Another Thoughtful Letter

Here is the next letter from my friend who is in Guatemala. A recent graduate from Missoula - now working with NISGUA (Network in Solidarity with the people of Guatemala) a group that is "Working for Justice in Guatemala". (GAP = Guatemala's Accompaniment Project.)

Why is accompaniment necessary? In the early 1980s, the Guatemalan military combined urban repression with a rural counter-insurgency campaign that uprooted more than a million people – many of whom fled to neighboring Mexico – and led to an estimated 200,000 dead and disappeared. According to the independent Historical Clarification Commission, these actions constituted a campaign of genocide against Guatemala’s indigenous population.

In 1993, organized groups of refugees began returning home and internally displaced groups started to come out of hiding. Two years later, G.A.P. formed in response to requests from these returnees for trained international observers to accompany communities as they rebuilt after 36 years of violent civil war, which formally ended with the signing of peace accords in 1996.

What is accompaniment?NISGUA is one of many organizations around the world that employs accompaniment as a vital tool in the global struggle for the respect of human rights. In the Guatemalan context, accompaniment creates a non-violent response to the threats, harassment, and violence faced by survivors of Guatemala’s 36-year-long civil war and grassroots organizations working for justice and human rights. To this end, NISGUA’s Guatemala Accompaniment Project (G.A.P.) places long-term volunteers side-by-side with people in rural communities and with organizations in an effort to deter human rights violations. The dissuasive physical presence of these volunteers, known as accompaniers, provides a measure of security and creates space for Guatemalan communities and groups to organize in defense of their rights. Accompaniers also monitor and report on the human rights situation and alert the international community to abuses. In the U.S., ten G.A.P. Sponsoring Communities are committed to immediately responding to abuses and providing ongoing support to accompaniers.

READ MORE AT THIS LINK:

http://www.nisgua.org/get_involved/join_gap/intro.asp
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LETTER:

Dear Friends and Family,

I’ve had the thought a number of times.

It’s usually when I see the incongruous flashing television screen in a one bedroom, dirt floor home, or hear the trill of a new cell phone, or any other telltale sign of the remittances sent home from family working in the states.
And I think, wouldn’t that money be better spent on Lupita’s education, or perhaps a sustainable community project? I hear it echoed, too; Adriana, a Brazilian woman working with an Ixcán NGO told me of favelas near her home in Brazil where families slept exposed to the rain, their only reasonable piece of roofing set aside to shelter their television; and of a homeless man awakened on the sidewalk by his ringing cell phone…all the ways poor people choose to spend what little money passes through their hands.
But then I realize, wait – I have all these things, and I like them, too. Am I justified in having a TV and a DVD player just because I have a nice stand to set them on and quality roofing to house them under? Are fancy fixtures reserved only for those who can make them look less conspicuous among other fancy fixtures?
When fifteen year-old Marta told me she was going to make the trek from Cuarto Pueblo up through the Sonoran Desert and ultimately to Atlanta, provided she didn’t get caught along the way, I asked her why she was leaving. I was already forming my own romantic ideas about Marta’s noble decision to migrate; that she felt obligated to find a way to pay for her mother’s medicine, that she was going to help put Yoli, her bright little sister, through school, that maybe there just wasn’t enough food to go around…
“I want to be able to buy my own stuff,” Marta answered. She wanted new jeans. She wanted cold sodas. She was born in Mexico in the refugee camps and had seen Cancun, the hotels, the refrigerators. And she wanted some.
Initially, I was disappointed and found myself wanting to tell her to stay. This wasn’t the story of a young woman risking her life to feed her family. Marta wanted cds and electricity. I wanted Marta to stay with her mother and grandmother, to know her Mayan language and how to make tortillas. But I have my refrigerator at home, my cd player, and my jeans and I don’t think I’m ready to give them up. So who am I to hope these things for Marta? I find myself pleased to see young girls speaking Q’anjobal and weaving, to hear young men explain the planting and harvesting of corn. But I am dropping in on this world, peering into these complicated and changing lives, making my judgments and hoping my hopes, all the while knowing I will return to the many comforts of my home. And I love my home.
So I have to catch myself, to ask myself if what I want for Marta is what I want for myself. And it’s not so simple, because we do come from vastly different worlds. But I have to be careful of this tendency to enjoy cultural preservation for my own sake, for my own viewing pleasures, only to slip comfortably back into my home in the U.S., where I will enjoy all the things that Marta wants too.

P.S. I am now working on a new regional team in the Ixcán, centered on natural resource issues. I will be working in communities where mainly Q´eqchi is spoken and little to no Spanish. I am studying Q’eqchi this week, trying to learn a third language using my second, which is, well, kind of hard. It is a beautiful, poetic language: ¨How are you? ¨ literally translates to ¨Do you have happiness in your heart? ¨, ¨Ma sa sa’ laach’ool laa’at?¨
I said goodbye to Cuarto Pueblo last month, after nine months there. On my last night we ate with Andrés, the carpenter I wrote about in my first letter. He told me, "Anita, now when you go home, you tell your family about what happened down here, what we lived through. But make sure you tell them that we are happy now. We are eating three meals a day of good food. We are no longer in the mountains, stuffing our babies' mouths with leaves to keep them from crying, cooking in the middle of the night so the army can't see our smoke, eating tortillas made from ground leaves...we're doing pretty good."
"No es el tiempo que anda cambiando el mundo; es la humanidad," he said to me as I was walking out of his house, something that just isn't quite as beautiful or translatable in English: "It's not time that changes our world - it is humanity."

I hope you all have happiness in your hearts.