What Are We Doing Here?

(written on June 11th)

My name is Caitlin Levine and I am a Senior Staff member of an organization called [NGO].  This year, in collaboration with the General Congress of Guna Culture, we will begin an initiative in 19 of the 28 communities here in the first sector of Guna Yala.

We as an organization believe that youth everywhere have the power to make positive changes in their communities.  We believe that every young person in the world has the potential to lead.  We believe that cultural exchange and community development, however that manifests itself in Guna Yala, are two paths towards reaching this potential.  We also believe in the mission of the Cultural Congress: to promote and strengthen the Guna culture, especially amongst youth, within these communities.

Our 45 high school-aged volunteers will spend 5 weeks, in groups of 2 or 3, on one of 19 islands in Guna Yala.  They will stay with host families—they will eat typical Guna food, sleep in hammocks each night just as the Guna do, and live as a part of their community.  They will not teach, nor are they trained to do so.  They will collaborate with their communities, especially with youth, to facilitate educational activities that aim to promote traditional cultural practices.  They are here to motivate, to support, to join forces, and to learn.

Is that cool with you?

But wait, seriously.  What is positive change?  Whose definition of “positive” are we working with here?  What does it even mean to “lead?”  Is cultural exchange really a path to developing leadership skills, making good choices, and making the world a better place?  What is a “good” choice?  When we talk about “community development,” what does that actually mean?  Even when you can move beyond the typical western perception of this phrase (i.e. construction, industrialization, coming into a rural region with a plan and “leaving your mark”), you might arrive at the word “progress” or “growth.”  But even those words are so contextually dependent.  I don’t know what “progress” is in Guna Yala, Panama, a semi-autonomous region home to an indigenous Indian population whose communities are so closed off that the approximate albino birth rate is more than 1 in 150 (so actually, that has nothing to do with why I don’t know the answers, but I think it’s really fascinating).

Everything is arbitrary.  Context is everything.  While [NGO] claims to hold this unbiased position in every country in which we have presence, we assume that all of our definitions of “leadership” and “positive” and “progress” are the same, for the most part.  And, honestly, [NGO] doesn’t even have working definitions of these words.  With my understanding of the western definition of “progress” in mind (i.e. evolution, changing something for the better and not reverting back to the past), the “work” volunteers will be carrying out Guna Yala is backwards.  But for this region, it is growth.  It is restoration.  This is something that I think our 16- to 17-year-old volunteers will have a very hard time grasping.  It is hard for us as a staff to label concretely.

This region has been screwed over before.  What reason do the Guna have to trust us not to take their pictures and use them in a brochure to promote our organization, to learn to make their traditional crafts and profit ourselves, or to make offensive comments about their cultural ceremonies?  We’re just another U.S. NGO.  Are we just here to prove that we’re the most culturally sensitive organization on the block and that we can have a presence here without fucking everything up?

Shit is getting real.  We make presentation after presentation to community leaders; some go wonderfully (i.e., the organization and idea are embraced), and sometimes we are questioned.  Today, it was the latter.  It’s like we’re pulling teeth to be accepted.  It’s fine, even great, that these communities aren’t just letting any old person in with open arms.  But what if we are just weaseling our way in, like they’re just accepting our presence rather than actually feeling passionate about what is supposed to be our shared mission?

What Are We Doing Here?

At 2 this morning, amidst an intense thunderstorm, Gregorio, our Panamanian staff member, received an email about an earthquake and tsunami in Panama.  For a minute, we thought we were going to have to evacuate the country, leaving the island via aircraft…or boat.  For one second, maybe even just a split second, I thought, “we could actually die.”  Never in my entire life have I thought that truly.  We called our International Office, and they found nothing on the news.  No trace of this information.  It was a total fluke—spam or something.  Really legitimate spam.  And, obviously, nothing happened.  We’re great.

Maybe that’s a sort of intense metaphor for right now—I kind of feel like we’re sinking.  For about an hour this afternoon, I was thinking for sure that this would never happen—or, at least, I was out.  But maybe it’s just a fluke and our moral compasses will stop spinning like mad and we’ll figure out what’s right.