Teaching...learning

The crayon drawing is a gift received in Guatemala by one of our (my) english students, Miriam. This immediately provoked me into telling her about the band DEVO.
Miriam is kind of the leader of the rest of the kids, a real smart trouble maker. We call each other Monstrua y Monstruo.
The volunteer program of the school in which Spanish is being studied is a little disorganized. There is no training for teaching. The volunteers whose Spanish is most advanced simply take charge. However, one cannot expect much since most of these kids have little experience even being in a regular school. Most of their parents cannot read and have little time for the most basic of parent-child interactions.

Thus my other position at the school is that of the caballito or caballo (horse). Two of the boys in particular love to take rides on the shoulders. It´s a lot of fun but no nutritional substitute for my lifestyle back home. Because we are so many thousands of feet above sea level my lungs feel like a smoker´s.

The classroom feels comfortable and you can tell when you really have the kids´attention. My self is now found as the most experienced Spanish speaker in the group that teaches english to the older kids. The acting international coordinator has set our expectations low--otherwise hoplessness would be felt all around. The problems run really deep.

The temptation is felt to take pictures of the water line construction on the school´s block. My dad, a plumber might have some criticisms just by looking at the ditches. On top of the lack of comprehensive sanitation services, mentioned in a previous post (and can someone answer where the hell our garbage goes), there is very poor if any water treatment.

40 + to 60 percent of the women during pregnancy in this country die just prior to child birth. About the same percentage of kids age 3 or younger die from malnourishment.

Many ¨Reds¨ a term of endearment for members of the US Republican party, stolen from Lawrence based writer, Patrick Quinn, and in fact many North Americans in general believe that poverty is caused primarily by laziness. Does this belief of theirs extend to the poverty around the world, it is wondered? The historical iliteracy is astounding.

Almost all of Latin America and much of the third world has suffered from a poverty that can be traced to the issue of Land rights, land use, land exploitation, land theft, land degradation, land ¨expropriation¨. Although there is much evidence of enviornmental degradation prior, the massive inequality started with the arrival of the Spaniards by taking over land that was nurtured by the Mayans (all thirty + groups of them, each with their own language) and pushing them up into the mountains where land was less valuable. This is not simply history. This is still the issue. Most indigenous peoples were subsequently exploited for slavery and then cheap labor. After being ¨freed¨ from slavery it was impossible for many to go back to their way of life since what little land they held onto was in inherantly horrible condition. In most countries where land reform has taken place, like Mexico, the indigenous people are given the crap. It is not a result of self reliant hard work that about 7 families (of European origen and in mansions in the US)own an overwhelming percentage of the land.

It is economics 101: those who have lots of land have the money and thus the political power.

We also know from history that widespread individually owned private property can be an insanely beneficial thing for the public as a whole. This is one of the prime features of classical Liberalism, the foundations of which were made concurrent with the rapid decline of the Spanish empire between the 17th century and early 19th century. During this time the spanish were defeated and most of the leadership was maintained if not transfered to wealthy landowning elites. A kind of feudalism persisted.

Often when debating informally opposing theories of social change with fellow Leftists, the issue always comes back to the origen of private property. How to define it. The legal empire (that is to say the legal literature) protecting oligarchs from conceeding even a small portion of this land back to those who cultivated it in the first place is immense. And how is it possible to have a debate when the indigenous conception of the human relationship with the land is so radically different?

Land reform is possible and has been done in almost every country in the Western hemisphere, but Hati--and Guatemala. In recent years, as most of you know, a huge wave of grassroots activism in Latin America as led to amazing victories for indigenous people--and working people in general. (In hindsight, when we look at the power brokers involved in these victories, they would not have been possible without the help of many non indigenous, non poor and in some cases, even non Latino). In 1954 land reform was almost achieved for Guatemala under the democratically elected presidency of Jacobo Arbenz-Guzman until a CIA backed military coup sent the country back and sent many of the indigenous supporters of the legitimate government back to the mountains. A 36 year civil war followed. The US Supported the thugs, democracy was squashed, intellectuals, activists , students and campesinos (farmers, rural citizens) were arrested, disappeared, tortured and killed.

Bolivia has just won a stunning victory in a recent referendum on the establishment of a new constitution assuring not just land *re*distribution to the indigenous people but assuring that natural and other vital resources, such as gas, water, electricity and communications belong to all bolivians under public trusts. Worker´s rights have now also been written into the constitution. Something that must sound like gibberish to many Estado Unidodensians. Then again, outside of California and a few other places, so does the idea of voting for actual laws.

It does help that Bolivia has Evo Morales, an indigenous man (an Amarya indian) as President, that he actually comes from the same economic background as those who make up a majority of that country.

About the same number of indigenous make up Guatemala, but unlike Bolivia, there is a lack of communication (behind which a practical geographical explanation lies) among the 22 different Mayan clans. Each with their own language. Moreover, a deep suspicion exists among many if not most Mayan decendents towards participating in national or even departmental politics. There are places in this country to which no outsider can go because of the rawness felt over the government sanctioned genocide that took place during the early eighties (over 200,000 thousand Mayans were systematically slaughtered). Corruption in government is also still a problem. Although Alvaro Colom was able to win the 2007 with a huge indigenous turn-out, groundwork has to be laid for a grassroots infrastructure. Most of the indigenous communities are so small and scattered that it is unlikely to see the kind of political coalition that Evo Morales was able to utilize. However the shared experience of poverty (inextricably linked to racism) in numbers are there. Like loosing weight, the simplicity of achieving political victories depends on the numbers.

It feels extremely draining to the body to write about this. But the assumption exists that a lot of if not most of this is new to you.