Reflection on week # 4

Last Wednesday, when we spent the morning volunteering at another Esperanza site, I was surrounded by the most Americans I've seen since I've been here, and it was certainly an interesting experience. It was nice to hear English for a few hours, and even nicer that, for once, I wasn't the most confused person around, but it was yet another interaction that forced me to reflect on how I appear to others, and why I am here. The volunteers from St. Louis were kind and hard-working, but there was certainly a division between them and me, and especially between them and the other students from our class. This can partly be explained by the language barrier, and partly by the fact that we were strangers, but I also wonder how much has to do with the inevitable distance created by cultural differences.

The few hours we spent with them made me think of a speech I read just before leaving Boston called "To Hell with Good Intentions." In it, the speaker, Monsignor Ivan Illich, boldly tells a group of U.S. volunteers in Cuernavaca to stop "pretentiously imposing (them)selves on Mexicans." I don't agree with everything he says, and I know I'm not even here in Mexico as a volunteer, but I've thought about his words often since being here. I'm spending five weeks reading articles about things I can't relate to - stories of nervously crossing the border, working in a maquiladora, losing family to drug violence -and sitting around a seminar table with people I certainly don't blend in with. Why? Why am I not at home, learning about my own community, serving them? Why do the volunteers come all the way from their church in Missouri to help build houses? What is lost by the ensuing culture clash, and what is gained?

I don't know the answers to those questions, and I'm not sure if anyone else in our seminar does either (though I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.) I only hope that my time here is not a waste, or a detriment to the other people involved, because I really feel like I'm learning a lot, and learning things I could not have from a text book or news article. And I hope that I can apply what I'm learning in my life, that we all can, that these five weeks don't just fade into memory, and that the volunteers from Missouri will be enriched by their time here.

I hope that this description doesn't apply to me, here, or in any of my other interactions with cultures different than my own:

"All you will do in a Mexican village is create disorder. At best, you can try to convince Mexican girls that they should marry a young man who is self-made, rich, a consumer, and as disrespectful of tradition as one of you. At worst, in your "community development" spirit you might create just enough problems to get someone shot after your vacation ends and you rush back to your middleclass neighborhoods where your friends make jokes about "spits" and "wetbacks.""

I hope, instead, that I'm helping facilitate some kind of education by providing my perspective, and that what I learn here will actually be formative and relevant in my career and daily actions. But I can't know that for sure, and this speech certainly makes me even more unsure.

If you have time, I'd recommend reading Illich's speech; you can find it online here.


Kelsey