It's All About the People

Conveying the real Peace Corps experience to people outside of it can be difficult. The day to day work is explainable: go to the school, make materials, promote new teaching techniques, etc. Day to day explanations, however, miss what really defines the PC for most volunteers: the relationships built with people. Crossing cultural and language barriers can sometimes make forming meaningful friendships difficult. Nonetheless I have fallen into some wonderful people here. Sometimes when I think about how the people in my life right now often seem like they could be the makings of some kind of zany small town novel, the plot of which would be not unlike the Little House on the Prairie novels, but with motorcycles and electricity and in Guarani. A few of my following posts will attempt to explain a few of the wonderful people I have fallen into, starting today with my host dad, Antolin.

Antolin

Most PCVS have that one person in their community who is their go-to guy to talk to or hang out with. If things aren’t going so well, or you are getting weird vibes from someone in the community, you have that one person from the community who you'll be able to ask questions about other people in confidence. For me since I have arrived here it has been Antolin, my community contact and host dad. Picture a decently well built 50 or so year old who has had his skin an body shaped by a lifetime of working in the fields (without a tractor). His left eye is made of glass, but remarkably looks quite similar to his right. Only a few stray gray hairs infiltrate his still full head of black hair.

When I first got to San Blas I lived in his house for almost 6 months and used to drink mate with Antolin and his wife every single morning. Like a true farmer, he enjoys his mate very strong and bitter. He is the president of the neighborhood commission and also president of the citrus cooperative. He donated part of his private land for the community’s water tank. Antolin attends church more than just about any other guy I know. I have heard a lot of gossip about a lot of people since living in Paraguay, and never, not once have I heard a bad word spoken about Antolin. “That Antolin knows too much how to work,” people say (love how that Guarani translates). Whenever I am over at his house he is working; watching TV and cracking nuts to sell at the farmer’s market, separating cotton from the cotton plant, shearing corn. Almost too rarely does he take a break from working. Antolin doesn’t drink, although I have seen him take a sip or two of wine when he is playing cards. I can tell it is just a tiny taste just for courtesy, though. He speaks Guarani almost all of the time with his family, but luckily for me he also speaks good Spanish after having worked for a while in a larger city of Paraguay in his 20s.

Born and raised in the rural community of San Carlos, which is 3 miles from where he now lives, Antolin has been a farmer his whole life. I can’t imagine the amount of awesome stories he must have, but unfortunately it is hard to prompt him into story-telling mood. I am never sure exactly what to say to elicit these stories from him, and usually our conversations just focus on the present. One night though, he told me how he got his glass eye:

Antolin “I don’t know if you can tell, Miguel, but my right eye, it’s made of glass.”

Miguel “It does seem a bit different. How did you lose it?”
He proceeds to tell me this story using the same tone I would use for say, summarizing what I bought at the grocery store. I don’t mean to infer that he is a boring story teller by any means but that to him, this story wasn’t even that big of a deal.

Antolin: “Well I was in the fields one day harvesting soy. We were in the middle of working when a bug flew in my eye. He got in there pretty good and didn’t want to leave. Well, I finished up the soy harvest that day and by that time my eye was hurting pretty bad.”

Miguel: “Wow did it hurt a lot when it first got in there? Wait did you just say you finished the harvest first???”

Antolin: “Yea, it’s got to get done. By the time I got back to my house it was hurting really bad, so I went to the hospital in San Juan. I kept getting worse, and next thing I knew I was in a hospital in Buenos Aires, and they were taking my eye out. Luckily they had this color.” (points to eye.) “just about the same color as my left eye!” (Taps eye with index finger.)

Miguel: “What kind of bug did you say this was?”

Antolin: “just a little bug. Not sure what kind.”

When Antolin was a kid his dad got bit by a snake while working in the fields. The snake was venomous and, given the fact that there were no hospitals in the area 40 years ago, he died that same day.

The guy has a perpetual smile wrinkled into his face from being in such a jovial mood all the time. If I ever get in a weird mood here I always know that I can head over to his house, drink some terere with him and his family and in a short minute I’ll forget whatever was troubling me.

On numerous occasions, Antolin has said some of the deepest, most profound things to me that I have heard in Paraguay, although unfortunately I can’t remember all of his quotes.

One example of this is when after spending a morning chopping down a vast amount of weeds with machetes in the back of Antolin’s property, we paused to suck the nectar from some oranges. Within 20 feet of us stood the remains of a raggedy old shack. Spitting out an orange seed, Antolin tells me how when he first married his wife Erma over 20 years ago, they used to live in that shack for a couple of years before moving into their current house. “We used to sleep their, tranquil, with no fear of being robbed or anything. If anyone stole a cow, you would report them and they would go straight to jail. So no one stole cows. Of course that was during the epoch of Stroessner (Paraguay’s dictator until 1989). Now we’ve got democracy and you have to watch out for yourself...” Right here Antolin pauses, kind of looks in the distance but the way his eyes were defocusing I thought I saw him looking back in the past. Then he delivered one a quote I will always remember on democracy post-dictatorship: “Democracy is nice, but you’ve got to use it right” (“Democracia es linda, pero hay que usarlo bien”) A lot of people actually looking longingly back on the period of the dictatorship as a time of more stability.

Antolin does not conform to the machismo stereotypes that latino men are sometimes guilty of. At a meeting about reading in the home I was administering at the school the other day for parents of Kindergarteners and first graders, he showed up in his favorite orange colored button down. The only male in a crowd of about 20 female moms, he had my back as he made comments to everyone about how important he thought the work I was doing. The guy’s an all-star.

Still, he’ll throw in comment that catches me off guard every once in a while, like when he commented on the volunteer before me’s boyfriend: “She wanted to bring him back to the U.S. but he didn’t want to go. But Luis sure enjoyed that while he was here.”

If San Blas has a local Renaissance man competition, I have little doubt Antolin will come out on top. Did I mention he’s got nine (well-behaved) kids?

Deforestation at the local level

I vividly remember the shocked look on my face (or at least making that look) in 5th grade when my science teacher Ms. Hewitt informed our class that 36 millions acres of natural forest are lost each year. I was so confused; where were these all these trees being cut down? It certainly wasn’t my hometown of Brookfield, where the only tree I had ever seen logged was my neighbor’s when it began to interfere with the power lines. I just simply couldn’t picture how a quantity of trees this large could disappear. Wouldn’t the world have run out of trees already? Where were these places in that let you cut down a tree without a permit as is required in the suburbs? I pictured an evil greedy old man with a team of bulldozers laughing like Jafar from Aladdin as he devastated huge rainforests for profit. After living in Paraguay for over a year though, it becomes obvious that deforestation is much more complex than I first thought. Although my personal experience obviously does not apply to all situations in the developing world, I feel like it is a good place to start for anyone who might be wondering how such a vast amount of trees continue to be lost each year.

First, people naturally remove the trees to make way for houses, communities, and agriculture. I live in a town called San Blas, where almost everyone is a small sustenance farmer. San Blas was founded in the year 1970, and by talking to the old timers who live here, I have been able to reconstruct pretty accurately the beginnings of San Blas. (Sidenote: those are always amazingly interesting and entertaining conversations. Picture yourself trying to talk to an Irish farmer from the boondocks who speaks English with a heavy accent, then imagine that he doesn’t even speak English but a weird sounding indigenous language. Throw in some whiskey and they start talking even faster, making it REALLY interesting. Yea, let’s just say it’s a good time.)

Picture this in your mind’s eye: 40 years ago, from my town to the nearest large pueblo, San Juan, there was no road, no fields being cultivated, not much of anything really. IT WAS ALL SUBTROPICAL FOREST. There were only FIVE houses in the 12 or so mile horse ride from San Blas to San Juan. The director of my school has told me about how, for him to get from San Juan to his house, he would walk for 4 hours to go there during the week, then four hours back for the weekend, carrying a rifle just in case he encountered any funny business on the walk. From 1970 on, outsiders would move here who didn’t have land and wanted to make a living by farming. Often they would burn the forest to get the land ready for cultivation. The fresh land had never been farmed, so it was easy to sow the fields, with Paraguay’s year round growing season you were ready to produce. Just keep get those big trees out of the way and you are good to go.

Currently there exist patches of trees here and there but are vastly less. We haven’t lost an area of square feet of trees the size of Portugal in just this area, but you can see how this process repeated on a large scale could have an extreme effect on the number of trees in the world, making those seemingly crazy statistics plausible.

The second thing I have learned first hand about deforestation in the developing world is that when there is a lack of ‘honest’ or ‘legal’ jobs, and what’s is more those jobs don’t pay very well, people tend to look for other ways to make money such as illegal logging. Even if there are ‘honest’ jobs that pay decently (i.e. farming) but people see the opportunity to make more money doing something else, they will take that opportunity unless they have a strong incentive not to (such as a long jail sentence that will actually be enforced).

San Blas is a prime example of the above. Not far from my house is a National Park, filled with old growth trees. Except not anymore, because they’ve all cut down and sold for profit. Some people from my town work full time harvesting the trees and selling them to buyers in San Juan. Of course they know it’s illegal, but that is beside the point. They also know that if the representatives come to enforce the law and get them in trouble for logging, they can just pay off the law reps. The park rangers have a certain price, and then the departmental public prosecutor representatives have another (much higher) price. Even if every once in a while they get caught, economically they are always going to come out way ahead. After being here for a year and learning about the price of old forest wood and the price of cotton, and the work-money made ratio by doing each of those two jobs, I will just say you can make a hell of a lot more money by just cutting down trees. And in a lot less time. To give you an idea, I can live decently here on my PC stipend, and those guys make at least 4x more than me per month.

This system is ridiculously unsustainable and unfair, of course. How would you feel if you made an honest but modest living by the sweat of your brow, and then continuously saw your neighbor making renovations to his house with the money he was money through illegal industry? My guess is pretty pissed off, at least I would be. Then there is the fact that the trees are going to run out sometime soon. THEN what do you do? Go find more trees in another area?

But here is just how institutionalized the corruption is: last Friday, several people from my area were arrested when the public prosecutor came to the park and found them, chainsaw in hand. I am talking about prominent community members, guys who I like to hang out with. How did they get out of jail? A payment of approximately $600 per head to the public prosecutor and they were free to go. Kind of makes me thing of what Chicago must have been like during prohibition. As the old adage goes, crime exists to the extent that the law lets it. Unfortunately this mindset of corruption is very ingrained in the mentality of people in power.

I empathize to a degree with the people who live here in the boondocks and have taken up logging; the reality is that there is a real lack of opportunity for upward mobility for those who continue to live in the rural areas as opposed to the cities. It makes perfect economic sense that they turn to illegal logging to make a living on a lot of levels. However, this is something that clearly needs to NOT happen. A sustainable solution to the problem does not lie in just enforcing the law, but also in changing the attitude of the community toward natural resources via an educational campaign or something like that, and also in enhancing the quality of the local schools so that the students/future workers that live here have the ability to become qualified for a variety of jobs.

One of the biggest disadvantages of illegal logging is that the revenue is not taxable. My opinion is that the powers that be need to make up their mind: either ban logging and enforce the law, or legalize it and tax it and put the money into the quality of the schools. This is a tragedy and huge irony of the 3rd world: in spite of all the primary resources that are taken from San Blas, the schools scarcely have any books or even paper.
So there it is, a little example of how deforesting work on the micro scale. After being here for a year it has become all too normal for me to see trucks going by with ridiculous amounts of wood, or at least hear them at night as they sneak by.

On another, perhaps oppositely related note, it is world environment day, and the theme this year is Forests: At our service. Happy World Environment Day everybody! Hope this post helps you appreciate trees!

Swinging for the Fences

Sometimes, in life, you just have to swing for the fences. How else does Barry Bonds hit home runs? (I mean before steroids.) At some point in our lives, we all move to L.A. try to become an actor, apply for a job you probably won’t get, ask the super pretty girl out. Or something of that nature. Finally, of course, we might present a series of professional development workshops to your superintendent for possible use in the whole district that would have high impact in the local school district. Any guesses on which one I attempted today?

Yep, since LA is just a little bit out of my current budget, I had a meeting with the superintendent of my district today. I presented him and his technical team an idea for professional development of elementary teachers grades 1-6. In this presentation, I showed him the results of my reading evaluation from the previous year: 31% of kids in first grade couldn’t read, 25% in second grade. Then, I showed him the positive results from this years work in the school where I am mostly based: all first graders can read. IN APRIL already. From my perspective the correlation with new teaching reading methodologies and was crystal clear. I felt that the positive results that I have had thus far in my school were significant enough to warrant this presentation. Basically my idea was to give monthly workshops based in different teaching reading topics, something that Education volunteers very commonly do. Well, unfortunately my results were evidently not clear enough, or something did not go precisely right in that presentation, because the super did not like my work.

I have been lucky enough not to have many overtly negative experiences in Paraguay, but this was definitely one of them. After my hour plus presentation, I asked the Superintendent and his panel what they thought of the results, the professional development ideas, and what kind of support they would be willing to give me. At this point, the supervisor turns to address his panel and proceeds to say more or less the following: “The Americans from the Peace Corps always come here and do the same thing. They have their four years of special academic preparation, and they think they know everything. Honestly, this idea would not work. This guy will not be able to run workshops. Personally, I think I’ve understood about 80% of this presentation...”

Anyone who knows me knows I am one of the most hard-to-piss-off people around. One of my best friends Elwood will tell you that the only time I have ever been pissed was when he stole my TI-89 calculator and refused to give it back. Well; my fuse was done here. Cultural barriers and Paraguayan indirectness be damned, I could not take this man passive-aggressively and openly ripping on me, while seated right next to me, less then two feet away from me. So I go, as he is speaking: “If you have some to say to me or about me, I much prefer that you say it to my face. I am right here.” At this, he starts to go OFF on me. I say one more thing right as he starts to speak (forget what it was, but it was not anything of note), and get the reply, “See, the problem with you, Miguel, is that you have no respect.”

And I’m spent. I spent the next 10 minutes smiling and nodding as the Superintendent criticized me, my methods, Peace Corps, etc. I wish I could remember the dialogue but I was busy spacing out thinking about other things...
Unfortunately, I think this gentleman had a bad experience with a PCV in the past who tried to work with him (wasn’t an education volunteer). I have heard bad things about this volunteer, even from PC, so yea what he’s saying is probably true, that volunteer didn’t do her job well and it has seemingly soured him on working with us. I understand that these things happen; sometimes PCVs do not uphold the standard of professionalism that is expected of them. He brings this previous volunteer just about every single time I try to work with him. It is unfortunate though, whatever the reason, that this gentleman in question seems almost combative against me, as if I am an enemy of his. As I explained to him privately after the meeting, I think and hope we both have the same goal: all kids read.

So I designed a series of workshops based on the best teaching reading techniques in existence, using my year of experience in the schools here to tailor the program specifically for the teachers here. I hoped that I might be able to reach out to a larger quantity of teachers and have a more rippling impact. And I got a resounding no, we don’t want them. Swing for the fences...aaaaand it’s a big swing and a miss. I’m alright with that, though. At least I got my hack in.
It’s just a little sad to me because, from my point of view, I have the knowledge, knowhow, reading techniques, whatever you want to call it, to create a vastly different educational opportunity and environment for students here. Still trying to figure out why, but the powers that be in the area don’t seem very open to new ideas and don’t even want me attempting to present those ideas.

This little story is a pretty good example of the countercurrent volunteers and other development workers encounter in their work. One of the hardest things to deal with in the developing world is seeing a problem, and, from your perspective, being 100% sure of the solution, but being utterly powerless to change it. Tends to happen alot with health problems, environmental stuff, and of course education. Yay for learning about the difficulties of grassroots change the hard way.

On another note, my host mom and sister INSISTED on randomly coming over today to clean my entire house. My sink, stove, and fridge are now spotless. Not to reinforce gender stereotypes, but they did a hell a better job than I ever could have done. They still couldn’t get the family of 3 mice out of my stove though.

My walk home today

“Raise your hand if you have ever pushed your bike home.
Through 6 km of caked red mud.
In the dark.
While carrying three bags of groceries.
With handle bars that don’t point forward.

Anyone?

Didn’t think so.”

I just had a flashforward to me saying the above to a whiny high school class when I am teaching Spanish back in the states. It would be followed by me mumbling something about ‘suburban cream cheese’ (in reference to the students, not an actual cheese reference) and how ‘you kids just don’t know how good you have it. I know you all have really difficult lives, but how about concentrating on this matching worksheet for 5 minutes.’ Hopefully some of my old RBHS students read this.

Peace Corps True Life: Teachers don’t wanna do my activities wah wah (with poker analogies)

For anyone who wonders precisely what it is like to be a Peace Corps Volunteer, this post is for you. It doesn’t contain any rah rah adventure stories like the time I got drunk on rum with this farmer and tried to convince him that no, the moon is not a ball of water, and no, Columbus did not discover Paraguay. But it is a damn accurate portrayal of the question PCVs often ask ourselves: What do I do when I walk out my door today? Why should I be doing that and not something else? (Hopefully most of us, not just PCVs, have asked ourselves this question at one point or another.)

One of the scariest things for people considering joining the Peace Corps is the uncertainty of where you will be spending two years of your life. You cannot choose your country, and once you get sent to your country, neither can you choose the town within your country. Of course you have some say when talking to your Sector director throughout training as to whether you would like to be in a small rural town, or a larger or medium sized city. But just because you preference a particular setting, say a large city, does not mean you will necessarily end up there. When I was being interviewed over a year ago about what my strengths are and what kind of site I would prefer, I said: 1) I would like to, and would be good at, teaching at a teacher’s college having just graduated with a bachelor’s degree from a very strong education program, 2) One of my main goals was probably going to be to work on raising the literacy interest level, through children’s literature as much as possible, and 3) I have an extremely patient personality and don’t become flustered easily so I thought I would make a good first time volunteer.

Then came the day we found out about our site and how many of my expectations had been met. Of the copious memories I have from the past year, the day I got my Site Information Packet remains very vivid. I opened up the folder and read the following information about my place of residence for the next 2 years: “Number of houses: 75. Number of inhabitants: 500. Electricity: yes. Running water: yes. Number of kilometers from asphalt road: 16.” Well, I thought, looks like I won’t be teaching at a teacher’s college. Also, there had previously been several volunteers in and around the area, so nor was I a first time volunteer.

The PC Paraguay director, though, tells a really great story to comfort us on at this time. He recalls handing out site info packets to two different women, years ago. One glanced at her packet and proceeded to climb up on a chair and dance around and start embracing random people, obviously ecstatic about her placement. The other read hers and began to weep. To make a long story short, the dancing one ended up hating her site and left Peace Corps early, while the one who cried when she found out her site ended up loving it and maybe even wanting to extend to stay an extra year. The moral? When it comes down to it, often it’s not the site that is important but what volunteers do at their site that matters.

(Warning: poker analogy coming up)

I have been in site for a year now, and although Kilometro 16 wasn’t exactly what I was expecting, I am damn happy with it. I don’t think I would trade it for any other site I know of; although I am still slightly salty that I wasn’t given a Teacher’s College to easily work with (the closest one is 16 km away—a one and a half hour bus ride—and impossible to get to when it rains). But, that is clearly life. You have to play the cards you are dealt. However, the difference between a poker game and a Peace Corps site is that you often don’t even know what cards you are ‘dealt’ for the first six months to a year you are in site. You are unsure of the community needs, what kind of project they would want, who you should align yourself with, etc. Peace Corps is like some really crazy 2 year long game of poker where the cards only reveal themselves to you after a minimum of six months of intense language and culture study via immersion, and probably some dysentery for good measure. Only then can you begin to play your cards. That is a crazy game of poker that would probably make even O.A.R. proud, you are probably saying to yourself.

After a year here, I am having fun playing this crazy poker game. My cards have definitely revealed themselves to me, and they are decent. But I am in no way sitting on a full house, a straight, or even two pair. I would say I have a low pair, or maybe even just ace high. Basically, I am going to have to bluff the shit out of the people who I am playing against. (Of course, maybe I’ll get a awesome river card and end up dominating the hand anyway.) Here’s why:

A major goal of the PC is sustainability. That is, make the work that volunteers are doing in the schools last after we leave. This makes absolute sense: if I teach one class of students how to read, I will have made an impact on just those 15 students. But if I teach 3 teachers who will teach 30 students per year for 5 more years, I will have impacted 450 students. Multiply the number of teachers trained, multiply the effect. Sounds simple, right?

In theory, yes. But I have been working with 11 teachers from the 3 local schools for the past year, and the results have been less than encouraging. Trying to get teachers (many of whom were themselves taught in a dictatorship) to change their methodology is about as easy as getting my Grandpa to read this blog on the computer screen instead of my Grandma print it out for him on paper (to my knowledge he still hasn’t read it on the screen).

I will give one example of this: Last year in July, I did a reading evaluation to see how many of the 14 or so students could identify words. As it turned out, only ONE of them was able to read me SIX (one syllable) words. (And that kid’s mom was a professor at the high school...so he didn’t even learn those words in school.) A few weeks ago, in April, I evaluated this year’s 1st graders. SEVENTEEN OF EIGHTEEN of the students are reading already. Why the difference from last year? Because I did a word wall with the first grade teacher for two weeks in April. I was so pumped when I shared the results of the reading evaluation with the 1st grade teacher. “They can already read this year! See how well the Word Wall is working?” “Yes they are really learning even Fernando (a kid who seems to rarely be paying attention in class),” was her response.

Seems like things are going well, right? Not totally. Fast forward to two weeks after this conversation. I had been visiting other schools, and in Asuncion, so I had not had time to even stop by the school. I rolled up to the first grade classroom in the afternoon, pumped to see the new progress that my 1st grade teacher had made with the word wall (you add 5 words per week to the wall, so I was expecting to see 10 new words). I say hello, peak my head inside the classroom, and the teacher must have visibly seen my hurt face when I saw that she had not updated the word wall at all, because she instantly said: “Oh I haven’t been able to update the word wall...I couldn’t find any paper.” No paper...what about the paper on my desk... I love my teachers very much, but I almost called bullshit (I mean almost said that out loud, in Guarani) on this excuse this time...ridiculous. My peak into the classroom also had revealed that the students were doing their usual lesson of copying nonsense syllables off of the board for a full hour, which, for most of the kids, is equivalent to copying Chinese characters off of the board because they have know idea what they are copying. And the teacher knows that my methods work...but she won’t change. This one example is typical in my work over the past year.

This has brought me to reflect on my own methodology of teacher training and to question a couple of things: Do the teachers really know that the methods that I am showing them work better than what they are currently using? Maybe I haven’t been 110% clear in conveying this information to them. Getting teachers to change pedagogical practice is by no means easy (not in the U.S., not anywhere). Also, maybe the teachers don’t like the feeling of being “forced” to do some specific activity, much less by a 24 year old hot shot Americano when many of them have been teaching already for 15 years or more. I personally I don’t think it should matter, the teachers get paid to do a job and have a substantially larger income then everyone else in the small town. However, I don’t have the authority to actually ‘force’ them to put into practice what I am showing them. This job is left up to the district supervisor (roughly ‘superintendent’), who is quite frankly useless when it comes to professional development and accountability of teachers.

After the word wall incident where I nearly lost it, I exited the school and took a walk and a step back from all the work I have done this past year and reevaluated where I am and where I want to go. What lasting impressions do I want to leave on Kilometro 16, aside from all of the personal connections and differences I have been making and continue to make? For about a year I have been hacking away at the official Peace Corps Early Elementary Education Goals from grades kindergarten-4th. And yea, undoubtedly I have had some success, as the kids in the school where I am mainly based are reading loads better, and the kids in my host family who I have personally taught to read have obviously benefited from me being around. But for me, that is not enough. The old Thoreau quote struck me as pertinent on my reflective walk: “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.” Improving Primary School is important, to be sure, but what is the root problem that I am trying to strike at? This is what I came up with: Paraguay, especially the rural areas, seems to be stuck in a post-dictatorship intellectual rut (a widely read book published just years ago was called “Let’s shake things up!:Keys for the construction of a new republic). This lack of education and proactive attitude for change affects Paraguay negatively in very real ways. To give one example, very poor Paraguayan sustenance farmers often live right next to Brazilian soy plantations. Brazilian farmers pour pesticides onto their plants and into the ground, potentially contaminating the rivers and water supply and the land for future generations. These Brazilian farms reap huge profits of millions of dollars off of their yields. This money gets brought back to Brazil and in no way helps the Paraguayan economy or public institutions.

(Illegal) deforestation and soil and water contamination in the 3rd world are huge, global issues in this 21st century. All three of these are happening right her in Kilometro 16. So, I thought, is my 1st grade word wall helping to resolve these problems, which seem to be at the root of the Peace Corps purpose in Paraguay? Maybe. More literate kids would ideally be better suited to tackle problems like this, and literacy competency is MOST important in the primary grades. But still, something seemed to be lacking to me in terms of how I am, to go back to the poker analogy, playing the hand I was dealt: small site in a rural area, very few students (and people, for that matter) show signs of intellectual curiosity as I judge it, few people have books at home, access to information is scarce...

This is when I had an “aha!” moment: instead of zeroing in on the problem at the elementary level, why not take a more ‘big picture’ approach to the problems of lack of literacy, disinterest in books and the sparseness of creative community problems solving? Sure, teaching reading in the primary grades is part of the problem, but why stop there? As a PCV, I have the freedom to choose which institutions I want to work with and on which projects, a position in which most people will rarely find themselves in their job. Bureaucratic and specific objectives aside, my job at its core is to ‘make kids read good and do other stuff good too,’ and I have a lot of flexibility as to how I want to achieve this end, as long as I can justify the means in my thrice a year report to Washington, D.C.
So this is my holistic plan for the next year to improve literacy and community involvement in Kilometro 16. Instead of just focusing on the elementary education aspect of things, it focuses on several areas.

1) Professional Development of Elementary Teachers. While not my only goal now, without solid elementary school teachers, it would be hard to sustainably see any of the other goals developing. I am not going to continue sailing along just as I have been doing in this area, though.

a) I will be doing once per month workshops, in which school is canceled on a Friday and I have the teachers’ undivided attention and 8 hours to focus in with them. I will especially use this time to convince teachers of the outdatedness of the board-copying method, and to get them to think about what their vision is of all the things that there students will have learned by the end of the year.

b) All of the model lessons that I do will include pre- and post- evaluations, and I will go over these with the teachers, making sure that the teachers can clearly see the usefulness of the technique that I am presenting. I will strongly suggest that they continue doing the activity/method in question. If they don’t want to do said method I will procure to find out why not.

c) I will get my Kindergarten teachers to teach WORDS and ALL OF THE LETTER OF THE ALPHABET to their students, instead of just the five vowels to FIVE and SIX year olds. They literally do not believe me that this can be done. So my job is two-fold: convince them that yes, it can be done, and then show them the methodology they need to use to do it. I am thinking about making a bet with the K teacher at my main school: If you do all of the activities I show you and the kids still don’t learn how to read by the end of the year, I will make you dinner for a week straight. If they do learn how to read, you have to make all the materials that I have shown you for the next year and continue teaching like this when I leave.

2) Using the local High School students as volunteers to promote literacy. What’s the best way to make some one believe in something? Have them promote the benefits of that something to other people. I plan to make the high school students advocates for literacy and volunteerism. Possible activities: Reading Buddies, World Map Project, giving dental health talks to Elementary school, raising awareness about environmental issues, Waste management project. This is possibly the most important part of my plan, and also the most difficult. Getting the youths age 12-18 involved in literacy and community initiatives will mean that (hopefully) a sense of community responsibility and intellectual responsibility will be instilled and them, and ideally carry over to future generations in the town. This will not be easy, though. I have a very charismatic high school principal who I am depending on help me carry out this initiative. This idea is in the developing stages, and I still need to set specific goals and a way of carrying it out. For now, I am brainstorming ways to make volunteerism attractive to local youths and incentivize them to get involved. This may take the form of exclusivity a la national honor society, or something totally different. Suggestions are welcome.

3) Work with Parent’s commissions to get them to take an active role in their kids’ education. Parental investment in quality of education is such a positive correlation that I would be idiotic NOT to do this. K16 has a long way to go in this area.

4) Bring more materials (books) to Kilometro 16. For this I will probably do some kind of financial help from the U.S. project. There are very few books in the school libraries in the high school, middle school, and elementary school in K16. But, Miguel, you are probably saying, no one wants to read in your town yet. You yourself said it. Why would you want books already? So yea, it is sort of a chicken-egg problem: kids can’t get interested in reading without the books, but it will be hard to get the community to invest in books if they are not interested in them. Personally I think the fact that the students aren’t dying to read books is a bullshit reason to not get books. (Although that is what a member of the Ministry of Education once said to us when asked why they didn’t give more books to schools in Paraguay.) So, this will be the material aspect of my plan, to bring more books and get students ages 5-18 interested in reading those books.
Looking at what I just wrote above, I feel like I have set me goals pretty damn high for the next year. Ho-hum, I just want to create a culture of book-reading, problem solving, and intellectual curiosity in Kilometro 16, a place where my teachers won’t even adopt my clearly amazing word wall. A place where the VAST majority of kids who graduate from high school have never read a novel. Hmmm...Looks like it is going to be a fun year of experience in learning how to motivate people to change their behavior at the most basic level.

But the thing is, I really don’t care if things don’t work out exactly the way I want them to. And they probably won’t. The important thing is that I do everything in my own control to work toward influencing and impacting the people of Kilometro 16 in the most positive way possible. It might be improbable, but it’s not impossible. As long as I am drawing analogies today, the achievement of my goals here might be like improbability drive in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: “There was nothing [improbability drive] couldn’t do, provided you knew exactly how improbable it was that the thing you wanted it to do would even happen.” Or to go back to the poker analogy, sometimes the Dude wins a millions dollar pot and it turns out he was sitting on deuce seven that whole time. The point is, in this game I am going all in.

At the very least, if I attempt to do all of this and I fail, K16 will be in the same situation as before, probably better off, as I will undoubtedly achieve at least some of the goals I have put forth. It is kind of the same idea as for teaching words to kindergarteners: if we teach letters and words and the kids don’t learn them, what has been lost? Nothing. And it will certainly be easier for them to learn their words and letters when they arrive to 1st grade if they already have some experience with them. Similarly it will be easier for K16 to arrive at a culture of volunteerism and literacy if they already have books and have listened to crazy Profesor Miguel trying to get them involved for a year.

To put forth a quote from the great one, Michael Jordan: “I have failed time and time again, and this is why I succeed.”

So in sum, I think that somewhere along all the time I was spending in elementary classrooms throughout the past year I lost sight of the big picture, which is to create a culture of literacy and intellectual curiosity in the town, and well, change the world.

Wow, I just reread this post, and it is riddled with Peace Corps idealisticness. Oh well, if we don’t have ideals, how will we make progress? Plus, I am in the Peace Corps. I am allowed a license to be overly idealistic. The toughest job you’ll ever love, baby.

If you read this whole post, I give you props. Honestly, this was as much written for any of my friends, relatives and colleagues who are curious about what I am doing as it was a way for me to articulate my goals for the next year in a way that makes sense.

Go Bulls.