While the volcanoes of language have calmed down and my Spanish skills have been improving over the past week, a new and controversial volcano between my group has erupted: ethics.
Personally, my main motivation to study abroad was to learn: to learn Spanish, to learn about a community very different from my own, to learn about consulting, to learn how to work better in a group, to learn life skills I could not possibly imagine beforehand, and to learn what it’s like to live here through staying with a home-stay family.
Regardless of our motivations, “why are we here?” is a question that has been asked over and over again amongst my peers (six students from Northwestern of all different majors and years) in country. As interns for Social Entrepreneurship Corps and Soluciones Comunitarias, we are sent here to consult for grassroots organizations in Nebaj, Guatemala, which can often be viewed from a “savior” lens, since we are foreigners with little knowledge about these projects.
Me and the rest of the GESI Guatemala group with one of our partners!
My group is working on a project with La Escuela Especial, a special needs school in Nebaj that faces many challenges including underfunding and a lack of specialized training for the teachers. Thus, it does feel strange. As a student who studies the arts, business, and marketing, I do not have tangible skills in working with education, much less education for children with special needs. So, why me? Why am I of all people working on a project so specific when I have very limited knowledge and skills on this subject?
One tool to combat this that we learned through GESI training is by being fully transparent with our partners about our abilities, time, and resources. However, the other day during a visit to La Escuela Especial, we failed to provide this transparency. At this visit, we decided to speak with each of the teachers individually to learn more about their experiences and challenges, simply stating that we were students from the United States and that we would be here for about two months. During the interview, many of the teachers expressed that they needed help with better specialized curriculum for their students and since we come a “more advanced country” we probably have “more training and knowledge” about these topics in order to help them. There was also an assumption that since we were there, we were studying or had a lot of experience with special needs education.
However, between our group, it is clearly obvious that the teachers, who have been working at the school for many years, know much more about special needs education than we do, students who have never worked with or studied this topic. Therefore, we learned after this experience the necessity for transparency, especially in a setting where so many assumptions can be made about our knowledge.
During our next visit, we will be more transparent about our skills and and plan to ask about various projects we could realistically work on, including fundraising, connecting the school to other special needs education resources in Guatemala, and working on a better communication plan between La Escuela Especial and Mayan Hope, the United States non-profit that supports them. Our plan is to see what the director of the school thinks could be the most beneficial and sustainable for them, weighing in the limited resources and time we have as foreigners and students.
Therefore, going forward, I will not try to answer the question “why am I here?” and will focus on the fact that I am here and will continue to be here for five and a half more weeks. It is up to me to use this time to do meaningful work and to listen and learn from my partners, my supervisors, and my host-family, since that is why I am here, after all.
Construction of the soon to be new building for La Escuela Especial!
The town center of Nebaj!