students, since opportunities for higher education in El Salvador
are scarce, to say the least.
I thank all who support Crispaz for
making it possible for me to spend the past three years learning a great deal
and sharing in the lives many Salvadorans.
I can assure you that my volunteer experience was not in vain, as my
life of accompaniment and work in the field of peacebuilding is just beginning.
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| Youth from Calle Real on a camping trip excursion in 2011. |
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