International Volunteer Tourism - Critical Reflections on Good Works in Central America

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International Volunteer Tourism Critical Reflections on Good Works in Central America

Edited by Katherine Borland and Abigail E. Adams

International Volunteer Tourism Copyright © Katherine Borland and Abigail E. Adams, 2013 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-1-137-36933-8 All rights reserved.

®

First published in 2013 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-47487-5 DOI 10.1057/9781137369352

ISBN 978-1-137-36935-2 (eBook)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data International volunteer tourism : critical reflections on good works in Central America A i / edited by Katherine Borland and Abigail E. Adams. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Volunteer tourism—Central America.

I. Borland, Katherine.

G156.5.V64I67 2013 361.3’7—dc23 2013026826 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Amnet First Edition: December 2013 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Acknowledgments 1 2 3

Introduction Abigail E. Adams and Katherine Borland A Brief Social History of Humanitarian Engagement Katherine Borland Priest in the Revolution Fernando Cardenal Translated by Abigail E. Adams

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El Salvador 4

Reciprocity and the Fabric of Solidarity: Central Americans, Refugees, and Delegations in the 1980s William Westerman 5 Untellable Stories and the Limits of Solidarity in a Sister-Community Relationship Ellen Moodie 6 Who Is a Global Citizen? Manifestations of Theory in Practice Katherine Daly

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Nicaragua 7

What We Are About to Do Is Highly Problematic: The Unpaved Road from Service Trips to Educational Delegations Irene King 8 From Skeptic to Convert, from (Short-Term) Service to (Long-Term) Witness: Toward Pedagogies of Witnessing on International Service Trips Eric Martin Usner

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9 The Learning of International Service-Learning: Student Reflections Several Years Out Alycia Buenger, Meghan Hensley, Nicole Klimas, and Liza Marks

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Honduras 10 In Search of Sustainable Community Development through Practice: A Sustainable Potable Water Project in Colinas de Suiza, Honduras David R. Muñoz 11 International Students and Volunteers amid Rising Violence: The Challenges in Honduras Katherine Borland interviews Jeff Boyer

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Limiting Structures 12 The Pilgrimage Transformed: How to Decompartmentalize U.S. Volunteer Tourism in Central America Abigail E. Adams 13 International Service-Learning: Fostering International Cooperation/Avoiding International Dominance Steven G. Jones 14 Conclusion Abigail E. Adams and Katherine Borland

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Bibliography

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About the Contributors

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Index

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Acknowledgments

With the exception of the introduction, chapters 6 and 9, and the conclusion, the essays presented here are based on presentations at the Good Works in Central America conference held at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies at The Ohio State University, May 3–5, 2012. Support for the conference came from OSU’s Mershon Center, the Center for Literacy Studies, the International Poverty Solutions Collaborative, the Center for Folklore Studies, the Center for Latin American Studies, and the Departments of Comparative Studies and Spanish and Portuguese.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction Abigail E. Adams and Katherine Borland

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ny reader who has boarded a flight to the global South has seen them—the predominantly white, middle-class, U.S. travelers with or without matching T-shirts embarking on what have variously been termed “short-term service projects,” “missions,” “delegations,” or “volunteer vacations.” Many of you, our readers, have led these groups. Increasingly, U.S. volunteers travel internationally with religious, professional, educational, and civic organizations for short-term stays that include at least a service component. They travel, often with little cross-cultural experience and little time, but with lots of good intentions and lots of material goods. They arrive and, in two or so weeks, pull teeth, inoculate chickens and dogs, build houses, churches, clinics, roads, dams or ovens. They plant trees and flowers. They make compost. They sit with institutionalized people or cradle babies at daycares. They perform puppet shows or choral arrangements. They teach English. Central America’s poverty and proximity make it a popular destination for North American voluntourists. It is poor; Honduras and Nicaragua vie with one another for the position of second-most-impoverished country in the Western Hemisphere, behind Haiti. And it is close to the United States; in one day, a time- and cash-strapped suburban U.S. citizen can move across borders of nation, class, biome, language, and race to a satisfyingly “remote” location, returning a week or two later transformed by their experience. Indeed, Central America has developed into what Mary Louise Pratt (1991, 34) famously called contact zones: “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today.” As a consequence, the inner

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workings of communities with names like “Posoltega” and “Nacaome” form a domestic subject of conversation in homes across the United States. The contact zone between cultures has expanded enormously over the past decades with improved infrastructure, and with it the presence in Central America of computer programmers, contractors, nurses, undergraduates, and housewives from all over the United States. Clearly, short-term international service has become a fixture in the twenty-first-century experience of globalization for citizens of both the global North and the global South. International short-term service is not new, nor are its critics (Illich, 1968), but it has reached eye-catching levels of popularity and practice in the current neoliberal moment. King estimates that colleges and universities sponsor six thousand alternative break trips annually to both domestic and international communities. Add to this an estimated 1.6 million church-sponsored service trips and countless short-term delegations organized by professional, nonprofit, academic, union, and other organizations (see King, this volume). It is a form of foreign aid, education, civic agency, citizen diplomacy, and tourism. In all of these forms, it is problematic. But it is also potentially transformational in ways that appeal to progressive educators and social activists. It is not going away; we will want to engage with it. The qualities of these trips are wildly appealing in the United States. Articles crop up regularly in the civic pages of local and state newspapers with headlines such as “Residents who forgo vacations to aid African country” (West Hartford News, January 7, 2012, p. 4) or “Spring Break in Paraguay offers goodwill in Tobati” (West Hartford News, April 5, 2012, p. 1). In these articles and in much of the positive discourse around volunteer vacations, it is not cosmopolitanism but rather the spirit of the voluntourist and rogue volunteer that are celebrated, the “roll up your sleeves and get the work at hand done” attitude, the sacrifice, generosity, fellow-feeling, humility, hands-on, initiative-taking, problem-solving, the can-do American spirit (see Borland, this volume). Another headline, again from the West Hartford News, on December 8, 2011, alerts us to the importance of recognizing the power-laden nature of international voluntary service. The article headlined “Woman who worked with UHart now helps inflict change in Ethiopia” describes a self-taught stage magician who uses her skills, formerly employed for high-tech industry personnel training sessions, to scare Ethiopian men into refraining from violence against women, or else be cursed. This story confronts us with the international volunteer’s central predicament: how does the odd, power-laden, gift giving of “service,” “help,” or “aid”—through which voluntourists long to overcome geographical and social distance—so often reify difference and inequality?

Introduction

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Unfortunately, the boom in short-term service contradicts most of the lessons learned in the international-development field since the early 1950s. To participate in a short-term service project, people need not share human rights standards, language, values, or knowledge about local markets, politics, or families. They can be, and often are, rank amateurs. Many short-term service trips reinforce local patron-client relations, promote external dependencies, distort or undermine local markets, and devalue local knowledge. In spite of volunteers’ “good” intentions, it is clear that the “work” they provide does not automatically produce benefits to their host communities. Many of these consequences are due to the fact that as a volunteer vacation, short-term service functions much like other kinds of tourism, where host communities cater to the needs of visitors rather than the reverse. Voluntourism agencies and infrastructure have developed across Central America in response to the demand for authentic encounters with an impoverished Other in settings that contrast with the tourists’ everyday world. This is a tough dynamic to confront for most of the authors of this volume, who organize and lead international service opportunities for students, and for many other educators who hope that such experiences will foster in students a disposition toward global citizenship, civic agency, and cosmopolitanism. For Martha Nussbaum, a cosmopolitan is a “person whose allegiance is to the worldwide community of human beings,” one who recognizes an obligation to others that extends beyond family, clan, or citizenship (2002, 4) and who embraces what Anthony Appiah (2006) describes as an ethic of kindness to strangers. The difficulty, according to Benjamin Barber (2002), is that the cosmopolitan commitment, rooted as it is in rational ethics, lacks the vitality of more local and familiar allegiances, such as patriotism. Appiah himself points out that the other side of cosmopolitanism is a curiosity about others that often reinforces presumptions of cultural superiority. For Appiah, the key to bringing curiosity and compassion together is hanging out with others, for disagreements based on cultural differences are more likely to be resolved through a process of getting used to one another than by reasoned arguments. Unfortunately, hanging out does not necessarily undo the problem of implicit ethnocentrism. In terms of promoting a cosmopolitan disposition, the cross-cultural, cross-class experiences that short-term international service trips offer can as easily reinforce assumptions of cultural superiority and patterns of privilege as challenge them. The existing literature on service-learning is clear that without careful framing or opportunities for reflection, the global experiences these trips offer do not automatically lead to a change in thinking, attitude, or behavior among privileged travelers. We contend that short-term international service is a messy, complicated encounter among unequal parties burdened with histories of past injustices whose

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mutual interests change over time. Formulaic approaches and attempts to rationalize away the material inequalities between hosts and guests will not serve our agenda of nurturing global citizens. Nevertheless, we assert that service tourism done right can offer an opportunity to actively cultivate cosmopolitan values, because as an experiential practice centered on an intensive encounter with a heretofore unknown Other, it is based on concrete relations, actions, emotions, and embodied practices. It provides a strong sense of a local reality different from the volunteers’ homeplace that they nevertheless come to know intensely if not intimately during their brief stays. Indeed, the transformation North American participants often report immediately after such trips is most often described in sensory terms: the unfamiliar smells, sounds, and tastes, the closeness of human contact, the brokenhearted experience (see King, this volume). The service trip, then, offers visceral, particularistic content for one’s membership in and responsibility to a human community that transcends national borders as well as distinctions of class, ethnicity, and, frequently, age and able-ness. We aspire to this cosmopolitan disposition in our and our students’ everyday lives. This volume provides a focused examination of the difficulties of Americans, particularly young Americans, performing meaningful, transformational international service in the United States’ hegemonic backyard. Designed to promote transformational reflection and better practices among the prospective volunteers and organizers of travel-for-service experiences, this collection of in-depth narratives is written by those who have organized a variety of kinds of travel for service over decades, by North American students who have been transformed by these experiences, and by Central American partners who are themselves centrally involved in promoting “kindness to strangers” in their own countries. Chapter 2 broadly sketches the social history of humanitarianism, detailing the ways in which “good works” are both part of and resistant to structures of domination. By selecting a limited geographic area, we hope to provide the relevant historical, political, and cultural framing so often missing in volunteer vacations, particularly on the troubled relations between the United States and Central America. The authors explore lessons learned from specific international service interventions in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and Costa Rica. Although the literature on service-learning is replete with best practices, these practices are most often described abstractly or as recipes for what service experiences should be. We offer elaborated narratives of successes and failures that are themselves examples of the kind of continually reflective, historically grounded practice we advocate.

Introduction

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These chapters are designed to provoke reflection among prospective organizers of and participants in short-term service trips to the region before they construct their projects, to stimulate reflection throughout the experience, and to provoke action on the part of the volunteer in that crucial period after he or she has returned home. If we wish to shift the emphasis in these encounters from vacation to global citizenship, we must build in support for participants that will encourage their lifelong engagement with global inequities. In short, the aims of this volume are both critical and practical. Although critical of much current practice, the authors affirm the importance of cultivating cosmopolitan values and acting to promote social justice in a profoundly unequal world. Unlike other texts that represent international volunteering as either morally unproblematic or morally bankrupt (Lupton 2011), we are committed to a nuanced, contextualized, historically evolving approach to this increasingly popular practice with an eye toward pushing that practice toward meaningful social change.

CHAPTER 2

A Brief Social History of Humanitarian Engagement Katherine Borland

C

onsider the figure of the rogue volunteer: a “doer” with resources. Often he or she has a commitment to a particular cause that motivates him or her to move from the global North to Central America, purchase a property, and build a dream. In San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua, for instance, I met a retired New York firefighter, who in 2008 had bought a stretch of dry forest in order to construct, in the words of his business plan, “a private wildlife reserve for ecotourism that effectively achieves profitability, natural resource conservation, and community development.” Curiously, the reserve contains a fishing village, with whose residents he has positive relations in spite of the fact that he speaks almost no Spanish. His action is protective; it opposes the environmental degradation caused by the resort-style development that has engulfed this coastal town. Through his website, he appeals to me and other like-minded environmentalists to come help build the park, enticing us with this byline: “Have fun. Save the world.” Rogue volunteers are our partners in short-term international service. In Honduras, for example, an interfaith delegation from Columbus, Ohio, constructed a hospice/orphanage for HIV-positive children after Hurricane Mitch. An attached facility hosts short-term service volunteers, whose visits generate funds to sustain the project (Fe Anam Avis 2005). Rogue volunteers are also inside us, waiting to burst out at any moment like superheroes. They epitomize the small-scale, grassroots, do-it-yourself approach that forms our most popular current paradigm.1 While leading a short-term service experience down the San Juan River in 2006, I learned of a plan to “develop” the river as a tourism corridor (environmental threat) and that, due to the political uncertainties of the moment, one

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could buy a swath of rainforest for a pittance (action opportunity). I confess: if I had not had other obligations, I might have purchased my own piece of the biosphere in the name of saving the planet. Such a move would have empowered me to advance my conservationist ideals, but it would not have empowered ordinary Nicaraguans to take control of their environment nor would it have necessarily contributed to their happiness. It would not have changed the enduring inequalities that allow citizens from the global North to feel justified in, good about, indeed, to “have fun” in deciding what is best for the global South. I contend that projects such as these—where good intentions and imperial designs intertwine—should unsettle us; they should fill us with a sense of productive uneasiness. How did this paradigm emerge, and what other models for international service has it displaced? In this chapter I will sketch the social history of international volunteering in order to contextualize the recurring dilemmas of acting on our cosmopolitan values in a profoundly unequal world. From its nineteenth-century beginnings, organized humanitarianism emerged out of and in opposition to situations of inhumanity. It is both part of and resistant to certain structures of domination, and its struggles to address the damage caused by conquest, warfare, and postcolonial globalization are political insofar as they attempt to change laws and provide protections, practical insofar as they focus on healing and rebuilding communities, and visionary insofar as they operate according to principals other than self-interest and force. Humanitarian principles are also fragile, easier to articulate than enact and constantly subject to internal and external pressures and threats. Given this fragility, it behooves the prospective volunteer to know something about the larger context within which his or her well-intended intervention into the lives of others takes place. Our contributing authors’ reflections will provide more specific backgrounds about the relevant histories of individual countries and communities in the region. Here, I will describe how U.S. humanitarianism emerged in the nineteenth century and upon what principles; its growth and institutionalization in the twentieth century; the Central American anti-intervention struggle of the 1980s; and the subsequent growth of do-it-yourself, grassroots voluntary activity that currently forms the basis of many volunteer vacations, alternative spring breaks, and study tours. Nineteenth-Century Beginnings Although humanitarian principles exist in most religious and philosophical traditions, the first organized Western effort, the International Committee of

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the Red Cross (ICRC), was formed in response to the barbarity of military conflict. At the Battle of Solferino in Italy, where 38,000 wounded, dead, and dying soldiers were abandoned to their fate, adventuring Swiss businessman Henry Dunant erected field hospitals, purchased the necessary supplies himself, and convinced local women to provide care. As a consequence of this experience, Dunant founded the ICRC, along with lawyer Gustave Moynier, General Guillaume Henri Dufour, and others in 1863, and he was instrumental in convening the first Geneva Convention in 1864, which granted protection to ICRC volunteers in situations of conflict. In return the ICRC pledged to remain neutral, attending to all victims regardless of their nationality (Forsythe 2005, 15–27). Admirable as these accomplishments might seem, Dunant was not without his critics. Another humanitarian, Florence Nightingale, argued that in practice ICRC volunteers were aiding the war machine by patching up soldiers in order to send them back into battle at no cost to those responsible for the conflict.2 North American Clara Barton became familiar with the ICRC while volunteering as a nurse in the FrancoPrussian War, and in 1881 she succeeded in founding the American Red Cross, expanding the humanitarian mission to serve victims of natural as well as human-made disasters (Irwin 2013, 15). Meanwhile, humanitarians at home addressed the plight of the urban poor, who were at this time of rapid industrialization suffering the brutal dislocations of capitalism. These domestic humanitarians, like their international counterparts, also refused to distinguish between “deserving” and “undeserving” victims and insisted on the politically neutral character of their work. But the assertion of the neutrality of “good works” did not go uncontested. The nineteenth-century social theorist Karl Marx regarded humanitarianism as a politically conservative enterprise; he asserted that middle-class benevolent societies, regardless of their intentions, act upon the less fortunate, denying them self-determination and thereby reinforcing the privileged position (1972 [1888], 358–59). A classless state, on the other hand, provides the conditions for nonexploitive humanitarianism—an all-for-all utopia where resources flow “from each according to his ability to each according to his needs” (1972 [1875], 388). In the absence of a social revolution, proponents of the Settlement Movement in the United States attempted a novel approach to service across lines of privilege. Jane Addams, who founded the Chicago Hull House in 1889, encouraged her student volunteers to live and work in the urban slum for a year or two, listening to their neighbors and fashioning with them workable solutions to their problems. At the same time, these progressive reformers successfully lobbied for laws to improve living standards and prevent exploitation in spite of the fact that, as women, they lacked the vote (Addams

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1999, 89–96). Even here, however, middle-class Settlement House workers and community leaders sometimes worked at cross-purposes. With regard to language education, Addams and others fought to close the bilingual schools that many immigrant communities had established because they felt they interfered with the assimilation process (Rabin 2009). The American Century At the close of the nineteenth century, United States public opinion was divided over whether the country should “take up the White Man’s Burden,” as Rudyard Kipling (1899) urged, and join the European nations in occupying and civilizing the world. Many—including Mark Twain, Jane Addams, industrialist-turned-philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, and others in the Anti-Imperialist League—believed that the Declaration of Independence forbade the United States from governing anywhere without the consent of the governed, yet Senator Albert J. Beveridge argued that the annexation of the Philippines was both essential to accessing China’s immense markets and to fulfilling the United States’ leadership mission: “[God] has made us the master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns. He has given us the spirit of progress to overwhelm forces of reaction throughout the earth. He has made us adepts in government that we may administer government among savage and senile peoples” (1900). With these words, Beveridge marshaled the humanitarian impulse to “give back” as a covering narrative for U.S. imperialism. Acting on this mission, the United States occupied not only the Philippines, but Puerto Rico (1898–present), Cuba (1899–1902), Nicaragua (1909–33), Haiti (1915–34), and the Dominican Republic (1916–24). Unfortunately for these countries, North American ideals of good government did not easily combine with the commitment to capitalist expansion. Instead, corrupt and repressive dictators (who were nevertheless friendly to U.S. business interests) rose to power in most of Central America and the Caribbean. Throughout the twentieth century, the U.S. government supported these antidemocratic rulers against homegrown popular liberation movements (Livingstone 2009; Grandin 2006). Addressing the Ravages of a World at War With the onset of World War I, U.S. humanitarians continued to work to influence world affairs. In 1915, the Women’s International Committee for a Permanent Peace (renamed the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom in 1919) gathered over a thousand women from belligerent and neutral countries at The Hague to hammer out a plan for a permanent peace.

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These citizen-diplomats were rebuffed, however, by the numerous ministers and heads of government they visited, including President Wilson. Moreover, when the United States finally entered the conflict in 1917, the subsequent war hysteria demonized U.S. pacifists (Addams, Balch, and Hamilton 2003). Responding both to conscientious objectors’ need for an alternative to military service and to the deepening European humanitarian crisis, the Religious Society of Friends formed the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) in 1917, which immediately sent volunteers to assist war refugees in France, and after the 1918 armistice, continued their relief and rebuilding assistance in Russia, Poland, Serbia, Germany, and Austria. By the 1930s the AFSC had returned to Europe to assist child refugees from both sides of the Spanish Civil War3, Jews escaping Nazi repression, and, later, victims of the London blitz. Several of today’s most well-known humanitarian organizations trace their roots to volunteer-staffed relief efforts during or immediately following World War II. In 1942, Quaker intellectuals joined with academics at Oxford, England, to form the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief (Oxfam) to assist women and children in enemy-occupied Greece. When the war ended, Oxfam turned its attention to refugee and rebuilding assistance throughout Europe.4 It was joined by several newly formed North American organizations—Church World Service (CWS), the World Council of Churches (WCC), the Lutheran World Relief (LWR), and the National Catholic Welfare Program (NCWP)—who together formed CROP, the Christian Rural Overseas Program (later renamed Communities Responding to Overcome Poverty).5 Citizens across the United States provided over 11 million pounds of material relief for the postwar European refugee crisis through their newly established humanitarian organizations. Thus, reconstruction was effected both through the government-sponsored Marshall Plan and humanitarian religious and civic groups. The war had not only been fought in Europe. North American soldiers who had served in other parts of the world returned home with a new consciousness of the immense needs in the former European colonies of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. A newly sensitized American public very quickly embraced a broader mission that combined humanitarian relief with development initiatives. From Relief to Development Recognizing the need for a strong, independent, international body to maintain peace and security among nations, world leaders established the United Nations in 1945. Security was not the only item on the agenda. President

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Truman (1949, para. 44) announced a “bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas.” To direct this world project, various UN agencies had been created, such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the World Health Organization (WHO), and later the United Nations Development Project (UNDP), which worked alongside the recently established Bretton Woods institutions of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank. Today, these organizations provide the institutional infrastructure for the business of international development, just as the ICRC coordinates international disaster relief. For the next quarter century, the global North, operating on Walt Whitman Rostow’s (1960) theory that economic takeoff could be orchestrated by moving less-developed countries through a set of universally valid development stages, invested in a series of large-scale modernizing efforts across the globe.6 Since greater production was assumed to lead to better living conditions for all, GDP became the measure of successful development. Critics of the development machine point to the way that development “experts” of this era defined development problems and solutions without reference to the complicated economic, cultural, and political realities on the ground. The notion of development as technological transfer was fundamentally flawed, they argued, because it failed to take into account the political nature of any kind of social transformation (Frank 1997; Ferguson 1997). No wonder, then, that ambitious projects sponsored by international institutions like the World Bank or by national ones like US-AID consistently failed to attain their goals of reducing human inequality and suffering. From GDP to Grassroots As Europe recovered and the world economy grew, however, social inequality also grew. Recognizing that misdiagnosed needs for large-scale projects led to misallocated solutions, governmental and humanitarian organizations adopted a more grassroots approach beginning in the 1960s. As part of President Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress, young volunteers were sent into the world to spread by example the optimism and “can-do” spirit upon which Kennedy claimed North American progress had been founded. The Peace Corps quickly took shape as a popular, government-sponsored, grassroots volunteer effort. Due to their prolonged and imbedded placement within the host societies, however, Peace Corps volunteers learned that those they had come to “develop” were already part of a shared, complex, dynamic, global reality, developed in some ways, threatened by international development

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schemes in others. They brought that new understanding home with them and into their professional lives in business, government, and education (Fischer 1998). Fischer argues, “Whereas the volunteer view of the developing world had little effect on American policy in the early 1970s, it is not too far-fetched to imagine that this sort of philosophy contributed to the broader push for human rights half a decade later in the Carter administration” (1998,196). Another shift toward grassroots engagement with the poor emanated from the Catholic reforms initiated in the Second Vatican Council (1962–65) that attempted to make the church more relevant and responsive to contemporary reality. A meeting of Latin American bishops in 1968 in Medellín, Colombia, recognized the ways that the church’s historical alignment with the privileged classes contradicted Christ’s teachings. Embracing a radical reinterpretation of the Gospel, they adopted a “preferential option for the poor,” pledging to work with and among impoverished Latin Americans to transform an unjust social order. Proponents of liberation theology believed that sustained immersion in the lives of the poor helped middle-class allies alter their perceptions of the causes and consequences of poverty. But their preferencee for the poor and the recognition that existing social relations needed to change steered the followers of liberation theology away from the traditional humanitarian stance of neutrality in political conflict toward a revolutionary alternative (see Cardenal, this volume; Martín-Baró (1974) 1991; and Hassett and Lacey 1991). As early as the 1960s, North American humanitarian organizations— including the AFSC, WCC, LWR, and NCWP—had recognized that conflicts and natural disasters were often produced or made worse by underlying structures of inequality. Consequently, they broadened their missions to include not only direct assistance in a crisis but the sustained work of building or improving both human and infrastructural capacity at the grassroots level. This work blurred the line between crisis response and development agendas. It also created new problems for humanitarians—how to address human needs while avoiding dependency and insisting that governments be accountable to and responsible for the well-being of their people. In the 1970s, the World Bank, under its director, Robert McNamara, also embraced a more grassroots approach to the development problem. McNamara’s (1973, 217) basic needs approachh distinguished between relative and absolute poverty, where the standard of living “falls below any rational definition of human decency,” a condition shared by 40 percent of people living in the third world at that time.7 The bank and other large granting agencies shifted their investments to the provision of food, shelter, and education for these groups, bypassing the governments and internal bourgeoisie of

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targeted countries and making use instead of nongovernmental organizations within civil society to deliver goods and services. As with earlier development paradigms, McNamara’s approach embraced a universal, abstract standard that ignored the political dimensions of social transformation. By defining extreme poverty as a continuing humanitarian crisis, the basic needs approach weakened the respect for state sovereignty that had previously been obtained in UN-sponsored international development schemes. At the same time, humanitarian agencies lost faith in the premise that states were responsible, able, and willing to provide assistance to their citizenry in times of crisis. Indeed, in various conflicts, not least in Central America, states were arguably the perpetrators of humanitarian crises; in the case of the 1972 Managua earthquake, well-placed officials appropriated international aid, leaving affected populations to fend for themselves. New organizations, such as Oxfam America and Doctors without Borders were founded in the 1970s to provide food and medical assistance to people in rapidly multiplying conflict zones throughout the world. But as quickly as humanitarian organizations were formed, they outgrew their narrow focus on relief to include attention to the root causes of human insecurity. For instance, Doctors without Borders broadened its mission to include research on drugs for diseases that critically affect impoverished communities and attention to social sectors not served by the existing medical system of a country (Redfield 2013, 179–204). During the 1970s, then, development and humanitarian agencies became increasingly intertwined while simultaneously distancing themselves from state governments.8 The Central American Conflict Within this larger context of change in the humanitarian endeavor, a new group of North American volunteers emerged, intimately connected with Central American struggles for political autonomy and human rights. Political dissent in the region had been simmering for decades, but by the 1970s, guerrilla forces were uniting with other disaffected sectors in Nicaragua and El Salvador, including the followers of liberation theology, students, and other political opponents of the dictatorships. In 1979, after 18 months of popular protests, spontaneous insurrections, and guerrilla actions, Nicaragua’s president, Anastasio Somoza Debayle, abandoned his country. A Sandinista revolutionary junta was immediately established, unleashing hopes for a more just and equitable society. The Nicaraguan Revolution became a symbol of the possibility of self-determination not only for Nicaraguans but also for progressive activists throughout the world. Efforts like the 1980 national literacy crusade, which reduced adult illiteracy rates by 50 percent in less than

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a year, health brigades that eradicated measles, and other national mobilizations drew the admiration and support of countless internationalists from Latin America, the United States, and Europe who traveled to Nicaragua to learn about the revolution and assist where they could. The internationalists took their direction from Nicaraguan leaders, government workers, and citizens (Walker 2003; Cayetano Carpio 1983). However, shortly after the 1979 triumph, the United States began to work to “contain” the threat of another Cuba. Meanwhile, in El Salvador and Guatemala, community and religious leaders, doctors, teachers, rural peasants, and whole indigenous communities became the targets of brutal repression. Those governments, directly and indirectly supported by the United States, attempted to prevent another Nicaragua by eliminating the FMLN (Faribundo Marti Liberación Nacional) and URNG (Unidad Revolucionario National Guatemalteca) guerrilla movements and their popular bases of support. By 1981, the United States had armed, trained, and installed the contras, a force of Nicaraguan counterrevolutionaries, in Honduras in an effort to destabilize the Sandinista government. Refugees fleeing the various conflicts in the region were streaming into Mexico and the United States, where, as a consequence of the U.S. government’s refusal to acknowledge the humanitarian crisis, they were branded undocumented economic migrants subject to deportation. As early as the mid-1970s, Central Americans at home and in the United States began urging North Americans to use their citizen’s rights to oppose U.S. policies destructive to the region. In the early 1980s, these networks were solidified into the Nicaraguan Solidarity and El Salvadoran and Guatemalan Sanctuary movements (see Westerman, this volume). One arm of these movements consisted of forming delegations—short trips to Central America for the purpose of witnessing the harm caused in Nicaragua by the contras and in El Salvador by the military and right-wing death squads. Short-term volunteer observers also visited the refugee camps in Honduras to learn about the humanitarian crisis. Delegates hoped the presence of North American volunteers would deter military and vigilante attacks on affected populations (Griffin-Nolan 1991). But the real work of these groups was to pressure their own government to abandon its interventionist strategy. Delegates wrote their representatives and local newspapers and talked to their home congregations and civic groups in order to raise consciousness about the crisis, counter government disinformation, and lobby and protest to change policy. In addition to pressuring the U.S. government to recognize Salvadorans and Guatemalans as refugees, Sanctuary activists provided safe houses for undocumented Central Americans. Solidarity and Sanctuary, as Perla (2008, 2009) has pointed out, were responses to a call from Central Americans—indeed, President Reagan even

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characterized North American volunteers as agents of the Sandinistas and FMLN. Whereas North Americans certainly helped determine the form of their voluntary efforts, they understood themselves to be collaborating with representatives of a local empowerment movement, taking their direction from the people on the ground. This relationship differed from studiously apolitical grassroots development projects or neutral humanitarian intervention in a crisis because it recognized the anti-intervention political struggle as a central and fundamental aspect of preserving and improving the quality of life of ordinary Central Americans. It also advanced the progressive tradition of humanitarianism by responding to a local call for help, rather than to an outsider identification of “needs.” Activists at the centers of resistance in California and Massachusetts exerted considerable influence on their more mainstream neighbors and on their elected officials. In the capital, Tip O’Neill, Ted Kennedy, Gerry Studds, John Kerry, Michael Dukakis, and Silvio Conte launched a decade-long challenge to the Reagan administration’s Central American destabilization policies. In 1986, when former president Jimmy Carter’s daughter was arrested with 58 others for protesting the CIA’s illegal mining of a Nicaraguan harbor, her father publicly expressed his support for her position, asserting that he too considered these activities criminal (Surbrug 2009,187). U.S. cities formed alliances with cities in Nicaragua and El Salvador using an Eisenhower-era initiative to promote citizen diplomacy through international exchanges at the municipal level.9 Refusing to acknowledge the U.S. government-imposed embargo, the Sister Cities program funneled funds and material supplies to their sister communities, and supported infrastructural improvements and welfare services, such as daily hot school lunches and preschool programs (Chilsen and Rampton 1988). Basing their opposition to U.S. policy on a people’s right to selfdetermination, volunteers from the Solidarity movement participated actively in monitoring Nicaragua’s 1990 elections. This commitment placed them in the unenviable position of certifying that the Sandinista party, whose right to govern they had defended for over a decade, had been defeated by a U.S. government-backed conservative coalition. Many internationalists engaged in service were bewildered by the February elections and by the sacking of government offices by outgoing Sandinista functionaries that followed (Babb 2001; Walker 2003). For their part, Nicaragua’s new leaders set about erasing all traces of social revolution—painting over murals, revising and reprinting textbooks, challenging Sandinista-era statistics on social progress, dismantling whatever was left of the social safety net. Lacking the context of a vibrant social revolution, Nicaragua of the 1990s became for most North Americans just another poor Central American country where

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entrenched inequality and corruption offered small hope for social progress (Babb 2001). In El Salvador the passage of the 1992 Peace Accords and the incorporation of FSLN leaders into the political system seemed to provide an end to the decade-long humanitarian crisis. In Guatemala, which had experienced close to four decades of civil war that resulted in over two hundred thousand dead, peace came more slowly. Solidarity groups continued to provide accompaniment to displaced groups as they attempted to peacefully resettle and rebuild their lives throughout the 1990s. Still, the UN-brokered Peace Accords in 1996 offered some hope that the conflict was winding down. Many partnerships forged during the Solidarity and Sanctuary movements remained active, weathering the political confusion of the moment and retooling for the struggles of a new decade. Groups like Witness for Peace continued to challenge U.S. policies in Central America and elsewhere that endangered human rights, focusing particularly on women’s rights and the structural violence of globalization (Weber 2006). Sister Cities continued their citizen diplomacy and grassroots development efforts. While shortterm volunteers might come and go, these organizations provided a structure for long-term partnerships with ordinary folk in Nicaragua and El Salvador regardless of political fashion (Gosse 1995). Volunteering as Tourism Elsewhere in Central America In the 1990s and 2000s, Central American countries that had not been involved in the Solidarity movement became attractive to international volunteers in distinctive ways. With its proximity, spectacular landscape, and colorful indigenous majority, Guatemala boasts the oldest tourism industry of Central America. Antigua, the lovely colonial capital and a UNESCOrecognized world patrimony site, has long been renowned for its plentiful Spanish language immersion schools. Short-term mission work is also well established in Guatemala. Church-based, U.S. lay volunteers provided relief to Guatemalan communities affected by the 1976 earthquake, and during the country’s evangelical boom in the 1980s (Stoll 1990; Garrard-Burnett 1998), these lay religious groups cemented partnerships with iconic mission churches while enjoying the closely policed tourism trail anchored in Antigua. During the genocidal counterinsurgency of the 1980s, Guatemala was not a major destination for Solidarity delegations, in part because U.S. aid to the government had allegedly been cut off. When the counterinsurgency was halted and a peace process initiated, accompaniment organizations such as Witness for Peace began to work in Guatemala resettling refugees. Indeed, despite its membership with Honduras and El Salvador in the Golden

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Triangle of narco-trafficking violence, short-term voluntourism is growing faster in Guatemala than in any other Central American country. Honduras became a target for international volunteering after the devastation of Hurricane Mitch in 1998. The combination of great need—Honduras vies with Nicaragua as the poorest country in Central America—and a U.S. friendly political climate resulted in a proliferation of small- and mediumscale international projects to serve displaced and underserved communities. However, lacking ties to an organized local empowerment movement, these external efforts risked contributing to the erosion of Honduran culture, language, and self-reliance. Rather than challenging the U.S. role in propping up the ruling oligarchy, whose repressive policies had led to the extreme vulnerability of the poor majority, “politically neutral,” grassroots international relief and development efforts allowed the Honduran government to shirk its responsibility to address the needs of all its people by filling in where necessary. Since the June 2009 military coup, a broad-based, popular, peaceful opposition movement has emerged in Honduras that has united homegrown grassroots groups working on a variety of issues—peasants, indigenous, women’s, LGBT, and labor rights, student and environmental activism, human rights work—around the common goal of reestablishing a democratic state. Predictably, state- and non-state-sponsored repression of the opposition has escalated. A few international Solidarity networks established during the 1980s have refocused their efforts to monitor the Honduran situation and provide support to beleaguered groups. However, this politicized humanitarian work appears disconnected from that of the more entrenched civic- and churchbased internationalists who have been doing poverty amelioration since Hurricane Mitch. In contrast to Honduras and Guatemala, Costa Rica has long been regarded as “the little Switzerland” of Central America. With comparatively greater social equality and no standing army, Costa Rica enjoys a robust democratic tradition. It has been a popular destination for students on their junior year abroad as well as for North American retirees. During the insurgencies and counterinsurgencies of the 1980s, Costa Rica played an important role in fashioning a regional solution to the conflict. A leading figure in the Contadora process, Costa Rican president Oscar Arias authored the 1987 Central American Peace Accords. As a nonrevolutionary neighbor of Nicaragua, Costa Rica also became the recipient of U.S. largesse, which allowed it, beginning in 1980, to develop its ecotourism industry (Vandermeer 1996). Ecotourism embraced two pioneering concepts: that tourism should be active, not merely sightseeing, and that it should make a contribution to the locale (Honey 2008, 160–165). By the early 1990s, Costa Rica had become the top overseas ecotourism destination

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for U.S. travelers. Tourism has been Costa Rica’s largest foreign revenue earner since 1993, and some quarter of a million foreign tourists visit every year. A 2000 survey found American tourists were seeking “genuine cultural experiences” and, in fact, were heading to off-the-beaten-path communities, so in 2007, the country’s tourism ministry announced that it would promote rural tourism. In contrast to the way that humanitarian crises in other parts of the isthmus attracted international volunteers, in Costa Rica service tourism grew out of strong preexisting institutions of educational tourism, church-based mission trips, and ecotourism. Agencies now provide the “work in the morning, whitewater rafting in the afternoon” programs currently in demand. The Ethic of Service in the Neoliberal North By the 1990s North American service to Central America rooted in citizendiplomacy was dwarfed by a growing number of initiatives that fostered a notion of good works as civic responsibility—politically compliant rather than transformational. In his inaugural speech in 1989, President Bush called for greater civic engagement with his “thousand points of light” metaphor, just as neoliberal policies were forcing a contraction of government services. National civic engagement initiatives were further popularized and extended by presidents Clinton and George W. Bush and, currently, by President Obama. Within this pro-service political climate, schools initiated new service requirements, fraternities and sororities became more active in their communities, corporations challenged their employees to participate in community initiatives, churches promoted service more vigorously, the government revived and extended national service programs for young people, and colleges instituted service-learning programs and centers.10 The goodness of service has become unquestioned social dogma (Frumkin and Jastrzab 2010). Study Abroad for the Masses Within this larger context, North American colleges and universities have embraced a new mission to educate global citizens. European and American elites have long understood the utility of a year or two of international travel for a young person’s preparation for leadership. Today an increasingly globally connected world requires young people of all backgrounds, whether they be engineering or liberal arts majors, to demonstrate both an awareness of global issues and a measure of global communicative competence. Although international educators concur that the best way to develop these competencies is sustained immersion in a foreign culture, rigid degree programs, job

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obligations for working students, and the high cost of semester- and yearlong study abroad make this model unrealistic for most. Cheaper, shorter-term study-abroad opportunities, such as one- to two-week study tours linked to on-campus courses or alternative spring break trips linked to student life programming, offer a practical alternative (Plater 2011). On many U.S. campuses, this “study abroad for the masses” connects with existing international service initiatives developed through faculty and student personal or professional networks. If well conceived, these increasingly popular shortterm programs can enhance global awareness and competencies. However, the short-term nature of such experiences typically skews the benefits toward the visitors as opposed to the host community and may even contribute to reinforcing damaging cultural stereotypes (see Jones, this volume). Conclusions In this brief historical sketch, I have highlighted the ways that short-term international volunteering is embedded in a long history of humanitarianism, a humanitarianism that for good reasons embraced neutrality, turned away from large-scale technology transfer mediated through sovereign states, recognized extreme poverty as a crisis necessitating action, and moved toward a decentralized grassroots approach. I have also argued that social transformation is always politically charged. Ignoring the political contexts within which we do our volunteering, treating the political engagement of our own country with our host country as outside the parameters of what we are trying to accomplish, is unlikely to result in the social progress we claim we desire (Mowforth, Charlton, and Munt 2008). I have also highlighted a troubling but enduring North American assumption audible in the discourses of imperialist, developmentalist, and rogue volunteers, perhaps even latent in the short-term nature of our currently popular volunteer vacations—the assumption that North American initiative and can-do optimism can solve the world’s problems. This confidence in both our abilities and our solutions poses perhaps the greatest threat to the recipients of our largesse because it denies them the authority, agency, talents, and knowledge to identify priorities, develop solutions, and tell us what they really need us to do. Moreover, the grassroots, people-to-people solutions that emerged to bypass corrupt and unresponsive states have resulted in a new set of problems and complexities for would-be humanitarians, particularly those working within the restrictions of a short-term model. To whom are the organizations we partner with accountable? How can we know that they help more than harm the intended beneficiaries if their only assessments are the ones they

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generate themselves (Fisher 1997; MacDonald 1995)? To whom are we, as short-term volunteers, accountable? How can we hear and appreciate the perspectives of our community partners when we often work across barriers of language and privilege, circumscribed by the social roles of guests and hosts, patrons and clients, tourists and natives? Notes 1. Combining a man of action and a powerful donor can achieve marvels, the press tells us, though the rise and fall of their most recently celebrated champion, Greg Mortenson (Flandro 2011), provides a cautionary tale about the limits of the marvelous individual. 2. For a discussion of how this contradiction continues to haunt the humanitarian enterprise, particularly in Africa, see Polman 2010. 3. The Spanish Civil War (1936–39) provoked a partisan internationalist response as well. Three thousand U.S. volunteers joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and took up arms to fight fascism without U.S. government approval. African American volunteer James Yates explained his motivations for supporting the fledgling Spanish Republic: “There the poor, the peasants, the workers and the unions, the socialists and the communists, together had won an election against the big landowners, the monarchy and right-wingers in the military . . . Spain was the perfect example of the world I dreamed of ” (Collum 1992, n.p.). By 1939, that dream had been hijacked by Franco’s victory in Spain, and the world soon plunged once again into war. 4. Oxfam. “About Us: History of Oxfam.” http://www.oxfam.org.uk/what-we-do/ about-us/history-of-oxfam (accessed September 3, 2013). 5. Church World Service. “History.” http://www.churchworldservice.org/site/PageServer?pagename=action_who_history; http://www.oikoumene.org/en/who-are-we/background/history.html; http://lwr.org/site/c.dmJXKiOYJgI6G/b.7521951/k.C498/History.htm; http://crs.org/about/history/ Accessed: 2012-09-02. 6. For more on the modernist development vision and its effects, see Scott 1999. 7. According to the World Bank, one in six people worldwide were absolutely poor in 2001. 8. Michael Barnett and Thomas G. Weiss (2008) discuss a similar shift among humanitarian organizations in general in the 1990s in response to the governmentbacked genocide perpetrated in Kosovo and Rwanda. 9. Wisconsin, which had maintained a sister-state partnership with Managua since 1964, advocated actively for U.S. cities to develop their own foreign policy in this way. 10. For an interesting discussion of the conceptual metaphors we use to describe service and their impact on the service itself, see Taylor 2002.

CHAPTER 3

Priest in the Revolution Fernando Cardenal Translated by Abigail E. Adams

I

have been talking with U.S. university students for thirty years, both in Nicaragua and the United States. I feel as though I know them very well, but most of all, I love them and want them to be happy. The distinguished Greek philosopher Aristotle, in the era before Christ, in the first book ever written about ethics, said that the end of ethics is happiness. That is to say, an ethically sound life produces a happy life as its consequence. Jesus of Nazareth said one day, “It is better to give than to receive.” He didn’t say it was bad to receive, not at all, since receiving is something very good: receiving appreciation, understanding, affection, a Christmas present—all of that is very good. What Jesus said is that it is better—it r produces more happiness—to give than to receive. In the act of giving to others—be it help, understanding, affection, solidarity—we always find more happiness than in simply receiving. The great Indian poet and mystic Rabindrananth Tagore wrote, “I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.” After reflecting on these three affirmations of three very wise people, we must be very intelligent, to choose very well our life path in order to construct in our own existence a great, authentic, and profound happiness. I received a standard education with the Society of Jesus, which many of my Latin American peers received. We led an almost monastic life, dedicating all our energies to the spiritual life and our studies. All of us took at least three different bachelor’s degrees (licenciaturas). s This stage lasted 15 or 16 years on average (including the novitiate, then studies, then three years working as a teacher in one of our high schools). Many carried out specialized

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studies afterward at the doctoral or master’s level. We knew about the poverty of most of the continent’s inhabitants, through references, information, and statistics, but we did not have many opportunities to come into contact with these peoples’ lives. So the information stayed in our minds without affecting our hearts or lives. At that time, when I began my studies, we almost always lived in large houses, very focused on our own business and with very little contact with the outside world; we were far from the cities. Even in countries with majority indigenous populations, like Ecuador, Peru, and Mexico, we never had the opportunity to talk with them. When we left for our weekly outings, we would find ourselves in the countryside with indigenous people. For example, in Quito, in the School of Philosophy . . . when we began to climb Pichincha Mountain, the indigenous were like part of the landscape. We waved to them and kept climbing. I never talked with them to learn directly about their lives and their problems. When I finished my academic studies as a Jesuit and had been ordained as a priest, I still had one more course to take, called the tertianship, a sort of final novitiate, with an intense spiritual training of nine months, an immersion in the spirituality of Saint Ignatius of Loyola. Our founder believed that after the long years of study, a time to help mature one’s personal relationship with God, which is the foundation of our religious life, was needed. That is why he developed the final stage. My companions usually did the tertianship in Spain because in Central America, we had to do all of our studies abroad with the exception of the initial novitiate, which we did in Santa Tecla, El Salvador. I liked the idea because I had never been to Europe. In addition to taking the course required by the Society of Jesus, I would get to know Spain, a wonderful country. I could easily request permission to visit the Vatican as well, where Saint Ignatius had lived and worked—see the room where he had worked, the house where he had lived, and so forth, and see Rome, a unique city. I might also return by way of Paris because that would make the trip complete, right? What more could one ask? But I had a concern that, undoubtedly, God had put in my heart, feelings that would not leave me in peace; I wanted a closer experience with the poor. I had never had that—neither in all my studies with the Jesuits nor in my childhood and youth before entering the novitiate. I decided to ask the provincial father of the Central American Jesuits whether I could do the tertianship in Colombia. This course had previously been taught just outside the city of La Ceja, in a three-story building where other parts of the Jesuit training were taught as well. The place was surrounded by evergreen meadows, in the midst of a beautiful landscape, framed all around by dreamlike mountains. Three years earlier, the Jesuits had sent Padre Miguel Elizondo

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to direct the tertianship in Colombia. He had been my teacher when I was a novice in Santa Tecla, El Salvador. He decided to move the course to a very poor neighborhood in Medellín. This was exactly what I was looking for and what I would not find in Spain. It was a decision that would have powerful repercussions for the rest of my life. In 1968, when His Holiness Pope Paul VI was to visit Medellín after Bogotá, the government decided to move all the residents out of the ugly slums that could be seen in the hills from the city center to the area of Bermejal. There they founded the Paul VI community. When I arrived, the streets were one big mud slick, but this was not a problem if one had fairly good boots. The real hassle was during the summer because the mud turned into dust that entered the houses from all sides and even worked its way into the food. The houses were very small but new, of red brick, and better than the cardboard shacks that people had lived in before. The big problem was that the people of the barrio were without work, which affected everyone deeply . . . Most of the people of Paul VI had not worked for weeks, even months. But even worse, they felt a deep and permanent grief and a belief that they were never going to find work. That was their experience, and they did not see any solutions to this problem. The community lacked almost all the social services that established neighborhoods enjoyed, but the most painful was the lack of any kind of medical care. There was no school. There was no electricity. There was running water, but it was always shut off. The climate there was chilly, even chillier for those of us living on the hillsides. Often the peoples’ meals consisted of arepas, which are grilled corn cakes, much like a round Central American tortilla . . . They ate, they told us, tortilla and with it, a glass of water sweetened with raw sugar. They bought a kind of brick of brown sugar (dulce de rapaduraa we call it in Nicaragua) and scraped off a bit in a glass of water. This was often the only food they had for all three meals. It is easy to understand the suffering of people who live on only this much food. It really affected me because during the nine months that I lived there, I grew deeply fond of my neighbors in the community. Their suffering was very difficult for me to bear. My eyes that did not see, my heart that did not feel now truly saw and felt for these beloved people. My heart had to feel a lot. The Colombian Jesuits bought three interconnected houses where we created our community, complete with a little chapel. There were about nine or ten of us, as well as Father Miguel Elizondo. We sought to integrate ourselves with the life of the people, but they had an experience that we simply did not have an inkling of: uncertainty. I knew perfectly well that if I were to fall seriously ill, the San Ignatius High School Jesuits of Medellín would pull me out of that mud hole and send me to a good clinic in the city.

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The poor had no one. They were alone and abandoned. Nobody looked out for them. Nobody rescued them in an emergency. Nobody rescued them from the emergency that was their everyday life. Our Latin American countries are continually subjected to natural disasters—earthquakes, floods, droughts, hurricanes, tidal waves, volcanic eruptions—but the inhabitants of Paul VI were permanently stricken, as is true in so many neighborhoods and communities of my Nicaragua. I remember one day after eating, I opened the door to the street and saw the children from across the street, the Jaramillo children, searching in our trash for leftovers, which they ate. I loved those children very much. They went everywhere with me, along with other neighborhood children. If I went, for example, to say a mass, one would carry the candles, another my stole, another my missal, still another the chalice, and another the wine. I was very fond of them. So the impact was enormous, to see that they, my friends, my little friends, were eating our trash. Each of us Jesuits had different jobs in the community. Among other tasks, I was in charge of buying the bread because, in our neighborhood, there was no bakery. You had to leave the hill and go to another neighborhood to buy bread. When I returned, climbing up the streets, children asked me for bread, children with hungry faces. I could not say to them, “Look, this bread is for the Jesuit priests who are doing their tertianship, a very important thing.” I did the obvious. I gave bread to each child. When I returned to our community, of course, I had no bread left. I told my companions, “You decide whether to send another buyer or to stop eating bread because I cannot carry bread through the hunger of those children.” We never ate bread again. At times, I did not want to leave the house because I did not want to see such suffering. That community was a sea of pain, and I felt as though I were going to drown in it. They were submerged in sadness, suffering, illness without cure, hopelessness. Emotionally, I could not take any more. The girl who helped in our kitchen—she was about 18 or 19 years old—was the only person in her family with a job. One day while we were talking, she told me that the only reason she did not consider suicide was because she was so afraid of hell. In Medellín, people are very religious—really, all of Colombia. I asked her, “You are so young; don’t you dream about falling in love, marrying, having children?” And she replied, “What? And bring children into this hell? I’d rather die.” It really affected me to hear that because I cared for her a lot. So young and without dreams or hopes for a future—only desperation. One day I was talking with a friend in front of our house, and this young woman told me that she was desperate. She used to tell me about her dreams, her ideals, her future. But this day, she spoke in another tone and told me she was saying good-bye to me. “Where are you going?” I asked her. “I am going

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to the city to become a prostitute.” I said to her, “You are going to enter a very black hole.” It didn’t matter to her, she said, whatever it took to get out of the black hole of the neighborhood. “Hunger is very sad,” I said. I spoke to her about her dignity as a woman and other issues. But I knew that I was speaking in terms that would be difficult for her to grasp. What woman’s dignity was I speaking of to a young woman born and raised buried in the mud of misery, first, in the slums of Medellín and now in Paul VI? She had no experiences that would help her understand the concept of dignity. I had learned about dignity in my home, in my school. She had not. We said good-bye. I hugged her with care and great sadness. It was a great blow to me because before I had served as a witness to her dreams and ideals. I never saw her again. Another time I was called to visit a young man who was dying. I was with him in his last moments. He was married but had no children yet. He said to me, “Father, I am putting my wife in your care.” A few minutes later, he died. I asked myself in anguish, “What do I do? What do I do?” Do I take her to live in the community? I knew this was impossible, but I still raised the possibility with Father Elizondo, who told me, “We cannot personally take responsibility for all the people abandoned in this neighborhood. What is important is that we take into account the social reality that we must change. That is the most important lesson we can learn from these experiences.” And, as in the other times, I felt weighed down with powerlessness. I entered the Jesuits in 1952 to begin my religious life because in the last year of high school, I felt that God was calling me to dedicate my life to him and his mission to save humanity. What I understood to be the most important business was to free the souls of others from eternal damnation and to save my own soul as well. But after my experiences in Paul VI of Medellín, I began to develop a much deeper understanding of the danger that so many people faced in hell, beginning with hell here on earth. This is the misery that millions of Latin Americans were suffering. And so, without changing a bit my fundamental direction, I began to concern myself with holistic salvation that included freedom from sin and also misery . . . My development to that point had been almost exclusively spiritualist. But there the picture began to fill out. I could not help but see in that neighborhood that there was a chain of links leading to death that began with unemployment and the inability to feed oneself. There were some ways to break this chain, such as selling things on the streets, begging, selling food, scavenging food from the garbage of restaurants and wealthy people, washing cars in the parks, and many other ways that people struggled to survive. Young people took up other activities that broke the chain but made me very sad: delinquency, prostitution . . . This affected me so much and convinced me to my core that the misery of our Latin American

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countries was absolutely intolerable and that I had to do everything in my power to change this situation. It was a deep and permanent conviction. My friends in the barrio begged me to stay. After nine months, we were dear friends, but I had to return to my Central American Province. My tertianship was completed. So I said to my friends, “I am going to take a vow. Before God, I promise that wherever I go in the future, I am going to work for justice, to build a new society, for the liberation of the poor of Latin America, for all the marginalized and excluded of the continent. This I will do in whatever country I end up living in, in whatever work my religious superiors assign me.” These words explain all of the decisions I made in the following years. The president and founder of the Central American University of Managua (UCA), Father Leon Pallais, a Nicaraguan Jesuit, who had been my spiritual counselor when I was in high school in Granada, petitioned the provincial priest to send me to work at the university . . . Father Pallais named me to a new position: vice president of students. My job description was “to be in permanent contact with student leaders and representatives to collaborate peacefully to reach the university’s mission.” I began work on Monday, August 24, 1970. The university was plastered with posters everywhere requesting dialogue with the president and the board of directors. The students had been requesting a meeting since August 15 or 16. On Tuesday, my second day of work, the demands continued. No answer. On Wednesday, August 26, the School of Engineering succeeded in setting up a meeting with the university authorities for 5:00 p.m. After much delay, two members of the board of directors arrived at 7:00 p.m. with the message that there would be no dialogue. The student leaders quickly called an emergency meeting in the gymnasium. Given my job description, I also went to the gym to listen to the students. The student body president explained that they had three demands: dialogue with the president and the board of directors, reform of the university’s statutes, and student participation in the direction of the university. He said that after the failure to arrange a dialogue, it was necessary to occupy the university to insist that the authorities pay attention to their demands. His proposal was accepted unanimously. While he talked, I was thinking that their demands were fair and serious, based on what I knew after talking with different sectors of the university during my first three days. I was listening peacefully, never expecting that the student leader would conclude by saying, “And now the new vice president of students will address us.” While they passed the megaphone to me, I had a few rushed seconds to think of what to say. I was clear that the students’ demands were fair, but I also knew that if I said in public what I thought, it was going to create a big problem. It would

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damage my friendship with Father Pallais because, in addition to being the president, he was the father superior of the Jesuit community in which we lived, in a house on the university campus. He wore two hats for me, and this created a great conflict for me. I had no idea what I was going to say. I also thought about the response of the provincial superior if I, being Jesuit, did not reject the takeover of the Jesuit university to force demands on the Jesuit president. I was filled with insecurity. In those seconds before the megaphone arrived, I realized that the vow I had taken in Medellín to fight for justice also required me to speak the truth no matter what. But the worldly thought did occur to me that if I supported the president, I would have quite a future at the university. I was just beginning, and Father Pallais had already placed me quite high, as a vice president. This university was also well connected with the wealthiest people in the country. Before me lay power, prestige, ease, and so forth. When the megaphone arrived, I said, “I have heard your demands, and it seems to me that these are fair. You can count on my support as long as you make your demands fairly—that is, using fair means.” I do not think anyone expected those words. I think, if I am not mistaken, that that was the first time in Nicaragua that a student occupation of a university was supported by an authority of the same university. The student occupation of the university was fair in every sense. They even posted signs, “Do not litter; throw trash here.” This was a very important symbol. They did not touch a paper in the deans’ offices; no windows were broken; none of the violence or vandalism common in student occupations occurred . . . I had just returned to Nicaragua after a long time away . . . and did not know the country’s situation well, but I saw that during the occupation the students always acted fairly and correctly. I maintained good communication with them the entire time, which was personally enriching because of their humane and Christian values. On September 1, the students and university authorities reached an agreement, and the students turned the university back over. I realized that during the occupation a breach had opened in the friendship I had with the president. This caused me much pain; I would have taken any steps to avoid problems and keep our longstanding friendship. He was the one who had counseled me spiritually during my senior year in high school in Granada; he was the one who had helped me discern my religious calling to the Society of Jesus . . . In addition to being my colleague, he was my role model for what a Jesuit was meant to be, for my calling to serve youth . . . I met with the president in his office, and he explained to me the spiritual foundation of the UCA, a serious Christian alternative to the turbulent national leftist universities dominated by the Marxists.

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He told me, “If someone does not agree with this foundation, then they should leave.” I responded, “I’ll be frank: I am going to support every action for justice here in the city—in the country.” It was a completely cold conversation; the two of us were talking calmly, but it was not the conversation of two friends of 20 years. We had very different positions concerning the state of the nation, our country. You have to remember that the atmosphere was very tense throughout the country, and Anastasio Somoza was running for reelection as president. He was the third family member of a bloody dictatorship that had been in power for 35 years. A few months before my return, the UCA had expelled a student president, and then the National Guard had captured and assassinated him in jail. [Due to space limitations, the editors have excised a portion of Father Cardenal’s narrative here that describes his support for the Revolutionary Christian Youth in the early 1970s and his collaboration, as a nonviolent sympathizer, with the armed resistance to Somoza, which culminated in the Sandinista victory and the removal of Somoza on July 19, 1979. This episode provides an important example of a Christian life and commitment within the Latin American context, an example of someone who ends up taking an active role in politics guided by faith.]

[After the revolution succeeded], the comrades in the new Sandinista government asked me to organize a literacy campaign for all the country’s people. I was taken aback that they would have considered me for such a beautiful project—so in line with my priestly calling and my desire to work with the Nicaraguan people. I realized at the same time that it was going to be difficult; they were giving me the project, but no money, because the state coffers had been sacked by Somoza when he fled the country, and he had not left a dollar in the Central Bank. No one had any experience with literacy campaigns waged at the level of the entire country; I had never taught someone to read and write, and I had very little organizing experience; I had just taught at the university level and worked as a university chaplain, and all of a sudden, I found myself leading such a huge project at the national level. But it seemed a beautiful project and a fantastic goal, so I immediately accepted. My community said to me, “Excellent!” The provincial father in San Salvador, Cesar Jerez, was also happy that I should have a project like this at the very beginning of the new government . . . When the new government asked me to lead the national literacy campaign, I thought of one of the founders of the Sandinista National Liberation Front, Carlos Fonseca’s words to groups of guerrilla fighters who were teaching peasants to use arms: “And teach them to read.” I decided that those words would inspire and direct our efforts.

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When I taught my class on the philosophy of education at the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua, I always taught about Paulo Freire, one of the greatest Latin American philosophers of education. I knew the ideas of this great Brazilian teacher, but I had never worked in adult literacy. My Jesuit friend Roberto Saenz lived in my community and had done literacy work in El Salvador and also in Nicaragua. He had worked right in the midst of all the dangers, including to one’s own life, of the Somoza era. For the somocistas, literacy work was subversive, communist. Roberto had worked with a young man, whom I knew through the Revolutionary Christian Movement, named “Pikin” Guerrero, who had been assassinated by the National Guard because of his literacy work in the same area where Roberto was working. I asked him to join my team . . . Now we were two. He had a sister who wanted to help, Ana Saenz, who could work as a secretary. “Bring her,” I said. Now we were three. Then he told me about a friend of their family, Katherine Grigsby, who was coming from Canada with a teaching certificate, and I said, “Bring her as well.” She played a very important role in the crusade. Now we were four, and we got to work. We called the literacy campaign a “crusade” because it was clear to us that this was a growing grassroots movement with great feeling and energy. I met with a revolutionary commander who had lived for years in the mountains as a guerrilla. He said that what we were creating as a great national campaign was going to be impossible. He knew how hard life was in the mountains, and he said we were going to have thousands of deserters. He advised me to create a more measured plan, such as starting with two departments and then adding two more and so forth until we covered all of Nicaragua. I told him that I thought what he was proposing was impossible because it was too easy. I would not have the number of young volunteers required, and without them national literacy was impossible. Students were not going to lose a year of studies for something that did not seem very exciting or relevant. But if we organized something national, in which the government, all the ministries, and heads of families were joining, something very big and transformational for the entire country, then, yes, I was sure that thousands of young people would volunteer to go to the mountains to teach peasants how to read and write. They would live in their homes, eat with them, endure the insects and all kinds of risk. This would be very important for Nicaragua and very diff ficult. That was how we were going to recruit young volunteers. I reminded him of what Paul Claudel said: that young people are made for heroism. I said I trusted young people, that “just as they won the revolution, they will fight for literacy. They’ll endure the difficulties of life in the mountains and not flee to their homes. You’ll see.” And in the end, I was proved right. But this I can say now; the reality is that the commander’s words . . . weighed on us during the entire crusade right to the very last days, and every day’s

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difficulties and setbacks seemed to prove him right. The government made 1980 the “Year of Literacy” and gave all its support . . . and volunteers arrived from all over. Very capable people. It was during this time that I learned that Brazil’s great educator, Paulo Freire, was coming out of exile and returning to Brazil . . . I contacted him and invited him to stop by Nicaragua on his way back to Brazil, so he could see how we were organizing the literacy crusade and give us some advice. He came to Managua when our team was barely seven people. We had long conversations with Paulo Freire about what we were planning, and we listened closely to the great teacher. He shared many insights; perhaps the most important was that literacy “is not just a pedagogical event with political implications, but rather a political event with pedagogical implications.” His method focused on consciousness-raising as the key objective in literacy, and this awareness is a political event that transforms lives and has political consequences in the actions of those who complete the crusade. One of the first things we had to do was carry out a census, so we would know exactly how many illiterate people there were in the country. This job, like almost every job, would be huge, difficult, and very expensive, according to the officials at UNESCO. Furthermore, they said it would be impossible to carry out in the country’s current condition; the census would take months and would not be ready for the beginning of the crusade. But we knew we needed the census, and so, just as we had done at every stage of the fight against the Somoza dictatorship, we turned to the people, particularly the young people, to help us do what others said was impossible. We told the members of the July 19 Sandinista Youth organization that we urgently needed to organize volunteers to carry out a census of the entire country. The young people would have little economic support; they’d be motivated only by the importance of the cause. They would have to go to the mountains and bring us information . . . including the number of illiterate people, how many wanted to learn to read and write, where they lived, and maps, so we could locate them when the crusade began. We also needed to know who else in each community could volunteer to teach reading and writing, where they lived, and what their level of schooling was. We urged the Sandinista Youth to find other volunteers, who would in turn seek other young volunteers to carry out the census. At this time, the Sandinista Youth did not have the organization they later developed, with groups in every part of the country. They were just beginning, but they had energy. This is how the first army of volunteers was raised to carry out the census. We recruited three hundred young people and held a four-day retreat in what had been the tyrant Somoza’s private home in El Retiro. They slept wherever they could, all over the house or in the yard and gardens, and they

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ate whatever they could get. In spite of the difficulties and inconveniences, they received all of the training they needed to understand and use the census instruments. In December 1979, they headed out to do the census. Six years ago, before an interview, the journalist Jorge Katin said, “I worked with you, Father.” I thought he was referring to the literacy crusade, but he was one of the census volunteers. “I was 17 years old, in my fifth year of high school at the Moravian High School in Bluefields. After the four-day training in Managua, the Sandinista Youth sent me with others to census in Bocana de Paiwas. When we arrived, the peasants told us, ‘It is going to take you months to gather the information you need. There are a lot of small, dispersed communities here; with this small group, it will be impossible.’ I wasn’t discouraged. Instead . . . I went with another volunteer . . . to the Cristobal Colon High School of Bluefields, in the city of Boaco. There we . . . met with all the students, classroom by classroom, and explained our problem and the urgent need to carry out the census. We also told them that we did not have a cent—that we would eat whatever the peasants gave us and sleep wherever we could. We recruited 70 volunteers, men and women, and returned to Bocana de Paiwas. We 79 volunteers went everywhere, to the most remote communities . . . In a week we finished the census; we thanked the 70 volunteers from Boaco, and I returned to Bluefields, to give the Sandinista Youth all the information that they asked for.” I did not have the chance to hear the wonderful details of countless stories such as this, happening every day during the crusade. What I do know is that the young people completed the census, which we were told was impossible, and that it was of very high technical quality, according to the UNESCO official who was advising us. At the same time, the counterrevolutionaries (contras) began threatening the young people of Nicaragua to intimidate them and keep them from going to the mountains to do the literacy work. They were very clear: they talked about killing the brigadistas, about gouging out their eyes with the same pencils used for their classes. One [opposition] politician from the Nicaraguan Democratic Movement said during a public speech given in Managua that the crusade was merely to deceive the peasants and therefore that the crusade was a criminal act. All of the attacks were due to the fact that the crusade was enormously popular and that it would be a great triumph for the Sandinista government. During the preparations for the crusade, we were not sure how far the hatred for the Sandinistas would reach. Therefore, we required every brigadista candidate to have written permission from their parents. The national office’s work was big and complicated, with gigantic problems, but everything would have been useless without the sixty thousand

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boys and girls voluntarily going to live with peasants and teach them. Sixty thousand volunteers was a huge number for Nicaragua [which had a population of about three million at that time], but more important than the number was the quality of the volunteers, their commitment, sacrifices, motivation, determination to stick to making the ideal a reality up to the very end, despite all obstacles and dangers. They had to risk their health, their bodies, even their lives, and indeed, 59 brigadistas gave their lives for their people. The Sandinista Youth organized nightly hikes for physical conditioning; I remember friends of mine talking about how their daughter returned to breakfast from a night hike, bathed, dressed, and went to school. I remember a 13-year-old girl who was working in a Managua neighborhood helping the Sandinista Youth build something, who cut her arms carrying cement blocks; she couldn’t carry the blocks by hand, so she used her arms. I asked her, “Are you helping build a new house?” And she answered, “I am helping build a new country.” Nicaragua’s young people had played such an important role in the fight against the dictatorship, in the mountains, in the city streets and towns, supporting the urban combatants, involved in all aspects of the insurrection; our revolution was a youth uprising. People everywhere called the combatants “the kids” (los muchachos) s . . . It seemed right that young volunteers should be in charge of the national literacy crusade, so we decided that the head of each squadron, brigade, and column would be a young person and that the teachers would be advisors. The teachers accepted this decision with great maturity and played a critical role in the crusade. The official send-off was Sunday, March 23, 1980, from the Plaza de la Revolución . . . I remember that Sunday, watching the trucks and buses roll by filled with young people. Many of them were riding on the roofs of the buses, and the entire plaza was packed, joyfully sending off the young people heading out for the crusade . . . [It was a] day full of happiness, full of joy for those of us who had worked on the long and complex preparations. The brigadistas lived with the peasants, one in each house. They taught the classes in the late afternoon. During the day, they worked with the peasants. The boys went to help in the fields, and the girls usually worked with the women in the numerous household chores: one of the first things they learned was how to make tortillas. The brigadistas and peasants connected deeply. The young people called them “mom” and “dad,” and the peasants called them “daughter” or “son.” The peasants were the best protectors of the brigadistas. The friendships have lasted to this day. One day, in the afternoon, I learned that a brigadista had been raped in the department of Matagalpa, and three squadrons of girls who had been doing literacy work in the area of Matiguás had gathered in that town. They said

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they would not return until they had talked with me. I went in a jeep first to Matagalpa, where the department military chief Javier Carrión was . . . I asked him for information on the military situation in the zone of Matiguás and about the presence of counterrevolutionaries there. By that time, small groups of counterrevolutionaries were beginning to appear. He told me that there were no counterrevolutionaries in that zone, that it was completely peaceful. With that, I headed to Matiguás. I arrived in the middle of the night and found the 90 girls in the small school, sitting on the ground, lit by a Coleman lantern. The leaders spoke with me. “Father, we want to continue with the literacy work; we do not want to abandon our peasants . . . But we want you to guarantee that there will not be another rape.” I told them, “I have just come from Matagalpa, where I talked with the department military chief, and he assured me that there is no counterrevolutionary presence in this zone, that the zone is completely peaceful. But it is impossible for me to guarantee that there will not be another rape. I have no means of keeping this from happening again. I am speaking to you honestly and with all the love that one would have for one’s own daughters. I am deeply saddened by the tragedy. I speak to you with admiration, and I will support any decision you make.” They asked how the literacy crusade was doing in Jinotega, in Managua, in other parts of Nicaragua. They asked me about the agrarian reform, how the revolution was doing in different departments. We talked like this until dawn. Then they told me each squadron would meet and make their decisions. The leaders of two squadrons told me, “Father, we do not want to abandon our peasants, and we are going to return to the houses where we have been living and continue doing literacy work.” I said good-bye to those girls, filled with admiration, really moved, with a deep joy. I hugged each one of them, and they filed out toward the mountains. I said good-bye, aware that I was addressing real heroines. They were not going back to gather together in a school, huddled together for security, but rather they were each going to be in peasant houses, dispersed across a vast area. It was miraculous that after the rape they would decide to return to continue the literacy work. The leader of the third group told me, “We want to continue with the literacy work, but we want you to move us to a town closer to the city of Matagalpa.” So we found a truck, and that very morning we moved them to San Ramon, which was very close to Matagalpa. There they worked until the end of the crusade. One day I learned that in a small community in the department of Jinotega, close to the town of Yali, near the Honduran border, a group of counterrevolutionaries had crossed the border and approached two brigadistas from Managua . . . They told them, “If you do not return home, we will kill you all.” Then, to prove they were serious, they shot one of the girls, Martha

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Lorena Vargas, a teenager from the Altagracia neighborhood of Managua. When I learned this, I was outraged by the crime, killing an innocent girl who was only serving her people out of love . . . Along with my feelings of sadness and rage, I was also afraid that the brigadistas would panic and return to their homes or that their parents would run to the mountains to bring home their young people. I immediately traveled by helicopter to the scene of the crime, and I met the squadron of 29 girls from Managua, who greeted me with these words, “Neither bullets or blows will make us leave the crusade; neither bullets or blows will make us leave the crusade,” and “The nation will not be free until everyone can read and write.” They repeated these words with enthusiasm and strength. The courage of those girls was unheard of . . . They stayed in the community until the end of the crusade. The literacy crusade continued throughout the country as planned. Only one of the brigadistas, the one who was with Martha Lorena when she was killed, asked me to move her closer to Managua, because of the fear of her parents. I moved her to Tipitapa, about 20 kilometers outside of Managua. She continued her work until the end. Martha Lorena was not the only one killed by the counterrevolutionaries, who continued . . . and eventually killed seven brigadistas. No brigades left their posts in the work to conquer illiteracy. Every day I admire young people more. I am convinced that once they have an ideal, nothing and no one stops them, not even death . . . One time I was speaking with some North American journalists, and I told them that Nicaragua was one of the richest countries in the world. They stared at me as if I was crazy. But I repeated that Nicaragua was one of the richest countries in the world because our young people were a treasure and were worth more than all the uranium and oil in the world. In a year and a half, I will be 80. I want to tell you that these things I have shared with you are not thought experiments—they are pure life. What I have put before you is my own life, and I testify to you that in the 60 years that I have been in service to others as a Jesuit and the 42 years since I took the vow to commit my life in service to the poorest of the poor, I have encountered a profound happiness. This has not been a fleeting or occasional thing. It’s been many years! It’s been a permanent experience! I want you to be happy, profoundly and permanently happy, as I have been very happy. The underlying theme of all my words in this message is happiness. It’s the testament that I want to leave with you: my happiness. I wish you great happiness as well.

El Salvador

CHAPTER 4

Reciprocity and the Fabric of Solidarity: Central Americans, Refugees, and Delegations in the 1980s William Westerman

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ervice-learning in Central America in the early twenty-first century has historical antecedents that go back at least as far as the 1980s, antecedents that set a profound political and ethical standard. Studying the format and intentions of such programs in that era of Central American revolutionary unrest—moreover, their work ethic, if it can be called such—points out what may be lacking in today’s service-learning opportunities, even as the social conditions that shaped the earliest variants of this kind of work were specific to the times. Be that as it may, there were and are still paradigmatic choices about how to make such work transformative. These involve distinctions about how such work transcends charitable service, who has agency in program design, how decisions are made, and whether such international exchange can be at all reciprocal. What follows is part reminiscence, but as with every cross-cultural interaction between Central and North Americans in those days, it is girded with social analysis. This chapter is dedicated to the memory of Saul Solórzano, who, like the man we know as Frederick Douglass, took a new name of his own choosing when he escaped from his place of origin—El Salvador—and started to speak out against injustice.1 When I first met Saul in 1984, he was the first Salvadoran (and the first undocumented immigrant) I had yet met to my knowledge. It was my first week of graduate school, and I was attending a meeting of the Central American Solidarity Alliance on the University of

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Pennsylvania campus. After a very long and very detailed history of Central America, presented by one of the graduate students leading the group, they turned the floor over to Saul, who had a broad, serious face with large, stern but gentle features and a demeanor that seemed at once uncomfortable about speaking in public and yet self-assured. He spoke calmly, his stance at times lumbering and off-balance, and in matter-of-fact, heavily accented English gave his testimony of persecution and escape from El Salvador. It would not be too strong for me to describe this as a conversion experience. While sympathetic, I had never really been a serious activist before, had shied away in fact from those college campus activists who seemed at that time to be more bravado than substance. After hearing Saul’s testimony and meeting him, my life would never be the same. Political activism had been symbolic for me until then2, but that night the goals, the means, and the potential for both societal and personal transformation became real, embodied by this awkward speaker who had no interest in glory. I would go on to interview Saul and write about him for Professor Margaret Mills’s class on folklore of immigrants and refugees and Dr. Don Yoder’s class on folk religion, and he would find his way into my dissertation as well, more as a moral and epistemological influence than an actual textual presence. Saul was one of the greatest teachers I ever had, a seminary student who had taken up the “preferential option for the poor” of Latin American liberation theology and had not backed down from that challenge, even when his life was threatened because of that choice. What happened to me that night was happening in the early 1980s all across the country, not only with students, but with union workers and, especially, people in faith communities who became part of a loose network known as the Sanctuary movement. At the time, Sanctuary churches were congregations that had voted to shelter Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees who were facing deportation back to Central America because the U.S. government, which was supporting these Central American governments as allies, did not recognize these immigrants as refugees to be given legal protection or asylum. Saul’s office was in the basement of Tabernacle Church, across the street from my International House dorm in West Philadelphia, and Tabernacle had declared itself a sanctuary for Central American refugees, one of the first in Philadelphia. While there was a Salvadoran refugee couple who were the “official” refugees being protected in that church, the church had also made a basement office available for Saul, who called it the “Office of Information and Solidarity with Salvadoran Refugees.” Part of a network of Salvadoran refugee activist groups who were supporting the nonviolent political movement from the United States, his office was dedicated to raising the awareness of U.S. Americans of the situation in El Salvador and of the U.S. involvement in providing military aid and advisors to the Salvadoran

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government. One of the main techniques for this during the 1980s was the practice of giving public testimony, a strategy that was shared, if not originated, by the Sanctuary movement (Westerman 2006). The Sanctuary movement had started officially in 1982, as churches in Tucson, Arizona, that had been aiding refugees from Central America to cross the border into the Arizona desert and safely move north, declared themselves to be public spaces of sanctuary, following ancient religious tradition, offlimits to governmental authorities (Bau 1985). Each publicly declared Sanctuary church was in turn supported by three or four other congregations, and the initial idea was that in addition to helping transport people, a refugee or refugee family would be housed in the church itself and would speak out in public, giving an address to the congregation, to students, or to other interested groups. This narrative came to be called the testimonio, or “personal testimony,” which was part of a larger tradition of Latin American testimonial literature, both written and oral, in which narrators gave witness to the human rights abuses taking place across most of Latin America. The refugee narrative typically followed a structure that began with the refugee’s work in Central America, his or her persecution—often including the stories of loved ones killed or “disappeared” by the military or death squads—flight, and journey to the United States. These were designed to be conscious narratives that evoked a people-to-people connection to already hardened, even cynical, television news watchers and newspaper readers. President Nixon had resigned only eight years before, and U.S. Americans were more skeptical than ever in the wake of the wars in Southeast Asia. Most of these U.S. citizens had never met, let alone listened to, a refugee before. Churches that declared Sanctuary would do so publicly, as if it were an act of civil disobedience, though many activists, like myself, argued that they were upholding refugee-protection laws that were on the books—most notably the U.S. Refugee Act of 1980, signed by President Carter—but that were being flouted by the Reagan administration’s eagerness to deny protection to refugees fleeing “friendly” governments. Still, whether the government would consider this legal or not, participants prepared themselves with the understanding this might be considered civil disobedience. And, in fact, there were arrests and trials in Texas and Arizona, of people providing humanitarian assistance to refugees. Bound up then with this reliance on narrative was the notion of hospitality, that North Americans would welcome “the stranger in our midst,” and in the case of the Judeo-Christian tradition, would follow the verses in Leviticus and the Gospel that talked of welcoming the stranger (notably Leviticus 19:33–34 and Matthew 25:35–45). Existing at the same time as delegations and work brigades to revolutionary Nicaragua, Sanctuary was a public forum through which U.S. Americans and Central Americans could

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meet face-to-face and unmediated, so that people were able to have conversations and meet those of different countries and social classes often for the first time. And these were revolutionary times. The revolution in Nicaragua had just overthrown the Somoza dictatorship in 1979 and was handily reelected in 1984, and both El Salvador and Guatemala were involved in revolutionary insurgencies. Thus the question of “help” or “aid” or “service” took on a somewhat different meaning in that historical context. Part of this arose from the fact of the agency of the Central Americans themselves. In their own countries, they were directing their own revolutions, whether armed insurgencies or nonviolent popular movements, and were attempting to unyoke themselves from U.S. domination and colonialism. This agency is a key factor here because the delegations from the United States that traveled to Nicaragua, and later to El Salvador and Guatemala, were invited by groups with often specific agendas and work plans. Medical delegations, of U.S. Americans and other internationals, were among the most important over the years, and there were other thematic delegations offering support, such as delegations of labor union activists, clergy and church officials, and others. Many in the Sanctuary movement, at the urging of the Central American refugees, traveled to El Salvador and Guatemala on delegations to see the social conditions there firsthand. The invitation came from the Central Americans themselves and the needs specified by them, both material and technical. While some might dismiss this as what might be, at its worst, a form of “revolutionary tourism,” especially among those without special skills or training, it can also be observed that this was the first groundswell of what is today less pejoratively known as “pro-poor tourism” (Hall 2007). Jacques Derrida (2000) has noted that hospitality is a marker of sovereignty; one can’t extend hospitality to another without having status or agency in one’s own domain. The point is that the direction was given from the point of view of those being visited in Central America, subjects of historical action rather than the objects of the tourists’ gaze. But actually this was more deeply reflective of a partnership, a vision of reciprocal hospitality as a form of solidarity. There was less top-down control of an agenda than the understanding that solutions in the form of a negotiated settlement to the wars would only come with Central and North Americans working and strategizing together. There could be tensions—significant social transformation of this kind can never be smooth—but the greatest successes came when Central and North Americans learned to synthesize actions that built on the best traditions of hospitality, including protecting refugees and giving sanctuary, and welcoming ordinary people, not just journalists, from other countries to come and bear witness to injustice and, by being the eyes and ears of the world, to prevent further invisible massacres such as El Mozote.

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“Prophetic witness is,” according to Jim Corbett, one of the unofficial philosophical leaders of the Sanctuary movement in Tucson, “the community’s only nonviolent way to hold the state accountable” (1985, 196). Furthermore, the rise of liberation theology, growing out of the Second Vatican Council but expanding to question the material causes of poverty and social inequality, with its stated “preferential option for the poor,” provoked many on the Roman Catholic Left (along with some progressive Protestant denominations) to critique the nature of charity itself.3 They questioned whether the aim of Jesus’s lessons was a charity toward the poor that was palliative or a more direct engagement in which, through the Gospel teachings, a more just and equitable society could be created in which the poor would be unlocked from structures that perpetuated the economic injustices against them. Though liberation theology was suppressed by the Catholic Church, often under the leadership of then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now retired Pope Benedict XVI), and though the Central American revolutions peaked without clear victories by one side or the other, the questions about charity versus structural change remain, even as they are less often articulated today. They have taken root in the World Social Forum and anti-globalization movement, among other places, but do not have the same urgency they did in the 1980s (at least not among the middle class), when there were wars—and in the case of Guatemala, a genocide—taking place. Since we do not now, perhaps, live in revolutionary times, then the partnerships and idea of “service” arise in a different historical context. The political connotations of “activism,” especially at U.S. universities, have shifted for a variety of reasons, including major structural and topical changes in U.S. higher education. It is possible that “civic engagement” itself is a paradigm that arose as a euphemistic alternative to “activism,” steering movements to better society back from a more critical social justice analysis toward a more palliative form of “service.” Yet in higher education, phrases such as “social justice” and “activist” are becoming more common than they were even five years ago, and not just in the context of Catholic institutions. This is not to say that service or civic engagement programs do not question inequality and injustice, encourage critical thinking, and inspire future action. Even within the last year or two, the vocabulary is shifting. No doubt new paradigms for study, including community-based learning initiatives and participatory action research, have been having an impact on critical programmatic decision making. But I would suggest that in the institutionalization of delegations, and the relative absence of revolutionary movements—even nonviolent ones, such as the left-leaning elected governments in much of South America—the demandd for social change was softened to a push toward social justice. A period that favored collective action, like the 1930s, eased into one

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that promoted individual transformation. That may simply be the difference between what is possible in revolutionary times versus normalcy in the neoliberal world order, or it may represent a historical ebb and flow between the collective and individual foci of social change. Or, one could argue, it may signal the weakening of a movement for social change when the historical moment can no longer be sustained because of internal or external factors. The Sanctuary movement drew on traditions of hospitality and specifically so within a faith-based framework. While Sanctuary congregations did form alliances with one another, they also concentrated on redefining liturgy in concert with Latin American forms of liberation theology (Westerman 2002; Shaull 1987) and, to a lesser extent, developed their own material and symbolic culture. Active congregations also formed alliances with other groups within what was more generally known as the Central America Solidarity movement, against U.S. intervention in Central America and for selfdetermination, in ways that explicitly referenced the antiwar movement of the 1960s and 1970s while anticipating and even framing a nascent immigrants’ rights movement that was decades away. While the concept of solidarity with the poor drew explicitly on liberation theology, there was a secular side to this too in the literacy work and campaigns of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire ([1970] 2000), who wrote in Pedagogy of the Oppressedd in 1968 about solidarity as well as education as a method to raise a consciousness of injustice and inequity that he called “conscientization.” This consisted not only of raising that awareness among the poor and oppressed as an act of political organizing, but among the wealthy and privileged also, enabling them to become liberated from being oppressors. Since literacy campaigns, as most notably demonstrated in Cuba and Nicaragua, could utilize not only poor volunteers but also educated volunteers from the wealthier classes, understanding that dynamic and conscienticizing both oppressor class and oppressed class is a necessary part of sustaining nonviolent social change, indeed nonviolent revolution. Sanctuary and the narratives of this movement then were instruments of conscientization while at the same time building solidarity between those fleeing persecution and those whose tax dollars were being misused to fund that persecution. There were always connections being made, in this case, and the discussions that took place in congregations about whether or not to become public Sanctuaries, private discussions with refugees after testimonies and services, conversations in schools and union halls all grew out of this narrative presentation of the current situation. Sanctuary and refugee narratives could not then be one-off discussions. Rather they were always envisioned by the refugees as organizing tools and first steps toward deeper relationships. They were paragraphs in a much longer historical narrative, in fact. Some in the audience might have only one or two

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exposures to the issue. But a deeper goal was a long-range transformation or conversion of a people. Sometimes these conversions were quite explicitly— especially within Sanctuary—religious in nature. Always they generated a sense of collaboration and construction of a group working together. But above all, this was not a temporary issue, the immediacy of the wars notwithstanding. You listened, you met others who were concerned, and you became involved. The Central American refugees themselves, imbued with the same agency as the compañeross they had left behind, formed their own organizations to further their work and continue outreach. Saul Solórzano, mentioned earlier, was part of a refugee-led organization and would later go on (after receiving legal status under the 1986 immigration law) to head a Salvadoran refugee organization in Washington until his untimely accidental death from a fall in 2011. Other refugees who were part of that organizing have gone on to prominence in AIDS advocacy and the larger immigrants’ rights movement. Some of the refugees who were actually in Sanctuary chafed at what quickly became an outgrown paternalism and maternalism on the part of the churches that sponsored them, especially because many were there not just to be protected and to hide but to be protected in order to speak out and denounce the injustice that forced them to leave home in the first place. Developing a North American consciousness of the repression and struggle in Central America was a key concern, and a cornerstone of this was introducing North Americans to Central American religion, culture, and social conditions (or “social realities” as they would be called, posing an implicit challenge, to the intellectual postmodernism that was dominant among the academic Left at the time). The Solidarity movement informed North Americans about Central American history and developed its own iconography, including the important figure of assassinated archbishop Oscar Romero. Supporting the popular movements in El Salvador and Guatemala was a central objective of the refugees and the movement in the United States; this included the raising of material aid—which is to say, for the most part, money, but also medicines, school supplies, tools, and so on. We would have fundraisers, often at the request from the Central Americans themselves, but usually for specific projects for which other funding was simply not available. Again, the agency of who was deciding what aid was needed and in what form came from the Central Americans themselves, so that the issues of dialogue and listening had a primacy that they may not in fact hold 30 years later, except among some organizations that have made that approach part of their practice. Sanctuary itself continued through the 1980s, but during the years 1986– 87, the focus of more active Central American refugees shifted away from

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their own protection and their presence in the United States as a way of raising the issues of U.S. government support for the regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala that abused human rights, and toward the plight of the hundreds of thousands of refugees who had been driven off their land, and out of their country, by counterinsurgency tactics that incorporated bombing, death squads, and scorched-earth campaigns. By the second half of the decade, the Salvadoran refugee organizations were beginning to work with their supporters, including very prominent Sanctuary congregations, to suggest that the focus needed to shift from protecting refugees in this country, who were nominally safe and who consumed greater resources, to protecting refugees and internally displaced people within El Salvador, whose status was much more precarious due to the bombing and counterinsurgency of the Salvadoran military. They began to organize support for these refugees and those who wanted to return to their villages in rebel-controlled or conflictive areas, where they had been driven off their land in attempts to flush out support for the FMLN guerrillas. The support manifested itself in the form of “accompaniment,” traveling alongside those who had repopulated their villages, and those refugees making the perilous journey back from refugee camps such as Mesa Grande in Honduras. And so, the hospitality turned pivotally, with U.S. Americans, often from Sanctuary congregations but also labor unions, student groups, and other allies in the Solidarity movement, flying to Central America in long- and short-term delegations to repopulated communities and refugee camps. What they—and actually I can say, we—found, when they (we) got there, was the war itself and its aftermath: bombed-out buildings, including schools and churches that were bombed after the refugees moved back from displacement. We found recently returned refugees living in tents while they built more permanent housing; in some cases we found communities with original buildings still standing, though perhaps damaged, or having been commandeered by the military during its occupations and passing patrols searching out the guerrillas, such as the school building in San José las Flores, Chalatenango department. While there, during Christmas 1987, we heard the bombing of a nearby village and light-machine-gun fire in the surrounding mountains, and at one point we were taken to military district headquarters when we were stopped at a checkpoint—not typical features of service-learning trips or pro-poor tourism. Residents of these communities led us on tours of their villages with descriptions of their lifestyle and future plans to rebuild, including graveyards where victims of aerial bombardment were buried. At meetings with the residents, along with hearing specific stories of continued military and government persecution, we would be told specifically what they hoped to achieve and what they needed in terms of material support to achieve that. Because they were living for the

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most part outside of state-controlled areas, and more to the point, because the government considered them to be guerrilla-sympathizers, they were not eligible for government aid and depended upon the support of international solidarity groups (not just groups from the United States). The church was also involved in the repopulation movement, including the Salvadoran Jesuits at the Universidad Centroamericana, and indeed one of the two who survived the massacre of November 1989, Jon de Cortina, only survived because he was staying in one of the repopulated villages with the refugees, where he heard erroneous reports of his own death on the radio. These delegations were the precursors to today’s Central American servicelearning trips, and it would be significant to know what percent of those who now lead such trips first went to Central America on a delegation to post-revolutionary Nicaragua or repopulated El Salvador. This was a significant strategic advance over the antiwar movement in Vietnam, as literally thousands of U.S. Americans, often from very comfortable middle- and upper-class backgrounds, traveled into the war zones. In one Sanctuary congregation, Central Baptist Church in the affluent community of Wayne, Pennsylvania, on the Philadelphia Main Line, at least 45 congregants visited El Salvador during the war. Delegates never went empty-handed, bringing school and medical supplies, clothing, even musical instruments, and, since it was impossible to send funds in a way that was safe and secure, cash. Our group in Philadelphia was specifically called on to raise funds to build a school building in San José las Flores, for which we held a walk-a-thon fundraiser, sold T-shirts, and later raised money from individuals and church denominations, eventually raising over $105,000 in direct aid. This was replicated all across the country and led to the development of the Sister City campaign. A central feature of these delegations, no matter how short-term, was that there was an explicit understanding that the work of those who returned to the United States was going to continue. The voyage itself, however brief, was the precursor to a longer period of action back home, not a substitute for it. We pledged to speak out and to contact our legislators, and in fact in Philadelphia for more than one year, Solidarity activists held a weekly protest on the sidewalk in front of Senator Arlen Specter’s Philadelphia house, demanding a meeting with him at any time and place of his choosing to discuss his support for military aid to El Salvador. We committed to raise money, literally signing a pledge that we would personally, one way or another, be responsible for one thousand dollars in donations to support repopulation. And we, not unlike the refugees who had come through Sanctuary, would speak out in churches and other venues, offering our slideshows of life in war-torn El Salvador. We went armed with cameras, not to record souvenir snapshots but to provide visual documentation of the war, U.S. tax dollars at

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work, and the condition of the peasants trying to survive amid the counterinsurgency. The goal was to come back not just changed, and not only having served, but to organize, a key revolutionary component that I fear has been lost (or discarded) in these postrevolutionary times. This was not, then, just what might now be called pro-poor tourism or service/voluntary tourism. It had a distinct organizing focus as a component of the overall experience, and a reintegration through commitment, even as delegates came back more alienated from their native country than before. The follow-up involved an explicit call to speak out, tell stories, and move others to action. It remains to be debated among those in higher education where that call to action (and opportunities for doing so) is in the early twenty-first century, or whether the call is unanswered. Those delegations inevitably led people to ask about root causes, beginning with why the refugees had come from Central America in the first place, but also about U.S. economic policy, colonialism, human rights, and so on. For many North Americans, it was a lesson in learning to listen. Much remains to be said about hospitality, but the important concept at this point of the paper is that it was U.S. Americans welcoming the refugees and the subsequent hospitality that opened the channels for narrative and dialogue. The reciprocally situated hospitality, starting in Nicaragua and moving to the other two countries later, also opened the door to bearing witness. Service-learning trips to Central America build on that tradition, but in the current context of the neoliberal world order, even under FMLN- and Sandinista-elected governments, key components of the relationship have become harder to maintain (such as deep dialogue around future response) or are simply nonexistent (such as specifically direct action upon return toward ending U.S. military involvement, the contra war, and funding for bombing and counterinsurgency). Hospitality was a kind of channel toward organizing. It was more, of course, including at its base, decent human kindness (never to be underestimated!). But hospitality was both an end and a means toward something greater, toward international solidarity and toward a process that called on those in the United States to become activists for peace and justice, even—perhaps especially—if they had never been so before. It is essential in considering service-learning to look at its own philosophical roots, which is to say to contextualizee the work not only in terms of Catholic and Quaker social justice teaching, but also in the recent historical precedents that have established the way it has and could come to develop. It also means thinking about the different—but, as liberation theology teaches us, perhaps complementary?—nature of pastoral service and revolutionary organizing for social change. The first part of Freire’s conscientization may be going on in the transformative travel of service-learning, since for many

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participants such travel is new and no doubt eye-opening. But there was a question that was central to our experience in the 1980s that may, in the structure of service-learning, unfortunately no longer be central: what are the avenues for students to engage in social change when they return? Yes, Sanctuary and its ethic of protection, and the heroic struggles of the returning refugees to rebuild their lives, left themselves open to a kind of romanticization, but that romanticization has its purposes. At some point, the appeal to hope (and faith in a God of hope, if you will) has to transcend the discouraging reality of daily defeats and an academic liturgy of impossibility. The perception, by some, of the noble and worthy refugee of the 1980s was in conflict with the “illegal immigrant,” as the Reagan administration had framed them. The refugee experience does not make saints out of anyone, although the opportunity to build movements for just social change and to reach across borders to build alliances calls forth qualities in ordinary people that can yield extraordinary results. Learning the lessons and method of solidarity—indeed, Saul’s humble method of reframing and recasting North-South power dynamics—had long-term implications for me personally, in unexpected ways. One of these examples comes from my recent teaching. For five years I taught a writing seminar at Princeton, entitled “Refugees, Immigrants, and Social Justice,” and every semester took all my students on a class trip to the Elizabeth, New Jersey, immigration detention center, where each student was paired with an asylum-seeking detainee. I did not expect them to come back and become activists—in some ways the course and program structure precluded my kind of deeper involvement—and of those many students who spoke about returning for additional visits only one ever did (though some corresponded). None could ever get a group together to do group visits, even though the university provided free vans and gas to any student group wanting to go (as they had for my trip, the only course at the university that was permitted to use such vans for its class trip, I might point out). But, as a result of studying immigration and interviewing immigrants as a requirement of my course, my students, together with those of sociologist Patricia Fernandez-Kelly, got together and formed the Princeton DREAM Team, to promote and lobby for passage of the DREAM Act, enabling undocumented children who study in college or join the military to have a path to citizenship. This is what I am proudest of in my teaching, and three years later, even after I have left the university, the new generation of students in the group just organized a fundraiser to create two-thousand-dollar scholarships for up to four New Jersey high school students to attend colleges. And they, the generation that came after I ceased teaching there, have taken it upon themselves to organize a group of students to visit the detention centers after all. So organizing as

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a result of delegations, trips, and listening, is still possible—but it must be facilitated as an actual opportunity. Second, it was through the teaching of Saul and the other refugees, and my own visit to El Salvador, that I was led to read the work of the Salvadoran Jesuits, who wrote critiques of the university and what universities can be. They did not talk about “service” in the same terms that we do. They spoke, especially Ignacio Ellacuría (1991), about the role of the university and the responsibility of the university to respond to human and social need, to apply knowledge to solving human and social problems. They fundamentally reframed the mission of the university beyond short-term service into a revolution of both mission and epistemology. Their concept of the university was fundamentally different. Service and good work—good intellectual work—was front and center in pedagogy and in research. The question is not just going out to serve or to build the houses alongside the poor, but to provide analysis and know-how to the situation of the poor that educated people can offer; to solve problems in part by listening to the poor and hearing about inequity and injustice firsthand; to teach and make popular education and adult education possible and accessible; to hear and understand what human problems need to be addressed; to plan; to organize; to engage in creative collaborations that address problems but also bring beauty and free expression. And then, cyclically, to learn from that experience of working with the poor, to self-adjust from what one has learned, and then to put that new knowledge back into teaching and practice. The critique I offer of service, and of short trips even to detention centers, is not of the service itself, but of the contextual university and academic structure that continues to marginalize and literally ghettoize social change. This critique begins, as always, with listening and seeing, with face-to-face encounter, and with hospitality that is reciprocal and deep. But this critique can’t end there either; it must continue with organizing and with teaching students not only aboutt injustice, but about the very real academic question of strategies to end it. What the experience of delegations and sanctuary showed, then, were three principles that can serve as a backbone of service-learning in the future. The first is reciprocity: whenever possible, there are ways that both the student and the host community can benefit from the experience, and there is a need to look for ways that both can benefit more deeply. Second, decision making is to become a process that veers from the Northern tendency to be top-down and technocratic. How do decisions emerge from dialogue among equal collaborators? How can U.S. students know how and when to be quiet and listen? And perhaps the most important lesson from this period is that the larger project of mutual work only begins with the intensive

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service experience. What one can accomplish in one week is just the beginning. The real work begins at the end. The expectation is that not only does service-learning become a platform for continued education and dissemination about the structural realities of such projects and social conditions, but also that the work is lifelong. Notes 1. I debated whether or not to use his “real” name or, in keeping with ethnographic tradition, to maintain the alias I had given him in my dissertation and other articles and writings in which he appears. The issue of naming is a significant one here, especially because “Saul” was a name of his own choosing, and because once he qualified for the amnesty of 1986, it became his legal name. I don’t mention here that he also had a playful side, and after I knew him for years, one night in my car he turned to me and blurted out, “By the way, my real name is _____” and laughed. I shouted “Noooo! I don’t want to know!” When does a name become “real” anyway? I decided it was fine to use the name we all knew him by as a way of paying tribute, because he used it publicly in his professional work, and because ultimately he could have been proud of all that was associated with that name—that is, if pride were ever an emotion he was familiar with. 2. Although to be fully honest, my undergraduate senior thesis experience on the Ghost Dance and the Wounded Knee massacre was a consciousness-raising experience from which there was no turning back. 3. I would also say that understandings and critiques of charity were already different in Quaker and Jewish traditions, two of the largest constituents in the Sanctuary movement in terms of numbers of congregations, although not the most visible.

CHAPTER 5

Untellable Stories and the Limits of Solidarity in a Sister-Community Relationship1 Ellen Moodie

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rcadia was the first person members of Sacred Heart Church2 met in 1990 when they traveled from downstate Illinois to El Salvador to set up a sister-community relationship, or hermanamiento. This was their “next step” after their involvement in the Sanctuary movement (see Westerman, this volume). They weren’t sure what exactly they could do, though, until Arcadia, a stout former guerrilla combatant and devout Catholic, reassured them: “All we want,” she told them, “is for you to walk with us, listen to us, and tell our stories.” For the next two decades, they tried to do just that, especially the Roman Catholic church’s priest, Father Dan, in his weekly homilies. The long-term links between these two sites, east-central Illinois in the United States and northern Morazán in El Salvador, in many ways exemplify best practices for cross-class, volunteer endeavors. Every year, often twice a year, delegations from the church visited La Cruz. They brought doctors and medicine. They funded a nutrition program and paid for scholarships for the most promising students to go to high school in the nearest city. Then in 2011 Arcadia and her son Julio were murdered. The deaths were not the first that parishioners had heard about. The people of La Cruz have suffered many hardships in the years since the war ended in 1992. In his Sunday sermons, Father Dan had lamented global inequalities as manifested in childhood mortality, alcoholism, heart attacks, and accidents, suffered by Salvadorans whom church members often knew by name. But these killings evaded the deep narratives of fellowship the two communities shared, constituting an untellable story within the context of the

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hermanamiento. The Sacred Heart–La Cruz experience may help us to understand both the hopeful possibilities of such encounters and also the limits. When I began teaching classes on Central America and its politics and history more than a decade ago, I assumed few students would feel as connected to the region as my college generation had in the 1980s. But I soon realized many students didd know the isthmus, in a manner of speaking; a number of them had direct experience with Central America. Today many of them, even at my secular state university, first encounter much of the world (or rather, confront “living,” as opposed to virtual versions of particular patches of earth) through short-term mission or service trips (see this volume’s introduction). I knew about these groups; for years I had been running into them in El Salvador’s Comalapa International Airport. In their (often) shocking pale or pinkish flesh, their matching T-shirts, and their simple masss (both the fact of their physical size—so much taller and broader than the average Salvadoran—and the fact that they usually moved in crowds), the groups were to me Susan Harding’s “repugnant cultural other” (1991). A few years ago, I decided to confront my discomfort. My unease about many international volunteer travelers is undoubtedly complicated by my fraught relationship with the religion of my upbringing and by my later training as an anthropologist. I was raised in the mild liberalism of a midwestern Presbyterian church, where my mother was the organist. By the time I was in my twenties, I had embraced a perhaps crude leftism that condemned the social and economic inequality I believed most conventional creeds implicitly sanctioned. I first traveled to El Salvador in March of 1993 with a secular group that had formed a sister-community relationship between a repopulated community of refugees in Chalatenango and activists in urban New Jersey. The most exciting part of the trip was the annual procession commemorating the assassination of Archbishop Óscar Arnulfo Romero from the chapel where he was killed to the cathedral where his tomb lay. I was thrilled to be surrounded by “real” revolutionaries and people I imagined as suffering peasants. I began graduate school in anthropology soon after. I learned the scandalous history of the discipline: in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, anthropologists arrived in “exotic” sites where the only other foreigners were missionaries, colonial authorities, mercenaries, or traders. Anthropologists would try to distinguish themselves from these types, often through their “scientific” approaches to what they described as cross-cultural interaction. By the time I finished a year of graduate study and returned to El Salvador, I too distanced myself from religious or solidarity travelers, especially those who embraced the “good” natives—undoubtedly with the same

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awe I had professed the previous year. Since then I have become committed to the ethnographic principle that privileges knowing through experience. I didn’t want to dismiss facilely the value of being there, of human connection and understanding emerging from encounters with difference. So I sought to research interactions among U.S. Americans and Salvadorans in short-term mission or service visits. I quickly found two religious communities in my east-central Illinois town with links to El Salvador, an Assemblies of God church and a Roman Catholic parish. Sacred Heart has been connected to five hamlets in the canton (or township) of La Cruz, in the rural northeastern department of Morazán, for more than 20 years. After talking to Father Dan, in his mid-70s, and Liz, 48, the church organist, in 2009, I proposed to join a delegation the next year. I have accompanied the Sacred Heart group twice. All participants consented to my presence, aware that I was an anthropologist. I am no longer quite the idealistic activist I was in my twenties, but I remain committed to the emancipatory possibilities of human connection. I told the Sacred Heart group that I was interested in the narratives that emerged among the people of diverse backgrounds who meet on such trips. I explained that I was asking if it was possible to move beyond the predictable scripts and self-other binaries that define so much travel. How much, I wondered, could be shared in the relationship between international volunteers and the people they encounter in service and mission trips? Can mutual understandings emerge through the stories people share? What are the limits of solidarity? These questions are not new. But they gained a particular urgency for me—and even more, for the people I have met in Sacred Heart delegations— when Arcadia and her son Julio were slain. What happened seemed to halt any predictable or familiar narrative of interaction between well-meaning, committed Northerners and struggling peasants of the global South. Perhaps the Sacred Heart–La Cruz hermanamiento cannot be considered representative. As Manuel, the El Salvador nongovernmental organization (NGO) organizer who accompanied the Sacred Heart delegation in July 2010, told me on the first night in La Cruz as we set up our hammocks after a two-hour walk between settlements: “This group is special. They have been coming back, year after year. The people love Father Dan. When he returned this May [after a two-year lapse; he had been ill], he wept, they wept, everyone wept. I almost cried. It was so moving. It is something unusual, people returning this way. We have other groups that have been coming for a while, but none like this.”3 I too almost cried during this first trip, when eight of us arrived after a five-hour drive from San Salvador. We disembarked from the minivan to

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be greeted by about 60 community members. Some had walked four hours through the mountains to get there. Someone read a small speech. They performed several songs, accompanied by a guitar. Most of the women wore plain cotton knee-length skirts, their dusty feet in thin rubber or plastic sandals. Most of the men wore broad hats or baseball caps and jeans with work boots. Many of them seemed both shy and excited, everyone smiling, looking at each other, some reaching out to Manuel, as well as to Liz and Linda, a nurse, both of whom had traveled to La Cruz many times before. Tears filled my eyes. I was surprised by my own sentimentality. As I joined the crowd to walk to the first hamlet, I was shocked to realize that I too had fallen into the very predicable traveler’s narrative from which, as an anthropologist, I had exempted myself (and critiqued in others). This welcoming scene would be repeated on a smaller scale throughout the week, as the delegation arrived to set up the clinic in each of the five settlements. Schoolchildren would hold up signs of welcome; villagers would crowd around. It felt like more than just curiosity or courtesy. As I scribbled in my notebook in the few minutes I had after translating all day, “There is something going on here.” Sacred Heart–La Cruz, I decided, might well offer a glimpse of one possible, hopeful, way of interacting between U.S. American service travelers and rural Central Americans. It represents a sustained effort at contact and efforts to understand between groups of people from radically different backgrounds. These possibilities inevitably shift with time, with changing conditions, with chance events—such as the murder of a community leader. I met Arcadia during that 2010 delegation. She came to greet us that first day and then reemerged when we arrived at her hamlet several days later. A stout, muscular, dark-skinned woman with a sly smile, she was 44 years old when she died less than a year later. She had spent much of the 1980s as a guerrilla, part of a faction of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (the FMLN). La Cruz and most surrounding communities are almost entirely made up of former guerrilla combatants and their social base. Northern Morazán, among the poorest regions in El Salvador, was also the site of some of the fiercest battles during the years of conflict (1980–1992). The infamous massacre at El Mozote (1981), in which a U.S.-trained military battalion slaughtered a thousand peasants, is only a few miles from La Cruz (Binford 1996). The first Sacred Heart parish delegation visited La Cruz in 1992, eight months after the FMLN and the Salvadoran government signed peace accords brokered by the United Nations. In 1994 they began to offer annual medical clinics, usually in July. Arcadia was always the first to greet them.

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She remained active in the remnants of a progressive church, played a key role in an agricultural cooperative, and worked as a health promoter supported by a feminist NGO—a job that demanded she walk for hours across the mountains, visiting new and expectant mothers and feeble grandparents. A good number of her guerrilla compañeross (comrades) in this former insurgent stronghold had turned their efforts inward, toward individual pursuits, trying to survive as best they could. Indeed Arcadia and her husband, Chepe, also strived toward such self-improvement. Chepe had earned a teaching degree; he taught elementary school. He also served as president of the agricultural cooperative. With Arcadia’s salary as a health promoter, they had invested in land on a steep hill high above the neighborhood of former combatants (they, and many others, had received a plot as part of a land-transfer agreement that the FMLN had negotiated for them), setting up a second home and small farm. Their successes are exceptional. Leigh Binford (2010) has documented the postwar political economy in the region. In recent work he has described how postwar reintegration of the region into the capitalist market economy has stymied efforts by former insurgents and their supporters to establish agricultural collectives and organize production around local needs. Further, he argues, the neoliberal policies that right-wing postwar governments pursued did not favor the rural poor. The FMLN’s 2009 presidential victory has changed little for these underserved groups. La Cruz is recognized as among the poorest parts of a poor region of the country. Most people work small, rocky plots of land, eking out a minimal living. Pharmacies, health clinics, markets, and secondary schools are long bus rides away. Few see possibilities for bettering their situation. According to one of the schoolteachers: “It’s rare for people to try to improve themselves. They barely make it to ninth grade. I try to tell them to study more, but they don’t want to. [Arcadia] and her family were different.”4 While I translated in the medical clinics, I heard, over and over, in intimate, intensely embodied detail, local stories of physical suffering. People’s symptoms were inscribed on bodies that worked too hard, too long, with so little sustenance. Some of them were clearly hungry. Arcadia’s final agony went beyond the ordinary, cruddy deprivation of marginalized peasants in El Salvador. She died on a Saturday evening after returning from the region’s main town. She had recently begun an intensive, weekend, adult education program there. Like most people her age in the area, especially women, Arcadia had not advanced beyond primary school. That night, as she and her 21-year-old daughter Fátima walked up the hill to their house, they saw four men. One was torturing 19-year-old Julio, his hands and feet tied up under a nearby tree. Others were raping the youngest

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daughter, age 13. According to her goddaughter Dina, Arcadia charged right up to them and demanded, “What do you want? We have what we have because we workk for it. You don’t work; you steal! I know who you are!” They turned and shot her.5 Before dying, on the hour-long ride to the hospital in a police car, Arcadia named her killers: people from the community, people she had known all their lives—whose families went to the same religious services and attended health clinics Arcadia helped organize. In May, two months later, two young men were arrested. Another reportedly committed suicide, and another fled. What I heard, over and over, from Arcadia’s friends, acquaintances, and many others, was that it was all about envy (envidia).6 “There was so much hate,” Arcadia’s cousin Tomasina told me. “Everyone criticized her. She helped her husband, her daughter, get ahead. People didn’t like that they had more land and a nice house.”7 The relationship between Sacred Heart and La Cruz has changed over more than two decades, Father Dan tells me, moving from “crisis” mode, in which Illinoisans accompanied refugees and displaced persons to return home, to ongoing support for struggling peasants. The church has been involved with a number of initiatives, including a nutrition program, a hammock project, a cable bridge crossing the Torola River, a church roof, a chicken cooperative, a sewing cooperative, a water project, as well as scholarships for students to continue their studies beyond the ninth grade. Some of these initiatives are doing well. Others have failed. In his years preaching to his Sacred Heart parishioners, Father Dan often spoke of the struggles in La Cruz. In January 2007, for example, he shared the story of María Alejandra.8 She had brought her ailing nine-month-old daughter to a hospital in the capital, using emergency medical funds provided by Sacred Heart. He tells her story: María’s mental health was fragile because her memories of the war continue to terrify her . . . She remembered the bombings and military Jeeps that meant the people had to run and hide in ravines sometimes for weeks at a time. She . . . is permanently and deeply scarred by this experience. In the city with her little girl, María suffered a mental breakdown and had to be placed in a mental institution. Alone and missing her daughter, her condition grew worse. When her daughter died, she was told, and she said she wanted to go home . . . María’s suffering has been softened by the tears of the compassionate God that are mixed with her own . . . This God may be elusive to us only because we do not know where to find him . . . Part of the mystery is this: María and her family are the shepherds who can lead us to our humble

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Lord . . . We have gone to the mountains to lend them a helping hand, and they have reached out to help us. We go to encourage them, and they evangelize us.

This story represents many of the themes Father Dan repeated to his congregation. It reminds listeners of the geopolitical as well as spiritual connections between groups: María Alejandra may be suffering, but her pain is not only individual but part of a larger, global tragedy (the war); and, further, she, in her humility, can help the supposedly privileged Northerners. We need each other, and we need God, Father Dan reminds his followers. Father Dan can tell this tale because it becomes redemptive in the end. It might be possible to see that Sacred Heart’s commitment to La Cruz has overcome some of the problems critics point to in relationships between U.S. American short-term missioners and the people they visit. Though not every delegation member can mentally string together Father Dan’s collected homilies to construct a coherent history of the area, by now the communities share a kind of history that is at least sentimentally revived each time they meet. Most church members do not take part in the small delegations; rather, they contribute money, $20,000 to $30,000 a year, and donate materials to the committee that directs the various initiatives. Take Emily, for example, a young medical student. “It [El Salvador] was always a huge part of his church,” she told me. “And, well, my six-year-old self didn’t really pay any attention to his homilies, to be perfectly honest. But there were always pictures around and, like, dolls and things that he would bring back, and beautiful woven things. And . . . as a child it just like really sparked my interest . . . I would see pictures of him crossing through the jungle and meeting people, and . . . it just looked really exciting.”9 Later, working in Chicago medical clinics that served Latin American migrant populations, she remembered Father Dan’s stories and joined the 2011 delegation. In La Cruz, Father Dan and Sacred Heart have become part of the everyday imaginary of the world as well. Father Dan has baptized babies who are now parents themselves. In the July 2010 delegation, I had long conversations with a 29-year-old farmer, Leopoldo, as he accompanied us between hamlets. He told me he had been watching the Sacred Heart delegations come since he was ten years old. He said that he was always curious about these big, strange white people. He wanted to be near them, even if he didn’t understand what they were saying. “I was so impressed that they came from so far, to see us,” he told me. I had heard the same words from several others. “People from our own country ignore us, but you come every year.”10 Wanting to accompany Salvadorans in their suffering, Father Dan traveled to La Cruz a few months after Arcadia and Julio’s murder. Due to the security

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risks that seemed apparent after that event, Sacred Heart had canceled the medical delegation that had been planned for July 2011. Rumors had circulated about a gang roving in the area. Soldiers began patrolling around La Cruz and were welcomed—a postwar irony, considering the military’s murderous record in this former guerrilla stronghold. A small group of people volunteered to join him, including Shannon, 50, a relatively new Sacred Heart parishioner and an Irish-American historian with flawless Spanish; Emily, 23, the medical student; and two social-justice activists who lived in the local Catholic Workers’ House, John, 48, and Noni, 25. Father Dan reached out to me, already in El Salvador for unrelated research. It was the first visit to El Salvador for all but Father Dan and me. All the delegation members had heard stories about the communities. Still, for Emily and John, the initial feeling was not one of fellowship or communion or solidarity but of awkwardness. John, a tall, gangly, white man, said his first feeling was of being utterly, utterly foreign. He was struck by an unavoidable sense of “us and them,” not what he had imagined from afar. But then at the same time, “I felt almost like there was something genuine and authentic going on with the welcome, but for some reason I didn’t feel . . . worthy of it. You know, I could not, I couldn’t be humble enough to just say, wow, this is very nice and very sweet, and just felt embarrassed and undeserving of that kind of welcome and attention.”11 With time, John shifted into a somewhat more comfortable sense of presence. “I ended up feeling better, and kind of connected, and more meaningful, about three-quarters of the way through. And I think it was when for me—it was getting a sense of the social justice issues, and it was just coming to the understanding that people talk about social justice differently; they respond to it differently from the communities.” Perhaps John had originally imagined something akin to the stories Father Dan had told in his Sacred Heart homilies about the early masses he had performed in La Cruz. As Father Dan explained in one interview with me, pointing to a picture, This—let me explain this image here. I proposed in the first mass I gave [in La Cruz] to the people that they forgive us, the North Americans, for what we had done to them. And they would give me their forgiveness; I would bring it back to the United States with me [to share with the people of Sacred Heart] . . . [I]t was a ritual of expressing my sense of sin, of my community up North, that empire that has been crushing the hopes of people for years. And so I let it be known in each of the settlements, and people came forward and surrounded me and laid their hands in my head, and I knelt on the ground there, and I just let it happen.

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These were all people that had a story of heartbreak, of loss, of people of their families, during the years of the furnace . . . At some point then [in every mass], they pray for the dead. And [I remember in that first mass in 1992] I asked them if they wanted to mention the names of the dead. And there was kind of a long pause. [Then,] around that table, one to the other, they mentioned the names of their martyrs. Many times we, in our gated community up here [in the United States], we imagine we know what’s going on. But until it impacts us to the point of physical collapse, you really haven’t walked with them, to really understand what they’ve gone through.

I did not understand what he meant, at first. “Unless you’re moved to tears, you haven’t listened,” he explained. He was quiet for a moment. “Now these many years later—we’re talking about 20 years—are the storytellers still there? Are people being listened to? Does this generation still know what happened?”12 La Cruz has many storytellers. But fewer people outside their hamlets listen to what they have to say. Their struggle continues to be lethal, but in a slower, less dramatic way than during the war years. The urgency of military massacres and political assassinations—state killing—has given way to the mundaneness of what some might call “letting die”: dying of diarrhea and tuberculosis, of heart attacks and drowning, of typhoid and alcoholism. Father Dan, and the core Sacred Heart members who have participated in delegations or sent money, have worked valiantly over the years to remind U.S. Americans of their complicity in Salvadoran suffering. In Arcadia’s words, they have walked with people in La Cruz, listened to them, and tried to tell their story. Until now. In 2011, the Sacred Heart delegation heard very little of the murders of Arcadia and Julio. In the masses he performs at each hamlet, Father Dan traditionally reads the names of the dead. In July 2011, he paused each time he read Arcadia and Julio’s names. In the place where they had lived and died, Arcadia’s mother-in-law brought up framed photographs of them to sit on the altar. A tiny, skeletally thin woman, she wept when she finally saw Father Dan. They prayed together for a long moment. Many people asked me why the medical clinic had not come to La Cruz this time. At first I was surprised by their question. I had understood from the San Salvador NGO coordinating our trip that members of the community had feared for us and asked us to delay our visit. “Because . . . because of what happened . . . what happened in March,” I replied haltingly, referring to the murders. People’s responses to my explanation shocked me: “That had nothing to do with you. That was personal.” l I couldn’t help but ask them what they meant.13 A former guerrilla combatant long beloved among the delegations told me, “It was something

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between them [the killers] and the son. You don’t have to worry about it.” A kindergarten teacher said it was “a problem between the families—a problem going back to the war.” My friend Leopoldo put it bluntly: “It’s hate. They [Arcadia and Chepe] had a little, a little bit more than others, and [others] didn’t like it.” A few people placed the events in a more political, if vague, frame: another schoolteacher suggested it has something to do with war-era resentments; a third teacher pronounced, “People here suffer a lot of violence, hunger, domestic violence. It’s all the structure.” When I interviewed Emily and John months later in Illinois, they still were not sure what had happened in La Cruz in March 2011. Though the original delegation had been canceled because of the tragedy, neither of them had heard about the murder until after they had arrived in El Salvador. It was as if this story could not be told. To many people in La Cruz, it was private, individual,l outside of the realm of public stories to be listened to and shared between communities. To Father Dan, perhaps it was difficult to conclude the account of Arcadia and Julio in the emancipatory way he had been able to tell the tale of María Alejandra, who lost her nine-month-old daughter. There Father Dan had described God’s tears comforting María. He reminded his Sacred Heart parishioners of how El Salvador’s humble, faithful people could help U.S. Americans remember their spiritual connections. It was undoubtedly painful for Father Dan to discuss the brutal murder of his dear friend, especially as her husband Chepe and her four daughters continue to suffer, living in fear. They fled La Cruz for the crowded city of San Miguel, hours away. It is possible that what happened in March 2011 simply cannot fit into the shape of a mission or service trip, into the prescribed and apparently almost compulsory narrative maps of such travel. In many ways these narratives contain what can happen on mission trips. Witness the way John recalibrated his initial feelings of discomfort at the ebullient greetings La Cruz residents gave the Sacred Heart delegation: “I ended up feeling better, and kind of connected, and more meaningful.” This is not to say that his reframed feelings were not authentic; merely that affect is always structured through social channels (Williams 1978). Father Dan still cannot quite tell Arcadia’s story. In early 2012 he began his annual letter to La Cruz supporters with a familiar, comfortable, perhaps heroic tale. He recalls the first delegation in August 1992, “in the aftermath of the 12-year war that was carried on in these mountains, [when] many of the people were just returned from other places to being anew.” He continues reminiscing. “Meeting them and hearing their stories, being welcomed by them into their homes and their lives has opened the door to us into the real world. Most of the world’s population lives like these campesinos

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[peasants]—in poverty, yet rich in other ways. They have stretched our minds and hearts.” He attempts to relate the present situation. “We are challenged by the report of violence in the settlements . . . [Arcadia], a wise leader and health promoter . . . and her son [Julio] were murdered last March.” He does not— cannot—say more. “The question that was frequently asked of me was, ‘Are you coming back?’ And I answered, ‘Yes.’ I intend to return each year at least for a visit.” I began thinking about what had happened in La Cruz and writing this essay by imagining that an “untellable tale” that did not fit the prescribed progress narrative had blocked the sense of connection and fellowship between people of the Salvadoran mountain community and the east-central Illinois town. I asked, as I started writing, how much can be shared in the relationship between international volunteers and the people they encounter in service and mission trips? What, I wondered, are the limits of solidarity? I may have posed these questions provocatively, but I intended to pursue them sincerely. Of course no one fully understands anyonee else. As I began this research, before Arcadia’s murder, I also hopefully pondered the possibilities for something new and unexpected to emerge, as simple human closeness overflows the constraints of structured itineraries. I am a teacher, after all; I cling to the perhaps naïve idea that a lecture might transform minds. Why would not 20 years of encounters between Sacred Heart and La Cruz produce some hopeful change in our political climate, some recalibrated understanding of how we are all interconnected? What I needed to recognize, what we all need to remember, is that these connections are built in small, often discontinuous sections, piece by piece, moment by moment. They stutter. They lose momentum as some people move on. Sometimes new people pick up again what others have abandoned. They comprise willing individuals, people impelled by faith and passion and politics, by curiosity and courage, and by the availability of money and time—as well as countless other contingencies. One day in 1990, a war-era NGO leader introduced Father Dan and Liz, the church organist, to Arcadia. They clicked. “Tell our stories,” she said, through a translator. For 20 years they continued those meetings, building their relationships slowly, often awkwardly, across a great chasm of knowledge and experience. They persevered. It was extremely difficult to tell the story of Arcadia and Julio. After all, they were murdered not by U.S.-trained soldiers but by neighbors who were also members of the sister community, who had undoubtedly attended mass as children, who likely lined up in the nutrition center and health clinic. But other aspects of the Sacred Heart–La Cruz relationship were changing

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as well. Father Dan, retired more than a year now, no longer gives Sunday homilies at Sacred Heart. The stories have not continued in the same way. The new priest, also in charge of the neighboring parish, has not taken up the hermanamiento, considering it his predecessor’s bailiwick. Church bulletins still occasionally remind congregants to pray for the people of La Cruz and to donate to the different projects. Further, physical disabilities mean that Liz can no longer make the trip to La Cruz. Time passes. Old storytellers step down, in both La Cruz and in Sacred Heart. New ones may step up, but not necessarily to the same place or in the same way. Father Dan hopes to visit La Cruz again soon. He has had to postpone the trip several times. It may be that the Sacred Heart–La Cruz relationship would have slowly cycled out of existence, whether or not Arcadia had been murdered. Still, trips will continue, if not from this Illinois Catholic congregation, if not to La Cruz, then from other places to other villages. Contributions will keep on flowing into medical clinics and school supplies and fellowships. People will continue to meet. Some will feel like crying despite themselves. Some may ease into a sense of connection even as they can’t quite communicate or understand each other. Somethingg will go on. Notes 1. Thank you to Abigail Adams and Katherine Borland for their help in developing and editing this chapter. This material is based upon work in part supported by the University of Illinois Research Board and in part supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. BCS-0962643 from the Cultural Anthropology Program. 2. All names have been changed to protect confidentiality. 3. This quote is a reconstruction from field notes (July 2010). 4. Interview, Morazán, August 2011. 5. Interview, Morazán, July 2011; quotes are reconstructed from field notes. Dina did not say how she knew this, but it appeared to be common knowledge four months after the event. 6. An extensive literature on envy as a kind of leveling mechanism in peasant (or subsistence farming) communities (Redfield 1956) has been criticized as overly functionalist and as not taking into account the integration of peasants into national and international social, political, and economic structures (Roseberry 1988). 7. Interview, Morazán, June 2011. 8. The text of this story comes from a photocopied collection of Father Dan’s homilies distributed in honor of the fiftieth year of his ordination. 9. Interview, Illinois, December 2011. 10. Reconstruction from field notes (July 2010).

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11. Interview, Illinois, December 2011. 12. Interview, Illinois, February 2012. 13. The following quotes are reconstructed from field notes (July 2011). I had not felt comfortable talking about this situation to the members of the delegation during the trip, but did so in Illinois, later.

CHAPTER 6

Who Is a Global Citizen? Manifestations of Theory in Practice Katherine Daly

T

hroughout my adult life I have been an unrepentant voluntourist. I have travelled to Central America to do “development projects” as a volunteer, gone to Havana to complete a study tour, and laid cement floors in the Dominican Republic. Through these experiences I developed new intercultural and language skills, built an “international” CV, and, at some point, I developed critiques of the host-visitor interactions in which I partook. My desire to reflect critically on voluntourism and, in particular, solidarity tours came to a head when I was studying for a master’s degree. My answer? Another trip to Central America but this time to ask communities how they felt about these visits. My career as a voluntourist began in 2001 when I participated in a service-learning experience as an extracurricular activity in my high school. For months we prepared by fundraising, learning basic Spanish, and learning about our destination, the Dominican Republic. We travelled to a rural community called Los Tramojos and worked mixing cement and laying floors in homes. Our physical labor had a negligible impact on the construction project, but the impact that the trip had on me was profound. My entire reality was called into question. I was touched emotionally, spiritually, and intellectually, and I was changed forever. That experience was a clear turning point in my life. I subsequently became involved in many social justice activities and pursued global development studies and critical perspectives in my undergraduate degree. All of my subsequent voluntourist experiences flow from the servicelearning trip that I took in 2001. That trip also led me to become involved in activism at home and abroad and to question solidarity-tourism experiences

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like the one in which I had participated. I see solidarity tours as a growing phenomenon that is problematic but also has potential for real transformative learning. I feel that for all their activist rhetoric these trips need to be properly deconstructed and critically examined in order to begin to make them truly transformative experiences for everyone involved. Through the course of my master’s program in adult education and community development, I found most of the literature and research on the topic focused on people like me. Many people seemed to be asking how people like me are transformed by these experiences, how facilitators elicit these changes, how we can create these changes in all participants, and how we go from sentimental charitable urges to critical global perspectives. These are valid concerns. The first tour that I participated in produced very mixed results among the visitors. Some of us became involved in social justice as a result of the experience while others went back to business as usual at home and showed no obvious desire to change. The literature that I have read since then readily admits that this is the case in every kind of voluntourism. Participants fall somewhere on a spectrum from reinforcing previous negative and, sometimes, racist stereotypes about hosts to indifference to a complete paradigm shift in their lives and a new commitment to social justice (Mündel 2002, 87 and 119; Simpson 2005, 462; Schwartzman 2007, 7). While the effects on visitors are an important aspect of these trips, I have found that researchers have ignored their impact on host communities. In this research I have tried to privilege the impacts that the solidarity tours have on communities, but I have found that the experiences of the visitors are very much interconnected with those of their hosts. Therefore, the research also looks at the facilitation of the visitors’ experience. Soft Global Citizenship By many definitions, I am considered a global citizen thanks to my numerous experiences as a voluntourist. I recognize that poverty and helplessness are a reality in our world, I know that I have the skills and knowledge that would help to solve these problems, and I act on my knowledge to help the helpless out of their situation. These experiences, rooted in my privileged position, give me access to a club that in popular culture represents a sort of hope for a better future. We are the young people who are trying to make a difference. Indeed, the Canadian International Development Agency has an entire program dedicated to producing more global citizens (CIDA 2012). The definition of global citizenship described above is what Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti (2006, 5) calls soft global citizenship. Soft global citizenship draws on the idea that issues of poverty and helplessness are caused by a lack

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of technology or education in the developing world rather than structures that create inequality and oppression. Soft global citizenship instills in the volunteer a feeling of agency to make a difference in the lives of others and through supporting broader social movements to work toward development (6). Andreotti goes on to argue that soft global citizenship reproduces a colonial logic where the privileged have the answers and just need to impart their way of life to the poor. The result is that the global citizens feel responsible for teaching the poor how to live the good life, as defined by “developed world” values, and they impose these values on those they seek to help. She warns that global citizenship can easily become “a new ‘civilising mission’ as a generation takes up the ‘burden’ of saving/educating/civilising the world” (1). I saw this kind of global citizenship at work in my own experiences with solidarity tours. The tours that I studied provided the opportunity for me to examine the negative impacts these attitudes can have on hosting communities. Solidarity Tourism and Global Citizenship In 2008, I worked as a facilitator of solidarity tours with the Associacion para el Desarrollo de El Salvador (APDES).1 During this time I helped organize, accompany, and translate for solidarity tour groups. My reflections as well as those of my Salvadoran colleague, Manuel, who was also a facilitator, inform much of the material presented here. As a bilingual volunteer facilitator, I have privileged access to the internal workings of the visitors’ group. They fight in front of me, include me in contentious debates, and express racist or ethnocentric viewpoints. At the same time, having spent time with Salvadoran communities, I am able to pick up on some of the subtleties of the host community’s reactions to the guests as well. While he does not speak English, Manuel has extensive experience working with visitors and other foreigners and can pick up on many of their nonverbal communications. He also has very close relationships with the members of the host communities, so he is very aware of their reactions. The goal of the solidarity tours that I helped facilitate is to teach participants about the reality of a Salvadoran community in the hope that they will return home and contribute to the struggle of oppressed peoples through financial contributions and volunteer activities. In many ways our goals resembled Andreotti’s concept of critical global citizenship where global citizens examine their role in these systems and then engage in the process of changing the complex social structures that maintain inequality (2007, 5), but in my opinion they do not go far enough. APDES arose from the Comunidades Ecclesiales de Base (CEBs) of the liberation theology movement that started during the Salvadoran civil war.

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Catholic parish communities in the United States and Canada partnered with CEB communities in El Salvador and protested against the violence that communities were experiencing. After the signing of the peace accords in 1992, El Salvador adopted neoliberal policies that have resulted in the privatization of many government services and dollarization of the economy. As leaders in the CEBs realized that the postwar period would mean unemployment for them and the end of their community work, they decided to institutionalize the work of the CEBs into an NGO called APDES (field notes, August 2008). In addition to the CEBs they had worked with during the civil war, APDES cultivated relationships with new communities in the postwar period. High school teachers and church communities from the United States and Canada have initiated relationships with APDES to fulfill an educational mission for visitors and a Christian mission for the poor. Currently, a group leader from the United States, Canada, or Italy facilitates the visitors’ learning and contracts APDES to arrange logistics, provide translation services, and maintain relationships with a host community. A group of between 10 and 20 visitors stays with the host communities for between three and seven days. They meet with community members, visit projects that their group has funded in previous years, and learn about daily life in El Salvador. Host community members plan the visitors’ activities, offer their homes as accommodation, and prepare the visitors’ meals. Visitors spend the rest of their trip visiting significant historical sites and speaking with experts on Salvadoran history, society, economics, and politics. While APDES seeks funding through a variety of international donors, solidarity tours provide its main source of organizational funding. These groups pay a daily rate to APDES in exchange for the logistical and translation support that APDES provides. Groups also develop relationships with the communities they visit, and an annual visit is almost always followed up with funding for a small community project (such as new roofs for homes). With assistance from a Salvadoran interviewer, I set out to better understand the degree to which host communities experienced solidarity tours as enactments of global citizenship by conducting 20 interviews: 1 with the permanent staff person at APDES responsible for the solidarity tours and 19 with members of communities that accept solidarity tours on an annual basis. These community members are heavily involved in the preparation and execution of the visits. Their communities are both rural and urban, and they represent some of the most socially and economically marginalized groups in the country. We found three main themes through our interviews and observations that are relevant to the issues surrounding inclusion and exclusion in

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global citizenship. We found that facilitators and visitors perpetuate soft global citizenship with their hosts. We found that the transfer of material resources can form a dependency of the host community on their guests and can greatly curtail the educational value of solidarity tours. Finally, we found that educational resources are dedicated to visitor learning but not to hosts, leaving them with harmful stereotypes about both their visitors and themselves. Unequal Power Relations Soft approaches to global citizenship tend to construct an Other that is in need of the benevolent help of the global citizen (Jefress 2008, 27). In the context of the APDES solidarity tours, visitors are able to construct their hosts in ways that do not serve the goal of understanding the structural causes of poverty. As we worked with the different groups of visitors to prepare for their trips, it became clear that the facilitators, group leaders, and host communities shared some fairly lofty goals. We hoped that the visitors would learn about El Salvador, its people and its history. We hoped that they would feel empathy, compassion, and genuine concern for the Salvadoran communities that they would visit. We hoped that visitors would act in favor of these communities through advocacy at home, fundraising for initiatives, and lobbying their government to change its policies toward El Salvador. Our goals were well-intentioned, but they emphasized the agency of the visitors and assumed the inability of their hosts to change their own situation. They also normalized the privilege of the visitors. We framed them as generous, caring people since they would take time to come to El Salvador to learn about the realities there. This perspective ignores the elements of privilege inherent in the trip. First, privilege to choose whether they would like to deal with the inequalities inherent in our global system. Second, privilege to have influence and the financial ability to travel and to give charity to the communities. Third, the privilege to draw conclusions about their hosts and to have that perspective matter in concrete ways such as shaping the resources that the communities can access. One visitor that we worked with gave us a glimpse into how these distorted images are created. He harshly criticized the litter in the community, saying that his hosts kept their houses clean, so they should clean litter areas as well. I explained that there were no municipal garbage services, so collected litter would simply blow away again. Someone else explained that people thought of garbage differently because most of the garbage in their rural community was biodegradable, but the litter was a product of processed products (mostly chips and soda) that could not be disposed of in the same way. The visitor

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would not accept this explanation. He insisted that cleaning litter would be an easy thing to do and that the hosts should simply do it. The question “why is there litter?” is a valid one. It was the visitor’s sense of entitlement to judge the community and to impose his standard of public cleanliness that concerned me. He didn’t recognize his own biases or that he was judging the community by the standards of his home country without taking into account the vastly different context. His ability to judge and construct the community as people who are careless with garbage is problematic. The litter made him uncomfortable and didn’t match his vision of the community values he expected to find, so he constructed this community “problem.” These distorted perspectives would be harmless if it weren’t for the unequal power of the two groups. In other cases, visitors returned home to raise money to address a “problem” that they personally had identified while on their solidarity tour (field notes, August 2008). One group slept in the community chapel during their trip and were awakened due to rain coming in through the chapel windows. When the time came, they chose to pay to have shutters put on the chapel windows rather than fixing leaky roofs, much to the community’s’ dismay (field notes, August 2008). The distorted perceptions of outsiders become real problems when they inform work that will happen in the community. Simpson’s (2005) study of the “British Gap Year” phenomenon supports these findings. She points to the ways that us-and-them binaries are used to establish a clear idea that visitors are the “helpers” and hosts are the “helped.” So-called gappers are also later assigned the status of development experts thanks to their experience of knowing the Other and experiencing their poverty (Simpson 2005, 461). In much the same fashion, visitors feel they can decide what the community needs are after visiting only for three or four days. The solidarity tours cannot create critical global citizenship when one side of the exchange has the power to construct who the other is and then to act on that construction in material ways. Material Resources In all the tours, visitors provided material resources to their hosts. Manuel, the solidarity tour coordinator, explains that the main exchange of benefits between the visitors and the host community takes the form of project funding. As Manuel points out, “There are groups who will contribute a project for the community, but that is basically the strongest [contribution] that you will see in a group. I would like that the visitors . . . not come with the mentality that the community is expecting material things because they

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aren’t expecting anything, but, yes, one sees the manifestation of the need we have” (interview with Manuel, September 2008). The incorporation of projects into solidarity tours reflects the communities’ difficulties in accessing resources through other means, but they are not the core goal of either APDES or the community. Despite the fact that exchange is supposed to be the focus of the visit, much of the community visit consists of meetings where community committees and leaders thank the visitors profusely for their previous help or subtly solicit future projects. Visitors have a real desire to help improve their counterpart communities. But these well-intentioned donations create an urgent need for community members to keep visitors happy, healthy, and comfortable throughout their stay and to encourage groups to return. A community member explained, “But a problem that could arise would be that these ties are broken one day, and they say that they can’t help us anymore— that would create a problem for us; but on the other hand, if the communication continues, it would be beneficial for us” (interview with Luisa, October 2008). When describing the visits, community members often emphasized their service to the visitors. One community member proudly recounted how he cured a visitor of an illness: “I made him lemonade with sugar, salt, and an Alka-Seltzer, and he took it . . . At 8:00 p.m. he was better . . . I’ve done that” (interview with Octavio, October 2008). The host here is heavily invested in the visitor’s well-being, not as mutual understanding and compassion but as a form of service to a benefactor. This need to keep the flow of resources open contributes to facilitators and hosts avoiding directly connecting the hosts’ circumstances and the visitors’ society. As an example of these connections, gang violence and organized crime is the single largest social problem in present-day El Salvador and was catalyzed by U.S. policy. Many Salvadorans who had fled the violence of the war were pulled into the gang culture in major cities in the United States. After the war ended, Salvadorans who were arrested for gang activity or drug dealing were often deported back to El Salvador, where they found a heavily armed country that had not demilitarized after the civil war and throngs of poor, young men accustomed both to the culture of violence, often traumatized by the war crimes they had witnessed and suffering from poverty and family disintegration inherited from wartime (Hume 2007, 742 and 747; McIlwaine 1998, 663). Privileged Americans benefit in some ways from this policy because undesirable people are sent elsewhere rather than causing insecurity in the United States or burdening the U.S. prison system. Canada and EU countries have similar policies toward noncitizens. Despite these clear connections, we repeatedly avoided confronting the role of the visitors’ home-country policies in contributing to the current violence

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in El Salvador. For example, one respondent from a community plagued by gang violence explained that the community members work in shifts to make sure that the solidarity tours are always accompanied by an appropriate number of community members in order to deter gang aggression against the visitors (interview with Mariela, September 2008). The visitors are never informed that this is the reason for their constant accompaniment and are unaware of their dangerous surroundings. This silence appeared to me to be a deliberate tactic on the part of the host community and facilitating NGO to reduce visitor anxiety, leaving them with more happy and romanticized notions of El Salvador. Visitors could feel that the community members simply enjoyed their company rather than feared for their safety. At the level of personal interactions as well, visitors are shielded from the complexity of community life and presented a much rosier picture than actually exists. One host community member said, “We say sometimes, if we have arguments, they shouldn’t come out in front of [the visitors] because that would cause bad things” (interview with Octavio, September 2008). Community members are aware that if they revealed the full complexity of their lives, the romantic vision of their community would be dispelled, and they would be seen as “less deserving” of the visitors’ charity. In discussion with my fellow facilitators, I found that some of us feared instilling guilt in the visitors because it would cause discomfort that could discourage them from returning or encouraging others to visit. Some of us felt that while we wouldn’t try to induce guilt in the visitors, we didn’t think we should shield them from this reaction. After all, guilt is an appropriate response to the realization that you have benefitted, through access to cheap goods and increased wealth in your own country, from the suffering of others. Guilt is also the reaction of many to the realization that they had been blind to the suffering of others for so long. After reflecting on the experience of facilitating, I concluded that the solidarity tours promote soft global citizenship in two important ways. First, the tour activities focus primarily on visiting the projects that solidarity tours have funded in the past and hearing testimony from community members about how these projects have improved the community. Visitors also sit through long meetings where various community leaders formally thank them for their generosity and help in improving the community’s living standards through providing roofing, a water pump, or scholarships. This perspective emphasizes the technological and educational deficiency of the host community as the main cause of poverty, and visitors provide the access to knowledge communities need. Second, an unequal power relationship is reproduced within the context of the solidarity tour. The constant performance of gratitude shows that the host community views the visitors as charitable providers.

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The community also serves and performs for the visitors, ending each meeting (or performance) by coming, hat in hand, to request more charity. Visitors feel good because they were able to help the poor. The stereotype of the noble, generous, do-gooder who is worthy of praise is reinforced. For Salvadoran community members, however, a far more damaging stereotype is reinforced by this relationship. The Salvadorans are affirmed in their belief that they are not capable of agency; they must have outside assistance in order to make a difference. A community member offered, “What they do is another thing, and just being here in this country, on the road, knowing that they are coming to discomfort because here is not full of comforts, so for me it is a big step [for them]” (interview with Mariela, September 2008). This respondent simultaneously disparages the way of life in her community by describing it as uncomfortable and exalts the decision of the visitors to come. This quote shows that the ability to travel to El Salvador is seen not as a privilege but as a charitable act undertaken by only the most special people. In my observations, the contributions of the visitors to community development projects are constantly recognized and appreciated, whereas the efforts of the community members go unremarked. Yet the host community members also contribute to the functioning of the solidarity tours. The women in the community cook the meals for the groups; they open their homes to them, and they organize and execute the tour activities. Manuel says the host communities “offer [the visitors] their bed, even though it is very simple, or their simple hammock, but they put up the best hammock so that their guest can sleep; and if the visitor doesn’t have a blanket, they find one” (interview with Manuel, October 2008). This generosity certainly adds to the overall sense that the host communities are very hospitable people, and some groups try to acknowledge these contributions. Unfortunately, the communities themselves often devalue their own contributions, and when APDES debriefs with the community, they don’t emphasize the value of their work either. Many of these problems result from a soft rather than critical conception of the global citizen. Both visitors and hosts view the visitors as global citizens working to make change for the host communities through their donations and their advocacy. The very act of visiting, even if it results in no further action, is viewed as a service to the poor. Everyone regards hosts as the passive Other in need of help. Their work caring for the visitors is rendered invisible and contributes only indirectly toward the goal of making change. Students and Teachers The facilitators and group leaders shared the view that the solidarity tours are important learning opportunities for the visitors. Current literature confirms

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that our perspective is widespread (Sherraden et al. 2008, 410; Schwartzman 2007, 6; Simpson 2004, 690; Mündel 2002, 87). We dedicated much time, energy, and thought to facilitating the learning of the visitors. We very rarely considered the learning of the host communities. They received no facilitation of their experience. The evaluations that we conducted with them focused on the host community’s service to the visitors. I believe that the host-community members are also learning lessons despite the lack of resources devoted to their experience. Several authors find that without proper facilitation of an intercultural experience, many people will simply use their new construction of the Other to confirm old stereotypes (Mündel 2002, 87; Simpson, 2005, 462; Schwartzman 2007, 7). This is likely happening in the solidarity tours as a result of the failure to facilitate these experiences for the host community. The stereotypes being ingrained in the minds of community members are ones that preach the inherent backwardness, unworthiness, and incompetence of poor Salvadorans while exalting the superior and capable foreigner. Critical Global Citizenship Andreotti (2006) proposes the critical approach as a potential remedy to these undesirable effects of global citizenship. She suggests that critical global citizenship could be a tool for challenging social structures that maintain oppression. Critical global citizenship identifies the causes of poverty as rooted in inequality and injustice. It seeks to have global citizens examine their role in these systems and then engage in the process of changing the complex social structures that maintain inequality. Critical global citizenship seeks to “empower individuals to reflect critically on the legacies and processes of their cultures, to imagine different futures and to take responsibility for decisions and actions” (Anderotti 2007, 5). The case of the APDES solidarity tours shows that soft global citizenship discourses often creep into practice despite the program’s rhetoric of solidarity. While I cannot say with certainty whether teaching critical global citizenship would change the negative power dynamics, I can propose some concrete practices that could help to redirect practices toward a critical approach. Possible Solutions Facilitation with Visitors A key relationship in the solidarity tours is between the group leaders and the Salvadoran facilitators. The group leaders have a lot of power in the relationship and are often unaware of this fact. They often act as customers who

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require a positive experience in order to guarantee their continued business rather than allies in a struggle that will require long-term commitment and negotiation. Especially in the area of facilitation, group leaders bring their own perspective about how their group should interact with the host community and what their group should be learning. I think that the Salvadoran facilitators need to be brought into the process more fully, and group leaders will need to give up some of their power to make room for their counterparts. This would mean more negotiation, disagreement, and consensus building, which is hard work but would likely lead to better solidarity in the end. I think that a popular education approach, one which is overtly political, uses the experience of the participants as the starting point and encourages praxis—learning and action together—as the best pedagogical approach (Freire [1970] 2000). While the work of confronting the uncomfortable truths of the interconnected nature of our lives will be very difficult, I believe that popular education could help to facilitate the process without any one actor having to “be the bad guy” who makes the group feel guilty. The overtly political nature of popular education encourages honest dialogue about perspectives and could help facilitators to avoid glossing over important political points in favor of pleasing the “client.” It could also help to encourage critical thinking in the participants, forcing them to confront their own politics head-on, question their “common sense” ideas, and become more informed. By starting with the visitors’ own experience of oppression, we can draw clear links between the inequities in our own societies and their replication in El Salvador and worldwide. Praxis would help to convert the initial feelings of guilt or shame into concrete actions both during and after participants’ visits. Another very important role for the group leaders is to support groups after they have returned home to integrate new understandings and action plans into their everyday lives. The El Salvador–based facilitators only have ten days to influence the groups, but the group facilitators can extend the life of the experience through their own commitment and proper support from their institutions. Facilitation with Hosts There is a clear, shared responsibility for APDES facilitators and group leaders to insist on the importance of quality facilitation for host communities. Nightly debriefs during the exchange (which would imply no extra costs) and follow-up sessions that deconstruct stereotypes and encourage concrete actions toward better solidarity (not service) are desperately needed. We should be working toward a situation where host communities are taking the lead in teaching and learning with visitors rather than taking cues from

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facilitators. We should be working with both hosts and visitors to explain that respecting and honoring guests does not mean unconditional deference but rather a real exchange of our values and ideas. I am not suggesting that we treat visitors with disrespect or unfriendliness, but we should work toward a point where community members feel able to communicate respectfully when they have been offended by guests and vice versa. Hosts need to feel they can remove visitors from their pedestal and see them as just people with flaws and strengths. On the other side of the equations, guests need to recognize that they may be offensive but that the relationship is strong enough that offenses can be made, confronted, and worked out. These relationships are called hermanamientos, or “sister communities.” We can start to see these as family relationships that can withstand slights and offenses and thrive through a shared history and values. As facilitators, we need to work toward translating these exchanges without censorship and allowing the negative and the positive to be understood on both sides so that mutual understanding can grow. One major obstacle to this work is time and financial resources. Groups often only pay the costs of their own trip and of community projects. Group leaders need to set aside a small portion of their budget for follow-up visits to the host communities. It would be ideal for group leaders to bring up this need with the Salvadoran facilitators and to negotiate a modest budget with them. I understand that this can be difficult in institutions such as schools where funds are hard won and the priority is visitor learning, but I believe this is a battle worth fighting. If solidarity is really our goal, then I believe we should dedicate fewer resources to the charitable projects and more to facilitation. I know that what I propose seems idealistic. I am aware that there will be many obstacles along the way. Many group leaders would disagree with me, and many El Salvador–based facilitators would find these proposals too risky. Host communities may not understand why we want them to start being critical of their guests, and some visitors may not return. Nevertheless, I believe we need to work consciously toward critical global citizenship in our practice as well as our words. Otherwise we will continue to take the path of least resistance, where the “common sense” of who teaches, who learns, who decides, who serves, and who is served is reproduced. This, in my view, disadvantages the community and reproduces the negative images they often have of themselves and their abilities. Despite the challenges ahead, improving the experience for communities is worth the extra effort it will take to start working out as hermanos. Note 1. All names have been changed to protect confidentiality.

Nicaragua

CHAPTER 7

What We Are About to Do Is Highly Problematic: The Unpaved Road from Service Trips to Educational Delegations Irene King

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n my second Alternative Break Trip (ABT) with college students in 1995, I found myself in Honduras troweling cement on cinderblocks of the house “we” were “building” under the supervision of Honduran foremen. A Honduran boy of seven or eight came over to me and shook his finger, signaling that I was doing the troweling incorrectly. He showed me the correct way and then went to the sidelines, where Hondurans from the village were watching the “gringos” work. As I began my work again, I had the epiphany that so many of us have—and went to talk with Sister Marisol,1 the Honduran nun who was organizing the work project. I asked her, “Wouldn’t it be more helpful if we just sent you our group’s airfare funds? Then Hondurans, who know how to build houses, could build their own houses more quickly and efficiently.” Thus began my questioning of the value of such trips—a questioning that continues to this day. As you will see from what follows, despite serious concerns, I now believe these trips can be transformative for both the in-country community and the students, if they are sensitively conducted. I will lay out my critiques of these trips, the reasons I believe they are still valuable, and a set of best practices that I developed in partnership with Nicaraguan community members with whom I have worked since 1999. Where our students exit the process of a “trip” depends largely on the pedagogy one uses in constructing it.

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Positioning Myself: Who I Am, Where Am I Located, and the Evolution of My Thinking Currently, I am the director of the Center for Service and Social Justice at Villanova University, a Roman Catholic university close to Philadelphia. I direct a center that organizes most of the weekly service, justice, advocacy, and alternative break experiences on campus. We currently send approximately eight hundred students per year on ABTs. While we are just beginning to assess the impact of these trips, we estimate that one-third of the students at Villanova participate in them during their undergraduate career. We work with 30 communities domestically and internationally per year, so the potential for positive—and negative—community impact is great. I have a master of divinity degree, and my focus of study was Latin American liberation theology. I began leading alternative break trips in 1992 domestically and in 1995 internationally, initially to Honduras and then to Nicaragua. In my early career as a campus minister, I coordinated social justice programming at Princeton and then Manhattan College. I soon saw that doing community work without developing a grounding in a community’s history, politics, and culture was irresponsible—I saw that no work was neutral. In order to “first, do no harm,” we needed to teach students not to act out of unconscious assumptions and prejudices by making them aware of where they were situated in terms of class, race, gender, and power. This desire to link education with service led me to create the service-learning program at Manhattan College and then to serve as the founding director of Sarah Lawrence College’s service-learning program. Problematizing ABTs I begin every first meeting with an ABT group with the statement: “What we are about to undertake is highly problematic.” Students must understand that a community “service” project is not simply a “good” thing—it is complex.2 For instance, despite our best intentions, it reinforces the hegemonic relationship of people from a richer, more powerful country coming to intervene/“help” those in the poorer, less powerful country. Given this inequality, the community may not feel it has the freedom to say no to the North Americans who want to come and help them. Yet student insensitivity can do great harm to and insult the community: I have seen students refuse to eat the food offered to them in a homestay, even though the family had killed one of their two chickens for them. Moreover, without adequate historical grounding and contextualization, students can return from these trips saying the people are poor but they are happy, a romanticized analysis of poverty that reifies the status quo.

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Some have argued that sending students on ABTs represents a large expenditure of money that might be donated outright to the community to better effect (Van Engen 2000). I have seen “gringos” implement a “helping project,” just to have the community redo it because it wasn’t what they wanted. For example, the military-green color an ABT group chose to paint an orphanage was not a choice the community was comfortable with during unstable political times. Even if a project is suitable, a week is usually not enough time to do anything significant in a community. In general, we North Americans are not physically fit enough to do the work that the in-country people are capable of doing. All these complexities lead me to wonder, as did Teju Cole (2012) in a recent column in The Atlantic, whether the “White Savior Industrial Complex,” as he calls it, is really about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege. Strikingly, there is very little research on the impact of so-called service on communities. We have the best of intentions, but how do we really know if we are doing good without an assessment from the community point of view? After all, communities are often too kind or too disempowered to tell outsiders directly that the work they have done and the time they have spent has been problematic. Why Organize ABTs Given the Lack of Evidence They Do Good? To be practical it would be hard nott to run these sorts of trips given that so many colleges use them as public relations tools for attracting students and so many students come to college having participated in a high school or church mission trip and expect to have that opportunity. More important, the trips can educate students about how most of the world lives. I return to my experience with Sister Marisol in Honduras. When I asked her if it would be more helpful to just send our airfare rather than be ineffectual house builders, she answered: “In the short term, yes, that would be helpful. But I am working on long-term solutions . . . If each of your students returns to the US with lived knowledge of how most of the world lives, if they really see the poverty that people live in every day, perhaps they will change the way they vote and the products they consume. This, in turn, will have a greater impact on Hondurans than a one-time five-thousand-dollar donation. Each group of 15 students is little by little changing your country’s worldview and actions, which so greatly impact our lives.” She met me where I was that day. Sister knew I had made the leap from “we are here to help you” to “are we really helping you?” Jorge Rivera, the leader of the cooperative in the Nicaraguan community with whom we work states, “We share this world, and the problems of the

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world and our future need to be worked on together with everyone. That is why it is important for groups to come to Nicaragua to learn. Some of the students may one day be in positions of power, and we need them to understand the world’s problems.” The oft-quoted words of aboriginal educator and activist Lila Watson are relevant here. As the story goes, a group of outsiders approached Watson’s group, asking if they could help with a project, and she replied, “If you have come here to help me, I don’t need your help. But if you have come because your liberation is tied to mine, come let us work together” (Leonen 2004). It benefits us all to work together on projects that liberate us mutually—whether these be housing, human rights, or combatting racism. Solidarity and social change involve seeing one’s liberation as bound up with another’s. My trip coleader, Eric Usner, and I have recorded hours of interviews with students that provide anecdotal evidence for the power of these trips to transform students’ lives. For a few students, the Nicaragua trip was really just another spring break—but for most students, the trip challenged them to change their majors, learn Spanish, start a free school on campus for the primarily Central American–born custodial and food services staff, or join a program that engages them in long-term service after graduation, such as Jesuit Volunteers (see Usner, this volume). The word that comes up most frequently in talking about these trips with students is transformational— l the trips become life changing. Students often return from such experiences “on fire.” This can be attributed to the excitement of travel to a radically different place and the power of positive group dynamics that leave them feeling included and affirmed (Tuckman and Jensen 1977) or, as Dean Brackley (2011, 33) states, having had a broken-heart experience of the Other that “shakes their world to its foundations” and raises questions of ultimacy, meaning, and one’s place and purpose in the world. My daily Facebook status updates from former trip members remind me of this fact, as I read about the good work former students are doing—work they might not have been doing had they not participated in an ABT. ABTs can also do the work of reconciliation—of establishing positive people-to-people relationships between two countries that have had a violent past. The Nicaraguans we work with always say they separate us from our government. One farmer, Rafael, told me, “You wouldn’t come here to learn from us if you were like your government.” Since the community we work with was the site of contra attacks, and we were the first U.S. citizens to visit Rio Arriba since the contra war, our visit had great symbolic value. On that first visit, when the presidential elections were coming up in Nicaragua, Doña Celia asked me, “Is this President Bush you have related to the other President Bush who invaded our country with the contras?” “Yes—he is his

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son,” I answered. She asked, “Will he invade us like his father if we elect a Sandinista president?” This was one of the many times my heart broke in Nicaragua because I knew I could not save her if my government intervened, and I was struck by how much power she thought I/we might have to change my country’s foreign policy. Finally, ABTs can harness the university’s unique resources on behalf of the community. The University of Central America (UCA) in El Salvador serves as a powerful example of the moral mission of the university (see Martín-Baró 1991). Ignacio Ellacuria, rector of the university and one of the six Jesuits slain at the UCA in 1989, asks: “What then does a university do, immersed in this reality? Transform it? Yes. Do everything possible so that liberty is victorious over oppression, justice over injustice, love over hate? Yes. Without this overall commitment, we would not be a university . . . But how is this done? The university must carry out this general commitment with the means uniquely at its disposal: we as an intellectual community must analyze causes; use imagination and creativity together to discover the remedies to our problems . . . educate professionals with a conscience, who will be the immediate instruments of such a transformation; and constantly hone an educational institution that is both academically excellent and ethically oriented” (1982, 12). Dean Brackley, a Jesuit who moved to the UCA in 1990, states, “No one should graduate from a university without knowing how wealth and income are distributed in the country, how many [people] . . . are living in poverty, or why so many homeless people roam the streets. In this era of globalization, and especially in the United States with its unequaled global reach, it is vital to understand la realidad mundial—global l reality.” Brackley argues that short-term service trips, done in conjunction with courses or deep reflection, “should send [students] to the library and inspire better term papers. When [and here I insert If ] students come to appreciate how complex and difficult social problems are, they should find at the university the resources needed to penetrate to the causes and to help to find solutions” (2011, 33). An Overview of Our Trip Model Our ABTs begin with eight to ten weeks of preparation meetings on campus, which include readings on history, culture, current events, and specifics about Nicaragua. We spend the first half of the trip in Managua meeting with Nicaraguan activists, social workers, economists, labor organizers, artists, musicians, educators—with the goal of hearing about both the reality of life in the hemisphere’s second-poorest country and the creative solutions Nicaraguans are implementing themselves. We spend the second week living with families

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in the comarcaa of Rio Arriba, experiencing daily life, playing baseball, swimming at the waterfall, perhaps assisting with a work project, such as planting seedling trees on the mountainside to prevent erosion or moving large rocks from the river to be used in building the road. We reserve the two final days for debriefing and bringing the group together, usually in a place where they can appreciate Nicaragua’s beauty in spite of its poverty. Mostly, we let the students relax, have fun, and participate in structured reflections throughout the day. But reflection is also part of the daily routine throughout the trip. Students make journals prior to the trip, and we expect them to write in them daily. Each night we have a group reflection. First, we check in about the events of the day. Then, after each person has had a chance to speak, we pull out the important themes. One of the nonstudent leaders who is skilled at facilitating group discussions leads the ensuing reflection. These discussions help us evaluate student learning on the ABT. They do not tell us much, however, about how our community hosts experienced our visit. In 2006 and 2012, we conducted two sets of interviews with members of the Nicaraguan community of Achuapa and the smaller comarcaa (outlying village) of Rio Arriba. The Nicaraguans we interviewed were organizers of the delegation and/or families we stayed with. Achuapa is both a state and a town in northwestern Nicaragua with a population of close to 3,500 people. It is an agricultural region, and its most important crop is sesame seed. We work with farmers who are part of the Juan Francisco Paz Silva Cooperative, who have been selling their sesame seed oil to the Body Shop since the mid-1990s. Achuapa is comprised of simple one- to two-room brick/cinderblock houses with a few paved streets. Most people from the comarcas travel by foot or on horseback to this center. Rio Arriba is four miles from Achuapa on a barely passable unpaved road. The residents of Rio Arriba live in one-room homes made of mud or wood. They have no indoor plumbing. Their bathrooms are hand-dug latrines. They have no electricity. They cook with wood in clay ovens. They are subsistence farmers who also grow sesame for the cooperative. A Turning Point in the College-Community Relationship The first assessment was precipitated by a specific incident that marked an evolution in our growing partnership with the Nicaraguan community. In the beginning the Nicaraguans were too polite to say anything critical about us. I knew we had reached a crossroads in our friendship when the following interchange happened: The day we were leaving Rio Arriba, Jorge Rivera, the cooperative leader, came with his pickup truck down what was euphemistically called “a road” to load up our bags, so we could hike the four miles

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to town unburdened. Getting to Rio Arriba involves crossing the river four times, which is difficult for a vehicle if the rains have made the river high. I was going with Jorge in the truck to store the bags, leaving my coleader to hike with the students. It was a hot day, and I told the students that if anyone was not up to the hike, they could jump in the back with the backpacks and get a ride into town. The members of the group who could not fit in the truck complained that it was too hot to hike and asked whether the truck could come back and get them. Putting the students’ well-being first is part of my job in my role as a college representative and trip leader, so I felt I had to honor their concerns. After we unloaded the bags in town, I grabbed a cold Pepsi at the cooperative’s tienda (store). As we rode back on the difficult road to Rio Arriba to pick up the second group of students, Jorge was very quiet. He finally said, “You know, Nicaraguans work in this heat for eight to nine hours per day.” I was stunned into silence—horrified at how entitled we seemed. After apologizing, I tried to bridge the tension: I asked Jorge if he wanted some of my Pepsi. He said, “I don’t consume products from transnational corporations.” I thought, “This is the end . . . We can’t come back here. They don’t want us, and we clearly don’t have the sensitivity and physical stamina.” Nonetheless, within one year I returned to reconcile with Jorge Rivera after the incident with the truck. We had a very frank conversation—and it was in this conversation that we reframed the trips from service-focused to educational trips. Jorge felt it was important to be part of the educational development of our U.S. students, in part because he felt that in the big picture they had the power to influence the lives of Nicaraguans. That conversation and others I had with community members led me, in collaboration with ProNica (the Nicaraguan NGO that served as our intermediary) and the comarcaa of Rio Arriba, to reconstruct our ABT programs. The community members clearly stated that they didn’t need our service. One farmer, Rafael, said: “If you had guests who came from another country to visit you once a year, would you make them build you a road? No! You would go to the waterfall and swim or hike to the top of the mountain to see the valley or play baseball. If you would make me build you a road if I came to New York, I am not sure I would want to visit you!” Doña Pastora and other members of the community echoed this notion. I explained why it was important for students to learn how most of the world lives and that I hoped they would be educators and not merely hosts for the visit. We designed a compromise where students would accompany families through their daily routine, which is physically demanding in a community without running water and electricity, and maybe participate in a small community work project. We allowed ample time for students to see

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the beauty of their village and their environs as well as interact socially over a meal or baseball game. As a result service trips became educational delegations—groups s of students going “to put a human face” on issues of poverty and to engage the heart as well as the brain in the learning process. Continuing Assessment: Fine-Tuning the Goals and Implementation of Our Delegation The second assessment in February 2012 enabled deeper conversations with community members about the purpose and design of delegations. As Jorge Rivera said, “A perfect model of a delegation doesn’t exist yet. There are still issues of language and culture that we need to understand about one another. We need to think about how we see each other: to many people here, you [North Americans] are still a tourist attraction. And to many of you, we are still ‘poor’ people, victims. Both categorizations disempower all of us. We need to move toward seeing one another as partners.” Brigido Sosa, the cooperative president, offered another powerful, paradigmatic shift, saying, “Delegations still are seen as receiving credit for any work project that is completed when they are here; we need to shift the credit to the community. Without the community, the projects would never be organized and implemented. The visitors assistt with the community project, but the project is the community’s project. For the visitors to take primary credit for the project disempowers the community and creates the dependency on outsiders we are trying to move away from.” Including the community in every part of conceptualizing one’s project is my key message to all who would undertake “good works” in Central America. To create a plan without integral input from the community is to recreate patterns of imperialism. If the relationship between U.S. and Central American citizens is to change, we must step out of the shoes of the “one who knows best” or the “one with access to the most resources” and try a different, more vulnerable way of relating. Any “good work” in Central America is only “good” to the degree that it begins and sustains a relationship of equality in every aspect of the project and builds in a constant process of reflection with the community on what is working—and what is replicating old ways of being that enforce patterns of dependency. Then, and only then, can we do something good together. Delegation Goals Based on our conversations and the experience of working together on delegations, community members from Achuapa and Rio Arriba helped

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me fine-tune our protocols for delegations; we came up with the following two goals: 1. To impact communities positively by interacting with them as partners in identifying the end goal for the project of hosting a U.S. group of students. The community must choose the project and evaluate whether the impact of our collaboration has been positive for them. 2. To transform the hearts and minds of students so they come away from the experience with an in-depth understanding of how most of the world lives and the desire and motivation to vote, consume, and act differently so that their impact on the most vulnerable of the world is positive. This transformation and reeducation will take place because of the interaction with community members but will be facilitated by the framings and reframings we provide prior to and during their visit. Moreover, the students will replicate our model of partnership with the community in their own lives. Best Practices for Delegations What follows is the “best practices” for educational delegations derived from experience and the input of the community of Achuapa/Rio Arriba in Nicaragua: 1. Require participants to complete a thoughtful application. Students interested in participating in a Nicaragua trip are required to complete an application, which has essay questions about why they want to go, what their experience with diverse communities has been, how they deal with conflict, how they deal with stress. Interestingly, we don’t take only the students who give the answers we prefer—we also take up to 30% of those whose answers are somewhat problematic—because in many ways these are the students who most need to be transformed by a trip such as this. The application process is important because it sets a tone of reflection that will be a thread throughout the trip. It also helps trip leaders assess how much sensitivity and cultural-awareness training they need to offer prior to the experience. 2. Share leadership with the community in creating the project. Shared power, or partnership, can be difficult to navigate at a great distance, since it is built on relationship. That is why this relationship must be established to some degree before a group is brought to the community.

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We ensure that the group leader has met with the community at least once before the students arrive. The more visits by the group leader, the better. Even if the group changes composition each time, the community relationship with the group leader positively affects the tenor of the trip and intergroup dynamics. Really think about the work component—and whether there is to be one. Talk with your community partner to make sure that students can really assist with a project effectively. Sometimes a work project makes the group feel better because they think they are doing something worthwhile. But Lillian Hall, the director of ProNica, and Jorge Rivera both agree that students need to understand the work project as a means to learning about and building fellowship with Nicaraguans. In her keynote speech to the Friends Association for Higher Education Conference, Hall explained, “If there’s a work component to the trip, we need to make them [the group] aware that their physical labor is not what is needed in places like Nicaragua. Such countries do not need more unskilled labor. In fact, they usually have vast un- and underemployment. If the issue were the need to paint a school or dig some ditches, the most logical thing would be for the students to stay home and send what would have been spent in airfare and put local people to work doing what they inevitably can and will do better than unskilled U.S. students will . . . These people need jobs to feed their families, not unskilled U.S. college students to come and do the work. It [having U.S. college students do the work] can actually reinforce ugly stereotypes that the locals are lazy and need a . . . savior to come and fix things. If the students come, paint the school, pat themselves on the back for being good people, and then go home unchanged, we have failed.” 3. Consider having students accompany the host families in their daily routine making meals, tending crops and livestock, washing clothes. Initially, the community of Rio Arriba was quite resistant to having guests help them with daily chores—it went against their cultural value of hospitality. Once the community saw its role not as host but as educator, they allowed the students to work alongside them. 4. Critically frame/contextualize the delegation experience pre-trip. We have found eight to ten two-hour sessions helpful to prepare the students. Following Shor’s (1992) dictums for critical pedagogy, preparatory sessions should introduce students to “habits of thought, reading, writing, and speaking that go beneath the surface meaning, first impressions, dominant myths, official pronouncements, traditional clichés, received wisdom, and mere opinions, to understand the deep

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meaning, root causes, social context, ideology, and personal consequences of any action, event, object, process, organization, experience, text, subject matter, policy, mass media, or discourse” (129). These sessions should include discussions about race, class, and gender difference, as well as difference related to ability. They should cover the basic geography of the area. They should introduce students to the history of the region, including the history of U.S. intervention, and they should make students aware of current events. Most of all, these sessions must problematize the idea of service. Jorge Rivera says we must rid ourselves of the idea that we are the “benevolent outsider” coming to help the “poor” Nicaraguans. Language. The Rio Arriba community emphasized this as a very important point. At least half the group must speak Spanish, so there is one person in each homestay who can communicate effectively. Ideally all students should be able to speak basic Spanish. Do not give monetary donations. Jorge Rivera states that donations perpetuate the idea that the community depends on people from the outside to advance, which is disempowering. Reflection/journaling. The application process begins a reflection that continues throughout the trip and into the post-trip debriefings. Best practices in the field of service/experiential learning include the praxis of reflection. Assessment of student learning. Throughout the last day of the trip, designated as a debriefing day, trip leaders interview students and lead group discussions aimed at capturing what the students have learned from the experience. We began videotaping these interviews on our last trip as a way to gain data on what was most effective in bringing about student learning and/or personal transformation. Assessment of community impact. Trip leaders meet with key community members after the trip to gain insight into what the community believes it has gained from the visit and interaction with the student group or what it believes it has contributed as part of the interchange. Post-Trip Debriefing. Organize a series of “What now?” gatherings that allow students to process the experience over the weeks after the experience. Include advocacy training and opportunities for them to work on social justice issues that arose during the trip.

Yet even as we put forth these “best practices,” we must remember what community leader Jorge Rivera said, “A perfect model of a delegation doesn’t exist yet. There are still issues of language and culture that we need to understand about one another. We need to think about how we see each other: to

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many people here, you [North Americans] are still a tourist attraction. And to many of you, we are still ‘poor’ people, victims. Both categorizations disempower all of us. We need to move toward seeing one another as partners.” Our best hope lies in continuing to work with our partner community to craft together a relationship that benefits and enhances the life of the other. This commitment to working together—through the often messy episodes of misunderstanding—is at the heart of any attempt to embody a “best practice.” It requires dialogue, rethinking, reframing, a willingness to be critiqued, and a willingness to offer another way of seeing—it requires courage. It requires not just the commitment of the trip or program leaders and the community, but the full endorsement of the university as well. These sorts of trips must not devolve into “good press” for the university but instead become an institutional commitment to solidarity through the provision of programmatic resources and the articulation of a vision for a more just and sustainable world. Notes 1. All in-country partner names are pseudonyms. 2. See Davis 2006.

CHAPTER 8

From Skeptic to Convert, from (Short-Term) Service to (Long-Term) Witness: Toward Pedagogies of Witnessing on International Service Trips1 Eric Martin Usner

Departures/Arrivals In January 2003, I traveled as a faculty coleader with the director of community partnerships at Sarah Lawrence College, Irene King, and 13 students on what would be the first of many trips to Nicaragua. Slipping out of New York City in a predawn ice storm, leapfrogging through Miami, we landed a few hours and two worlds later into the Hollywood-cliché decrepitude of a Latin American airport, passing broken-down Soviet planes and helicopters as we taxied to the terminal. Our in-country contact ushered us quickly through the airport and into the heat of Managua and waiting taxis that hurried us away. The caravanning cars quickly crossed town, cutting a path through the heat rushing over us from open windows, the acrid fog of burning garbage, a chaotic melee of street vendors and window washers that flooded our cars at each stop, the bleating of horns, and clouds of black diesel exhaust. We apprehensively absorbed a cityscape still bearing scars of a decades-old earthquake and revolution. This, it seemed, would be the adventure to write home about that many of us were looking for, the travel narrative of exploration and exotic difference that we do-gooders from the North expect when we volunteer as students, mission workers, or aid workers. The delegation spent its first week in the capital Managua, each day organized around a particular issue approached via morning speakers, afternoon

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site visits, and evening group reflection. On our first day, Carlos Pacheco, a Nicaraguan economist, spoke with us about the impacts of the structural adjustment policies of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and the anticipated impact of CAFTA (Central American Free Trade Agreement). We then met with Gladys Manzanares, a labor organizer who worked in the free-trade zones around Managua. After lunch, our excursions allowed us to see in practice the theories of trade we had discussed. We visited the Nueva Vida fair-trade women’s sewing cooperative and then drove to the maquilass (sweatshops) to see the shift change. Here we walked among the workers in a makeshift open market as they left the gated and guarded foreign-owned factories—subcontractors to U.S. retailers in the production of goods and clothing that we ourselves were likely wearing. Such encounters, grounding classroom knowledge in experiences, made profoundly tangible the ties between Nicaraguan lives and our own. With this model of moving from academic discussions of theory to examples of practice, we also studied local poverty, gender relations, women’s health, the lives of street children, the coffee industry, and the political history of the country—a case study in U.S. foreign policy as lived experience. The days sweltered by, and we struggled to remain hydrated, healthy, and rested. The subtle respite of evening offered a chance for intense and often lengthy reflections on each day. Driven by the youthful expertise of the students, we mustered collective knowledge to process what we had witnessed. Thus evolved our delegation’s praxis, a student-led process informed by both academic talks and site visits that respected the authority of lived experience, not privileging theory over reality. After a week in the urban heat of Managua, we boarded the famous chicken buses (repurposed U.S. school buses that form the improvised transportation infrastructure of the western part of the country) to head north to Achuapa, a rural town of six thousand that is the exclusive producer of sesame seed oil for Body Shop massage oils. During our visit, community leaders and workers taught us about the community’s experiment with fair trade and about the alternative and sustainable agricultural methods of their farming cooperative. We visited the nearby hamlet of La Gartillo, where residents narrated how, in 1984, the community had successfully, though at the loss of seven lives, fought off a contra attack, describing U.S.–Nicaraguan relations as lived experience. We concluded our time in the countryside with longer homestays in the mountains north of the town, in Rio Arriba, an agrarian community of roughly 35 families with ties to Achuapa. Here, we just were, often shadowing the everyday lives of our hosts, our mornings spent helping with daily chores and our afternoons spent playing our mutual national pastime, baseball, one legacy of the U.S. Marine occupation in the 1920s.

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Music served as a keystone for our entire trip. A theme for lectures and discussions of history and politics, we learned of its role in the revolution when we met with Carlos Mejía-Godoy, the central figure in the Nicaraguan nueva canción movement. We visited the home of contemporary nueva canción singer Salvador Cardenal to learn of its renewed role in contemporary struggles for social and environmental justice. Through song and conversation, reggae musician Philip Montalban taught Afro-Nicaraguan and indigenous Miskitu history and contemporary struggles. Music was therapy; we provided guitars, and students made much music together during the trip. Finally, as it so profoundly does, music created community, offering immediate collective experience as we listened to and sang with musicians and the communities we were meeting for the first time. Our trip thus soundtracked, music would also become a touchstone for our experiences upon our return home—a sonic mélange of snapshots that captured and collected emotion and experience. Nothing I had encountered in my young academic life had prepared me to find a path toward validating the glaringly troublesome politics of the trip: I had been trained to theoretically critique and to problematize just about everything, to find what was wrong in just about anything, theoretically. What the hell was I doing in an utterly foreign and impoverished place with a group of privileged students on the trip abroad that has become a kind of institutionalized slumming, a U.S. middle-class collegiate rite of passage? Trained as a scholar to view such excursions through familiar and comfortable scholarly critiques of the ethnographic project, of tourism, of the politics of globalization, I was ill-prepared as a person to resolve the intellectual and emotional dissonance that lingered within me. I discussed my concerns with Irene and, sometimes, offered them to the students. Irene was becoming increasingly uncomfortable herself with a program whose effectiveness she believed in, but whose political and administrative justification was becoming ever more difficult. During our collective reflexive exercises, informed by their own individual reflection and journaling, the students were impressively capable of finding their ways through their experiences. I could rely on and be assured by our ability to do what we did, our free (economic) will, the comfort of critique, but a mantra that had been with me from an early and transformative graduate course stuck with me. On the final day of a course that would be this anthropologist’s last at a university that would not offer her tenure, she told her students: “If you are comfortable, you’ve been coopted.” I could offer the comfortable armchair critique of the trip and all we were doing, debating the politics of our travel, what is broadly called “service-learning” or “experiential education,” orr I could honor my discomfort.

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I could begin by witnessing the impact of the encounters on the students, people, and communities who allowed us to share briefly in their lives. I could also try being present to my own experience. Compelled to acknowledge the profound effects of this trip upon everyone involved, I thus begin with the experiences of participants to develop a grounded response to the politics of the trip. I combine this reflection with writing from community service-learning (CSL), anthropology, and ethnomusicology to offer thoughts on a “pedagogy of witnessing”2 in an attempt to mitigate critiques we, in becoming engaged academics, might pose to our own engagement. Witnessing recalls protestant roots and Quaker routes and proffers an ethics of experience that holds personal belief accountable to our lived experience. Witnessing, then, is a robust theological or epistemological method. If we shy away from the challenge, choosing the comfort of belief over the accountability of experience, we lose something of ourselves. This is ultimately how individual and social transformation takes place. I want to acknowledge, honor, and ultimately advocate for the very complex but real effects of properly yet imperfectly facilitated service learning upon students and communities and the roles that academics might play in such work, whether abroad or at home. Revisiting this experience in the emergent post-neoliberal moment as higher education seeks to work more collaboratively with communities near and far can be one manner to truly reclaim and restore the democratic mission of U.S. higher education. “Poverty Tourism” and to What End Ethnography? King’s most salient concern with CSL is with what she terms “poverty tourism,” which she links to the privilege that underlies our trips. The asymmetries of wealth and development opportunities between visitors and hosts mirrored those that had hung me up as a young ethnographer, resulting in a project in Europe rather than in the “non-West.” We were both concerned with questions of reciprocity: What were we doing for our host communities? How did our presence benefit them? While we believed in our work, we were also deeply concerned about insuring a mutuality of experience, about not being complicit in a form of soft neocolonialism, one in which we exoticize the plights and poverty of others for our own personal growth. Or, as blogger Leila de Brune (2012) very recently put it in a reflection on voluntourism: “We have to stop making this about your niece.”3 Are we just tourist-voyeurs, shocking students, bursting bubbles with glimpses of an exoticized “real,” or “two-thirds,” world that supports the slightly surreal “one-third” we inhabit in the United States and global North? Or are we, at best, engaged in a kind of charity where we visit organizations,

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provide a small donation, the visit having served a vague pedagogical purpose of grounding education in experience and perhaps inspiring students to some further action in the United States? Are these trips then a form of socially responsible consumption, like fair-trade goods, where we get to feel good about ourselves because our consumption (a self-edifying experience and story) contains an ethical offset? What good are we doing? What responsibilities do we have when we set up such programs? What are the long-term responsibilities that come with creating human relationships? “We” always go “there”; can this model be turned around? How to assuage the discomfort that lingers deep? Do we honor it and use it as a prompt for action? Should discomfort, in fact, be a pedagogical goal of these trips? A dismissive view of short-term trips abroad misses the redemptive potential of the theories and methods of community-based education (responsibly, rigorously, and collaboratively undertaken) that lie at the ideal core of servicelearning: the power of human relations that form among participants and the long-term effects and deeply felt human concern that I’m trying to capture with the term witnessing: g an experience of interconnectedness and compassion that compels a change in our understanding of the world and how we act and live in it. The knowledge and perspectives gained through honest, vulnerable engagement with human experience evoke ethical responses that compel us to question taken-for-granted truths and norms. They help put the human back in the humanities. This questioning leads to the best kind of liberatory education, one that in the classroom, at home, or abroad, pushes students to the edge of chaos, into asking uncomfortable questions that become the real means to individual and social transformation. It offers opportunities for extraordinary forms of learning and growth and becomes truly transformative. Collaboration, born from a sense of mutuality, of shared fate and of shared benefit, of what Thich Nhat Hanh (1987) calls “interbeing,” is what distinguishes CSL from study abroad, alternative spring breaks, and other more conventional development, charity, and mission work. This understanding of collaboration should be implicit in all social science projects and indeed, as some have argued, be understood as the mission of higher education (see Harkavy and Benson 1998). It mitigates critiques we, as academics, might pose to CSL; it offers a positioning and method to address critiques of the ethnographic project, the social role of academics and community leaders, and the purpose of our educational institutions within society. Resolving the “crises of ethnography” through reflexive and collaborative modes of ethnographic method and representation does not go far enough in my mind and heart. Instead, I agree with Daniel Mato, who advocates formulating an “[ethnographic] method that seeks to articulate the production of

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knowledge with social change” (Mato 2000, 495). Early on in his fieldwork among indigenous communities in rural Argentina, Mato encountered reluctant informants who questioned whyy he wanted to study them. They wanted to know how they would benefit from their cooperation in his research. He naively replied, “What do you need?” The answers were simple, “We need water” or “We need a medical doctor” (486). The reply forced Mato to question the very nature of what he was doing. He felt disempowered, for he was not properly situated to respond to these needs. How might the knowledge he wanted to produce—and which disciplinary and institutional structures in the U.S. academy deemed worthy of production—result in some form of fair reciprocity? He writes: “Conversations I held with some indigenous leaders brought me to the conclusion that most of these material requests were in one way or another related to situations of social disadvantage, which were in turn rooted in historically established power relations that kept these people in subordinated social situations. Therefore, instead of studying the ‘subaltern,’ I would rather study those accountable for social injustice and make this knowledge available to subaltern subjects” (484). Accountability for Mato (and I believe for all) resides ultimately in the human relationships formed in the “field” and not the varied mandates of the academy. He argues, subaltern and area studies are ethically, politically, and epistemologically problematic because they produce knowledge about others in a language foreign to them from which they rarely benefit (480). If Mato wants us to study what I’ll call, expanding the range of Clifford Geertz’s “web of culture,” (1973,  5) the global sociopolitical webb through which culture courses, then a CSL, steeped in a commitment to working withh others for social change, provides the chance to deploy socially responsive knowledge in powerful pedagogical contexts. Such an orientation in higher education is axiomatic throughout much of the world—the work of intellectuals and academies are part of a progressive infrastructure to improve the lives of local, national, and global communities.4 How can the collective work of a trip, a course, a grant, a program, a discipline be collaborative and reciprocal? Asking this question has implications for what we, individually and disciplinarily, deem worthy of research, how this research is conducted, and what constitutes the aims, applications, and uses of the research. Posed differently, the motto of the responsive funding body, the Social Science Research Council, “Necessary Knowledge,” offers a litmus test. Why is the knowledge we produce necessary? To whom? The need to get a grant to do fieldwork to complete a PhD, to pay bills, to land a job, to get tenure? At what point does an ethics of mutuality take precedence over our individual and institutional need for success? What makes our work good?

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Like Mato, many ethnographers, especially those struggling to make sense of their first major fieldwork, are vocalizing these struggles through moral responses to the lived realities of the people with whom they work. Conventional and powerfully normative practices discipline those questions away in the often self-justifying, self-perpetuating epistemologies of social science or the ever more corporate needs of higher education. Indeed, we intuitively realize that there is no field; rather, we share life circumstances with our research communities. This is not feel-good universalism, but rather a felt ethical response, a recognition of the codependent material conditions of all of our lives—from clothing to oil, from food to labor, to research and knowledge. Regarding my own field of ethnomusicology in the United States, which crystallized around the recognition that music‘s meaning resides in its cultural contexts, our epistemology must now shift—informed by our ethnographic experiences—to recognize that these cultural contexts are often intertwined with transnational and global geopolitical realities. Being able to see these threads of mutuality deeply alters what it means to witness how music and culture have meaning in the lives of others. Anthropology and ethnomusicology are beginning to offer examples of such work under the monikers of “applied” or “engaged” practices, but we have much to gain from considering two fields that are far ahead of us: community service-learning and the scholarship of engagement.5 Community Service-Learning In the United States, CSL began in the late 1980s during a period of drift in the mission and character of the U.S. university, from a nonprofit entity modeled on the nineteenth-century German institution to a corporate entity modeled on the logics of a free market.6 This was also the moment of the “crisis in ethnography” exemplified in the critiques of anthropology by Johannes Fabian (1983), James Clifford (1988), and George Marcus and Michael Fischer (1986), the feminist work of scholars like Ruth Behar and Deborah Gordon (1997) and Kamela Visweswaren (1994), and the postcolonial “writing back” of Talal Asad (1986) and Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999), among others. Some writers locate CSL’s early roots in key trends in education in the 1960s and early 1970s—such as multiculturalism, collaborative learning, and learning communities (Kezar and Rhoads 2001, 150). Others argue that service-learning and ideas of social justice stem from late-nineteenth-century Settlement House projects (and the work of Jane Addams) and are marginally linked to the emergence of the Chicago School of Sociology (Boyte 2002). All agree, however, that the general impetus behind CSL is to dissolve the

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philosophical dualism that maintains the split between knowledge and practice, between thinking and doing, between pedagogies that privilege intellectual ways of knowing and those that rely upon experiential ways of knowing. The resolution of this divide (first attempted in the United States by John Dewey) is key to higher education’s recent struggles to redefine its own mission in a manner that is socially relevant. There is a growing literature on service-learning, myriad programs and innumerable practices, but I’ll offer here the definition that King offered during an interview, which captures the equitable maxim that is often missing: “Service-learning courses are courses that bring four voices to the table: the voice of the teacher, the voice of many scholars encountered in the readings, the voice of the community and its lived experience of the issues under discussion, and the voice of the student who synthesizes all of these voices and creates ‘new’ knowledge from their interaction” (King, personal communication). Many programs that describe themselves as service-learning, community engagement, or community outreach, are often nothing more than old wine in new bottles—study abroad recast in the language of service or engagement. Whether domestic or abroad, they fail to take seriously the difference of service-learning—that the service meets both community and academic needs and that those needs are determined through the difficult dialogic cooperation among university administration, faculty, students, and community partners. Moreover, service-learning requires the partial or wholesale transformation of many of the traditional curricular and pedagogic models of higher education. Ethnographers and CSL In an issue of the Michigan Journal of Community Service Learningg devoted to educating anthropologists about CSL, Arthur Keene and Sumi Colligan (2004) provide a summary of a second “crisis in representation”: “Trepidation over the ‘politics of representation’ and the processes by which knowledge is created as well as the increasing focus on the way in which our excursions into the ‘Other’ generate previously unexamined insights into ourselves moved anthropology quite purposefully away from political engagement to excursions in hyper-relativist, highly theorized, overly reflexive approaches.” They argue that issues of social justice offer us a chance to “expand our focus from the poor to structural conditions, mechanisms of structural violence and the global forces that create poverty.” They call for the interrogation of power within our pedagogy and within our research. They challenge us to

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think about the role that “pedagogy itself plays in the production of structural inequality” (9). Tall orders! I look to my own discipline for precedents, and room for such a praxis is clearly granted, if not indeed compelled, by the Society for Ethnomusicology’s “Ethical Considerations”:7 Ethnomusicologists acknowledge that the responsibilities of field research extend beyond the fieldwork setting and often involve a long-term commitment to the rights and concerns of field consultants and their communities.

I suggest that ethical,l in this use, implicitly must include issues of social justice. Ethnomusicologists accept their role as educators in both formal and informal teaching and training settings and, in their teaching, endeavor to include information about and discussion of ethical issues, particularly regarding field research.

Here pedagogy might be seen as part of an ethical imperative—we have a mandate to make the knowledge we and our field produce “socially responsive” and, indeed, responsible, wherever the classroom may be, and to remain always aware of the implicitly engaged nature our work. Ethnomusicologists accept the necessity of preparing students and trainees to make informed judgments regarding ethical matters in field situations, by making sure they acquire sufficient knowledge to understand the social, cultural, political, economic, and legal realities of the communities in which they plan to work, as well as the potential impact of the processes and products of their work.

I want to understand this as also encompassing all pedagogical contexts of ethnographers, scholars, and culture brokers, such as our undergraduate lectures, our preparation of students for CSL trips, andd creating and leading such trips. This also opens the possibility for us to be both initiators and allies of service-learning programs within our institutions. Keene and Colligan point out that anthropologists are logical partners for CSL programs because of our shared concerns, our sitess of work, and our rich methods. Among the latter they list methods of participant/observation, experience with the ethics and logistics of negotiating entry into a community that is not our own, the preparation of students and selves for entry in the field, theory and practice in interview techniques, contending with culture

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shock and ethnocentrism, an established body of theory for problematizing difference and diversity and for developing holistic, anti-essentialist, interand meta-disciplinary perspectives on the human condition, the proper recording of and reflection on our engagements in the field (through field notes), careful reflection on the ethics and mechanics of partnership between host and researcher, and the long-term visitor status we often have within communities. Ethnographers, they argue, have the “skills of entry,” but CSL practitioners have developed the “theory of collaboration” that brings together students, faculty, and different publics to put theories of “power and structural inequality into action” (2004, 9). A theory and practice of collaboration is something that has preoccupied ethnographers since the mid-1980s and might be enriched by collaborating with CSL. In the context of this volume, I mean to argue that ethnographers are logical partners for service-learning proponents. They can develop servicelearning components in their work and coursework by partnering with already existing offices and programs that partner beyond the institutional walls of the academy in the service of renewing our educational models. Students “On Fire”: Aftermath, Outcomes, and Impacts I’ll conclude by returning to my own experience with CSL and elaborating upon the one program I helped run at Sarah Lawrence. More experienced by my third trip (and two intervening summers immersed in Nicaragua), I now view the project as an intervention into both the lives of Nicaraguan communities and of the students. The work itself, and its visible impact upon students back at school, is also an intervention into academic practices. I seek to create moments and situations where students and communities come together—moments that can be transformative. The moments of human interaction made possible by a criticall CSL approach have profound effects— creating a sense of solidarity and shared humanity from which a concern for social justice organically emerges in the questions students ask when processing their experience. Comforting answers are not offered; rather, students are urged to grapple with the experience of witnessing, finding their own way through their dilemmas and determining their own responses. In short, one goal is to leave them with a nagging sense of discomfort that will fire their critical thinking and compel them to action. This is the most challenging and personally terrifying thing I have done—for transformative moments can quickly collapse—whether in the classroom or in the field. Some students just shut down. But experience—my own, the students’, other CSL facilitators’—proves this pedagogy’s profound importance. After one of our trips, King called me up excitedly: “Josh in Political Science just phoned!”

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she exclaimed. “He asked me, ‘What the hell happened in Nicaragua? My students are on fire!’” Sarah Lawrence, like most colleges and universities, relies heavily upon the labor of workers contracted through a third party in its food service, physical plant, grounds and maintenance, and safety and security divisions. Increasingly, these workers are migrants; in some cases they are undocumented. As with many U.S. companies, subcontracting enables Sarah Lawrence to elide responsibility for the conditions of the contracted labor. Back at Sarah Lawrence, the students—drawing strength from the community they had built among themselves on the trip and inspired by the community actions they had witnessed—turned their experience into action, founding the “Community School.” Gaining the trust of the workers turned out to be the first step in trying to collaborate. Students organized Saturday soccer games between students and workers before pursuing the project further. With the workers and staff, the students designed a Spanish- and English-language survey to create a needs assessment. Eventually, they began offering reciprocal language classes—they taught English, and workers taught them Spanish—as well as computer classes. They secured workers access to the gym and library, offered life-skills classes (such as banking), and provided transportation and child care when needed. They also brought an American Friends Service Committee lawyer to campus to offer free legal counsel on immigration. Having tapped into college resources and funding to found this collaborative program, the students successfully lobbied the president and later, after a sit-in, the board of trustees, to raise the salaries of minimum-wage workers. The Community School addressed the needs of campus service workers andd bridged the student-worker divide to strengthen the campus community. It provided redress for racialized conflicts between other students and workers that had occurred in the past. The CSL students also successfully pressured the campus food-service provider to switch to fair-trade coffee and tea, a gesture of solidarity toward our partners in Nicaragua, many of whom were coffee growers. Sam Stein, a key student leader in this work, also turned to chronicling it. His post-trip action nourished his academic work, resulting in a published example of the scholarship of engagement (Stein 2005). To varying degrees then, CSL produces a commitment to learning and active engagement in democratic processes as students piece together a vision of the larger order of things. They find within themselves a confident sense of civic, or perhaps ethical, responsibility and are bearing witness to the tools and models for action Nicaraguans have offered them. Students remake their education into a praxiss by intervening in the institutional politics in which they have been complicit and that they, as the educational consumers, have the power to change. They have addressed the local face of the social realities

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of globalization they witnessed in Nicaragua. This activism within the institution enacts civic engagement as praxis. Furthermore, students aid in the empowerment of others and, by their actions, challenge the administration to refashion its vision of the college as an engaged institution. Witnessing is not passive, but active, stressing listening, observation, and humility. It does not end after the experience; rather, this lived understanding seeds a commitment to join in the work for justice wherever and whenever one can, for to turn away would betray the experience and a bit of one’s self. When students claim voice to make changes in their own lives, their view of themselves and their role in the world is altered. For faculty and administrators, witnessing can be an approach that shapes our research and its uses, our teaching, our discipline, the role of the university, and our larger role in community. A pedagogy of witnessing is the space in which we can begin to synthesize varied but aligned concerns: the concerns raised by all the voices at the table of CSL ventures. Most important, this approach creates community— among “us and them,” for some, dissolving the normative divide perpetuated by notions of “us and them.” In an oddly ironic and profoundly humbling way, witnessing the actions and briefly accompanying the lives of the poorest empowers the privileged to join the work for social justice because they have an experiential understanding of the inextricably linked dimensions of their shared lives. The intersections of ethnographic work, CSL, and social justice activism clear a space to craft personal praxes that address power, privilege, and social relevance. Creating such praxes offers an opportunity to reimagine our roles as ethnographers and academics, teachers, faculty, community leaders, and global citizens—in ways that powerfully affirm our place and our disciplines, the university, or our faith communities within the larger world. How far can CSL’s initiatives, grounded in commitments to social justice, be incorporated into a praxis? How can the humanist- or faith-fueled fires that brought each of us to our vocations be a catalyst for improving all our lives? As Ben Linder8 urged us, “Whatever you can do needs to be done, so pick up the tool of your choice, and get started!” Notes 1. This essay has been an iron in a smoldering fire for too long. It was first presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology in 2003 as part of an early attempt by ethnomusicologists to grapple with issues of running classes “in the field.” Next, at UCLA in the spring of 2004 it was part of the second specific conference to take up issues of ethics, impact, advocacy, and responsibility in my discipline. Finally, from a very different field (dissertation fieldwork on classical

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music in Vienna, Austria), I flew in 2004 to the Musicological Society of Australia’s annual meeting to speak at the first national conference that directly took up issues of disciplinary self-critique through the explicit lens of social justice: “Music and Social Justice.” I benefited greatly from conversations with colleagues on each occasion and thank all the organizers as well as Elizabeth MacKinley, Deborah Wong, Jason Stanyek, and Michael Quintero. I wish to thank the students who inspired me during those years I was lucky to land a gig at Sarah Lawrence while awaiting a dissertation fieldwork grant and, of course, Irene King, who first drew a Europhile to Central America. I am grateful to Katey Borland and the participants of the Good Works in Central America conference at Ohio State in May 2012 for allowing a disciplinarily and academically adrift carpenter to sit in on their extraordinary conversations. Finally, I thank the coconspirators, organizers, teachers, musicians, activists, and hosts in Nicaragua, ProNica’s then director Lillian Hall, the communities of Rio Arriba and Achuapa, especially Juan Bravo and Brigido Soza, Philip Montalban, and, finally, Salvador Cardenal, an extraordinary musician, painter, and human being to whose memory I dedicate this essay. I borrow this term from the Witness for Peace program, begun in 1983 to protest U.S. intervention in Nicaragua. I also mean to invoke its religious connotations that call people to live out their beliefs in the decisions and actions of everyday living. Voluntourism is the term used to describe generally the industry and practice of university groups, high school groups, and church groups, heading from the global North to the global South, at great monetary expense, for short-term volunteer work. These experiences amount to a kind of experiential tourism, where participants go in search of a common narrative of transformation that they can then claim as their own. A “been there, done that” approach once meant for encounters with a foreign place and their people predicated on a kind of cultural exoticism has now become reliant upon an economic exoticism, inflected with a self-congratulatory “do good” justification. Or, as priest and educational critic Ivan Illich (1968) presciently challenged back in 1968, “To Hell with Good Intentions.” There is a rich body of literature and critique that puts forth lucid arguments for why this is the case in the United States. On the evolution of the mission of higher education, see Scott 2006. On the recent critiques of the corporatization of higher education, see Press and Washburn 2000 and Giroux 2003. For arguments to repurpose higher education for public good, see Arnowitz 2000; Benson, Harkavy, and Puckett 2007; Kezar, Chambers, and Burkhardt 2005; Shapiro 2005; and Colby et al. 2003, among others. For a critique of the arguments for civic engagement, see Fish 2008. For arguments for reshaping graduate education, see Calhoun 2004 and Woodrow Wilson Foundation 2005. Much fresh thought and experience has been brought to bear on the situation I describe here: Checker and Fishman 2004, Lassiter 2005, Sanford and AngelaAjani 2006, to point out only a few.

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6. For accounts of this process, see Benson, Harkavy, and Puckett 2007 and the more recent, more dire description in Martin 2011. 7. Board of the Society of Ethnomusicology. 1998. Position Statement on Ethical Considerations. http://www.ethnomusicology.org/?EthicsStatement (accessed September 10, 2012). 8. Ben Linder was a young engineer from Oregon who traveled to Nicaragua in the 1980s to help in the civil engineering projects. He was targeted and assassinated by the U.S.-government-backed contras, becoming the only North American or European to be killed from among the many thousands who volunteered there to help in the nation-building projects of the Nicaraguan Revolution (see Kruckewitt 1999).

CHAPTER 9

The Learning of International Service-Learning: Student Reflections Several Years Out Alycia Buenger, Meghan Hensley, Nicole Klimas, and Liza Marks

What do students learn through international service-learning? This chapter provides four student reflections about the Nicaragua Service-Learning Experience (NSLE), Ohio State University’s first international service-learning program. The NSLE began in 2002 as an overdue response to a vision that Monimbó community activist Carlos Centeno and I had had during my 1990–1991 dissertation fieldwork. Rapid urbanization had rendered the indigenous character of the neighborhood all but invisible, and modernizing rhetoric had disparaged the indigenous knowledge and communal practices of traditional house building. We dreamed of building a house, not for anyone to live in, but to activate that knowll edge and reenact those values. Beyond any practical uses it might have, it would stand as a testament to the indigenous character of the community. Returning to the neighborhood in 2001 with the connections to university resources of a tenuretrack professor, I was anxious both to “give back” and to mine the pedagogic potential of this unique community that I loved. Thus, the first iteration of the NSLE emerged, a reverse development project, where indigenous builders taught North American students how to construct a traditional, thatch-roofed house. We repeated the experience in 2004, inviting students in the tourism program at a local university to join us. Over the years the NSLE evolved in response to the interests of a changing body of collaborators—from assisting the rainforest community of Pappaturro while studying conservation with OSU biologist Karen Goodell in 2006 to building

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infrastructure for cultural tourism at the request of our most constant partner, the Monimbó Indigenous Movement, in 2008. Recognizing that the work project was the least defensible aspect of the program, we adopted a focus on fair trade in 2010 and 2011 that allowed us to shift the student-service component to Columbus, Ohio. With the collaboration of Global Galleries director Connie DeJong and Suyen Barahona of Augsburg College’s Center for Global Education in Managua, the NSLE became a study tour, after which students embedded their service to Nicaraguan producers into their ongoing college activities. Each of our models over the past ten years has involved us in contradictions and challenges. Nevertheless, each has provided uniquely valuable experiential learning for our students. The following reflections were submitted at my request from four former students who are two, four, and eight years distant from their experience. I asked them to reflect on what they had learned from participating in the NSLE. Each was emphatic: the experience had not been life changing. Instead, in hindsight, each saw it as an integral part of her emerging life path, something that solidified or clarified her values, a piece of the whole cloth of her identity. Although I would have liked confirmation that the theoretical abstractions I had tormented them with in the classroom were made concrete in the experiential part of the course (because that’s what I’ve been saying I’ve been doing all these years), these students, each in her own way, point to a different kind of learning, something more to do with feelings and values than with facts or theories. Alycia Buenger talks of the important developmental work that being thrown out of one’s element can do. Nicole Klimas describes the way that coming to know “the good” and one’s own part in it involves letting go of old convictions, an ongoing process that is unlikely to be completed in a single class or service experience. Meghan Hensley emphasizes that sociality and relationship are far more important in the long run than the “work” of a service project. Liza Marks identifies the small gestures of sincere connection that bring community into being. I am continually amazed by how often students who had little to no international experience prior to visiting Nicaragua have found ways to return and return again to Latin America. Alycia studied Spanish in Ecuador and anticipates joining a delegation to the Dominican Republic shortly; Meghan and Nicole returned to Masaya to immerse themselves more fully in community life; Liza spent a summer on the Mexican side of the U.S.-Mexican border studying Spanish and border culture. In each group, two or three or five students find their way back to el pueblo latino in order to deepen their learning, fluency, and engagement. And it is in this returning, this continuing drive to experience life beyond our geographic, social, and cultural borders, that I find my reward and inspiration. I am grateful too that these students, my fellow travelers, remain willing to think out loud with me about the meaning and value of international servicelearning beyond the confines of a class, a project, or a semester.

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Alycia Buenger, Rising Senior, OSU—NSLE 2010 “I didn’t know how little I knew myself until I was forced to actually be me.”

I had never traveled outside the United States. I’d had limited travel experience within the States, and I didn’t speak Spanish. In the spring of 2010, I was just finishing my first year as an undergraduate at Ohio State University and still undecided on a major. I wanted to travel—anywhere—and I wanted to learn something and contribute something, though I didn’t know what. Before understanding at all what I was doing, I applied and was accepted for a service-learning trip to Managua, Nicaragua; a ten-week class preceded the two-week stay in-country. The course included an intimidating amount of information on Nicaragua, a country about which I knew very little. I remember reading chapters of material that excited ideas I had never understood during high school. I learned about free trade and fair trade mostly and about world economic issues that challenged my own philosophies and ethical assumptions. “Thiss is the reason I chose college,” I thought. “Thiss is what I have been looking for.” The two-week-long trip to Nicaragua was not what I had imagined, though exactly what I desired. I didn’t expect to feel at home in a place I had never been. I expected the weather to be different, and the people, too, would probably look different and speak differently. A few of these presumptions were correct—I found Nicaragua to be quite different in climate (though similar in temperature to my un-air-conditioned dorm room) and peculiar sometimes. I remember a colony of shacks on the streets of Managua—capital city residents, most of them jobless, lived there. And these lined a main street, crowded with expensive Japanese- and American-made sedan-style vehicles. Never had social inequality seemed so apparent and blatantly visible. Another difference was that everyone there, or almost everyone, spoke only Spanish—a language that sounded nice but was incomprehensible. Some of the food, too, seemed unfamiliar. I remember first spotting white pineapple—“that pineapple looks odd.” d And I recall drinking fruit juices whose names I couldn’t remember, one that tasted a bit like cough medicine and gave me a funny face. Although things were differentt from what I knew, they often felt familiar as well, as though I were at home in a new place. The city landscape was brighter, more polluted, and quieter than Columbus. Walking along the jagged sidewalks and beneath hanging tree branches, I felt happy, as though I was walking down the sidewalk to my home. And later, the rural area reminded me a bit of my hometown—a small farming community in northwest Ohio. The fields of crops and cattle reminded me of my grandparents’ landscape at home.

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What really felt different, and perhaps the least comfortable, was the absence of those comforts from home I too often relied upon—and I don’t mean flush toilets and air-conditioning. I mean language, social norms, and independence. I didn’t like not speaking Spanish in a Spanish-speaking nation; it felt uncomfortable and embarrassing. I could no longer kindly greet someone or offer short conversation; I could only offer a smile—a quick one to ensure that a conversation did not begin. And often I felt like a child, requesting that our translator inquire about a bathroom location or pointing to a picture on the food menu at a restaurant. If I wanted to walk alone somewhere, I could not ask for directions without help. And if I had a question for one of our speakers, it required translation. I was dependent, and that upset me. I felt as though my insides were screaming out to say something more than a “thank you,” more than a shy smile could reveal, but my language handicap prevented that. I felt ignorant, and it was scary and intimidating. Primarily, I had to learn to rely on those Spanish-speaking members of the group—and that was most difficult. My independent self felt demeaned and embarrassed, as an older person feels requiring assistance in a nursing home. But what could I do to instantly change this? I couldn’t learn an entire language, or even enough to communicate, in three days—so maybe reluctantly, this realization helped me to let go of my tight grip on “doing everything for myself.” And letting go of that feeling of embarrassment allowed me to do things I wouldn’t have volunteered for otherwise. I pounded a tortilla at the market—very horribly, the worker said—and that was my communication. I milked a cow, kind of, with the help and kind smile of my host father in Miraflor, and that was my communication. I found another way to communicate in the dance community of Masaya. Our group visited a man named Carlos and his family. Carlos was a traditional Nicaraguan folk dance teacher, and I had 15 years of experience in a kind of American ballet. I was excited to finally be doing something familiar, and our time with Carlos reminded me again of what it felt like to be home. I learned new things, a new and different dance form, but I also felt like I could finally communicate without speaking another language. I recognized this language; we were speaking the same language, really, without verbal confusion. Carlos would demonstrate something, and we would follow his movements. And unlike verbal corrections of form and style, Carlos would watch and demonstrate the movement again, sometimes saying, “Mira!” or “Watch!” We would follow his feet until everyone could be in sync with his movement. This was maybe the closest I felt to being competent while abroad—I understood Carlos’s language. Maybe most importantly and most valuably, the trip forced me out of a comfortable place. I could no longer rely on things like language. I was forced

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to give up what I felt I knew and become a part of things I didn’t. My comfort zone usually limited me to only doing what I felt I had control over. Nicaragua, and my inability to speak its verbal language, changed that—or, rather, it took away my comfort zone and replaced it with a necessity to do things I wouldn’t otherwise do. I left the United States to experience the things I was learning about in the classroom. I expected only to sponge information, to reflect without really altering any part of my already confused thoughts. But this expectation had to change almost immediately—I was forced to learn by doing, by changing myself. I had to adjust myself, my own culture and my own language, to the place I had chosen to visit, to this place that felt familiar though it wasn’t. And that was good for me. Let me clarify, too, that the trip didn’t change my lifee in so many ways, mold me into a better person, or determine my life’s plan. But it became a part of my life, a part of my journey recorded by time. I didn’t clarify any philosophies or solve the ethical issues we had read about and discussed in class. And I still struggle with this sometimes desperate clinging to what feels easy and most comforting. But now I can reflect on an experience where I found success in letting go of this—and continue to fight that comfort grip. This experience and its influence on my life impacted my being, and its teaching became a part of my thinking. Nicaragua became a part of my life, and the things I learned, the people I met—they became a solid memory lodged in my otherwise fluid thoughts. My service-learning trip was directed at connecting one’s experience abroad with action at home, in the United States. After returning to school, following my trip abroad, I chose a major—comparative studies—and a focus on culture and global relationships. I think this choice is due partly to my experiences in Nicaragua; mostly, though, its flexibility and wide-ranging focus allow me to study things that I want to learn about, things that I find important—like fair trade. And I’m considering returning to Nicaragua to do my senior research with one of the fair-trade producers we met during my first stay. I’ve also learned Spanish—not to avoid feeling uncomfortable, because I still feel quite incompetent in my second language. I learned Spanish after feeling desperate to understand it, ignorant to the place and the people I visited. The 14 students who participated in our trip, including myself, started a student organization when we returned—Students for Fair Trade at The Ohio State University. The club aims to increase student awareness of fair trade and the social injustices it aims to correct while also taking action on campus. We started a petition for fair-trade coffee at Ohio State cafés, and we’re helping student organizations place club T-shirt orders with fair-trade companies in Central America. Also encouraging is the support from Ohio

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State’s Consumer Science Department in inserting fair trade into the educational curriculum through sponsoring Ohio State’s first fair-trade retail store on campus, Global Gallery @ OSU. For this I am most excited because we sell products of producers I met in Nicaragua. My first service-learning trip opened many avenues for my journey in social justice, and it remains one of the most helpful experiences of my undergraduate career. Nicole Klimas, MSW, OSU—NSLE 2008 I grew up in a suburban town outside of Cleveland and went to an all-girls Catholic high school. I had my first international experience when I was sixteen, a two-week mission trip to El Salvador with my high school. After this experience, I wanted to travel abroad again, and I was enthusiastic to help people. This led me to apply for a service-learning study-abroad program to Nicaragua in 2008. I was a sophomore, and I had just declared a social work major. I was ready to travel, and I believed that I could change the world. Four years later, I have graduated with a master of social work degree. My values have always aligned with those of social work, which focus on service and social justice. Yet a fundamental component of the profession is empowerment. Throughout my coursework and field experiences I have seen the amazing power of individuals and communities to bring about change within themselves. The key is that change always comes from within. I traveled to Nicaragua on two separate occasions, the first in 2008 for a two-week service-learning trip in Masaya, Nicaragua, following a tenweek course to learn about the country. In 2010, I spent eight weeks split between Masaya and La Concepción. I worked briefly as a research assistant for Dr. Borland and then conducted my own research project, which focused on the extra-educational costs experienced by parents sending children to school. I spent time interviewing families in Masaya about their experience paying for education. As a result of these two trips, my understanding of international service changed dramatically. I will never forget my first day as a sophomore in college in class with Dr. Borland, taking a course to prepare for my first trip to Nicaragua. She assigned the class to read and discuss the Adam Davis (2006) article, “What We Don’t Talk About When We Don’t Talk About Service.” Davis stated that “service” actually widened the inequality gap, as the server had the choice to serve but those receiving service were receiving out of necessity. I was appalled. I was taking this class in order to spend two weeks in Nicaragua on a service-learning study-abroad program. Of course service was good! Why else would I do it? It took me years to really understand the meaning of this article and the lesson Dr. Borland was trying to teach us as a class.

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I went on my first trip to Nicaragua because it was important for me to go on a study-abroad program that had a service component. If I was going to travel in another country, I wanted to give something back. I felt that I was doing everything right. After reading Davis’s article, it still didn’t hit me that my trip might not be creating good. We were going to Nicaragua to build cabins on the property of a hammock cooperative. The cabins would be made of cement, and construction workers had been hired to build them. Yet I was a student coming down for a service project, so I felt that I must really be needed. After a few days, I began to realize that I wasn’t. The students didn’t have any basic skills in construction, so there was little that we could do to assist the builders. Yet everyone was extremely gracious to us. Nobody pointed out the fact that we weren’t needed. What I didn’t understand at the time was the legitimacy that Dr. Borland brought to our group. She had built relationships with the community for decades. Even though I spoke very little Spanish and had no skill to offer, I was treated, as all the students were that she brought down, with wonderful hospitality. I never felt the need to represent myself, as I was represented and legitimized by the group. This was my first eye-opener into Davis’s article. I felt that I was coming down with the best intentions to do good. Yet I realized I wasn’t needed. Why did I believe that I had a great skill to offer that no one else in Nicaragua had? What made me so special? And there it was—the idea that Americans can go into another country and fix the problem. I was raised in the United States, and without even knowing, this belief in my superiority was ingrained in me. It fit with the belief that those in the first world can solve all of the problems in the third world. This is where I started to understand that there is a power dynamic between the global North and the global South. As a U.S. citizen, I inherently had power because I could choose to go to this country and “serve” others. Yet Nicaraguans didn’t choose for me to come down, and they definitely didn’t choose to be one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere. I began to see that this lack of choice was the real inequality that exists between the two regions. If there is an innate inequality between the global North and the global South, could I go down to Nicaragua and actually do good? On my second trip, I believed I could. I was aware of this inequality from my first trip and wanted to grow as an international traveler. The second time around, I took more Spanish classes and enrolled in Spanish school in Nicaragua as well. I stayed eight weeks instead of two weeks. I stayed with families instead of staying in a group at a cooperative. I realized that an outsider could not come to a country and make changes. Change always must come from within. So I decided to not be an outsider. I thought that I could really begin to understand what it was like to be a Nicaraguan.

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I left Ohio with my research questions in hand and thought I could make a difference. I thought that we could set up a long-term connection with Masaya. The goal of our group research with Dr. Borland was to build an ongoing relationship with members of the Monimbó, Masaya, community. We were going to collaborate and come up with a grassroots project that could bring about sustainable economic change to the community without sacrificing culture. Once again, I thought I could do good. Yet our community partners were not inclined to cooperate with one another or provide a clear vision to us of how we might help. They decided that outside funding for projects proved more divisive than unifying for the community. We would have to wait until a “true” need arose. As for me, a few Spanish courses and a few months in Nicaragua did not make me an insider. The longer I stayed, the more I learned how much I didn’t know. Every time I learned something new, there were one hundred things I saw that I didn’t know. I began to reflect on the idea of being an insider. Unless I had been born in a country and grown up with the culture in such a way that it was natural to me, it would be hard to become an insider. While this idea seems obvious now, at the time it was a real discovery. Not only was I not an insider, but I was also a very stereotypical outsider. Most of the time on this trip, I had to represent myself. This is a normal aspect of life, so it seemed like it would be easy. Yet I had difficulty. The first difficulty was that after learning about development theory, coming to Nicaragua as a U.S. college student to do research began to make me feel apprehensive. I could only speak a little Spanish and had very little experience with the culture. I began to feel that I was becoming everything that I did not want to be. I felt that I was perpetuating the “young, female, American volunteer” stereotype. And in a way I was. Somehow, I was still portraying the idea that an American can come down and help those in Nicaragua better than Nicaraguans can help themselves, even though I no longer believed that. I became anxious about this portrayal and began to shy away from discussing my research project or the reason I had come. What I realized is that I had lost my legitimacy. During my first trip to Nicaragua, I had a professor to legitimize me. This second time around, it was just me. I felt that I had to prove myself. I had to show everyone that I wasn’t doing what every other American volunteer was doing. The person I needed to prove this to the most was myself. This has led me to an internal battle. I come back to the same question I had after my first trip: can I go on a trip to Nicaragua and ever bring about good? My first response is yes. The trip brought about good in me. I’ve learned a lot about myself. I’ve learned a lot about what it means to be a global citizen. I wouldn’t be writing this without the travel to Nicaragua.

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I wouldn’t have understood the inequalities between the global North and global South in the same way. For this reason, I feel that international volunteer trips help the volunteer more than they help the host community. Yet I am still unsure if they bring about good for the country that is being helped or if there is any way that they can. Which brings me back to the core value of social work: empowerment. Individuals and communities have an amazing ability to bring about change for themselves. It all starts within. Meghan Hensley, BA, Ohio State—NSLE 2008 My college experience has been a “nontraditional” one. Before attending Ohio State, I had been working my way through school, taking a class here and there at a local community college. When I heard about a short-term service-learning trip to Nicaragua in 2008, I was in my third quarter at Ohio State and had not really been involved in anything at the school outside of my classes because I was working a full-time job and had a long commute. Earlier that year, I had decided to major in history after taking a class on women in Latin America. I heard about the Nicaragua trip from Dr. Borland, who came to one of my classes to recruit last-minute applicants. I was 28 at the time and had never really experienced college life, much less any kind of international trip that would introduce me to people and cultures outside of my own. I decided to apply right away. I ended up travelling to Nicaragua twice. The first time was with a group for ten days to Masaya on a trip that ended up being much more about building relationships through service-learning than building the physical structure we had thought was our task. I went back in the summer of 2010 for 42 days on a combined research trip with two other students. For the first two weeks, I was at a Spanish school in La Concepción. I spent the rest of my time with a family of five in the barrio of Monimbó in Masaya, where I set out to do a short ethnography by following the mother in her daily tasks. Before my initial trip, I thought I had a pretty good concept of how Latin Americans view people of the United States. I had gone through classes focusing on the vast period of pre-Conquest to the present and had sampled history from both South and Central America. I felt that Latin Americans saw us as colonizers filled with corporate greed, that our society was superficial, and that Americans in general were ignorant of the effect that we as mass consumers had on the rest of the world. If I was stereotyping “us” as the big bad wolf, then I was definitely putting “them” in the role of the victim. I thought that they possessed rich culture and history, but, due to the many side effects of globalization, the masses did not have the same opportunities

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as those in more developed countries. I felt the opposite way about the world I was coming from, devoid of culture but overflowing with resources and opportunity. All of these things may have been true to an extent, but I would discover that I could not and should not put people or whole cultures into such cramped boxes. Before the first trip, I had a few apprehensions that stemmed from my position as a student who also worked. I had taken a demotion in order to gain the time I needed for my studies. While still working full-time, I had lost the benefits of my old salaried position, so I had less job security and no vacation time. I was terrified to ask my boss for time off. Luckily, he granted my request. But I remained apprehensive. What was I going to have in common with a group of college students in their early twenties? How would I communicate with Nicaraguans with only two basic Spanish courses under my belt? I would learn in ten short days that my assumptions about the age and diff ferent life experiences of my fellow students and the obstacles that language can bring at times were both of little consequence when it came to building relationships on our trip. During the mornings we worked together to help the Nicaraguan contractors build a cabina meant to help promote cultural tourism at the hammock cooperative, Movimiento Indígena Monimbó (MIM), which had graciously hosted our group. Working and living side by side with my fellow students, I got to know and love them. We wanted to help, but we also realized quickly that our physical service paled in comparison to the rewards that both we and our new, Nicaraguan friends received from our many shared experiences. To my surprise, I bonded with my group so much that even now, almost four years later, I consider many of them my closest friends, no matter how removed we are physically. Perhaps this is a result of our different backgrounds: I was not only learning from my environment—this intense experience of Nicaragua—but also from the perspectives of other students whose outlooks were different from my own. On this first trip, our group became very close with a group of Nicaraguans, particularly the women and their children who came to the co-op for every meal and cooked for our group. These women and their families also taught us about Nicaraguan culture in the afternoons and evenings when we traveled to different barrios, learning about different aspects of indigenous culture. Among the most memorable experiences of this trip was our “vacation” when we trekked to San Juan del Sur for a day at the beach. Accompanying us were our hosts, four Nicaraguan women and five children of varying ages, with whom we had spent the better parts of our days in Masaya. We enjoyed the day at the beach playing soccer and swimming. On our threehour trip back to Masaya, which we refer to now as the “dance party” on the

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bus, we had the time of our lives. It started out with all of us singing pop songs in English that the teenagers knew by heart. They then taught us a few of their songs, line by line. Things got crazy when our driver put on club songs and each of us got up in the aisles, showing off our dance moves. This was a day filled with pure joy. My second trip down was less about forming a college community and more about my immersion in Nicaraguan culture. During the first two weeks, I have to admit that I felt a little like a recluse in a Spanish school that was filled with mostly English-speaking people. I spent this time with two other students from the first trip. My teachers were Nicaraguan, but they left after the lessons were over at noon, and the rest of the days were filled with tourist-like activities. The three of us longed to feel a part of the community as we had on our first visit. When we set off for Masaya, where Dr. Borland had found homestays for each of us, we were all a little scared to be on our own without being fluent in Spanish; but I hoped I would be able to really get to know the family I was staying with nonetheless. I was placed with a family who lived in Monimbó, just steps away from the family that had cooked for us on the first trip. The household was comprised of a mother and father whose sole source of income at the time was selling Coca-Cola and beans and rice from their home, as they were too ill with diabetes to work. Three of their daughters still lived at home. The oldest was in her second year at university studying psychiatry, the middle in her first for nursing, and the youngest in her second-to-last year of secondary school. I had initially thought that I would solely focus on “A Day in the Life” of one woman, which I could record through observation and interviews. Instead, I spent my time having fragmented conversations about commonalties between here and there and learning through daily life. I formed equally close bonds with every person in the house. Everyone in the family was instantly protective of me. As a white girl with blond hair and blue eyes, I stood out. They did not want me to go anywhere by myself. As the family had no expendable income, we mostly spent time at home. I frequently joked with the girls, calling them “my little mothers.” We went to market to get food almost every day and watched a lot of novellas and the World Cup, played cards, and went to nightly dance practice. Still, compared to my first trip, which had been a whirlwind of activity, I was surprised by the amount of downtime in ordinary barrio life. By the end of the second trip, I knew that I had found another family in Nicaragua. On my last night, we sat around and talked, laughed, and cried. They all assured me that their home would always be my home too. It was then that I realized that my experiences abroad were really less about the

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lofty goals of solving huge world problems and more about an intercambio, an exchange of ideas and moving away from stereotypes of difference to a realization that personal relationships are the core of learning, growth, and cultural connectivity. I now realize that my role in service is directly connected to the relationships that I maintain with my friends in Central America. They are not victims. They never viewed me as a colonizer. The parents of my family in Nicaragua have the same hopes for their daughters that my parents have for me. My parents did not go to college and neither did theirs. The daughters, while living in one of the poorest countries in the hemisphere, aspire to make something of themselves through education. My role is not to fix their problems through short-term service but to support these young women as if they were my sisters, encouraging them as they accomplish goals throughout their lives. They, not the North American volunteer, are responsible for changing the future of their country. Liza Marks, BA, Miami University, MSW Student at Simmons—NSLE 2004 In June 2004, as a student at The Ohio State University–Newark, I participated in a two-week service-learning trip to Nicaragua. The professor who led the trip and its preliminary course, Dr. Borland, had existing ties to the cooperative that hosted us. The trust and connection she had established through her relationships helped create an atmosphere in which I could have the overwhelmingly positive and meaningful experiences that I did. In fact, this trip strongly influenced how I understand human relationships. Ultimately, insights I had as a result of my brief time in Nicaragua impacted my professional identity as a student of social work. The spring of my eighteenth year was an awkward time of life, difficult and strange but full of potential. I was attending my first quarter at OSU–N, exploring a political science major while I worked two jobs (serving food at a college cafeteria and canvassing for John Kerry, futilely). I was just getting unstuck after almost a year of spinning my wheels after my high school graduation. Most of my spare time was spent listening to the Flaming Lips, drinking Coors Light from a drive-through that never checked my ID, and hanging out at my apartment. I was unhappy and confused more often than not, but through all of that I was becoming a person I can now usually be proud of. The course I took with Dr. Borland was a sort of left-wing Nicaraguafocused survey of concepts in international development, colonialism, and modern Latin American history. At the end of the course, the 12 or so of

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us traveled to Nicaragua, where we helped build two chozass (a type of house with a construction style straightforward-enough that we could grasp it). My thinking about what that trip meant for me has evolved over time, but one thing I saw right away when we returned was that I wanted to go back. I missed eating perfectly-ripe sun-warmed mangos off the ground. I missed the adventure of being in a different place. I missed feeling the sun on my skin all day long while we worked outside, and I missed being surrounded by some of the most beautiful men I’d ever seen. But more than any of these things, I missed something so small it almost seems like it should have been insignificant: I missed being touched gently on the arm when people spoke to me. I spoke almost no Spanish at the time, so it wasn’t the warmth of what our hosts said (although they were remarkably patient in explaining things slowly with lots of hand gestures). It was that single cultural habit of using a very kind and subtle gesture of personal closeness in normal conversation. I was out of place in Nicaragua, but I didn’t feel out of place when someone I hardly knew looked me in the eye and touched me on the arm while they said something in Spanish I couldn’t understand the first word of. I felt real. When I came home to Newark, I remember going on a shopping trip to the Wal-Mart across the street. For the very first time, I noticed that I went through the entire shopping trip without making more than momentary, accidental eye contact with anyone. I went home and looked out the window of my apartment on a world of people who seemed to avoid each other. Regular conversations I had felt guarded and distant without that touch on the arm and all the feelings I had to go along with it. I returned to the same midwestern world of above-average friendliness that I had left, but I felt more alone. I used to take anonymity for granted, carefully tiptoeing around the humanity in those with whom I experience shallow, perfunctory relationships. Modern life seems to provide lots of these—with people who are strangers even if I see them every time I check out at the grocery store or go through the turnstile at the train station. In a way it sometimes seems like a faux pas to interact beyond absolute necessity with people in these settings. After all, why bother someone who is just trying to do his or her job or get through the day? It was more comfortable to stay in my own separate bubble and let everybody else stay in theirs. I no longer feel this way (although the habit of self-insulation persists sometimes). Now I attempt to break through that formal anonymity, even in very small ways like making polite eye contact with strangers as we pass on the street. The seed of this change in my own approach to life was planted in Nicaragua. For me, one of the most important benefits I got from service-learning in Nicaragua was that it allowed me to understand my own culture from a new

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angle. Experiencing a place that was so different opened my eyes for the first time to the realization that normality is socially constructed. And thanks to Dr. Borland’s culturally-competent guidance, I was able to see my experiences through a lens that was somewhat self-aware. I was prepped to think about culture and history and personal experience all at the same time, or at least begin to learn how to do this. It often seems this way to me—everything I learn, I learn incrementally. So while the seed of attempting more authentic relationships in my daily life was planted right away, it took some time for it to take root. In the years since then, I’ve come to believe that living among millions of people while rarely truly getting to know them—especially if they are outside familiar group boundaries—undermines the potential to realize Ubuntu in daily life. (In fact, I didn’t learn about the concept of Ubuntu, an African philosophy about how humanity is a shared experience, until about three years ago. So in Nicaragua I didn’t have this perfect vocabulary word to describe what I was feeling.) This pervasive anonymity makes human interactions feel cheap when they should be holy. I imagine everybody has his or her own threshold for tolerating this—I have my limits for widening my social net and still feeling like a real person who belongs in a real place. I don’t want to overgeneralize about cultural practices. I also don’t mean to suggest that my experience of U.S. culture as often impersonal and alienating is due to some inherent national flaw. One of the things I love about my country is how enormous it is—it is physically vast, spanning 50 unique states, and it is home to hundreds of millions of unique people belonging to a breathtaking diversity of cultural groups. However, I wonder if our hugeness is the root of this phenomenon—this physical closeness and personal farness—as if the enormity of our social life were so overwhelming it became too hard and too time-consuming to value each person individually. As a social work student living on the fringe of a metropolis, these issues are very important to me. Fundamentally, my goal is to facilitate moments of genuine human connection in a world where such connection is uncommon at best. I saw how powerful connection could be during my internship at a group treatment program for poor women in recovery from addiction. I had the privilege of facilitating group therapy and bearing witness to the intensity and the healing that can take place through connection. Those women brought it all together for me, after all those years—what I had felt when I was 18 and brokenhearted that no one in the United States touched me on the arm. Most or all of the clients I worked with had at some point been treated by another person as if they were a thing—a thing to be used, a thing to absorb someone else’s rage and hurt, or a thing to be ignored.

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Connecting with other women in a group was a way to begin to heal from those experiences. Although I don’t wish to draw too fine a distinction between abuse and impersonal social interactions, I see them as essentially on a spectrum— where on one end we actively deny or disrespect another person’s humanness, and on the other end we simply don’t have the capacity to engage it. There is a feeling of effacement in blatant mistreatment, surely. But it’s also there in small interactions that leave me feeling invisible—when I visit a doctor, for instance, who doesn’t really listen to my complaint. I like to assume that such people are just overtired, stretched beyond their ability to truly be present with me. I have had days when I felt too burdened by my own troubles to treat clients—or anyone—with the kindness and attention I believe they are entitled to. After all, offering those things to another person is a difficult task, especially in an enormous world. It requires a sort of spiritual exertion to be fully present for someone else, and it can feel a little risky since there is no guarantee of reciprocation. That has been one of the major challenges for me as a budding social worker—developing the capacity to love and connect with others in an authentic way. This has to happen not just when I’m in a good mood but, ideally, all of the time. I expect I will struggle with it my whole career because people are complex and challenging as a rule. (This applies to the social workers no less than the clients.) My desire to take on that challenge evolved over time, as I accumulated experiences that helped me feel more or less equipped for it. I received unearned privilege that made it possible for me to go to college and ultimately to graduate school. I had family experiences that taught me how to empathize with other people’s struggles and allowed me to witness spiritual strength. And the service-learning trip to Nicaragua taught me other things, like how to appreciate the meaning of personal warmth, eye contact, a touch on the elbow, and a welcoming community. The process of becoming who I am took place, and is still taking place, in the context of all of my experiences. Between and throughout the immediate moments—the increments of two weeks in Nicaragua, four years in college, three years working, and two years in graduate school, seven years with my partner—I need to reflect and try to integrate the different parts. Nicaragua taught me that, too—that I can get the most out of my experiences, right down to the small ones like the feeling of a touch on my arm, when I continue to think about them and try to understand how they fit into who I am.

Honduras

CHAPTER 10

In Search of Sustainable Community Development through Practice: A Sustainable Potable Water Project in Colinas de Suiza, Honduras David R. Muñoz

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass the world is too full to talk about. —Rumi

Introduction For decades engineering students and professional engineers have attempted to assist communities around the world to achieve sustainable equilibrium1. At Colorado School of Mines, my colleagues and I established an interdisciplinary humanitarian engineering (HE) minor program that incorporates Sustainable Community Development (SCD) practices. This chapter evaluates the lessons learned and challenges faced over an eight-year span of an HE potable water project in Colinas de Suiza, Honduras.2 Through sharing our practical design and implementation experiences, we have formed a growing understanding of those lessons and challenges while providing rich learning experiences for our students. Over the past eight years, more than 50 senior-level and graduate engineering students have travelled to Honduras for one to six weeks to work and interact with the

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people of Colinas de Suiza, in addition to two other smaller villages within the municipality. While this project was ongoing, we were in the midst of developing an undergraduate minor to help prepare students interested in engineering careers in the development field. This project began in April 2003 following a reception for my aunt and uncle’s fiftieth wedding anniversary in Villanueva, Honduras. I met the mayor of Villanueva and asked if he had any projects that I could work on with my engineering students. He told me about Colinas de Suiza, a community within the municipality of Villanueva located about six miles from his office. My father was born and raised in Villanueva, located in northern Honduras ten miles south of the major city of San Pedro Sula. Though I had no direct relatives living in Colinas de Suiza, this project also offered me the opportunity to be present in Honduras and better understand my familial roots. Now home to 1,300 families (8,000 to 10,000 people), Colinas de Suiza was one of two communities established to accept refugees following Hurricane Mitch (October 1998). The massive storm stalled over all of Honduras (and portions of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua). Mitch left 6,500 dead in Honduras alone, up to 11,000 missing, 1.5 million people homeless, and estimated property losses of $4 billion (NOAA Report). In order to help mitigate the post-storm trauma to thousands of displaced families, the Honduran federal government quickly parceled 1,750 lots from a 100-acre, privately donated tract of land located in Villanueva. Unfortunately, the only improvements they could afford were graded roads. Electricity was added in 2005. Three elementary schools were built during the past decade, along with a kindergarten. For those who can afford to buy the uniforms, books, and school supplies, education is generally available in Colinas de Suiza to children for grades one through six. The families of children seeking higher education incur additional transportation costs as their children must travel a mile to the community of Dos Caminos or six miles by private bus to Villanueva. Other basic needs, including potable water and long-term sanitation, were not met. The villagers compensated for the lack of running water by collecting rainwater from their roofs during the rainy season or, much more costly, purchasing water from local entrepreneurs who drew from the municipal well, delivered it by truck, and sold it for $1.65 per 55-gallon barrel. From early assessment, we learned that, during the dry season, the cost of this truck delivery water was estimated to be one-third to one-half of their incomes. The average wage is $6.00–8.00 per day for the typical laborer who lives in Colinas de Suiza, and many work year-round in one of the local maquilas3, seasonally cutting sugar cane, or periodically in local construction. Some single mothers, who had very limited time available to work because they were caring for their small children, could little afford to purchase this more expensive water. These women relied on the generosity of their neighbors or

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the infrequent, albeit free, water trucks supplied by a local coffee company or the municipality. Community Leadership As is typical for villages throughout Honduras, the citizens of Colinas de Suiza democratically elect their local leaders and representatives. Because of its size, the community of Colinas de Suiza had 12 community representatives (four from each of the three sectors). Francisco Masariego has served as president of the patronato4 for the entire time that we have worked on the water project. The president of the patronato provides local leadership and represents the community to the municipality and outside world. We have also worked with three mayors of Villanueva since the project’s inception, from both of the two major political parties, the Liberal and the National. The project was initiated with Jose Felipe Borgas. He served as mayor with the Liberal Party through 2004. The second mayor we worked with was Antonieta Botto. Antonieta is a wealthy landowner whose family came from Palestine in one of the immigration waves of the early twentieth century. She is a member of the National Party and works hard to provide aid to the poor. She helped provide lodging for our student teams by offering her nearly completed new home and later renting a house for us (and other groups of people who came from the United States to work on various projects throughout the municipality). The third mayor, in office at the time of this writing, is Dr. Walter Perdomo. Dr. Perdomo is a family physician from the Liberal Party who was quite helpful in directing municipal funds and resources to complete the water project in Colinas de Suiza. Another significant leader was Licenciado Jose Cecilio Santos Pacheco, the director of the Water and Sanitation Department in Villanueva under Antonieta Botto. Cecilio was helpful in communicating the day-to-day challenges that they faced during the installation phase of the project. Project Timeline The following is a chronological account of our experiences in Colinas de Suiza. 2004–2005 In the summer of 2004, I learned about a new program called Mondialogo, sponsored by Daimler-Chrysler and UNESCO, designed to bring engineering students from the affluentt5 world together with those from the economically

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poorr world to work on projects of common interest. I had already committed to work with the mayor of Villanueva, so I began to search for a Honduran university with an engineering program with whom we could work and learned about a San Pedro Sula extension of a private school called Universidad Tecnologica Centroamericana (UNITEC). That fall, I traveled for one week with several senior-level engineering students (including one graduate student) to meet with students and faculty at UNITEC and to assess the project in Colinas de Suiza. Many of the UNITEC students and a few of the Mines students were bilingual. The students were combined in teams of two or three to overcome the language barrier for the monolingual students. After a short meeting with a few hundred villagers in one of the local school rooms, the students fanned out into the village and went door-to-door with a questionnaire to determine the most important needs that residents faced. We also used this week to meet with officials at the UNITEC campus and at the municipalityy6 of Villanueva, including those at the Water and Sanitation Department. This team produced a proposal for the Mondialogo Engineering Award competition that was selected for an award. We were invited to a ceremony in Berlin and provided project funds and an opportunity to meet students and faculty doing similar work around the globe. From the initial assessment, we learned that potable water was the primary concern for the local people. Therefore, both the Colorado School of Mines (CSM) and UNITEC senior design teams produced reports describing a preliminary design for a potable water system. Their designs called for drilling a third well, to a depth of four hundred feet in the existing aquifer, reflecting the desire of the Water and Sanitation Department personnel. As is typical in this area, water would be pumped from the well to a water storage tank located at the highest point in the village and then distributed by gravity to each home. We also took samples of the water drawn from one of the existing wells and from trucks that were used to deliver water at a cost to the local villagers. We learned that the contaminants in the water drawn from the wells were within the limits suggested by both the World Health Organization (WHO) and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). However, the water drawn from the truck was heavily contaminated with coliform levels (2,000 counts/ ml) greatly exceeding those standards (2 counts/ml). The water testing was completed by our Honduran university partners, as they had access to the required laboratory facilities. The following project goals were developed after the first assessment visit. 1. Reduce the cost of water for local families, so they could meet their basic needs, allow some families to send their children to school beyond the sixth grade, and generally improve community health.

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2. Design and implement gray-water treatment systems and composting toilets to provide a sustainable alternative to the latrines. 3. Enhance the educational experience for engineering students interested in the development field. We had learned that projects required both technical engineering skills and an enhanced sensitivity to cultural and societal differences to achieve sustainability. This need was developed after reading about previous failed humanitarian efforts (Freire [1970] 2000; Reiff 2002) and reinforced after speaking in 2008 with Maury Albertson, one of the cofounders of the Peace Corps, when he indicated that a study had been done to verify the success of potable water projects they had undertaken decades before. The result was that less than 15 percent were still functional. Though technically sound, missing were the local participation, sociocultural acceptance, and the engagement of local people through education on how to maintain the systems. 2005–2006 A second senior design team was formed to develop a detailed budget, which required an accurate three-dimensional surface map of the village. In addition, questions were raised about the 400-foot well. The two existing wells in the field were 250 feet deep but were beginning to draw large quantities of sand with the water (the reason that the municipal personnel wanted a deeper well). The team became concerned about the possibility of piercing bedrock and draining the aquifer for all users. Therefore, in addition to creating surface maps using global positioning systems (GPS), student teams also acquired electrical resistivity geophysical measurements, which resulted in subterranean maps. We learned from these measurements that the aquifer was a continuous media to the 400-foot depth. We could therefore endorse the drilling of the 400-foot well. Unfortunately, we also discovered, after returning from that trip, that the GPS data had disappeared when the GPS systems lost battery power. This was a hard lesson that required a third visit to reacquire these critical surface measurements and determine an accurate budget. By this time we began to understand a reasonable breakdown of the responsibilities of each stakeholder. It made sense for the municipality, through their Water and Sanitation Department, to be responsible for financing the well, the pump, and the labor to install and maintain the water supply and distribution lines. They were already providing a similar service to other communities throughout the municipality. Likewise it made sense for the people of Colinas de Suiza to be responsible for the water tank. This meant financing it, selecting a contractor, and approving the design and materials selection.

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At first the people did not generally accept the idea of their financing anything. Many had assumed that the gringoss coming to help would provide everything. When asked about their participation, the people seemed much more amenable to providing manual labor in digging ditches and participating in the distribution-pipe burial. However, the community patronato agreed that it was important for the people to participate with both their money and their labor. Therefore, they decided that the people would be responsible for financing the water tank. After going out for several bids and discussing several material options, they decided on a welded steel water tank that could store one day’s supply for the village. They considered that 10 percent of the families were single mothers and could not afford to contribute. Dividing by the number of families they thought could afford to pay yielded a quantity of $125.00 per family, the equivalent of 10 to 20 days’ work. Community members also contributed labor to dig ditches and help bury the water distribution pipe. In return each family would be able to connect with the main water line; each was given 30 feet of half-inch PVC pipe and a valve to make the connection. 2006–2007 I travelled to Colinas de Suiza with two students from the third senior design team. In one long weekend, we were able to reacquire all of the surface data that had been lost. These data were then used to develop a topographical map of the village, which was then used in a program called WaterCAD that allowed us to determine an appropriate pipe layout design for both the water supply and distribution lines. From this we could determine the dimensions of pipe and number of fittings needed. This resulted in a more detailed project budget and proposal that was later submitted to various potential funding agencies. I returned to Honduras with my father late that spring to visit family. While there, I met with the people of Colinas de Suiza to inform them of the activities on the project since our last visit. By this time, the people’s hope for water was beginning to peak. However, I noticed sour faces on some in the audience. I later asked the patronato president, Francisco, why they appeared upset, and he related that a mayoral candidate had learned that we were encouraging the community to financially support the water tank. The community leaders had set up a special account in a local bank to receive deposits for the water tank fund. The candidate had told many people to be wary of the gringoss taking the money for other purposes. These accusations arose in spite of the fact that no one other than the community leaders had access to the account. The project and community leadership wanted the

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people to be owners (dueños) s of this portion of the design. The only active part that we had played in the water tank design was to verify that they had specified the proper electrodes in the steel welding process and also encourage them to paint the inside of the tank with an epoxy based paint and the outside with an anticorrosive paint to maximize the tank life. It was clear that I, an engineer, was in over my head dealing with the sociopolitical intricacies of this issue. I had observed that communication was a challenge, even for the local patronato committee, let alone foreigners from the outside. Therefore, I asked an anthropologist colleague, Dr. Kay Godel-Gengenbach, to accompany me to Colinas de Suiza later that summer to focus on improving communication by holding smaller group meetings around the village. Summer 2007 A graduate student from Argentina accompanied Dr. Gengenbach and me to Colinas de Suiza. We met with nine small groups and learned a great deal. For example, we learned about the experience that sector three (the sector located the farthest from the main road and the last to be populated) had had with the last major community project. The government workers had run out of utility poles before they completed electrifying their sector, so they hung the wire on large tree limbs. However, the wires were strung to a lower height than that of conventional utility poles, which prevented larger delivery trucks from reaching the homes located in these back portions of the village. The people living in this area consistently said, “We know that you will run out of pipe before you get back to our part of the village. Why should we support this water project? We always get left out!” In addition to learning about their doubts and frustrations, we also learned about their dreams for the future. One tangible benefit from these meetings was the growth of trust. Following that trip, patronato president Francisco reported an increase in the deposits for the water tank bank account. At this point I worked with students to develop a number of proposals for funding of the water system. For example, in the small group meetings we learned that many Colinas de Suiza residents were employed with maquilas for Fruit of the Loom (owned by Berkshire Hathaway), Hanes underwear (owned by Sara Lee), and others. We sent proposals to their U.S. offices to make a case for infrastructure support for Colinas de Suiza. These companies are attracted to the Villanueva area in part because it is a tax-free zone. But without a sufficient tax base, the municipalities cannot afford to install needed infrastructure for communities near Colinas de Suiza that grow as a result of the jobs promised by the maquilas. Therefore, infrastructure development in

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Honduras proceeds very slowly and has become dependent on the municipalities’ ability to secure loans or grants from entities like the World Bank or international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Unfortunately, our proposals to these companies failed. The municipality has been successful in securing loans and grants from international agencies for other communities within the municipality. However, I was never privy to the specific uses of these funds. CSM alumni proved more successful. One alumnus had contacted me about using his new book he had written on plastic pipe as a text for one of our engineering courses. I told him it would make a good reference book, especially on our HE projects. I then told him about the need for plastic pipe at our Honduras project. He was well connected to the Plastic Pipe and Fittings Association (PPFA) and submitted a proposal to their board for an in-kind donation. The PPFA board agreed to support the project, and 11 member companies donated 72 tons of plastic pipe and fittings. With this donation, we were able to leverage a grant from Food for the Poor, a Floridabased nonprofit focusing on Latin America that allowed us to collect and ship the entire quantity of pipe to Puerto Cortes, Honduras. A Honduran nonprofit called CEPUDO (our original connection to Food for the Poor) received the pipe and fittings in Puerto Cortes, navigated the customs process, and then handed the pipe over to officials at the Water and Sanitation Department in Villanueva. 2007–2008 I initiated a new senior student design team to consider the challenges associated with sanitation. We travelled to Colinas de Suiza in December 2007 to begin laying the donated pipe and identifying families interested in testing student designs for gray-water and composting-toilet systems. The municipality provided a backhoe to help dig the trenches for the larger pipe, and the now engaged community came out to help cover up the pipe after it had been laid and dig ditches for the secondary two-inch pipelines. The senior design team returned to Colinas de Suiza in March 2008 to implement the gray-water systems and composting toilets they had designed. During that trip we observed that the people were still working with the municipality backhoe to finish burying the pipe. In fact, the process of laying the water distribution pipe required six months to complete. These projects necessarily take time and exist on their own schedule that is independent of the academic schedule. Because we engage the community from the outset, we are dependent on the local people’s schedule. Limitations in their financial capacity and, in the same way, their time available to perform physical

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work are largely independent of when teams of students and faculty can be present. Some within the village may become frustrated with the length of time to complete the overall project. The pipe in their portion of the village may have been laid months or even years ago, and yet the system, because of its size and expense, will not work at all until the key features (water tank, well, 3-kilometer supply line, and 45 kilometers of distribution lines) are completed. 2008–2011 During the next three years, the project continued but at a reduced pace. The world was on an economic slowdown. In late 2008, President Mel Zelaya (of the Liberal Party) increased the minimum wage by 60 percent. This had an immediate impact on the cost of business in Honduras. Many maquilas closed, which put many people out of work. Savings for the water tank dried up. Then, in June 2009, Zelaya was ousted in a coup. The Organization of American States (OAS) condemned the coup, as did Europe and most of the rest of the world. Economic aid to Honduras plummeted, and an already diff ficult economic situation became dire, seemingly overnight. The municipality of Villanueva felt the pinch as did all of Honduras. But even in this stressed environment, local innovation and expertise provided the critical resources to complete the projects, although at a slower pace. By summer 2011, the water tank was completed, and the pump was installed in the well. Water was flowing, but there was a nagging problem of coupling breaks in the six-inch-diameter (three-kilometer-long) water supply line leading from the pump discharge to the water tank (three hundred feet above). Patronato president Francisco requested that I locate a pressure-sensing relief valve and bring it with me on my next trip. We installed it near the pump discharge. However, the pipe couplings were failing at pressures far below the pressure limits for the valve. I mentioned these challenges to a cousin who is the lead agricultural engineer at the local sugar cane plantation, and he connected me with a highly experienced local water engineer. The engineer was also baffled by the problem. He suggested using a series of air-release valves evenly distributed along the supply line. The water and sanitation workers consequently installed ten of these air-release valves. Additionally, I sent one of the broken couplings to a lab for analysis, and the lab report indicated that not enough glue had been used to support the joint. These were small, donated couplings designed for application in the United States, where it is customary to glue all of the couplings in the entire length of pipe (over the course of days) and, after the glue has had time to

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cure in air, lay the entire length of pipe into the ditch and cover it with dirt. Unfortunately, this process is not possible in Honduras, as pipe left unburied even overnight would be gone the next morning and likely sold for scrap. Typically, Honduran workers glued the joints in the ditch and immediately buried it as they moved along. After replacing several dozen failed couplings, the Water and Sanitation foreman (Juan Pablo Avila) and workers developed their own solution. They purchased several lengths of six-inch pipe and cut them into two-and-a-half-foot lengths. They heated several gallons of transformer oil in a 55-gallon drum, dipped one end of the short pipe into the hot oil until it became soft, then pushed one end of an unheated pipe into the end of the softened pipe, which flared the end. They did the same thing to the opposite end of the short pipe to complete the coupling. This provided a much larger coupling that yielded more than twice the glued surface area for each joint. The combination of the air-release valves and the Honduran couplings eliminated the supply line leaks. Challenges The water system significantly reduces a family’s water cost by an estimated factor of ten when compared with the cost of purchasing water from a truck. However, our project forced the water truck drivers/workers to find other employment. We estimated four to six families living within Colinas de Suiza benefitted from these businesses. However, I also became aware of outside financial interests in the water business. For example, an engineer working with my cousin sold water and was complaining about a gringo who helped the people of Colinas de Suiza. I have estimated that the potential profit from this water delivery business overall approaches $80,000 per month. This economic incentive, when combined with frustration over the length of time that this project has required, accounts for several instances of vandalism/ sabotage against the Colinas de Suiza water system. In one case, 25 manual pressure-control valves were clandestinely cut out of the water distribution line. These had been protected by substantial brick and concrete enclosures, built by the Water and Sanitation Department. In one meeting with residents of Sector 3, I voiced my frustration to the people about the stolen valves, and one man spoke up, admitting that he had taken one of the valves, and wondered if it was okay to return it. He received an immediate ovation from the remainder of the meeting attendees. Another event involved the destruction of the large 12-inch pipe at the submersible pump discharge at the wellhead. Already, 50 feet of copper cable used to carry electrical current from the power line to the pump had been stolen and replaced. Before the power to the pump was introduced, a thief

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entered the concertina-wired well enclosure and broke through the steelreinforced concrete column that contained the 12-inch plastic pipe as it exited the well. The thief then built a fire next to the hole in the concrete, softened the plastic pipe enough to open it and cut the copper wire, and again stole the wire leading to the utility pole. Following this event, the municipality paid one of the patronato members to guard the pump site. The final act of vandalism occurred after the air-release valves were installed. Below each automatic air-release valve, a manual valve was installed to allow for future maintenance. Someone closed several of the manual valves one night, which disarmed the automatic air-release valves and caused other coupling failures. This act required a technical understanding of very specific water system components. It’s clear that the sustainable solution to vandalism is not simply greater policing. Instead, alternative forms of commerce for those who have relied on the water delivery business must develop. One option might be collecting and selling human urine, a valuable product of the composting or ecotoilet when used as liquid fertilizer concentrate. A local sugar cane plantation currently purchases granular urea fertilizer and might be a potential buyer. But for this idea to be accepted the ecotoilet and the urine/fecal separation concept upon which it is based must be accepted. In any case, we believe that the community members must decide for themselves what future direction they will take. Sustainable Community Development Assessment To assess this project, I turned to the life-cycle approach defined in McConville and Mihelcic (2007) and McConville (2006). Jennifer R. McConville and James R. Mihelcic utilize a cross-matrix approach for project assessment with two dimensions: project life cycle and sustainable development. The following elements are used within the project life-cycle dimension: ● ● ● ● ●

needs assessment conceptual designs and feasibility design and action planning implementation operation and maintenance

Elements used within the sustainable development dimension included the triple bottom line of social, economic, and environmental sustainability. McConville and Mihelcic further divide the social sustainability component into three separate parts.

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Table 10.1 Results of the Colinas de Suiza project evaluation using the McConville criteria (9) Sustainability Factors Life Stages

Needs Assessment Conceptual Designs and Feasibility Design and Action Planning Implementation Operation and Maintenance Sum Fractional Score (1.0 is highest)

● ● ●

Sociocultural Community Political Economic Environmental Respect Participation Cohesion Sustainability Sustainability

Sum

Fractional Score

2

3

2

4

2

13

0.65

2

2

2

3

3

12

0.6

3

3

1

3

2

12

0.6

3

4

3

2

2

14

0.7

3

3

2

3

2

13

0.65

13

15

10

15

11

64

Overall

0.65

0.75

0.5

0.75

0.55

 Overall

0.64

sociocultural respect community participation political cohesion

I developed a matrix of these two dimensions for the Colinas de Suiza water project. I assessed each element using rubrics developed by McConville (2006) and qualitatively scored them using a 0–4 Lykert scale, where 0 refers to a “poor evaluation” and 4 refers to an “excellent evaluation.” Since there are five life-cycle stages and five sustainability pillars considered, there are 20 points possible for each two-dimensional element. Discussion Table 1 provides a baseline from which further development within Colinas de Suiza and other projects can be compared. The lower scores occurred in the political cohesion, sociocultural respect, and community participation categories over a few of the design-life stages. Plans are in place to return to Colinas de Suiza to carry out a much more detailed community development project involving the initiation of a hundred or so circles of trust. A Honduran expert in circle facilitation will be engaged to train circle facilitators to help initiate the circle development process. Establishing strong relationships between the student engineers and the villagers is important for both. Beneficiaries must become involved in the

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project from its inception and sustain their commitment through to its end. It is their community that will have to develop and then fully maintain future applied technologies. As an engineering faculty member, I sought to create a culture of sociocultural sensitivity, acceptance, and appreciation of community for the engineering students through interaction with the beneficiaries (see also Munoz 2006). This kind of reciprocity necessitates appreciating a complicated reality comprised of political, social, historical, institutional, and technological dynamics by engaging with one another. However, because of the students’ limited time in-country, and their demanding engineering sciences curriculum, the interactional opportunities necessary for a robust participatory project are limited. Fortunately, many students have benefitted from multiple visits, allowing additional opportunities for community members to develop a sense of trust with our team. Timing can also be a problem if the funds or materials to implement the project do not coincide with rigid academic schedules. For instance, the pipe did not arrive in Honduras until six months after the water-system designers graduated. Therefore, a subsequent design team began the water system’s implementation phase while also initiating the project’s second phase, composting-toilet and graywater system designs. I believe, however, that students develop an attachment and orientation to these types of service projects and carry this knowledge and desire into their professional careers. Evidence of Benefit to Students Many students who have participated in the Colinas de Suiza project have continued working toward careers in development. For instance, one graduate completed an integrated MS in civil engineering and Peace Corp experience through Michigan Tech University. Another graduate is leading fundraising efforts for the nonprofit Water for People. Yet another graduate recently contacted me for the latest on the Colinas Water Project status so that he could update his resume for a development job in Africa that his firm was bidding on. Below is a comment that one student has provided from a reflection of his experiences in Colinas de Suiza. On a personal level, I was struck by the generosity and indefatigable spirit of the community residents—and by my own naiveté—assuming that poverty implies unhappiness. I realized that I had carried the misconception that people in poverty lead emotionally stunted lives because their energy is constantly focused on overcoming economic hardship. However, many residents of Colinas de Suiza do not consider themselves impoverished. While I perceived some people’s scrap

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aluminum and cardboard dwellings to be shacks, these structures were homes— places to begin families and to nurture bonds as strong as those in my own family. On a professional level, I realized that I do have the potential to effect positive change in the world. It is not simply a matter of what I do, but also what I don’t do. Now I study Building-Systems Engineering and sustainable building design. My experience working in Central America has altered the way I approach engineering design challenges. I try to move through the process holistically, taking into account the cultural and social differences that shape engineering practice. For example, many renewable energy applications that I study are available exclusively to people with enough money to make a considerable capital investment. By working to develop renewable energy technologies without striving to make them available to the majority of the world’s population, which falls into a much lower income bracket, the Earth does not have much hope for a sustainable future.

Student reflections are personal observations that the students choose to share regarding their experience. They are an essential portion of the servicelearning process. The activity helps instill confidence in their ability to connect with people from a culture and society different from their own, yields a sense of meaning for the time spent, and enhances the motivation to move beyond and hopefully improve on their approach toward personal interaction. This educational process is valuable in many ways; perhaps the most important is instilling an awareness of the humanity of the Other, who under different circumstances might be construed as an inhuman enemy. Conclusions I believe that sustainable community development is a major long-term goal of this project and indeed will be for all of my future humanitarian engineering projects. This implies a strong emphasis on the project’s social and environmental, in addition to economic and engineering, aspects. Through the course of this project I have (1) observed that local control over development decisions has been paramount to successful SCD, implementing consensus-building activities, like small group meetings, that help to facilitate the process; (2) verified that investing physical “sweat equity,” in addition to financial contributions by the families for the 250,000-gallon tank, enhanced project ownership; (3) found that building relationships is a necessary and time-intensive activity; and (4) learned, through encountering the acts of vandalism, about the need to include all stakeholders in the design, if not the discussion, of the project. I also recognize that finding an appropriate means of collaborating with those who see no benefit to communication or community progress is indeed a challenge.

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The current way of life within the affluent world is generally believed to be unsustainable. Fortunately, a growing number of appropriate models help us visualize and evaluate sustainable community development (see Bridger and Luloff 1999). We at CSM began our HE project believing that we had most of the knowledge necessary to solve their problems. However, during the past eight years, we have learned to look inward as we try to work alongside the economically poor families in solidarity. Together, we struggle to find a way for all of us to thrive on this planet with dignity and grace. Acknowledgments This work was made possible through a generous grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. We also want to acknowledge the significant efforts of Lic. Jose Cecilio Santos Pacheco, formerly director of the Water and Sanitation Department of the Municipality of Villanueva, Honduras, who passed away suddenly on May 16, 2008. His presence is greatly missed by his family, the CSM/HE team, and the people of the Municipality of Villanueva. Notes 1. Engineers for a Sustainable World, Engineers without Borders USA, Engineering for Change. 2. See also Savage et al. 2008. 3. A maquilaa is a foreign-owned factory that has moved into the region to take advantage of low-cost labor and tax-free zones established by the municipalities to attract jobs to their communities. In this area of Honduras, the maquilas are largely clothing factories. 4. Patronato are the locally elected community leaders. 5. I prefer to use the words affluentt and economically poor, instead of developedd and developing, g respectively. The word developedd implies that we in the United States or Europe have arrived as the global examples to follow. However, the earth is not large enough to sustain all people living like us. Therefore, until we identify a sustainable lifestyle on this planet, we are all developing. g 6. The municipalityy in Honduras is similar to a county seat in the United States. It is the primary regional governmental entity.

CHAPTER 11

International Students and Volunteers amid Rising Violence: The Challenges in Honduras Katherine Borland interviews Jeff Boyer

Katherine Borland (KB): I want to thank you for participating in our collective reflection on the state of international service-learning in Central America. With your long years of experience working in, studying, and teaching about Honduras, how do you understand the current moment there? Jefferson Boyer (JB): The recent headlines from Honduras hardly depict a slumbering banana republic, let alone an inviting tropical vacationland. While the mainstream media emphasize the violence associated with a rising tide of drug trafficking, more deeply structured sources of conflict have engulfed the major institutions in this society of eight million citizens. Having endured more than a century of U.S. dominance over their economic, political, and social life, many Hondurans are fighting back against the many ways that this now globalized hegemony inhibits the creation of a more genuinely democratic and equitable world. I passionately believe that North Americans and other foreigners who are interested in studying and working collaboratively with Hondurans, their communities, and organizations need first to understand the difficulties Hondurans face and, second, acknowledge that we face limits as well as possibilities in what we can do to assist them during this time of crisis. KB: Can you describe how you have been engaged with Honduras and what makes you cautious about much that goes by the name of international service-learning? JB: I began in Honduras as a Peace Corps volunteer in the early 1960s, was a graduate student researcher of agrarian life and peasant-led agrarian reform movements in the 1970s, a social activist with Witness for Peace in the

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1980s, and have led 12 trips to Honduras and neighboring countries for university students, community volunteers, and social activists. Most of those trips involved anthropology and sustainable development undergraduate and graduate students from Appalachian State University. I usually placed them in the campesino1 communities that crowd Honduras’s southern highlands, where I had carried out my doctoral research. I decided to suspend that program in order to give time and space to reset our relationship with the rural network Las Comunidades Unidas (CU) in ways I hoped could be more reciprocal and just.2 It was clear that the students learned and benefitted greatly from their immersion in campesino villages, but as a group we were never able to transcend our privileged status and role as wealthy, if friendly, gringos/gringas3, who had many more contacts with influential powerbrokers in both Honduras and the United States than our hosts would likely ever have. KB: Why is that a bad thing? Doesn’t solidarity mean we should each leverage the power and resources we have to accomplish our collective goal of achieving social justice? JB: Sure, but it’s more complicated than that. My experience has convinced me that our very presence in Central America’s cities, towns, and rural hamlets as mostly white, healthy, English-speaking gringos/gringas, invariably with the latest attire, footwear, and electronic accessories from North America’s cornucopia of commodities, combine unwittingly to embody hegemonic power and cultural superiority. Any mutuality and reciprocal learning is severely challenged by the visible signs of our privilege and the resultant hierarchical ordering of North American versus Central American knowledge and presence. This is extremely difficult to overcome in Honduras with its “banana republic” legacy and all the dominant-subordinate power relations that this appellation implies. Second, our ability to marshal goods—grain during emergencies; a training center, dorm, and kitchen (thanks mostly to North Carolina Episcopal donations); and other agricultural and community infrastructure support; annual medical brigades staffed by doctors, dentists, nurses, and UNC medical students—had concrete benefits for local residents, but these benefits tended to accrue more to favored communities and some veteran leaders of the CU peasant network. In addition, our local collaborators, observing our largesse, developed an attitude over time that, when push came to shove, the gringos and their friend, “Don Boyer,” would eventually replenish the fund. Clearly our long-term presence had created relations of dependency that were the opposite of what we had all hoped for at the outset. KB: So in contrast to the dictum that establishing relationships takes time and therefore international service-learning facilitators ought to think about and nurture long-term commitments to and relationships with their community partners, you’re pointing out that conditions on the ground

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change over time, and our continued presence may actually harm the communities we serve. So if we are to be responsible to our students, our community partners, and our social justice ideals, we must also know when to rethink our purpose, suspend a partnership, or pull up stakes altogether. JB: Yes. We don’t want to foster unhealthy relationships. At the same time, I would argue that Honduras provides North Americans with a rich opportunity for cosmopolitan citizenship, precisely because of Honduras’s longstanding history of successful grass-roots social movements and civil society development, in the midst of our two countries’ dance of dependence and imperialism. However, trip leaders need to take very seriously the current level of violence and conflict in both rural and urban Honduras. In the past five years, Honduras has arguably become Central America’s most polarized, fearful, and violent society, steadily eclipsing its also troubled neighbors, Guatemala and El Salvador, with the world’s highest murder rate. The Peace Corps pulled out in 2011 after 40 uninterrupted years in-country; much international mission activity that flooded the country with North American volunteers since Hurricane Mitch has been curtailed. The U.S. State Department’s frequent travel advisories on Honduras underscore the very real threats to physical safety for students, volunteers, and tourists. Unless a university trip leader can be assured of the safety of either taking or sending North American students to study, live, and work in Honduras, such programs should be suspended. However, this may not necessitate a complete ban on student trips to Honduras. As Witness for Peace veteran Richard Boren (2011) has recently noted about North American visits to Juarez, arguably one of Mexico’s most violent and dangerous cities, there are times and places in Juarez that Americans can still safely inhabit. Nevertheless, I would argue for exercising extreme caution until safety conditions change. KB: I find it interesting that as one of the founders of Witness for Peace, an organization that developed the remarkable strategy of putting North Americans in harm’s way, you insist now on such caution. This must put you in an interesting position. JB: Certainly, seasoned representatives from media, human rights, and social justice organizations must continue their visits to Honduras and other nations in political crisis, regardless of the personal physical risk. These activists can expose human rights abuses and educate North American populations at home about on-the-ground circumstances as they unfold. Even so, journalists have suffered excessively since the coup. As of November 2012, over 30, mostly Honduran, journalists had been murdered, according to a Telesur television news report, 21 of whom were killed since Pepe Lobo assumed the presidency and supposedly restored the state’s democratic legitimacy in January 2010. This is very dangerous and courageous work, indeed.

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The key difference between this work and study abroad centers on the legal (and ethical) responsibilities that university and college faculty members have to students and their parents to ensure their safety. Students generally are young, inexperienced—without strong language skills or a deep understanding of the political context. These are all characteristics that predispose them to unintentionally act in ways that may put them at risk. These same characteristics place an even greater burden on our hosts, and so North American trip leaders need to weigh carefully whether interrupting and distracting Honduran citizens and communities during this crucial moment in their painful history with such programs as work-study internships and service-learning projects is really going to benefit our partners or our students. KB: So are you suggesting that we abandon international service-learning in Honduras at this time? JB: I’m suggesting that we can find better ways of collaborating with Honduran citizens and their communities if we take the time to learn about their vibrant history of agrarian communal struggle as well as more recent, modern forms of agency that are too often obscured by the despair, repression, and violence of this current dark period. Indeed, in the Cold War period, the Honduran state was amenable to carrying out at least some of the redistributive reforms that active labor and peasant movements demanded. This is a key reason why Honduras was spared the massive deaths and violence stemming from revolutionary and especially counterrevolutionary struggles from the late 1960s through the 1980s that engulfed much of Central America. KB: Can you give us a thumbnail history that will help us get a sense of both the challenges Honduran civil society is now facing and the resources the Honduran people bring to the task? JB: In many ways, Honduras has suffered doubly from the late-nineteenthcentury popular journalist writer O. Henry’s pronouncement that the country was Latin America’s quintessential banana republic. That this descriptor accurately captured the emerging American economic enclave along the north coast and U.S. political dominance in Honduras’s internal development and international relations was disheartening. But the related notion that neither this country nor other coastal nations where the U.S. banana empire spread possessed any agency of their own to either contest this hegemony or to create spaces for counterdevelopment and active resistance obscures the much more nuanced history that actually unfolded. Historian Dario Euraque’s acclaimed 1996 study Reinterpreting the Banana Republicc examines the rise of the United Fruit and Standard Fruit Companies, and especially the emergence of a dynamic merchant class composed mainly of Christian Arab immigrants to Honduras who gradually expanded from their initial base in the banana enclave itself. Throughout the 1960s this group led much of Honduras’s agro-industrial surge while

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supporting modern reforms, not only in commercial infrastructure but also in national education and health care. By the 1970s, Honduras’s industrial class, also led by Christian Arabs, were holding their own in national politics and government, which had long been controlled by agrarian landlords, foreign mining companies, and the military. Scholars have also examined the country’s traditional agrarian power. Cattlemen and other landed elites prevailed in what many termed Honduras Honduras, or “the real Honduras,” which comprised most of the national territory beyond the north coast banana enclave. Yet their authoritarian rule contained a seeming contradiction. Traditional political power in the mountainous capital of Tegucigalpa expressed an outward centralization of governmental powers left by the military dictator, Tiburcio Carías (1932–49). He combined harsh authoritarian rule along with many political favors to placate and maintain the loyalty of provincial cattlemen caudillos. They, in turn, maintained a tenuous hold over the many agricultural smallholders through similar expressions of material and social generosity. This deeply agrarian world was powered by humans wielding machetes, hoes, and fire, occasionally augmented by horses, mules, or oxen. These technological and energy constraints placed limits on capital accumulation and on the degree of social distance between the wealthiest landlord and the poorest campesino. Political bosses needed to appear generous, to dispense material favors during hard times, such as crop failures brought on by drought, hurricane, or insect plagues. For such local elites, this display of generosity needed to occur not only during annual civic-religious festivals but frequently throughout the year to maintain their dominant status. This canny system of reciprocity and redistribution made possible the social reproduction of Honduran and isthmian agrarian worlds, often described as semiegalitarian peasant moral economies (Argueta 1989). KB: That’s how the power structures developed in different parts of the country. What about peasant organizing? JB: The agency of peasants turned banana workers became abundantly evident when they mounted one of Latin America’s largest postwar strikes for recognition of labor’s right to organize and to press for improved wages and working conditions in 1954. Interestingly, it was the example and organizational support of these north coast labor unions of the 1950s that helped energize Honduras’s peasant movements of the 1960s and 1970s. These groups demanded a more just distribution of land across much of the country. By 1975, Brazilian agrarian-reform lawyer, Santos de Morais, observed that Honduras was the only Central American country where the peasants played the decisive role in the process of agrarian reform. Indeed, by the end of the decade, the combined actions of the country’s national peasant unions had succeeded in obtaining 8 percent of all arable land, benefitting 22 percent of landless and near-landless cultivators and their families. This represented the greatest material advance in the fortunes of

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a Central American rural population prior to the Nicaraguan Sandinista agrarian reform of the 1980s (Rhul 1984, 53). KB: Many of us who learned about Central America during the years of revolutionary conflict and U.S. intervention were so centered on Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua that we didn’t consider Honduras a model of organized resistance, nor were we as aware of Honduran human rights violations. What about Honduras in the 1980s? JB: The overwhelming presence of the U.S. military in Honduras at this time shielded Honduran citizens against cross border violence. However, the U.S. Embassy and Pentagon directed counterinsurgency wars against revolutionary processes in neighboring countries, turning a progressive-leaning Honduras into “USS Honduras.” Interrogation and torture cells emerged in Tegucigalpa and on the northern coast. Internal repression by police and military during the 1980s in Honduras was quite real. A small band of Honduran revolutionaries was wiped out in the country’s eastern rainforests. Moreover, labor and peasant leaders and their allies, including the Vatican II priests and nuns embracing liberation theology, were targeted for repression, harassed, and sometimes killed. This official violence directed internally against Honduras’s popular and progressive movements curtailed much of the campesino and labor mobilizations and caused many movement leaders to go underground or into exile (Carney 1985; Peckenham and Street 1985; and Nelson-Pallmeyer 1989). Nevertheless, Honduras’s ten thousand dead are significantly fewer than those of its Guatemalan, Salvadoran, and Nicaraguan neighbors. Robert Williams argues forcefully that Honduras’s broad-based and well-organized peasant, teacher, and labor movements, together with a government that at least during the first half of the 1970s was willing to support their demands for land reform and wage increases, spared Honduras from the kind of revolutionary violence and government repression that engulfed Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala (1994). The Honduran case suggests that workers and peasants struggling to press their claims can create impressive cross sector solidarities and widespread bottom-up agency at key historic moments (Sandbrook et al. 2007). A similar “agency in unity” has emerged in the current widespread civil protests against Honduras’s 2009 military coup. KB: So given that Honduran civil society was as active as you say, why haven’t ordinary Hondurans been able to secure their democracy? After all, they recently suffered a military-backed coup, something we thought would no longer happen in Latin America. JB: Against the backdrop of this remarkable history of peasant, worker, and teacher activism for greater democracy and social improvement, there have been many, mostly external, assaults on Honduras’s popular agency: economic globalization and the corresponding neoliberal policies of market rule and privatization at the expense of much-needed public schools, clinics, and infrastructure; the U.S.-led rollback of agrarian reform in favor of agribusiness, which has led to efforts to entice or violently force peasant

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cooperatives to sell their lands to the highest bidder; the violence of narcotrafficking; the violence and violent repression of youth gangs; and current government and corporate repression of the anticoup resistance, which has the more-than-tacit support of the United States. We also must not forget that the United States maintains its largest military base in all of Latin America on Honduran soil. All these forces have weakened the earlier solidarities that were pushing for distinctly Honduran forms of social democracy and economy. This history, then, and the current frustrated agency that continues to express hope in the midst of fear and despair must be taken into account when we discuss our small efforts at good works in Honduras. KB: Can you explain the basis for the current violence? JB: Even before the 2009 coup interrupted a 32-year transition to democratic elections, civilian governments, and neoliberal regimes of market rule, Honduras was plagued with almost one thousand unresolved land conflicts. Most of these stemmed from U.S.-encouraged rollbacks of agrarian reform and the rise of agribusiness dominance in an impoverished countryside during the 1990s (Boyer 2010). The largest agribusiness, DINANT, has hired mercenaries from El Salvador and Colombia to threaten, torture, and kill peasant farmers who resist incursions on their holdings, especially in the fertile north coast Aguán valley. These are mainly African palm plantations; the oil extracted from seed pods and kernels are used in industrial food processing and increasingly for the production of ethanol for biodiesel fuel. In 2011, the World Bank authorized a million-dollar loan to DINANT for expanded palm oil production; it only recently suspended fund disbursements due to the gross human rights violations. Since 2010, Honduras’s army and police have consistently backed the DINANT security guards.4 When I visited the Aguán valley in February 2013, the area around the main city of Tocoa was literally an armed camp. Another instigator of violence and public corruption is the now-extensive presence of narco-traffickers who participate in the cocaine network that stretches from Colombia across the Caribbean to the United States (Pine 2008, 2010). Indeed, for all the threatening presence of the Honduran soldiers and police on the north coast, they reportedly have all but ceded their authority to the Mexican-led cartel in four contiguous coastal municipalities that stretch to the region of La Mosquitia. Yet it would be incorrect to assume that the violence that has recently distinguished Honduras as the murder capital of the world, with 82 homicides per 1,000 people, emanates solely from rural sectors. Most murders are occurring in the cities: San Pedro Sula on the north coast; the capital, Tegucigalpa in the south; and secondary cities throughout the country. Moreover, state violence, frequently carried out by narco-corrupted police, adds a share to the urban death toll, as it has in the countryside. Tragically, both the army and the police, since the 2009 coup, attack the citizen protests and antigovernment mobilizations of an organized resistance movement. This practice effectively abandons a decades-long effort to separate

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these armed institutions; it ignores civil society’s legitimate demands that the tasks of protecting citizens be separated from those of military defense. The United States is deeply complicit in fomenting the current conditions of violence and instability. Clearly, the Obama administration has more than tacitly supported the coup. Initially it joined the world in condemning the military when, in June 2009, soldiers escorted the democratically elected president Manuel Zelaya out of the country in his pajamas. Within days it had backpedalled, claiming a noninterventionist stance. The U.S. government restored aid to the military and police in 2010, after neoconservative Porfirio Lobo won the presidency in an election that most Hondurans boycotted (Salomón 2010, 2012). What this meant for the organized opposition was increased repression and assassinations. The United States maintains Soto Cano, its largest military base in Latin America, in Honduras. It views its military presence in Honduras as vital to defending the many economic interests of transnational corporations, investors, and neoliberal allies that “need protection.” As a consequence, an aging U.S. hegemony has reproduced materially and metaphorically a new kind of banana republic at the expense of democratic governance. KB: So do you find any reason to hope in this terrible period that things will improve for ordinary folk? JB: Many Honduran citizens and their long-term friends, including me, share in a social-spiritual vía negativa—dismay, anger, immense disappointment, a psychic freezing of options—at the state- and narco-induced violence and resulting social decomposition. At the same time, Honduras’s organized resistance against the coup makers have put forth alternative visions and concrete proposals for a more inclusive, democratic political system and sustainable development, an emerging social-spiritual vía positiva and vía creativa5. The way I see it, the many decentralized aspects of Honduras’s older agrarian structures, together with its social, populist reforms of the 1950s into the 1980s and more recent organizational strategies of the resistance, offer much for a transformational praxis that could cut the moorings of USS Honduras while establishing new forms of healing, participatory democracy, and community-regionally based sustainable development. In May 2010 a delegation representing the National Popular Resistance Front (FNRP) traveled to Madrid, where it was officially recognized at the Summit of European, Latin American, and Caribbean Peoples. By September the FNRP had gathered more than 1.3 million signatures of Honduran citizens demanding a more socially and economically inclusive constitution (Kryt 2011). In February 2011, approximately 1,500 peasants, teachers, unionists, and small business people, elected from municipalities across Honduras, gathered in Tegucigalpa to draft a more participatory national charter. In May 2011, Zelaya returned to his country after almost two years in exile. Diplomats around the region (including U.S. officials desperately seeking to legitimate Honduras’s return to the OAS) had negotiated with

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the Lobo government to allow his peaceful return. Nevertheless, the repression and state-sponsored violence has continued. KB: I can add that by October 2011, the FNRP formed LIBRE, a third political party in a traditional two-party system, in order to push their nonviolent street protests into the electoral arena. Various factions united around Xiomara Castro, Zelaya’s wife, selecting her as their presidential candidate. The LIBRE party garnered enough support in the November 2012 primaries to fuel expectations that its candidates will be competitive in the planned 2013 elections. Along with these encouraging signs of a return to democracy, the repression and state-sponsored violence have continued, with peasants in the Aguán valley, opposition journalists, Garifuna minorities, homosexuals, teachers, human rights lawyers, and political candidates being particularly targeted for harassment and assassinations. So once again, considering both the unintended negative impacts of North American student presence in impoverished communities and the ongoing crisis of Honduran society, are you abandoning international service-learning? JB: Counseling caution is not the same as giving up. Over a century ago, Thomas Hardy advised, “If a path to the better be, it begins with a look at the worst.” Developing cosmopolitan citizenship requires a deep unlearning of privilege and privileged ignorance. Latin Americanist John Womack Jr. eloquently described that problem with ignorance: “Our problem is not merely the media, or our notorious inability to learn another language. It is our entire evasive and mendacious culture, which (to the enormous profit of the mega-companies that feed it) makes our selfish decadence entertaining to us, sells us headsets that deafen us to crying injustices in our own country, and changes every real, complicated, painful struggle into a brief sensation of stars, or meteors, gloriously noble or wicked, always somehow erotically intriguing today, dead boring tomorrow” (1999, 59). KB: So Womack urges outsiders to consider carefully how difficult it is to really know w the situation of another group, particularly when their struggles for social justice are necessitated in part by an enduring inequality from which the outsiders benefit. JB: Writing even earlier in the last century, Ivan Illich urges North Americans to desist from their project of improving Latin Americans: “I am here to suggest that you voluntarily renounce exercising the power which being an American gives you . . . I am here to challenge you to recognize your inability, your powerlessness and your incapacity to do the ‘good’ which you intended to do . . . Come to look, come to climb our mountains . . . Come to study. But do not come to help” (1968, 5). These critics point out that North Americans carry with them tacit and uncritical assumptions about the rightness of U.S. hegemony. We take for granted the superiority of our own modernist and aggressive national culture. We assume we have all the solutions (mostly of the techno-fix nature)

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and so are most interested in learning about problems that are concrete and isolatable from local and global contexts of exploitation and inequality. Unfortunately, the hegemony we prize has been constructed through a long history of U.S. intervention and dominance in the region. This history has conditioned many Central Americans to uncritically accept the proposition that North Americans possess universally valid knowledge about how to live, how to improve the general well-being, and how to develop socioeconomically. Such assumptions breed dependency, which in turn undermines the dignity and self-esteem of local peoples (Wood et al. 2011; McGehee and Andereck 2008, 22; Deeley 2004). They also ignore or mystify continuing U.S. interventions that work against the interests of the less powerful and shore up existing patterns of exploitation and privilege. What I want to challenge—and I am grateful to my Latin Americanist colleague, Cynthia Wood, for marshaling this growing critique of a certain kind of service-learning on our campus and beyond . . . Conventional service-learning carries the uncritical North American assumption that direct experience and social action, much more than guided reflection and study about the historical, political, economic, and ecological contexts of Latin America, is the best teaching guide in life’s many social settings, including cross-cultural settings south of our border. KB: So you advocate careful, thorough preparation in all these areas before a student ventures into an experience. You mentioned earlier you were taking some time to reset your relationship with your CU partners of many years in southern Honduras. Can you talk about how you would approach a future service-learning project differently? JB: Well, yes. After much soul-searching, I initiated a relationship with the indigenous Lenca in another set of rural communities in Honduras’s western highlands that I hope can evolve in a healthier way. Two years before leading a trip with students, faculty, and Episcopal church members to the Lenca communities, I was able to cosponsor a preliminary participatory research effort to identify this community’s expressed needs and hopes for the future, with support from several Appalachian State departments and units.6 A year later, I met with community leaders. The Lenca municipal leaders and influential elders (including women) set the goals for our mutual collaboration and the rounds of social and work activities scheduled for the following year. I’ll not rehash the details and outcomes of our 2009 experience except to say that both the Lencas and North Americans agreed that it was a positive and fruitful encounter. We North Americans were learning not to repeat the missteps of our previous collaboration. Three months after our successful sojourn, Honduras’s elected president was removed from office by a military coup in June 2009. Since then, of course, virtually all of us working and researching in Honduras have had to face the consequences for future international educational programs of the resulting political upheaval, not only in terms of student safety but also in

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terms of getting out of the way of a people, hampered by dependency, as they struggle to define their own future. You would be interested to know that during my February 2013 visit, I witnessed the mobilizations and enthusiasm for the new Libre Party. Interestingly, it included not only the indigenous Lenca but also a growing number of small-town businesspeople who have felt alienated by both dominant traditional parties, the National and Liberal Parties. KB: I imagine that you would counsel young people interested in studying/ service in Honduras and other Central American countries to invest time and energy before their travel to become informed, effective cosmopolitan citizens. You have insisted that gaining an understanding of the place one is traveling to is a weighty endeavor, necessitating study and commitment, but is critical in in order to know how even to begin to do good. Often, international volunteers arrive convinced they will learn what they need to know on the ground or arguing that their proposed work exists outside of politics or their voluntary effort provides an alternative to a failed state for which the volunteers have no responsibility. What concrete advice would you offer to students and trip organizers who wish to learn and work in Honduras in collaboration with Hondurans in the years ahead? JB: First, students should take as many language and area studies courses as possible prior to their travel to Honduras and/or Central America. “Freshman exposure” international service-learning programs should be shelved in favor of those for which students must demonstrate a serious commitment to predeparture preparation. Second, once in country, the curriculum should be based on immersion-style educational and living experiences that are planned by host nationals. The lessons of cosmopolitan citizenship are best learned from or in collaboration with self-organized community partners, who recognize themselves as the central agents of the pedagogical process. These experiences should intensify a critical awareness of at least some of the following: local, regional, and national histories emphasizing the struggles of poor and working peoples; local cultural, economic, political, and/or ecological efforts that contest local subordination to transnational hegemonic forces. KB: It seems to me that to mount the kind of educational program you are suggesting, North American study-abroad coordinators must be prepared to invest considerable time identifying and selecting community partners. Not every community organization will have the staff and expertise necessary to break the dependency mold in their interactions with and instruction of North American students. JB: I suggest we return with our in-country hosts to the model of adult pedagogy that was part of the peasant movement for agrarian reform in Honduras in the early 1960s and 1970s, a pedagogy that has been an intermittent part of the anticoup resistance since 2009. This model of education formed study circles for the express purpose of advancing what Eric HoltGiménez (2006) has called structural literacyy (see also Boyer 2010, 344), an

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understanding of the underlying structures responsible for producing the inequalities that shape the lives of impoverished rural and urban communities and an identification of the specific agents of the national, U.S., and global power structure responsible for maintaining those structures. Such knowledge is crucially important to forming savvy, effective local-regional counterhegemonic strategies for change. KB: Our study-abroad programs can cultivate local learning for empowerment while at the same time contributing to our students’ unlearning of hegemonic privilege by having them sit in on the sessions designed to promote local agency as opposed to dependency. Such a format requires, however, that we privilege the learning of our host communities, confident that by reordering standard study-abroad priorities, we will simultaneously enable rich, transformative learning opportunities for our students. JB: Exactly. Both Charles Hale (2008) and Marc Edelman (2009) have written on the rich opportunities and multiple challenges generated by community-based research, research designed to address real-world community problems. I suggest we fold such social engagement into our pedagogy as well. I personally can’t think of a more exciting and vital real-world learning opportunity than to involve well-prepared, sensitive students in the preparation for and, if possible, participation in structural literacy sessions and workshops with peasant leaders and community, union, or cooperative members. If these three elements of education and training abroad—serious predeparture preparation, immersion, and structural literacy—are seriously attempted by North American faculty and host community teacher/ leaders, then everyone in this positively charged educational environment can approach Paulo Freire’s and Myles Horton’s goal of developing sitespecific “pedagogies of the oppressed” (Bell, Gaventa, and Peters 1990). In such a process, North American students will have a much greater probability of becoming vitally involved with, accompanying and “being with” their hosts, whether campesinos, indigenous, and/or low income urban dwellers. Finally, we North Americans, both students and faculty, must undergo a personal and cultural transformation. We must suspend our faith in our technical and cultural superiority, our faith that we can immediately become community problem solvers in communities that are not our own. We need to control our temptation to be First World resource and service givers in the Third World. At this moment I include my home region of Appalachia as “Third World” for many outside do-gooders (see McGehee and Andereck 2008, 18–19). Clearly, some painful decentering needs to occur on our part, a decentering of culture, class, and nationality. Yet the rewards for such a move are great—among these would be making space for a new, more autonomous, yet convivial and critically aware and confident Honduras. At the very least, such a humbling, decentering process would usher in a much more critical service-learning that has only recently begun to be imagined and attempted (see Mitchell 2008; Steinman 2011; Simonelli, Earle, and Story 2005).

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KB: What you have sketched here is a practice that requires able facilitators, conscientious students, and an administration that understands the importance of careful, sustained planning with our community partners. Do you have any final words? JB: Honduras is currently in a deep struggle for survival against death and violence. The forces arrayed against a successful transformation are formidable and emanate doubtless from the United States as well as from within their borders and from the wider isthmus. North American higher education faculty must take this fact seriously and sensitively as we craft new forms of classroom and experiential learning and attempt to engage and reengage with Hondurans. And finally, Central American scholars and activists need to be especially sensitive to the calls for freedom, solidarity, and democracy emanating from the South and to place the aspirations of Hondurans above those of our university study-abroad and service-learning offices as we fashion transformative education.

Notes 1. Campesino literally means “dweller of the countryside.” In Latin America it is widely understood to refer to a subsistence cultivator or peasant. This is the name Honduran rural dwellers use for themselves. 2. Las Comunidades Unidas, or The United Communities, is an intervillage organization and network of the southern Honduran highlands that traces its roots to Christian-based communities inspired by liberation theology during the 1960s and 1970s. 3. Gringo or gringaa is the colloquial, very often pejorative, Mexican term for North American. In Honduras, it can be used negatively, but it is more often employed in friendly and positive ways. 4. See Kerssen 2013 for a discussion of recent land-grabbing in the area. 5. Here Boyer deploys terms from Matthew Fox’s creation- and eco-spirituality. 6. These included the Anthropology Department; the Office of Undergraduate Research, International Education & Development; and the Sustainable Development Program.

Limiting Structures

CHAPTER 12

The Pilgrimage Transformed: How to Decompartmentalize U.S. Volunteer Tourism in Central America Abigail E. Adams

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n his 1869 book The Innocents Abroad, d Mark Twain famously said: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” But one should always be cautious when quoting our American trickster. In the same book, Twain observed how his fellow travelers solidified their class status, ignorance, and foibles. He wrote, “The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become until he goes abroad. I speak now, of course, in the supposition that the gentle reader has not been abroad, and therefore is not already a consummate ass.” Twain’s wry eye caught what the Roman poet Horace noted centuries earlier, “They change their climate, not their soul, who rush across the sea.” In this volume, we note that many U.S. citizens and students rush across the sea, in good faith, hoping to change their souls, make a meaningful contribution to the world, and broaden their lives. In this chapter, I address how difficult achieving that transformation is, given at least two dynamics that stand in the way of our earnest travelers, in this case my students. One is the current neoliberal economic moment and the conversion of all manner of relationships into market opportunities. The second is the cross-cultural emergence of liminoid patterns of pilgrimage in voluntourism trips. These two dynamics (at least!) converge and conspire against my students’ development as cosmopolitan citizens, making it easy for them to contain and compartmentalize their trips as extraordinary experiences, clearly removed from their everyday life and responsibilities.

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We know, after decades of study and service abroad, the kinds of experiences that lead to strong global citizenship. Those institutions and programs with the resources to do so provide us with numerous models of best practices in global education: small classes and travel groups, experienced faculty directing programs on campus and abroad, sophisticated language training, ample periods for travel, academic and extracurricular programs and staff to support students before and after study abroad, including as they serve in their local communities. But for institutions on the other end of the widening resource gap in neoliberal higher education, any attempt at arranging study or engagement abroad means struggling with inadequate funds, financially stressed students, overwhelmed faculty and staff, little time for travel, language studies undermined or eliminated. This is where I work, at a public comprehensive university. Our university embraces study abroad and global engagement as part of our mission; yet the study-abroad or service courses are often “extras” for faculty members, in addition to their contractual teaching load. Most faculty study-abroad leaders fall into their roles without prior experience or training. The voluntourists with whom I work are people of less affluent communities. They are of the class that former secretary of labor Robert Reich dubbed “white collar technicians” (2002). They are under tremendous pressure in the current market to add value to their resumes. They are on very tight budgets and schedules. The increased demand of this new class of tourists has led to the commodification of voluntourism by the tourist industry and the creation of shortcuts or efficiencies that militate against the kinds of best practices that we advocate. While I focus on these newer travelers, the realities I describe apply to most voluntourist groups, including those from elite circles. Readers from those circles will recognize the work intensification that affects us all, the increasing reliance on third-party service providers as well as the debt burdens and unpromising job markets that limit our students’ horizons. Using anthropologists Victor and Edie Turner’s unfinished work on pilgrimages, I describe how a ritual process develops in service-tourism trips that contains the powerful impacts of the experiences and contrasts these to the “profane” life of “home” (Turner 1969, 1973; Turner and Turner 1978). As the Turners note, pilgrims depend on “prototypical narratives” for a good deal of the meaning they extract from raw experience. I turn also to the research on “flashbulb memories.” Flashbulb memories are distinctly vivid, detailed, concrete, long-lasting memories of a person’s experience of shocking historical or personal events. Flashbulb memories are stored on one occasion and retained for a lifetime. The kicker, though, is that these persuasive and powerful memories are infamously inaccurate (Pappas 2011).

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Under this current set of pressures, the mushrooming short-term service abroad phenomenon has produced (1) new pilgrimage routes, hardened and commodified into tourist-scapes throughout Central America that implicitly depend upon hierarchies that make possible the encounter between those who want to serve, those who make service possible, and the de-serving needy; (2) widely circulating highly codified “flashbulb” narratives of relationships between Central American and U.S. residents; and (3) a further “neutralizing” of the travelers’ awareness of privilege (see also Steven Jones on HEADS UP, this volume). Given my personal and individual investment in every trip I lead, I care what these trips produce. I want to contribute to the development of global citizens. To provide a measure of hope, I present Marshall Ganz’s work on public storytelling and accountability, as a means for eliciting the reflective disposition that marks and motivates the global citizen (2009). But first, I draw on my personal experience to explore why I support study, travel, and community engagement outside the United States. Background I was transformed at age 19 by study abroad and work with international volunteers. I attended a language school in Guatemala in 1980, the year that country’s counterinsurgency acutely sharpened ( Jonas 1991). I was interested in international development and had interned at Oxfam America; I took a year off from college to gain some experience. I set off for my stay oblivious to the increasing repression in Guatemala. My first host, a very street-wise gringa, abruptly raised my consciousness as we checked into a backpacker’s pension. She taught me the word orejass (ears), which encapsulated the fact of living as if everyone were listening in bad faith and reporting to thugs. My naïveté quickly disappeared as the violence of the early 1980s escalated throughout the months I studied in Guatemala, striking the very people on my list of contacts prepared by my Oxfam America mentors. Nevertheless, I left the country in early June, completely located in the romantic stage of cross-cultural experience. I had had a wonderful adventure. I had gained a life-changing skill in the Spanish language. I had traveled all over the country, met and hosted by inspiring people. I had been terrifically lucky: the saying holds that God looks after drunks and fools—and ignorant young women, it seems. I had been struck into an enchantment, coupled with a crusading sense of commitment to Central America. My DIY experience reflected the best and worst of study-abroad practices. I benefitted from long-term immersion in a new setting, excellent language study, and home stays, and the experience of life off the tourist track. I had

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great mentors and connections. But I was also alone. I craved the opportunity to reflect on and articulate the impact of what I had undergone. Furthermore, I clearly would have benefited from considerably more sociohistorical pre-trip orientation to Guatemala. This I sought as I continued college, switching majors from art history to a double major in biology and anthropology. I returned to Central America immediately after graduating college. Based in Costa Rica, I led numerous groups of concerned U.S. citizens through Reagan-era Central America. Years later, while conducting doctoral research in Alta Verapaz, Guatemala, I worked with short-term service groups, including translating for medical missions. I have led study-abroad trips as a professor of anthropology since 1994 and know that the short-term format can be transformative. While homestays of at least seven days are better, I have seen that two-night visits can create longstanding transnational relations for my students. I have also watched many a student’s secondary-school Spanish training rise from the ashes of disuse, phoenix-like, and transform a student’s ability to connect independently and meaningfully with community members. But I acknowledge that my trips can settle into the pilgrimage pattern. This was true at times during the factfinding missions we ran in the 1980s and continues to be a problem in my academy-based trips today. I want to disrupt the liminoid pattern when I lead trips, because it short-circuits the goal of producing actors committed to long-term engagement with issues of global social importance. Pilgrimage The Turners described pilgrimage as having three stages analogous to rites of passage: separation (from one’s home or conventional surroundings); the journey itself, which includes an intensified sense of the sacred, a strong sense of unifying communitass (oneness with others, leveling), and a temporary release from ordinary social bonds (societas); s and the final reincorporation stage of homecoming. People build pilgrimages and rites of passage on the predictable individual and group psychological responses to drastic structural change. The Turners identified several categories of experiences that lent themselves to the ritual process: the life changes of birth, death, puberty, or serious illness; shared work; seasonal changes; and shifts in social status, such as marriage or graduation (1980). The key to the ritual process is what the Turners called the liminal stage. This second stage takes place on the limins, or edge, of society and effects a status change for the participants. In the classic liminal phase, initiates are manipulated by the power of experiences, sensations, and

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images/objects made monstrous, unbounded, inverted, or overwhelming. They experience the strange-making sensations of losing Self and respond with states of both hypoarousal (such as loss of a sense of space, pace, time, and identity) and hyperarousal (such as paranoia, hypochondria, quick anger, anxiety, giddiness). Their former status—with its norms, guidelines, and boundaries—dissolves, and a new status emerges from the chaotic swirl of rich polysemic material that saturates the liminal (1969). Travel produces another form of drastic change, in which a person’s primary enculturation or unquestioned sense of second nature is challenged. Travel’s challenges are captured in the term culture shock. Many tourism experiences are explicitly designed to enhance romanticism and reduce unwanted stressful challenges to the visitor’s worldview. The raw energy of culture shock can also be harnessed into the framework of a pilgrimage, ritualizing a challenging experience over a certain course. In contrast to the liminal character of rites of passage, the Turners described pilgrimages as liminoid. d Some of the differences between rites of passage and pilgrimages, according to the Turners, are that the latter work to confirm rather than change social status and individual will rather than social mandate provides the motive for participation. While the internal group dynamics become very important in the pilgrim’s experience (Chaucer had it right!), pilgrimages are marked by their translocal nature. The pilgrims interact with people embedded in the landscape, who operate under different moral, social, and material economies than the pilgrim’s. The landscape becomes a character in its own right. Separation, the First Stage Guatemala and Costa Rica, the two countries where I have led most trips, contrast starkly with each other on most socioeconomic indices, but together these are the most popular service-mission destinations in the Central American region. Throughout mestizo and indigenous Central America, including Guatemala and Costa Rica, pilgrimage is a familiar idiom (Crumrine and Morinis 1991). It is a powerful idiom as well in American Christianity. (One group of American short-term missionaries with whom I worked brought a silent film version of Pilgrim’s Progresss for its cross-cultural evening entertainment.) As the Turners pointed out, pilgrimage sites depend on relations between the center and the margin, and Costa Rica and Guatemala have strong relations with the U.S. center. In parallel form to what the Turners described for religious pilgrims, the process for the would-be voluntourist begins when he or she is moved by a desire for private transformation, for release from everyday life. In deciding

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to join a short-term mission or study abroad trip, volunteer travelers begin the complex process of separating from their profane life. These trips require participants to prepare, sacrifice, and make financial commitments, as well as deal with a sense of uncertainty. This is the first stage of separation. For most of my students, the trips require considerable sacrifice, including more student debt. Participants have to set aside time, work, and family duties. In fact, the length of the classic short-term service or mission trips is tied to the length of annual vacation time and has shortened recently, as work demands in our society have intensified. The trips usually emphasize group and personal preparation. The better service-trip groups meet on a regular basis prior to departure. They study orientation materials, such as videos and lectures on culture shock. They follow the classic steps in bi-enculturation by entering the experience with rosecolored lenses. But their preparations also heighten the sense of apprehension about the coming ordeal: filling out medical releases, leaving emergency contacts, reading the U.S. State Department travel advisories. Guatemala, of course, offers a chilling reputation for violence. Many of my students know someone who volunteered in Central America, and the personal reports have played a role in their decision to join my trips to Central America, rather than to “classier” Europe (see below). I find that among my students the distinction of traveling in service and not as “tourists” is very important. The participants imagine heading to “remote” areas without the facilities provided to tourists. They imagine Guatemala to involve traveling among exotic peoples, while Costa Rica will provide raw contact with the “jungle” or rainforest. For most participants the journey will take them outside their comfort zone: they will spend far less time dressing, bathing, and preparing themselves for each day. They express their anticipation and apprehension in joking and swapping tips before and during the trip. And many of them will be challenged intensely. Most of my students are members of what has been dubbed the “Go-Nowhere Generation.” Their cohorts received that characterization because increasing numbers of them in the United States live at home and do not leave to bowl, work, or even get their driver’s license (Buchholz and Buchholz 2012). They have not camped or “roughed it” in any significant way; they have little experience with new venues that require them to accommodate themselves to different hygienic, dietary, and interactive norms. My groups routinely include people holding their first passport, some who have not left Connecticut (the third-smallest state) or boarded a plane before. These are not John Zogby’s “First Globals,” those young people who plan on making their lives in any part of the world (2008).

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My students also experience class insecurity. Most are lower-middle or working class. They are very different from me, a late boomer raised in an upper-middle-class household. My class status was never threatened by rubbing elbows with the poor. Their inexperience, insecurities, anticipation, and apprehension prime them to enter the liminoid. The Liminoid Once I land with them in Central America, the difference in worldview, world arrangements, food, noise, personal space—and yes, the poverty— shocks my students. Predictably, they manifest hypoarousal (withdrawal and immersion in cyber cafes or the traveler group) and hyperarousal (sensory vulnerability) responses. Many of the students are confronted simultaneously with two psychic movements: first, their fear of poverty and, second, a confrontation with their privilege—the fact that on a world scale, they/we are the 1 percent in a world of the 99 percent. As the voluntourists grapple with the suddenly obvious differences, furthered by language barriers, two well-worn paths and preexisting narratives open ahead and allow them to move around the differences rather than through them. Either path leads to bracketing the experience. The first path is to react against the differences and fear these as dirt, disease, or contagion (Douglas 1966). The second pathway is more common in service trips, which is to romanticize the locals and transform the shock through hallowed hard work. This discursive pathway is cleared long before the travelers arrive onsite. One woman wrote to me, “I expect to see . . . people that mean much more to each other than any of the material things that we may have. I expect to see people that are true instead of people that are corrupted by worldly things such as TV, movies, etc. I expect to see the love in families that we are lacking.” Her church materials instructed her to “consider [your host culture] better than your own,” a place where people were more spiritual and less material. I find that people manage their shock by immersing themselves in the cocoon of concrete, measurable work. The work becomes the analogue to the physical challenge of walking for pilgrims. The voluntourists frequently invoke the idea that common work unites different peoples around meeting common needs. The challenge for most service trips becomes actually getting the “locals” to work with the service trippers. It is not, after all, vacation or spring break for the local people! Their absence from the worksite is disappointing, given

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that contact with these narratively prefigured local people is important to consecrating the experience. The goal of work—getting the job done—takes over other goals and, in fact, justifies avoiding immersion. The travelers avoid speaking Spanish. The brevity of the trip heightens the importance of controlling and using every minute productively. Trips tend to be highly scheduled with work time, breaks, meals, sharing time, lights out, and “free” time. People worry about “losing precious time” to illness and avoid local foods. In one mission trip, visitors barely ate local food. Instead, they prepared meals in a portable church-camp kitchen, stocked with provisions mission members had brought in their suitcases. The work itself becomes the satisfaction: it is challenging, and people work far more physically than they do at home, with the exception of the assistance of local washerwomen and men who haul the supplies. They take pride in their newfound manual skills. At night, people proudly show their blisters and the extra room in their waistbands. They tally up the work accomplished: concrete poured, walls raised, nails pounded. During the course of two weeks or so, U.S. Americans glimpse the material needs of the Other. They are impressed by the locals’ hard work and accomplishments in rustic and undersupplied conditions. They perhaps experience a frustrating encounter with some blocks to progress and a surge of enthusiasm for what they imagine could be done with just a little money, a little education. At the same time, they discuss how they could never live like the locals. The Turners noted that within the loosely structured pilgrim groups, whose members may share little more than the common destination, peoples’ shared longing for home tends to intensify the farther people travel from home. Most end their trips glad to be going home and reconfirmed in their awe of long-term missionaries, Peace Corps workers, even the helpful anthropologist and accompanying professor. The liminoid phase draws to a close. Groups typically end their stays with a celebration that self-consciously includes the locals, usually around a meal and exchange of awards. The group then spends a day or two enjoying some leisure time in a tourist area. I call it the “cruise ship” portion that my students expect of the tropics. And like Latin American religious pilgrims, they return home with material tokens. While I did meet one woman who donated her souvenir money for local needs, she was the exception that confirmed for everyone else that they were not cut out for this life of sustained service. Shopping is a gleeful step back for most into the pleasures of materialism and also a means of congealing the sacra of the local experience into something tangible for the living room. I have a small theory that Guatemala and Costa Rica are popular

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destinations for service work because these combine exotica with a consecrating touch of danger, finished off by lovely local handicrafts. Reincorporation, Flashbulb Memory, and Coming Home Trip participants return home with their souvenirs, photos, and stories. The stories become reduced, intensified, and codified fairly quickly, due to many factors: audience, lack of time for reflection, preexisting narrative arcs, and the flashbulb memory effect. As anyone who has traveled knows, homecoming does involve telling the stories. People do want to hear about your trip—up to a certain point and in condensed form. And as all travelers know, the return home is often like stepping into a fire hose stream of postponed deadlines and piled-up responsibilities. This is true in the most ritual processes—the reincorporation phase is the least elaborated. Protecting the time to reflect, even if just to organize the pictures, takes real effort. More commonly, the reincorporation stage solidifies the process of bracketing and containing the powerful experiences, which are quickly stored away in cystlike dormant narratives. The bracketing dynamics of the reincorporation stage is further reinforced by flashbulb memories. Flashbulb memories, again, are highly reduced, formulaic, reifying stories that are told of very challenging, emotional, timecompressed, significant events, such as the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy—or short-term service trips, I argue. A researcher with the 9/11 Memory Consortium described how people began to tell canonical stories of their experience of that eventt (Pappas 2011). What makes the flashbulb memory special is the emotional arousal at the moment that the event was registered to the memory. It is the emotions elicited by a flashbulb memory event that increase the ability to recall details, including the misremembered details. The stories are remembered because these tend to be retold over and over again. The flashbulb memory effect combines with the pre-existing “prototypical narratives” of the pilgrimage (Turner 1973) to help the traveler resolve the dissonance they are undergoing (see Moodie, this volume). People quickly formulate how they feel they should feel and supplant what they do not know how to feel with these narratives, even during the experience. The stories draw on readily apparent binaries and so further contribute to the bracketing effect. Central America, “down there,” becomes that authentic “heart” place of loving, warm people and powerful emotional experience, of hard(er) manual labor conducted close to Nature, in opposition to the cold, “rational,” technical North, where work is what you do at a computer with the tips of your fingers. The stories transform emotional, psychosocial challenges into inspiring stereotypical

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stories, smoothed by the physicality of the service work and the covering “good works” metanarrative (see Borland, this volume) to neutralize any confrontation with one’s own privilege and the other challenges of the encounter. These stories circulate between travelers and travelers-to-be, in local newspapers, in preparation materials, and in inspirational memoirs. Fellow Travelers: The Locals’ Contribution to the “Bracket” The Turners’ writing remains the most elaborated theory of pilgrimage, but many scholars have contributed valuable critiques, particularly about the hierarchies and differences created and reified in every journey (e.g., Sallnow 1981). The current popularity of short-term service trips also reifies transnational social inequality. In both Guatemala and Costa Rica, I have found that the locals, the hosts, are acutely aware of the differences between themselves and the travelers in resources at play. Even the widely used evangelical language of “brothers and sisters,” assumed to be egalitarian in U.S. circles, is understood to be the language of ranking in Guatemala. While the mission travelers may experience Turner’s communitas (a temporary state of undiff ferentiated equality and oneness), the locals are working out the impact of the material aid, the patron-client relationship building, and the new requirements of developing a “quality-controlled environment” necessary for successful voluntourism. One more factor plays a role in consolidating the bracketing and containment of the experience on the ground within Central America. Local people are building the infrastructure for a new niche market. In the new millennium, in-country tourism operators and tourism communities hoping to attract faith-based groups, educational institutions, gap-year agencies, environmental organizations, and other groups have picked up on the formula of the service pilgrimage worked out by church and solidarity groups. The Turners noted that third parties tended to organize, bureaucratize, and exploit pilgrimage routes. This is in part due to the cross-culturally recognized obligation of a local community to provide for the physical well-being of pilgrims. In the emerging pilgrimage sites that are created by the waves of new arrivals, coming with their ways and their supplies, the locals quickly stop staring and start to provide; within the hosting responsibility, altruism and opportunity quickly mix to produce new tourism offerings. For example, the Central American travel experiences of a retired journalist in her sixties reflects the voluntourism evolution described above. She first went to Costa Rica and Nicaragua on a “fact-finding” mission during the Reagan administration’s covert war against the Sandinistas; in the 1990s, she went to Guatemala for language-immersion tourism. In 2010 she spent two

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weeks at a coffee cooperative in El Salvador. Currently, she works to find microfinancing for the co-op’s newest project, a café/handicrafts storefront. Her continuing service supports a project that serves the service missions that visit the co-op. The co-op is developing into a service mission destination, and its members are building the necessary infrastructure. So What Is to Be Done? I want to foster a cosmopolitan disposition in my students and in the participants of the groups I lead. I hope my students will take their place as citizens of global civil society, those who maintain their local/national identities and allegiances, but are cognizant of and sensitive to transnational interdependencies, able to achieve policy changes and social justice through transnational activism (see Steven Jones, this volume). I am adopting two proposals for my own trips. First Proposal I propose to have my students listen to and tell stories, but public stories, during and after travel. Public storytelling is a necessary antidote to the formulaic stories that congeal due to the flashbulb memory effect. Marshall Ganz (2009) tells us why, reminding us that stories not only entertain and teach/ model how to act; good stories inspire us to act. Good public stories inspire us to act publicly. I paraphrase Ganz here when I write that given the investment that study abroad entails of individuals, institutions, and families, the participant has a responsibility to offer a public account of who he or she is and why he or she does what he or she does. A cosmopolitan needs to develop several stories: the story of selff of who he or she is before, after travel, and within the connections of family and clan, nation and neighborhood; the story of us, who are the traveler’s new people, with whom he or she shares the ideals of mutual respect within certain shared arenas across more locally grounded differences; and finally the story of now, how now is critical for those people gathered in new community and in shared challenges and choices. Ganz writes that a good public story is drawn from the series of choice points that have structured the “plot” of the journey—the challenges faced, choices made, and outcomes experienced. Public stories are public and, therefore, are open for critique, interrogation, and grounding in reality. This requires the hard work of group leaders, building in reflection time at all stages and motivating people to articulate what they are experiencing. It means calling people to deeper reflection when they fall back on the worn-out binaries or attempt to maneuver around the

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discomfort of recognizing their own privilege. Public storytelling goes against the unreflective, distracted, fragmented grain of everyday U.S. life, and it certainly goes against the grain of tired, overwhelmed travelers. But it is critical. Second Proposal With the exception of first response material aid to disaster areas, and perhaps of highly specialized skills, I propose that trip leaders should consider ending the service component of U.S. American short-term engagement trips abroad, at least for the moment. Instead, I encourage leaders to seek and develop forms of engagement other than the donation of dollars, unskilled labor, and “give-away” clothes, pharmaceuticals, and books (see King, this volume). What happens when the focus of these trips shifts to the acts of receiving, listening, learning, talking, playing, and working together rather than the delivery of service and/ or goods? When students immerse themselves in homestays and help with real work, it is possible for them to learn what real food preparation involves for the world’s 99 percent. They can accompany community members with special projects that they have already identified, prioritized, and undertaken. They can explore the host community’s traditions and history of community service (see Cardenal, this volume). Leaders, including local community leaders, will need to foster and require thoughtful, reflective community service before, during, and after the international travel. They can promote service as an expected part of adult everyday lives, rather than an extraordinary liminal experience, carved out of work and family time, and at the expense of leisure time. This step is critical in battling the bracketing effect. Leaders can also promote real reciprocal experiences and exchanges. This is one of my radical proposals: if our students travel “there,” then we host a group of “them” here. We invite and sponsor key speakers and actors from “there” to address our communities “here.” If we share a special talent or resource “there,” then we make opportunities to receive what they have to offer “here.” Conclusion All of my study abroad trips have been for four weeks or less, and the vast majority for two weeks, far different experiences from my own initial immersion. Although my students may not travel for as long as I did, I have witnessed how community-engaged short-term trips can provide a critical gateway experience to a life of cosmopolitan citizenship. I am excited to work

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with this emergent class of travelers, given the pedagogical rewards of even short-term travel and my students’ refreshing lack of a sense of entitlement. I am glad that educational travel now includes them and is not reserved only for those upper-class men and women able to afford the “grand tour.” I have years of anecdotal evidence that these experiences can turn Go-Nowheres into First Globals. This is what I expect of my students and my community members, my “kind,” my fellow cosmopolitans.

CHAPTER 13

International Service-Learning: Fostering International Cooperation/ Avoiding International Dominance Steven G. Jones

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y contribution to this volume differs from the others. Rather than focusing on individual experiences as an educator or researcher in Central America (where I have neither taught nor conducted research), I provide another context for understanding service in Central America—the growth of international service-learning programs in higher education. As opposed to volunteerism or cocurricular community service by high school and college students, international service-learning is a pedagogy that integrates community service with academics in students’ study-abroad experiences. Of the cases discussed in this volume, David Munoz’s description of the water project in Honduras comes closest to representing international service-learning. International service-learning contrasts with the alternative break programs discussed by Irene King and Eric M. Usner in their chapters. Although alternative break programs involve college students in organized service activities, service is only one of the facets of international service-learning. In addition to providing an overview of international service-learning, I also provide insights from the perspective of a college administrator who was responsible for balancing the interests and demands of students, parents, faculty members, host communities, and host colleges. Frequently in international service-learning, faculty and students want to make a difference and develop meaningful, sustainable partnerships with marginalized communities. As an administrator, my primary concern was the safety of students, which meant that sometimes I would have to cancel planned travel courses in the event of real threats to the health and security of the students. Canceling

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courses often resulted in disappointed, if not angry, students, faculty members, and hosts. Students, faculty, and their community partners believed that the benefits of the planned collaboration outweighed the risks to the students. My calculus as an administrator had to be the opposite. Jefferson Boyer’s reflections on his experiences with students in Honduras movingly and accurately depict the dilemma of taking students into harm’s way even when the potential for doing good is high. My essay has four parts. First, I provide a more complete definition of international service-learning. I then review the literature on international servicelearning to identify the potential pedagogical benefits of service-learning. I then turn my attention to the potential drawbacks of international servicelearning, which, I argue, are also drawbacks for any type of international service. I conclude with some recommendations on how educators can avoid those drawbacks and develop international service-learning projects that can provide deep learning experiences for students while developing mutually beneficial partnerships with communities based on respect and equality. International Service-Learning g Defined The phrase “international service-learning” has been used to describe a variety of international learning experiences, some of them curricular, others not, some organized by individual U.S. faculty or academic offices in U.S. universities, others organized by third party organizations. However, what defines international service-learning is neither the addition of a service activity to a traditional study-abroad experience nor the addition of an international experience to a domestic service-learning course. Rather, international service-learning is a transformative pedagogy that synthesizes the benefits of both study abroad and service-learning. For the purposes of this essay, I employ the following definition of international service-learning: [International service-learning is] a structured academic experience in another countryy in which students (a) participate in an organized service activity that addresses identified community needs; (b) learn from direct interaction and cross-cultural dialog with others; and (c) reflect on the experiencee in such a way as to gain further understanding of course content, a deeper understanding of global and interculturall issues, a broader appreciation of the host countryy and the discipline, and an enhanced sense of their own responsibilities as citizens, locally and globally. (Bringle and Hatcher 2011, 19, italics in original)

This definition reflects a pedagogical emphasis, true at least in U.S. higher education; the focus is on students, not necessarily the host community. Furthermore, explicit learning outcomes are built into the definition that go

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beyond understanding course content: understanding of global and intercultural issues, appreciation of the host country, and development of local and global citizenship. These outcomes are expressed through guided, structured reflection activities within curricular frameworks. This definition differentiates international service-learning from the other types of service described in this volume. In addition, this definition demonstrates that international service-learning is more than simply adding a service project to a study-abroad course or program or teaching a service-learning course outside of the United States. As Robert Bringle and Julie Hatcher note: Students do more than study in another nation; they are also engaged in organized service activities that (a) complement and augment their classroom learning, (b) contribute to the community in the host-country, (c) support face-to-face interaction with others, (d) increase cross-cultural understanding of others, and (d) challenge students to clarify and reconsider their roles as citizens. As a result, the international service experience provides opportunities for additional learning goals, activities, and relationships that are not available in the same domestic service learning course or in a traditional study abroad course. (11)

I will specify the potential “learning goals, activities, and relationships” alluded to by Bringle and Hatcher in the section that follows. For example, at its best, international service-learning immerses students in distinct cultures, improves their intercultural communication skills, and helps them transcend national, ethnic, or religious identities (Kiely 2005a, 2005b) while providing them with unique perspectives on their chosen disciplines by working with community members to address community problems in a non-U.S. setting (Parker and Dautoff 2007). On the other hand, international service-learning also has the potential of combining the shortcomings of each approach. Sara Grusky (2000) has observed that the concept of service learning only makes sense in countries such as the United States and among the upper and middle classes, and she cites the famous definition of international service-learning as “allowing relatively well-off people in this world to travel long distances to experience other people’s misery for a life-enriching experience” (Guo 1989, 108). Consequently, rather than increasing intercultural communication and understanding, international service-learning can reinforce racial and ethnic stereotypes and feelings of national superiority. Potential Benefits of International Service-Learning Although I stated earlier that international service-learning is more than the combination of study abroad and service-learning, both pedagogies share

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similar outcomes, which can potentially be magnified through international service-learning. In this section I examine the literature on study abroad, service-learning, and international service-learning to identify the primary pedagogical benefits of each. Enhanced Critical-Thinking Skills Because service-learning and study abroad are rooted in the philosophy of experiential education, both of them share the Dewian notion of learning through perplexity, by being confronted with and resolving situations in which our simplified assumptions and stereotypes are put to the test (Giles and Eyler 1994; Hatcher 1997; Montrose 2002; Saltmarsh 1996). Both pedagogies ideally put students in situations outside of their comfort zones. My hope as an educator is that by combining such experiences with critical reflection, students will develop more complex and nuanced opinions and attitudes toward race, gender, poverty, nationalism, and other issues. Additionally, several authors have noted the powerful impact that study abroad and service-learning have, particularly when combined, on student personal development and self-awareness and self-understanding (McEwen 1996; Steinberg 2002; Tonkin and Quiroga 2004). Empathy for the Marginalized When students are placed in different linguistic and cultural settings, particularly when they reside with host families, and when they are confronted directly with poverty, global inequality, poor access to health care and sanitation, and the host of issues they are likely to encounter, they are in a position to confront head-on their preconceptions with respect to those issues and the causes and consequences of these issues. My hope is that through international service-learning, students will not only develop greater empathy toward the poor and marginalized (Dunlap et al. 2007; Rockquemore and Schaffer 2000), but also greater cultural understanding and tolerance (Green 2001; Hayes and Cuban 1997; O’Grady 2000). New Perspectives on the Role of the United States in the World Another potential outcome of international service-learning is that students will critically examine the role of the United States in contributing to and resolving the circumstances they confront through their experiences (Kiely 2005a, 2005b; Kauffmann et al. 1992).

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Career Focus and Definition Both service-learning and study abroad provide students with opportunities to reconsider career options. This is particularly true when these pedagogies are integrated into preprofessional programs. Because students and their parents tend to view college education as a requirement for a good job, rather than a worthy end in itself, I hope that students develop attitudes and values that reflect a service orientation as well as a career orientation in their chosen professions. Service-learning and study abroad do result in such changes in students’ career orientations (Fisher 1996; Hannigan 2001). For example, future teachers who combine preprofessional training with study abroad to seriously explore opportunities often choose to teach in schools with high proportions of underserved and underrepresented children (Cushner and Mahon 2002; Roberts 2003). Likewise, medical students with significant preprofessional training overseas are likely to choose careers in underserved areas (Godkin and Savageau 2003). Even such students who choose to work in middle- and high-income communities develop a desire to provide clinical and pro bono services to underserved communities (Ramsey et al. 2004). Intercultural Learning and Respect Another expected outcome of each approach is that majority students will gain a greater understanding of and respect for minority cultures, and that minority students will begin to reexamine their own cultures from new perspectives (Anderson 2003; Tonkin and Quiroga 2004; Medina-Lopez-Portillo 2004; Williams 2005). Enhanced Learning of Subject Matter For administrators who are worried about increasing calls for greater evidence of the value added by higher education, there is ample evidence in the respective literature of study abroad and service-learning that each are linked to academic achievement as measured by academic knowledge and college completion (Eyler and Giles 1999; Hadis 2005; Ingraham and Peterson 2004; Sutton and Rubin 2004). Civic Agency and Global Citizenship It is particularly important to me that students’ civic agency and sense of global citizenship are enhanced. My hope is that students will develop the knowledge, skills, and dispositions to make positive contributions to the

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global commonwealth and that they will be able to “think globally”—that is, make decisions grounded in their international experiences and the insights gained from those experiences and, more importantly, act on those decisions. I want them to address global problems and concerns by applying the benefits of their college education and international experiences to collaborative problem solving based on their sense of a shared humanity. I believe that international service-learning, when done well, can contribute to students’ sense of a shared humanity and help them develop the efficacy needed to believe that positive social change is possible. What Study Abroad Adds to Service-Learning Just as service-learning can increase the impact of study abroad, study abroad can increase the impact of service-learning. By bringing cross-cultural issues to the fore, with explicit methodology for crossing cultural boundaries and developing cross-cultural competencies, study abroad as a methodology increases the opportunities for cultural understanding and respect through service-learning. Study-abroad professionals and experienced study-abroad instructors place a high value and priority on students’ intercultural sensitivities and cross-cultural communication skills. When this emphasis and expertise is combined with the deep cultural contacts that can emerge from service-learning, these competencies can be more directly addressed and enhanced (Parker and Dautoff 2007; Porter and Monard 2001; Westrick 2004). Service-learning in an international context often provides opportunities for service activities not obtainable in one’s home country. For example, most domestic service-learning places students with nonprofit agencies with various degrees of resources and specialization. In international service-learning, there may not be an organized nonprofit sector, at least as we would describe it in the United States. Or the nonprofit organizations that do exist, as discussed in other chapters in this volume, frequently lack the infrastructure and capacity to orient and train short-term volunteers. Where such capacity does exist, well-organized NGOs prefer to invest their time and efforts training volunteers who will make long-term commitments. Consequently, students frequently engage directly with communities at the grassroots level, work with government agencies that provide social services, or work with local religious authorities. Working with these types of community partners provides opportunities for comparative reflection on how social services are delivered and what service means in other contexts. Combining domestic service-learning with international service-learning provides an opportunity to work with groups that are ethnically similar, but

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are situated differently geographically, economically, and socially. For example, students might engage immigrants from El Salvador living in the United States as part of their domestic service and ethnically similar groups as part of an international service-learning project. Combining domestic and international service in this sense allows students to more deeply explore the meanings of race, ethnicity, culture, and identity through examining the impacts of economic and social contexts on how those meanings are derived. Such comparative experiences, then, allow students to truly grasp what “socially constructed” means. Service-learning in an international context also allows students to rethink concepts of community, service, and civic engagement by virtue of the contrast between their home and host country. Just as concepts of race, ethnicity, culture, and identity are socially constructed, so too is the concept of service (Anheier and Salomon 1999). International service-learning provides students with constant connection with the local community and service site. Whereas in domestic servicelearning, student contact with the “host” culture is limited to a few hours a week, international service-learning can provide students with constant and deeper contact with the host culture by combining homestays, courses taught by host country faculty, and service-learning projects (Montrose 2002). Just as service-learning can add a civic component to study abroad, studyabroad programs that integrate service-learning can expand students’ sense of citizenship and responsibility from local to global. Domestic service-learning, as noted above, tends to emphasize local civic responsibilities. International service-learning, on the other hand, should intentionally focus students’ attention to the connections between the local and the global, where “local” refers not only to their home community, but the host communities in which they are working (Cabrera and Anastasi 2008; Kauffmann et al. 1992; Lutterman-Aguilar and Gingerich 2002). The international aspect of service-learning can help North American students learn and reflect on the role of the United States in international affairs. It is not uncommon for North American students abroad to be confronted with questions about U.S. foreign policy. Frequently, these questions are negatively worded. North American students may have little to no understanding of the foreign policy actions that are affecting the host community. As a result, they may be tempted to respond to such questions defensively rather than engage in mutual inquiry into the causes and consequences of North American actions overseas. When students work in the community, particularly through meaningful service-learning, complaints and criticisms of North American policy may still arise, but they will probably be raised in less-threatening ways. Consequently, North American

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students are more likely to respond constructively to these criticisms and explore the roots of their hosts’ concerns (Kiely 2005a, 2005b; Kauffmann et al. 1992). One of the potential outcomes of domestic service-learning is that it allows students to critically examine issues of wealth, power, and privilege. Adding an international component provides opportunities for deeper reflection on these issues by virtue of comparison with social inequality in the host country. For example, it may be difficult for middle- or lower-income white students to acknowledge or understand the concept of “white privilege”; they don’t see themselves as privileged due to their race. However, when performing service in poor communities outside of the United States, issues of wealth, power, and privilege take on different meanings. Students begin to realize that these issues are relative and must be understood from the perspective of the person or group that has less of these social goods (Monard-Weismann 2003). Adding an international component to service-learning also can increase students’ abilities to negotiate and comprehend cultural difference within their home country. In an international setting, cultural differences are likely to be more pronounced, thereby requiring greater accommodation and intercultural skill on the part of U.S. students. Ideally, these intercultural skills can be applied to dealing with cultural differences in the home country too (Otten 2003; Williams 2005). Potential Limitations of International Service-Learning In an evaluation of national service programs, McBride, Brav, Menon, and Sherraden (2006) identified three interrelated limitations: elitism, state interest, and imperialism. Although their study focused on national service programs, these shortcomings could easily present themselves in international service-learning. The authors defined elitism “as the power certain members of a society have to make decisions for and dominate others” (McBride et al. 2006, 310). Elitism is likely to occur in international service-learning when the benefits to the service providers take precedence over the benefits to service recipients and/or when community organizations or residents have little say in the development of the service activities. With respect to the problem of state interests, McBride et al. (2006) noted that many national service programs were designed with explicit or implicit political goals that had little to do with educational outcomes for the service providers or development outcomes for the communities served. They found that rather than increasing civic capacity, national service programs frequently undermined individual and community capacity through

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excessively programmatic activities that were designed by government officials without input from other stakeholders. When international servicelearning is linked to either the home country or host country through grants, scholarships, or other forms of government sponsorship, there is the potential for government interference in the project. When faculty and staff are looking for financing, they must look for the explicit or implicit political goals of the funder, including government funders. When home or host state interests are integrated into international service-learning as a requirement for financial assistance, student and community interests may not be represented well, and the project may not have a long-term impact. Grant and scholarship seekers would be wise to question the objectives of potential funders and pay careful attention to the degree to which their objectives advance or deter the interests of students and communities. Current international and transnational service programs continue to run the risk of perpetuating the cultural, political, and economic hegemony of First World over Third World countries, spreading notions of development and underdevelopment. While the covert, and sometimes overt, intent of development is economic growth, cultural hegemony is both potentially an outcome of economic growth and a way of promoting it (McBride et al. 2006, 314). This risk is greatest when service-learning projects are modeled on North American practices or when the interlocutors between North American students and the community are members of the Westernized, local elite. The triple threats of elitism, state interest, and imperialism can overlap and reinforce each other. When service projects reflect state interests, it will be difficult to avoid the outcomes of elitism and imperialism. Likewise, elitism may be the result of pro-American or pro-Western biases on the part of the service providers and consequently be linked to imperialism. Ideational Shortcomings of International Service-Learning International service-learning and international volunteerism can result in unintended consequences for ideational reasons as well as structural weaknesses in how the service is organized. To understand the ideational reasons behind these unintended consequences, I turn to the work of Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti. Andreotti (2012, 2) identifies seven common problems with international education and coins a useful acronym—HEADS UP. H=Hegemony (the idea or belief that there is a single nation or group that possesses the sole power, authority, and expertise to “solve” all social problems)

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E=Ethnocentrism (comparing and evaluating all cultures through one’s own cultural perspective) A=Ahistoricism (failing to take into consideration the historical contexts of particular social economic conditions in particular countries and communities) D=Depoliticization (ignoring the degree to which inequalities in power contribute to social circumstances and frame responses to those circumstances) S=Salvationism (a desire to help based on the notion that helping is the duty of the strong and rich relative to the weak and poor) U=Uncomplicated solutions (the belief that social problems can be addressed and solved without recognizing the need for systemic change) P=Paternalism (the belief that those being helped are incapable of helping themselves because they are deficient) As attested by many of the contributors to this volume, most leaders of international service trips have seen evidence of one or more of these attitudes in our students’ approaches to service and, if we’re honest, our own. As academics with specialized degrees, we are especially susceptible to hegemonic approaches, believing our disciplinary perspective is “the best” at addressing a particular problem or issue. I have found most of my students to be prone to ahistoricism and salvationism; they tend to be ignorant, through no fault of their own, of the historical roots of the social conditions they address through service, and they approach service from a sense of religious or moral duty based on faith and socioeconomic status. Andreotti is quick to point out that the fact that we possess one or more of these beliefs or attitudes does not make us “bad” people. However, these attitudes do get in the way of developing deeper insights about ourselves and our home cultures in creating, facilitating, or sustaining the very social conditions we are trying to ameliorate. Furthermore, HEADS UP attitudes unintentionally prevent what Andreotti refers to as “mutual learning,” what I describe as the joint production of knowledge. Consequently, service may actually be a disservice by unintentionally reinforcing ideas of national or cultural hegemony relative to the host culture, ignoring opportunities for intercultural understanding, failing to mobilize communities for systemic change, and perpetuating paternalistic attitudes among the servers and the served. It can also reinforce a noblesse obligee attitude towards service rather than foster a sense of common humanity by addressing universal problems such as poverty, disease, and environmental degradation (Morton 1995; Rosenberger 2000; Ward and Wolf-Wendel 2000).

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Lack of Adequate Pre- and/or Postorientation and Reflection Richard Kiely (2005a, 2005b) has argued that the transformational learning that can occur through international service-learning is unlikely to occur unless students have reflection opportunities before and after their service experience. When faculty and staff fail to provide students the opportunity to critically examine their stereotypes, preconceptions, concerns, and hopes through structured and unstructured reflection, before, during, and after the service, the likelihood of their achieving the outcomes we desire is minimized. I share many of the frustrations expressed by Irene King in her chapter. Too frequently, our well-intentioned students focus on what they’re receiving in terms of emotional validation from their service work. In some cases they may come away with a heightened consciousness toward and greater awareness of the complexities related to global poverty, its causes and solutions. More frequently, and to my frequent dismay, they come back with “a greater appreciation for my way of life as a North American” or feeling good that they were able to brighten someone’s day. But avoiding these kinds of results is challenging. Lack of Attention to Developing Sustainable Community Partnerships International service-learning programs that provide service opportunities for students, but without establishing long-term, sustainable partnerships with local communities and community organizations, run a higher risk of elitism and imperialism than programs that do establish such partnerships. Linda Chisholm (2003), former director of the International Partnership for Service Learning and Leadership, argues that creating effective international service-learning partnerships requires a great deal of planning, communication, forethought, and mutual respect among partners. She encourages practitioners to think carefully about short-term international service projects that cannot be easily integrated into ongoing projects and cautions against the dangers of engaging students in service projects for which they are culturally and/or technically unprepared. Without proper planning and preparation, the result, she warns, will be “another of the halffinished and then abandoned service projects that one sadly sees throughout the developing world” (279). Many faculty members simply lack the time and expertise to develop these reciprocal partnerships. Lack of Attention to Impact of International Service on the Communities Served Just as there is insufficient attention paid to the impact of service learning on communities in domestic service-learning (Cruz and Giles 2000), there is

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also insufficient attention paid to the impact of international service on communities outside the United States (McBride et al. 2006). Not only should practitioners periodically assess the impact of international service-learning on local communities for the sake of the communities and to contribute to program improvement, but to not do so reinforces elitism and the possible community perception that the service is more for the good of the North Americans than it is for the local community. Furthermore, to avoid elitism and imperialism, community partners and residents should be involved in the design of community-impact evaluations (Aubel 1995). Recommendations In this section, I offer some recommendations for strategies by which the benefits of international service-learning can be achieved and the shortcomings avoided. Many of these recommendations will appear to the informed reader as common sense. Be that as it may, they are not always implemented. Recommendation 1 Make the time and effort to research and develop long-term partnership relations in the host country. As Chisholm (2003) acknowledges, this is frequently a time-consuming and potentially costly process. The practitioner will need to evaluate potential higher-education and community partners as well as research local conditions related to crime, economics, and political stability. He or she will need to consider the degree to which there is a good match between the host institutions and the home institution with respect to values, curriculum, and definitions of service. The practitioner will also need to determine whether the opportunities for service are suitable for North American students. For example, what time commitments will students need to make, and what level of foreign-language competency and/or technical skills will they need? Chisholm (2003) recommends that this background research and preparation will be made easier by identifying “a qualified native informant, someone who is familiar with the past and present conditions in the country you have chosen, who knows the inside story of the country’s service agencies and institutions of higher education, and who has a large network of connections on which to draw” (276). Although this strategy will make the background research and preparation easier, it also runs the risk of fostering elitism in that such contacts are likely to be members of the local, Westernized elite. Chisholm also recommends, as does this author, that the practitioner make at least one preparatory site visit to the host community before committing

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to an international service-learning project. With the help of the local informant, more grassroots agencies may be identified as potential partners, and discussions with these groups can begin. Taking the time to develop a long-term relationship with a core community partner not only addresses many of the logistic and structural challenges of international service-learning, it also helps the instructor to develop material to address Andreotti’s HEADS UP concerns. For example, working with a reliable local partner can help instructors and students develop an awareness of the historical roots of the social conditions in the host community, thereby avoiding ahistoricism; it can help them identify the political and systemic challenges of finding long-term solutions to local social problems, thereby avoiding depoliticization and uncomplicated solutions. Recommendation 2 Provide as much predeparture orientation and training to students as possible. This includes basic travel orientation as well as an introduction to the host country’s history, culture, politics, and economy. When feasible and possible, invite local residents from the host community or country to speak to the students. Predeparture orientation should also engage students in initial discussions of wealth, power, privilege, gender, and ethnicity, including how these concepts are defined by majority and minority groups both in the home and the host countries. If the service requires minimal levels of language or technical skills, create a mechanism for assessing what skills students have when predeparture training begins. Then, design a training program that will ensure that students acquire the necessary skills before departing to the host country. Predeparture training, as noted above, should also include opportunities for critical reflection. Reflection at this point should encourage students to examine their preconceptions, stereotypes, expectations, and concerns. Directed readings, films, presentations by past participants, guest lectures, and other means of providing students with information can all be sources for stimulating reflection. Furthermore, predeparture orientation should introduce the HEADS UP terms, and students should begin to engage in self-reflection with respect to how any of these attitudes affect their own approaches to service. Recommendation 3 Provide opportunities for in-country reflection. This may be particularly diff ficult during short-term service trips that occur in the middle of a semester

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or near the end of the semester. If the service is intensive, lasting six or more hours a day, students may complain that they are too tired to reflect. Providing them with guided, structured reflection prompts may ease their anxieties about the time and energy necessary for reflection. In addition to reflection on course or disciplinary topics, reflection topics can include comparative analyses of wealth and poverty, ethnicity and race, gender and power; reflection on the role of U.S. foreign policy in the host country; and/or reflection on the importance of local knowledge and expertise and its value relative to “expert” knowledge. Self-reflection on the HEADS UP should continue. Where feasible, dialogic reflection with host community residents should explore real examples of HEADS UP thinking and practices. Encouraging students to reflect informally with each other by sharing their feelings, concerns, disappointments, and revelations will also stimulate thoughtful reflection. Indeed, Kiely (2005a) believes that it is imperative that international service-learning participants have the opportunity to express their affective and emotional reactions to the service as well as their cognitive reactions. Recommendation 4 Encourage students to engage with as many people in the host community as they can. Help them overcome their natural reticence to speak to strangers. Encourage them to talk to taxi drivers or people they sit next to on local buses or the staff in their local schools. The more they engage with individuals from a cross section of the host community, the more competent they will become in their intercultural skills and the more likely they will be to develop the kind of comparative perspective that will expand their understanding of the host country and culture and its interactions with the United States. However, it is also imperative that students be sensitive to the degree to which their reactions to people in the host community reflect HEADS UP reactions. Recommendation 5 Maintain close, frequent communication with local community partners. It is important for practitioners who travel with their students to take advantage of their time in the host country in order to strengthen the relationship with community partners. This will also allow opportunities for in-service evaluation as well as opportunities for planning and designing subsequent service projects and/or project evaluations. If neither faculty nor staff is traveling with the students, this is still the best time to use electronic media to touch base with the community partners. As Chisholm has argued, much of

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the success of international service-learning depends on the degree to which North American faculty and staff establish relationships with community partners that are based on “trust, mutuality of benefit, and open communication” (271). Frequent communication with community partners should continue after the service is completed and the students have returned home. Recommendation 6 Provide students with reentry orientation and opportunities for reflection. Kiely (2005a), in a longitudinal study of participants in an international service-learning program in Nicaragua, uncovered what he terms a “chameleon complex,” which describes the difficulty students have in reconciling their newly acquired attitudes about poverty, power, and social justice with the prevailing norms and attitudes in their home country (278). One way of helping students acknowledge and react to the chameleon complex is to provide opportunities for reentry debriefing and reflection, as well as mechanisms for participants to communicate with each other about their reentry experiences and challenges. Face-to-face and social media venues for ongoing communication after reentry can be formal (that is, as part of a structured course) or informal. Conclusions International service-learning, by combining elements of service-learning and study abroad, has the potential to magnify the positive effects of both, provided that the very serious potential pitfalls are addressed. It can provide students with an expanded sense of civic responsibility, one that adds a global perspective. It can engage students in comparative analyses of issues of race, gender, power, privilege, wealth, and poverty and lead to a deeper understanding of these concepts than they might gain through domestic study. It can allow students to become more informed of and engaged in a critical perspective on their own country’s foreign policy and international behavior. By requiring students to work in and with communities that are culturally, ethnically, and economically different from their own, it gives students the opportunity not only to develop greater cultural awareness and appreciation, but also to rethink their assumptions about what “counts” as knowledge and expertise.

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ow in the end can we fashion short-term service trips to Central America in ways that empower our students, our community hosts, and ourselves to be agents of change in our own and others’ lives? How can we replace the ethos of the rogue volunteer with one of solidarity, revive the ancient laws of hospitality, and learn from the remarkable successes of grassroots movements in the region, as Bill Westerman and Jeff Boyer urge? How can we recover a sense of hope and purpose amid the rising violence, corruption, and impunity that Boyer and Ellen Moodie identify? How can we harness our colleges and universities to the complex project of promoting social equality that our Central American partners propose? Lessons from Our Central American Partners During his visit to Ohio and the conference that generated this volume in May 2012, Father Fernando Cardenal shared an illuminating anecdote from his 45 years of working with young people in service: “Three years ago when I was presenting my memoir, which had been published in Spain, in the city of Granada, an audience member asked me, ‘How can you be a man of hope after all the political disillusionment you’ve experienced in this most recent stage of your life?’ I told him that I didn’t place my hope in theories; rather, I placed it in the youth . . . And I told him this: ‘My hope is that the young people return to the streets to make history.’” The newspaper in Granada, Spain, reproduced that phrase. Then it was reproduced in the Managua Nuevo Diario. And then, on Managua’s Jean Paul Genet Avenue, they were preparing a commercial billboard—the frame and the zinc plate were already set up—and someone took some black spray paint

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and wrote, ‘My hope is that the young people will return to the streets to make history. Fernando Cardenal.’ It stayed there for a year and a half. That avenue is very busy, and so thousands and thousands of Nicaraguans could read the message. A friend took a photo of the sign, framed it, and brought it to me in my office. A young Spaniard was doing two years of voluntary service at the Jesuit university in Managua, and he saw the photo. He returned to Madrid, and a few months later, he emailed me and said, “I’m in the streets of Madrid with the ‘indignant ones’1 making history.” Father Cardenal’s “words turned to signs turned to actions turned back to words” remind us of the important connections among us and among the themes of this volume. His confidence in the inner strength of young people, forged of idealism, energy, and purpose, resonates with the experiences we have had when our pedagogies function at their best. Most important in this anecdote, the international volunteer, a Spaniard in this case, applies the lessons he has learned in Nicaragua to the struggle for social justice in his home. For him Nicaragua provides neither a laboratory for working out his ideals, nor a “vacation” from ordinary life. His work is connected through words, signs, actions, and, most importantly, people. Cosmopolitan citizens understand themselves not as acting on or on behalf of others but in solidarity with them in a globally relevant struggle for a more just and equitable society. Similar to Father Cardenal’s focus on young people, our volume dedicates quite a number of essays to those young people drawn to international service-learning through higher education, but we also address those other U.S. citizens engaged in service from outside the university context. They also bring passion and energy, although perhaps not a great deal of experience in travel or formation in the academic study of those regions and localities to which they commit themselves. The essays in this volume demonstrate the problematic nature of shortterm international service, but also how productive cross-class international collaboration can be. Those of us from what David Muñoz calls the “affluent countries” and classes can engage in such collaboration. In fact, as Jesuit and Central American academic, Ignacio Martín-Baró, argued almost 40 years ago, cross-class alliances are essential to the struggle for social justice. Martín-Baró worked as a psychology professor at the Central American University in San Salvador for much of the 1970s and 1980s.2 He argued that the proper focus of the university ought to be research on the problems facing the oppressed majority. This focus would require university professors and students to acknowledge their own privilege and reorient themselves to the everyday suffering of ordinary people. This is a big step, given the resistance embedded in the very structures of the university (1991).

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Indeed, the forces that reify privilege and inequality in short-term service encounters are strong, ever present, and, in some cases, growing. These reemerge over time and history, indeed perhaps in every trip. Some of these forces include the robust, Salvationist narrative arcs that crop up in participants’ reflective, memory, and dissemination work—the ways in which the interests of those that Katherine Daly calls “the Visitors” overshadow the interests of other stakeholders, including the interests of local communities; and of course, the ramping up of time pressure during the current neoliberal era makes prolonged immersive experiences impracticable and regular ongoing reflection on one’s practice very difficult. What Daly calls “soft global citizenship” has the infrastructure and momentum to thrive, whereas developing critical global citizenship takes a lot of pushing back against the structures that shape and circumscribe our lives. As our contributors have shown, even the most conscientiously designed tour, mission, or project can reinforce existing social inequalities, and projects that once made the difference in an embattled community’s survival can breed destructive relations of dependency over time. But also recurrent are middle-class movements in opposition to privilege and inequality, as well as concrete attempts to ally with working-class and poor people to accomplish progressive change. Katherine Borland’s historical sketch of humanitarianism depicts grassroots overseas service movements emerging from the ruins or contradictions of more top-down, centralized foreign-aid relief efforts and institutions. Westerman and Cardenal describe the important role that university students and faculty played in supporting popular social revolutions of the 1980s. Eric Usner provides the invaluable contemporary example of students at Sarah Lawrence College lit on fire by their experience abroad, challenging the exploitation back home of the mostly immigrant cleaning and grounds staff and winning concrete concessions from the administration. Central America—proximate, poor, and problematically the target of over a century of U.S. intervention, imperialism, and cultural hegemony— lends itself to prefigured and widely-circulating soft global citizenship and charity-oriented narratives. But it has also served as the generator of important solidarity discourse and action. As Martín-Baró describes, it is a tragic, conflictive but hopeful region, from which the “arrow of consciousness, even though it flies from the longbow of a historic past, aims at striking a new and different future” (1991, 227). Many of the contributors to this volume found their way to international service-learning through a personal involvement with the U.S.-Central American solidarity movements of the 1980s or with organizations that sprang from those movements. Many movements and moments before and

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after the 1980s have modeled the kind of solidarity and cosmopolitan citizenship that we advocate. Yet, as Abigail Adams, William Westerman, Katherine Daly, and Ellen Moodie point out, that revolutionary moment of political tourism and engagement has passed. We are now witnessing the rapid institutionalization of short-term service tourism. The challenges of this new context are felt most acutely in the domain of U.S. higher education, from which many of these essays have been generated. Several of our contributors are critical of the way that our academies promote international service-learning but do not provide the resources to students and faculty necessary to develop robust programs of critical global citizenship. The obstacles are considerable, despite many institutions’ well-intentioned mission statements or their sincere efforts to link international service-learning courses and activities to substantial programs of social and pedagogical change. As Steven Jones explains, student learning and student safety remain priorities for university administrators of international service-learning. The four student voices—Alycia Buenger, Nicole Klimas, Liza Marks, and Meghan Hensley—attest to both the power of and the embodied, highly personal nature of that learning. Yet many of our contributors locate the importance of liberatory pedagogy, research, and collaboration with communities outside of the student experience. Katherine Daly, Irene King, and Jeff Boyer argue that we must include our community hosts as both colearners and coteachers in a collective consciousness-raising process rather than as paid providers of enrichment experiences for our students. This would require the university and community to develop a sense of mutuality, shared fate, and shared benefit. Countering the ways in which universities and institutions of education everywhere ensure class distinctions, our contributors envision the possibilities for a university “to define itself through its choices in favor of the total liberation of our people” (MartínBaró 1991, 228). Student learning and community benefit are not, after all, two sides of an exchange but are a single, ongoing learning experience with benefits for all. Clear steps and missteps emerge from the narratives collected in this volume. We discuss these, pointing to best practices, but not in a how-tomanual, prescriptive way. Indeed, we believe that a trip facilitator who has confidently concocted the perfect recipe for international service-learning, repeatable to the same effect regardless of changing global and local contexts, would do well to take another look, wax reflective, and confront the contradictions he or she is ignoring. At the same time, we affirm that there are many ways to engage the world. This volume acknowledges the diversity of cosmopolitan dispositions and practices but advocates for those we think result in the most enduring and deepest-rooted global citizenship.

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Creating Informed Travelers These essays emphasize the importance of learning about the host community’s global and local context—the history, politics, geography, language— before engaging in service trips. Jeff Boyer recommends not sending freshmen on these trips because they will not have sufficient time to prepare, particularly in terms of language training. We are not calling for a reinstitution of the junior-year-abroad formula that can exclude so many students, but rather for all trip leaders, university administrators, and community-based groups to take very seriously the amount of preparation and language learning that these trips require if they are to prepare the foundation for cosmopolitan citizenship. International service-learning sites such as those located in Central America are not places where students can “parachute” in, assuming that either all poor countries are alike or that they can learn anything necessary once they hit the ground. There is no mystical quality or process inherent in “immersion experiences” that can substitute for rigorous academic preparation. Nor can faculty and administrators, excited by the current push in higher education to prioritize global education and service-learning, assume that any country can provide the conditions guaranteed to fit some formula for international service-learning. The pressures of today’s economies and institutionalized reward systems often militate against the kind of thorough preparation we advocate and make it easier to consider adopting more “efficient” or streamlined processes. Schools and interest groups without direct contacts with small communities will necessarily rely on third-party providers. But as Daly points out, even those organizations founded in a revolutionary struggle can devolve over time into service providers for a sort of voluntourism steeped in revolutionary nostalgia, but organized around catering to “wealthy” visitors. We must not only cultivate open and honest relations, as King points out, we must also be willing to dialogue about problems with community members and change our programs as a consequence or, as Boyer argues, suspend them in order to combat unhealthy, counterproductive patterns of dependency. Fortunately, many of our university-based programs do arise from personal connections; in these cases the uniqueness of a particular set of relationships is often retained. But even these cases call for ongoing attention to how one’s presence may negatively impact communities over time. We must continually engage in the academic work of putting each particular situation into its larger context. Ultimately, we argue that international service-learning, given its potential to achieve deep engagement, requires deep academic preparation—as much or more than traditional academic study trips. Jones points out that the

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potential of international service-learning exists in the overlap between what we can achieve through international education and what we can achieve through service-learning. This means thinking of service not as an add-on to some other kind of international trip nor international education as an addon to the service experience. Instead, the particularities of the service community must be thoroughly contextualized, so that volunteers understand material poverty and inequality as rooted in local, national, and international histories of exploitation as opposed to being an inevitable consequence of “culture” or “values.” Cultivating Reflection Key among best practices is the driving need to “thicken” reflection— before, during, and after travel. Only by engaging in a process of critical consciousness-raising can the privileged begin to recognize the injustices upon which their everyday lives rest (Freire [1970] 2000). Experiential education, immersion, and accompaniment may constitute the first steps in this process, but as the contributors in our volume have emphasized, changing one’s way of thinking and acting in the world takes time and requires ongoing facilitation. As Martín-Baró (1991) pointed out, liberatory pedagogy confronts deep structural resistance, both within and outside universities. These essays model the complex reflective practices we see as foundational to international service learning in all its varied contexts. Even our work with the transformative impact of these trips on the travelers themselves has to be tenacious. Short-term service trips are powerful opportunities for practice and reflection to come together. Nevertheless, their intensity and the limited time encourage both facilitators and students to just focus on practice. Reflection, even when implemented, as Moodie, King, and Adams demonstrate, can reinforce the ethnocentric narratives that permeate North American self-representations and practice. As facilitators, we need to challenge our students to think beyond readymade narratives long before the trip, to engage with them intensively during the trip and determinedly afterwards. While we acknowledge the narrative power of the flashbulb memory effect and the erasures of the untellable stories, we point to the work outlined in King’s essay, Jones’s thoughtful piece, and Marshall Ganz’s exhortations to be able to tell your public story against the grain but in a way that connects with and inspires others. So what do we say to Aunt Jane who is proudly recounting the story of how her daughter rescued street children for a week in Nicaragua? How do we confront soft global citizenship not only in our own educational travel but in the wider communities we inhabit? We suggest opening up the conversation

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about North American do-gooding by sharing the difficulties, contradictions, and challenges we have faced in our own practice. Cultivating Communities Another key practice is conducting short-term service projects in the context of long-term, ongoing, and accountable relations with a local community, relations that do not privilege one group over another, but rather engage diverse groups on site. At first glance, short-term service would seem like a win-win situation, but our narratives demonstrate the presence of invisible, ignored, and sometimes enraged stakeholders. These trips unfold in the domain of an international hospitality and tourism industry in which the fragile sovereignty of the Host is systematically subverted by the privileges and centrality of the Visitor. It takes a long time and a lot of effort to locate and cultivate inclusive partners, but that is critical to avoiding the kind of patron-client relations that are often built into the local social infrastructure, traditions of gift giving, and a long history of political, economic, and cultural imperialism in the region. Dealing with Material Inequalities Material aid is often a double-edged sword, particularly when visitors from affluent communities want their efforts to transcend charity and poverty tourism, and promote instead pro-poor or structural transformation. Part of our work as facilitators is to set reasonable and limited expectations for what these trips and our travelers can do in the short-term format. We need to confront head-on the problematic nature of the odd but very popular projects and gift-giving relationships, in which volunteers exchange material assistance and inexpert manual labor for a spiritual or emotional experience that feels more real than life “back home.” Instead, we suggest that volunteer visitors accompany local volunteers as they work on communitybased, community-initiated projects and activities. We acknowledge that such projects will be difficult to identify and even harder to plan at a distance. This may require several preliminary visits on the part of facilitators. This investment is necessary, however, if one wishes to avoid developing relations of dependency that damage community self-concept on the one hand and reinforce notions of North American superiority on the other. Alternately, King suggests a form of accompaniment in which volunteers share in the everyday chores of their hosts and in this way learn viscerally and firsthand how the “two-thirds world” lives. How do we handle the student who chafes at not being able to display his or her generosity in the

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presence of great need? Conversely, how do we keep our assertions about the evils of dependency from leading students to an attitude of insensitivity in the face of want? Once again deep and careful reflection on the causes and consequences of social inequality is at least a step in the right direction. Clearly, exceptional cases call for material aid, such as disaster relief or the water project Muñoz describes. In Muñoz’s project North American engineering students perform short-term professional service, but the community is at the center of and a co-owner in a long-term process of implementing needed change. The student engineers offer their specialized skills and interventions, but they work closely with colleagues from the nearby university as well as with local political representatives and civil service employees. Such large-scale, multi-year infrastructure projects require repeated consultations with community stakeholders, some of whom, Muñoz admits, may never be won over. Moreover, Muñoz emphasizes the crucial importance of recognizing and seeking help with the nonengineering dimensions of the project, an important modification of the now bankrupt “technical solutions” approach to international development. The key is to activate networks of locals and outsiders in ways that make the beneficiaries of the project the ultimate decision makers. Bringing It All Back Home Finally, the importance of continuing engagement back home emerges from these pieces, most clearly in Jones’s and King’s work from Jesuit and Dominican universities, where the ethos of service pervades the curriculum and cocurriculum, and in Usner’s essay, in which a group of students returning from Nicaragua make the shift from educational consumer to cosmopolitan. Westerman points out that student learners may develop unforeseen ways of enacting their commitments after their course or service experience has officially ended. But in order for this kind of follow-through to occur consistently, we need to build structures of support for such efforts within the university. Martín Baró (1991) wrote clearly of the need for universities to develop both complementary and structural mechanisms for developing a liberatory educational curriculum and mission. . . . When universities are able to achieve this, then short-term international service or witnessing abroad are tied into longer projects of service and activism “back home,” as Westerman points out was true for the sanctuary and accompaniment movements. For all of us, much of the real work begins at the end of these trips.

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Notes 1. Los Indignadoss is a Spanish social movement that emerged in 2011 in response to economic crisis, high unemployment, particularly among the young, and a feeling that the interests of ordinary people are not represented in Spain’s current political system. 2. In 1989 Martín-Baró was assassinated by the Salvadoran military, along with five other Jesuit scholars, their housekeeper, and her daughter. Salvadorans continue to mark the anniversary of this atrocity with an annual vigil, as do North American opponents of their own country’s responsibility for the militarization in the region that led to these deaths.

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About the Contributors

Abigail E. Adams, PhD, is a sociocultural anthropologist, professor at Central Connecticut State University, and former journalist. She did her doctoral work at the University of Virginia, researching the role of U.S. and Maya evangelical Christians during Guatemala’s 36 years of civil war and counterinsurgency. She earned her master’s degree in Latin American studies from Stanford University. She first visited Guatemala when studying Spanish there as an undergraduate in the first of the years of acute violence. She continues research and publishing on Mayan cultural revitalization, U.S.-Central American relations, and postviolence civic culture. She leads field schools in cultural anthropology to Central America on a regular basis. Katherine Borland d is a folklorist specializing in the politics of culture and performance who teaches in the Comparative Studies Department at The Ohio State University. In 1990 she traveled to Nicaragua for the first time as an election observer with her sister-city organization. She returned shortly after to conduct doctoral research, which resulted in a book: Unmasking Class, Gender and Sexuality in Nicaraguan Festival (Univ. of Arizona 2006). She also recorded the stories of Mexican, Caribbean, and Central American migrants working in the poultry processing plants of southern Delaware (Creating Community: Hispanic Migration to Rural Delaware 2002) 2 for the Delmarva Folklife Project. In 2002 she initiated the first service-learning study-abroad program at The Ohio State University, and since then she has co-organized and participated in a variety of service-oriented travel experiences to Nicaragua, Honduras, Paraguay, Brazil, and Bolivia. Currently, she is working on a critical ethnography of international volunteering with a focus on solidarity activism in Honduras. Jefferson C. Boyer is professor of anthropology and founder of the Sustainable Development Program at Appalachian State University. He has led 11 student, inter-faith, and fact-finding trips to Honduras and Central America since 1984, emphasizing living in host communities, working and learning about agrarian realities, justice struggles, and hopes for a more people-oriented, sustainable development. He writes on Central American and Appalachian agrarian movements, rural development, and sustainability issues. Recent publications include the article “Food Security, Food Sovereignty, and Challenges for Transnational Agrarian Movements: The Honduras Case” in The Journal of Peasant Studiess (2010), as well as a coauthored chapter “Daring to Hope in the Midst of Despair: The Agrarian Question within the Anti-Coup

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Resistance Movement in Honduras” in the 2012 anthology, Central America in the New Millennium: Living Transition and Reimagining Democracy. In April, 2011 he chaired the panel on violence associated with land grabbing and presented on the Honduran case at the Conference on Global Land Grabbing, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK. It is, indeed, the growing safety and ethical concerns about student and citizen immersion projects in the midst of expanding political and structural violence that inspires Boyer’s contribution to this book. Fernando Cardenal, SJ, is a Nicaraguan Jesuit priest who has dedicated his life to the liberation of the poor and to the struggle for social justice in Latin America. After completing his religious studies in 1969, Cardenal joined colleagues in Colombia, where he lived in a poverty-stricken neighborhood in the city of Medellín. In the 1970s he returned to Nicaragua and supported the resistance to the Somoza dictatorship. During the Sandinista government in the 1980s, Cardenal served as minister of education. In this post he coordinated the National Literacy Crusade, which helped raise the country’s literacy rate from 49 to 87 percent and earned UNESCO’s International Literacy Award. In 1984, unhappy with his work within the revolution, the Jesuits expelled Cardenal. Nevertheless, he continued to live in his Jesuit community, and in 1997 he became the only Jesuit in 460 years to be reinstated. Father Cardenal now directs Fe y Alegría in Nicaragua, an organization dedicated to providing education and sustainable development to poor children in marginal urban and rural communities. The organization has been active in several Latin American countries for more than 50 years. In August 2008, Cardenal published his memoirs, Sacerdote en la Revolución, a personal reflection on ethical, religious, political, and social issues affecting Nicaragua and Latin America over the past four decades. In 2012 he gave the keynote address for the Good Works in Central America Conference, from which this book emerged. Katherine Dalyy is currently working as the program director at Pueblito Canada, where she leads an exchange between teachers from Canada and teachers from Nicaragua. She continues to be involved in solidarity organizations that facilitate solidarity tours. She is trying to practice what she preaches. She graduated with a master of education degree from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education–University of Toronto in 2009. She is immensely grateful to Professor Daniel Schugurensky for his guidance, advice, and support throughout this research project. Dr. Steven G. Jones is the director of the Center for Engaged Learning, Teaching, and Scholarship at Georgia College and State University. He oversees the campuses’ faculty development, service-learning, nonprofit-leadership, student-leadership, civicengagement, and undergraduate-research programs. Prior to his current position, he served as associate provost for civic engagement and academic mission at the University of Scranton, where he was responsible for academically-focused civic engagement programming and supervision of the Office of International Programs and Services. Dr. Jones has also served as coordinator in the Office of Service Learning, Center for Service and Learning, at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis and as project associate for the Integrating Service and Academic Studies project at

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Campus Compact, a national organization that promotes and supports civic engagement in higher education. Dr. Jones has authored and edited several publications related to domestic and international civic engagement. He is a coeditor, with Robert Bringle and Julie Hatcher, of International Service Learning: Conceptual Frameworks and Researchh (2010). He edited the second edition of Campus Compact’s Introduction to Service Learning Toolkitt and is a coauthor of two other Campus Compact monographs, The Community’s College: Indicators of Engagement at Two-Year Institutionss and The Promise of Partnerships: Tapping into the Campus as a Community Asset. He is also coeditor, with Jim Perry, of Quick Hits for Educating Citizens. Steven received a PhD in political science from the University of Utah in 1995 and was an associate professor of political science at the University of Charleston from 1995 to 2002, where he also served as the director of the Robert C. Byrd Institute for Government Studies. Irene Kingg is the director of the Center for Service and Social Justice at Villanova University, which sends approximately eight hundred students per year on alternative break programs. She holds a master of divinity degree from Princeton Theological Seminary, where her primary work was on Latin American liberation theology. She was the founding director of the Center for Community Partnerships and Service Learning at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, where she led delegations/alternative break trips to Nicaragua and other locations for 13 years. Before that she served as the director of the Social Action Program at Manhattan College, establishing their service-learning program and leading alternative break trips to Honduras. She also worked as a chaplain for social justice programs at Princeton University. She coedited Enhancing Religious Identity: Best Practices from Catholic Campusess in 2001 (Georgetown University Press) with John R. Wilcox. Ellen Moodie is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She first became involved in Central America in 1982 through solidarity activities while an undergraduate at Indiana University. She first traveled to El Salvador in 1993 with a sister-cities organization based in New Jersey, where she had worked as a journalist for seven years. At the Jersey Journall in Hudson County, she reported on many issues involving Central American migrants and refugees. Her academic research, begun during graduate school at the University of Michigan, has centered on the transformations of public meanings during political transitions in Central America. She has focused on representations of encounters: until recently, quotidian experiences of violence and insecurity in a site once saturated by the horrors of war. Currently she is researching middle-class political subjectivities and new youth movements in El Salvador. Her publications include El Salvador in the Aftermath of Peace: Crime, Uncertainty, and the Transition to Democracyy (Pennsylvania 2010) and Central America in the New Millennium: Living Transition and Re-imagining Democracy, coedited with Jennifer L. Burrell (Berghahn 2013). David R. Muñoz, emeritus associate professor of mechanical engineering at the Colorado School of Mines, earned PhD and MS degrees from Purdue University and a BS from the University of New Mexico, all in mechanical engineering. He has advised engineering students on hundreds of design-build and research projects on topics

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ranging from hybrid electric vehicle design and implementation (1992–94) to potable water systems (geophysical water prospecting through distribution design and field implementation) in Honduras and Uganda (2004–10). David was born and raised in Indiana to a North American mother and Honduran father. This familial relationship to Honduras has had a profound effect on David’s life and especially the latter portion of his professional career. He has taught several thermo-fluid science and design courses, including a course that he developed entitled Sustainable Engineering Design, to specifically broaden the young engineer’s view of the engineering design process. He served as the director of the humanitarian engineering minor program, the objective of which was to prepare students interested in using their engineering skills while also following their hearts to develop positive working relationships with the economically poor. He is interested in working on interdisciplinary efforts toward achieving global peace and sustainability. To that end he has been a member of the Fetzer (Institute) Advisory Council for Engineering Professions to explore the power of love and forgiveness in engineering practice. Eric Martin Usner received a PhD in ethnomusicology from New York University in 2009 and an MA in ethnomusicology from University of California, Riverside. While teaching at Sarah Lawrence College from 2002 to 2005, he developed a service-learning curriculum in Nicaragua with Irene King. He has also been involved with public sector work in New York City (Center for Traditional Music and Dance) and with community engagement initiatives on the South Side of Chicago while a postdoctoral fellow at The University of Chicago. He was a founding officer of the Applied Ethnomusicology Group within the UNESCO-sponsored International Council for Traditional Music. His interests in performance cultures and ethnography are broad, but all are undergirded by a concern for socially responsive and responsible intellectual praxis and creating sustainable higher education. Earning a living as a carpenter and furniture-maker while negotiating the post-neoliberal academic job market, he is preparing for publication an ethnography of contemporary cultures of classical music in Vienna. The monograph, entitled Classical Musics, Cosmopolitanisms, and the New Vienna, grows from fieldwork conducted while an international doctoral research fellow of the Social Science Research Council. He can be reached at [email protected]. William Westerman is a folklorist who teaches at Goucher College in the master’s program in cultural sustainability. Prior to that, he was an Archie Green research fellow at the American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, and taught courses on immigration and human rights at Princeton University for five years. He has been director of the Cambodian American Heritage Museum and Killing Fields Memorial, in Chicago, and the Drake House Museum of the Historical Society of Plainfield, New Jersey. He founded and directed the Program for Immigrant Traditional Artists at the International Institute of New Jersey and was staff fieldworker and curator for the Philadelphia Folklore Project. He has also taught at Rutgers, Villanova, and the University of Pennsylvania, from which he received his PhD in folklore and folklife. As an activist he has been involved in refugee and immigrants’ rights issues since 1985.

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He worked with Chinese detainees from the Golden Venture and curated an exhibit of their artwork, Fly to Freedom, at the Museum of Chinese in the Americas. He is a cofounder of the Interfaith Refugee Action Team—Elizabeth/First Friends of New Jersey and New York, the largest volunteer immigration detention visitation program in the country.

Index

Accompaniment, 17, 192; in daily routine, 87, 90, 104, 152, 168, 193; of displaced Salvadorans, 17, 46; of Salvadoran suffering, 59, 194; of North American visitors, 74 Achuapa, Nicaragua, 86, 88, 89, 94, 105 Affluent world and economically poor world, 127, 139 African Palm oil, 147 Agency, 39, 144–47, 152; denied to host communities, 20, 71, 75; of Salvadoran refugees, 42, 45; volunteer feelings of, 2, 3, 69, 71, 175 Agrarian reform, 35, 141, 145–46, 147, 151 Aguan valley, Honduras, 147, 149 Alliance for Progress, 12 Alternative break trips, 81–87, 217; numbers of, 2 Anthropology, 54, 96, 99–100, 142, 153, 160; and CSL, 96, 97–102; colonial baggage of, 54 Appalachian State University, 142, 150, 215 Appiah, Anthony, 3 Arias, Oscar, 18 Assessment, 83; needs, 103, 128; of impact on community, 20, 83, 88, 91; of impact on students, 91; sustainable community development, 126, 135–36

Augsburg College, Center for Global Education, 108 Banana republic, 141, 142, 144, 148 Barber, Benjamin, 3 Best practices, 4, 53, 81, 89–92, 158, 190, 191–94 Binford, Leigh, 56, 57 Body Shop, 86, 94 Brackley, Dean, 84, 85 Bush, George W., 19, 84 Bush, George, H. W., 84 Campesino (seee Peasant) Cardenal, Fernando, 13, 23–36, 168, 187–88, 189; and Contra activity, 33, 35–36; and national literacy crusade, 30–36; as VP of Students at UCA, 28–30; early training, 23–28; Jesuit identity, 23, 27, 36; life in Colombia, 25–28; on structural violence, 26–28; service as happiness, 23 Cardenal, Salvador, 95, 105 Carias, Tiburcio (see also Honduras, history), 145 Caudillos, 145 Central America; dictatorships, 14, 30, 32, 34, 42; guerrilla warfare, 30, 31, 46–47, 53, 56–57, 60, 61; Peace Accords, 17–18, 56, 70; refugees, 15, 17, 39–51, 54, 58, 126

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Charity, 71, 74, 75, 97, 189, 193; critiques of, 43, 51 Church-sponsored trips; in El Salvador, 53–66; numbers of, 2 Civic Engagement; as activism, 104; as alternative to activism, 19, 43; rethinking, 177 Civil society in Honduras; 146–48 Colinas de Suiza, Honduras, 125–36 College administrators, 104, 153, 175, 189, 190, 191, Colorado School of Mines, 125, 128, 139; alumni donation, 132 Communitas, 160, 166 Community leaders, 56, 74, 91, 94, 97, 104, 130, 139, 150, 168 Community leadership, 127, 130–31, 148, 150, 151 Community projects, 67, 70, 78, 81, 88; as solidarity, 48, 50–51, 70, 84; dependency and, 13, 71, 72, 73–75, 88, 142, 189; material aid and, 131, 45–46, 53, 59, 64, 90 Community service, 82–83, 168, 171, 177 Community service learning (see also Service learning), 3, 4, 19, 39, 46, 48–49, 50–51, 67, 82, 95, 96, 99–100, 144, 150, 151–52, 171, 172–85, 188–94. Community (seee Host community) Community-based education, 44, 50, 97 Comunidades Ecclesiales de Base, 69 Comunidades Unidas, Las (CU), 142, 153 Consciousness raising, critical, 32, 50, 51–52, 190, 192 Contact zones, 1 Contra war, 15, 33, 48, 84, 94, 106 Cooperatives, 57, 83, 86–88, 94, 113, 116, 118, 146–47, 152, 167 Corbett, Jim, 43 Cortina, Jon de, 47

Cosmopolitan citizenship, 2–5, 8, 143, 149, 151, 157, 167, 168–69, 188, 190, 191, 194 Costa Rica; and ecotourism, 4, 18–19, 160, 161, 162, 164, 166; role in Peace Accords, 18 Critical thinking, 43, 77, 102, 174 Cross-cultural sensitivity, 89, 129, 137 Davis, Adam, 112–13 Delegations (seee Trips); educational, 88–92, 94; 1980s precursors to modern service trips (see also Solidarity, transformation, mission trips), 15, 41–43, 46–48, 50–51, 54–55 Democracy, in Honduras, 18, 127, 141–43, 146–49, 153 Democratic mission of higher education, 96, 103 Dependency, 13, 71, 75, 88, 142, 150, 151–52, 189, 191, 193–94 Derrida, Jacques, 42 Deserving and undeserving poor, 9, 74 Development; as cultural hegemony, 139, 179; as technological transfer, 12, 68–69, 194; history of, 11–14; local control over, 8, 138; sustainable, 129, 135–37, 138–39; 142, 148; theory of, 12 Dewey, John, 100 Disaster relief, 9, 12, 14, 17, 18, 26, 126, 143, 145, 168 Disasters, 13, 14, 26, 93; human-made, 9 Donations, Monetary (see also Material aid), 47; in-kind, 132, 142; negative consequences of, 73–75, 91 DREAM Act, 49 Drug trafficking, 73, 141 Edelman, Marc, 152 Education, adult, 50, 57, 68, 151–52; experiential, 91, 100, 108, 153,

Index 174, 192; popular, 50, 77; structural literacy, 151–52 El Mozote massacre, 42, 56 Ellacuria, Ignacio, 50, 85 Engineering students, 125–26, 127–34, 136–38 Engineering, humanitarian (HE), 125, 138 Envy as reason for murder, 58, 64 Ethnographic knowing, 97–99 Ethnography, crisis of, 97, 99–100 Ethnomusicology, 95–96, 99, 101, 104, 106 Euraque, Dario, 144–45 Facilitation, financing of, 77–78; importance of, 26, 76–78, 89, 120; of host learning, 77–78; of visitor learning, 76–77; post-trip importance of, 49–50, 69, 91, 194 Fair trade, 94, 97, 103, 108, 109, 111–12 Faribundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), 15, 16, 46, 48, 56, 57 First Globals, 162, 169 Flashbulb memories, 158, 165 Food for the Poor (CEPUDO), 132 Forgiveness, 60, 87, 182, Freire, Paulo, 31, 32, 44, 48, 77, 129, 152, 192 Ganz, Marshall, public storytelling, 159, 167–68, 192 Gap year, 72, 166 Global citizenship, 3, 4, 5, 19, 70, 104, 114, 158–59, 173, 175–76; critical, 69, 76–78, 189, 190; critical, definition of, 76; soft, 71–75, 76, 189, 192; soft, definition of, 68–69; soft, as new civilizing mission, 69 Global Gallery, 108, 112 Globalization, 2, 8, 17, 43, 85, 95, 103–4, 115, 146

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Go Nowhere Generation, 162 Godel-Gengenback, Kay, 131 good works, 4, 9, 19, 88, 147, 166; metanarrative, 166 Grand Tour, 169 Gray water treatment and composting toilet systems, 129, 132 Gringas/os, 142, 153, 159 Guatemala, 4, 15, 17–18, 40, 42, 43, 46, 126, 143, 146, 159–60, 161, 162, 164–5, 166 Guilt, as precursor to action, 77; avoidance of, 74 Hale, Charles, 152 Harding, Susan, 54 Hardy, Thomas, 149 HEADS UP, 159, 179–80, 183, 184 Hermanamientos (see also Sister-Cities), 53, 54, 55, 64, 78 History, importance of knowing, 8, 45, 71, 82, 85, 91, 120, 143, 144, 183, 191–92 Honduras, 123–55; and U.S. aid, 148; anticoup resistance, 147, 151; as voluntourism site, 7, 18, 81, 83, 141–43, 144, 150, 151–53, 172; Christian Arabs, 127, 144–45; Contras in, 15; DINANT, 147; drug trafficking, 17, 141, 147; history of, 144–47, 148; Hurricane Mitch, 126; LIBRE party, 149, 151; National Popular Resistance Front, 18, 147, 148–49; peasant organizing, 145–46; police and military, 146, 147, 148; political parties, 127, 135, 151; potable water project, 125–39, 171; poverty of, 1; refugee camps, 15, 46; U.S. military presence, 146, 148; vandalism, 134; violence in, 143, 144, 146, 147–48, 149, 172; 2009 Coup, 18, 133, 143, 146, 147, 148, 150; 2013 elections, 149

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Index Jesuits, 24–27, 28, 29, 31, 36, 50, 84, 85, 188, 189, 190, 192, 194; Salvadoran murdered, 47, 50, 85, 188, 189, 195; volunteers, 84, 194 Journals, 86 Journaling, 91, 95

Horace, 157 Hospitality, 41–42, 46, 48, 50, 90, 113, 187, 193 Host community, as educators, 87–89, 90, 190; as learners, 77–78, 142, 152, 190 Host community, as needy, 72–73, 74–75; as partner, 81, 86, 88, 89–90, 92, 100, 102, 108, 114, 142–43, 150–151, 176, 182–83, 184–185, 187–190, 193; as volunteers, 168; burden on, 74, 144; cultivation of, 70, 182; deference of, 177–78; generosity of, 75, 137; realities, 12, 94, 172–173, 174, 177–78, 183–84, 191, 193 Host-visitor, exchange of roles, 77, 86–87, 168, 180 Host-visitor interactions, critiques, 3–4, 20, 67, 69, 71–76, 96 Hosts, 21, 50, 68, 110, 115, 116, 118, 119, 142, 151, 159, 166, 171, 172 Humanitarianism, 19th-century critics of, 9; 19th-century origins, 8–10; and anti-imperialism, 10, 20; and development, 11–12; grassroots efforts, 20, 189; institutionalization of, 11–14; World War I, 10–11; World War II, 11 Hurricane Mitch, 7, 18, 126, 143

Labor, physical, impact of, 67, 90, 165, 168, 193; volunteer, 130 Labor activism, 103, 144, 145; repression of, 146 Labor organizers, 85, 94 Labor unions, 42, 46, 145 Land conflicts, 147 Language, 1, 3, 18, 183; barriers, 21, 88, 91, 98, 109–11, 116, 128, 163, 166; training, 10, 17, 67, 91, 103, 111, 144, 149, 151, 158, 159, 166, 182, 191 Lenca, Honduran indigenous people, 150–51 Liberation Theology, 13, 14, 40, 43, 44, 48, 69, 82, 146, 153 Liminal stage, 160–161, 168 Liminoid, 157, 160–164 Litter, 29, 71–72 Lobo, Porfirio, 143, 148–149 Local innovation, 133–134 Local participation and acceptance, 129–130, 132–133, 138, 152, 161

Illich, Ivan, 105, 149 Immigration detention center, 149, 150 Imperialism, 10, 88, 143, 178–79, 181, 182, 189, 193 Infrastructure, 94, 131–32, 142, 145, 146, 193; community, 98, 142, 194; developmental, 12; for volunteers, 2, 3, 108, 166–67, 176, 189 Innovation, local, 133–34 International service learning, benefits of, 172, 173–78; definition of, 172–73; limitations of, 178–82; literature on, definitions, 3

Managua, 14, 21, 28, 32–36, 85, 93–94, 108–109, 187–188 Mapping, 62, 129–130 Maquilas, 94, 131, 133, 139 Martín-Baró, Ignacio, 188, 189, 190, 192, 194, 195 Material aid, 1, 2, 14, 16, 42, 53, 59, 74, 128–134; as part of Sanctuary movement, 42, 47; promoting dependency, 71, 91, 130, 142 Mato, Daniel, 97–99 McConville and Mihelcic, 135–136 McNamara, Robert, 13–14

Index Medical clinics, 56, 57, 60, 61, 64, 142, 160 Mejia-Godoy, Carlos, 95 Mission trips (see also Trips), compulsory narratives, 62 Mondialogo, Daimler-Chrysler and UNESCO, 127–128 Monimbo Indigenous Movement, 108, 116 Monimbo, Nicaragua, 107, 114, 115, 117 Montalban, Philip, 95, 105 Mortenson, Greg, 21 Music, 95, 105 Narco-trafficking, 18, 147, 148 Narratives, compulsory form of, 62 Needs assessment, 126, 128, 135, 136 Neo-colonialism, 96 Neoliberal economics, impact on education, 2, 96, 158, 218; impact on former insurgents, 70 Neoliberal policies, 19, 48, 57, 70, 146, 147, 148, 157 Nicaragua Service Learning Experience, The Ohio State University, 107–108 Nicaraguan National Literacy Crusade, 14, 30–36, 44; organization of the census, 32–33; sacrifices of brigadistas, 35–36; violence against volunteers, 34–35 Nicaraguan Revolution, 14–16, 30, 41–42, 95, 106 Nussbaum, Martha, 3 Obama administration, 19, 148 Ohio State University, The, vii, 105, 107, 109, 112, 114, 115, 118 Organization of American States, 133, 148 Pacheco, Carlos, 94 Pappaturro, Nicaragua, 43 Participatory Action Research, 43

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Peace Corps, leaving Honduras, 143 pedagogy of the oppressed, 44 Personal relationships, 44, 55, 59, 63, 69, 84, 89, 97, 108, 113, 114, 116, 118, 120, 136, 138, 142, 173, 191 Pilgrim’s Progress, 161 Pilgrimage, 157, 158–159, 160–165, 166–167; prototypical narratives, 158 Plastic Pipe and Fitting Association, 132 Potable water and sanitation systems, 126, 128–135 Poverty tourism, 96–99, 193 Poverty, structural causes of, 13, 43, 71, 76, 100, 184–185, 192 Pratt, Mary Louise, 1 Praxis, 77, 91, 94, 101–104, 148, 218 preferential option for the poor, 13, 40, 43 Princeton University, 49, 82, 217–218 Privilege, 3, 9, 13, 21, 44, 59, 68, 69, 73, 75, 83, 95, 96, 104, 121, 149, 150, 178, 183, 185, 188, 189, 193; travelers’ awareness of, 3, 71, 142, 152, 159, 163, 166, 168, 192 Projects, sustainability of, 12, 18, 51, 114, 126–129, 137–138, 144, 172, 179, 181, 189, 194; community views of, 74; community-initiated, 73, 88, 168; visitor-initiated, 8, 75, 78 ProNica, 87, 90, 105 public storytelling, 167–168 Ratzinger, Joseph, 43 Reciprocity, 50–51, 96–98, 137, 145 Reconciliation, 84 Reflection, 3, 4, 5, 8, 69, 85, 86, 88, 89, 91, 94, 95, 96, 102, 137–138, 141, 150, 165, 167, 173–174, 176, 181–185, 189, 192–194 Refugee Act, 1980, 41 Refugee activism, 40–50

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Index

Relationships, ending, 142–143; engineers and villagers, 136–138; time required, 63, 113 Research, on receiving communities, 83, 91, 150; on volunteers, 55 Return home, 1, 5, 47–49, 69, 72, 77, 82–84, 95, 111, 119, 164–165, 185, 194 Rio Arriba, Nicaragua, 84, 86–91, 94, 105 Rites of passage, 160–161 Rogue volunteer, 2, 7, 20, 187 Romanticizing, 49, 74, 82, 161, 163 Romero, Oscar, 45, 50 Sallnow, Michael, 166 Salvationism, 180, 189 San Pedro Sula, 126, 128, 147 Sanctuary movement, 15, 40, 41, 49, 53, 194; material aid, 47; Arizona origins, 41; as civil disobedience, 41; biblical origins, 41; participation of Quakers and Jews, 48; paternalism of, 45 Sanctuary movement, role of Central Americans, 40, 42, 44; shift to aiding displaced populations outside the U.S., 17, 42, 46 Sandinista, 15–16, 30, 48, 85, 146, 166, 216 Sandinista Youth organization, 32–34 Sarah Lawrence College, 82, 93, 102, 189, 217, 218; student activism, 102–103 Second Vatican Council, 13, 43, 146 Sentimentality, 56, 59 Service learning, 3, 4, 19, 39, 46–51, 67, 82, 95–97, 99–109, 112, 115, 118, 119, 121, 141–144, 149–153, 171–185 Service trips (seee Trips) Service, and inequality, 3, 8, 9, 39, 43, 73, 75, 76, 112, 178, 187, 191; as citizen diplomacy, 42, 112, 151, 177;

as civic responsibility, 19, 50, 175, 176; critiques of, 2, 8, 50, 87, 91, 149, 172, 179–185; political aspects of, 19, 178–179; power-laden nature of, 2 Short-term service trips (seee Trips) Sister Cities, 16–17, 21, 47, 53–55, 58–64, 78 Social justice, shifting vocabulary, 43 Solidarity movement, delegations, 15, 17–18, 46; election observers, 16; Jimmy Carter, 13, 16 Solidarity movement, role of Central Americans, 40–44; Sister Cities, 16–17, 21, 47, 53–56, 58–64, 78; U.S. politicians, 47 Solidarity tourism, 46, 54, 67–78; as funding source, 71–74, 78, 142; community impact of, 74, 166; structure of, 74 Solidarity, as reciprocal hospitality, 42, 48; financial priorities, 45, 72; limits of, 53–55, 63–64 Solidarity, rhetoric of, 49, 189 Solorzano, Saul, 39–40, 45, 49–51 Souvenirs, 164–165 Specter, Arlen, 47 Stakeholders, 129, 138, 179, 189, 193–194 Story, redemptive, 58–59; untellable, 53–65 Student debt, 62, 158 Student safety, 143–144, 150, 171, 190, 216 Students for Fair Trade, OSU, 111–112 Study abroad, popularization of, 19–20, 158–159, 191 Subaltern, 98 suffering, stories of, 57–59, 61 Sustainable Community Development, 153 Sustainable Development Program, 153

Index Tegucigalpa, 145–148 Testimony, 40–41 Testimony, limitations of, 74 Thich Nat Hahn, interbeing, 97 Time, pressures, 1, 83, 120, 137, 158, 162, 164, 165, 168, 181–183, 189, 192; required for completing projects, 78, 127–138 Tocoa, Honduras, 147 Tourism, pro-poor, 42, 46, 48, 193 Tourist industry, 159, 166, 193 Transformation, for North American voluntourists, students, 44–45, 84–85, 89–91, 96–97, 105, 152, 157, 161, 181 Transformation, lifelong, 84, 107–123 Transnational inequality, 82, 151, 166, Trips, as reciprocal hospitality, 42, 46–50; as service to poor, 92, 112; as socially responsible consumption, 97; educational, 2, 20, 82–88; debriefing, 75–77, 86, 91, 181, 185; post-trip expectations, 47, 103, 111–112, 194; preparation, 85, 89, 90, 161–162, 181, 183, 191–192; structure of, 85–86, 157–165; troublesome politics of, 2–3, 68, 96–97 Turner, Victor and Edie, 158, 160–161, 164–166 Twain, Mark, 10, 157 U.S. military base Soto Cano, Honduras, 148 U.S. State Department travel advisory, 143, 162 U.S., global dominance, 4, 10, 42, 48, 85, 91, 96, 141, 150–152, 174, 177–178, 184, 189 United Nations development agencies, 11–12 Universidad Tecnologica Centroamericana (UNITEC), San Pedro Sula, 128

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University, 28–30, 39–40, 49–50, 54, 82–85, 92, 99–100, 104–105, 107–109, 111–112, 118, 128, 142–144, 158, 189–191 University of Central America, 28–30, 85 University of Pennsylvania, 39–40 University, as liberatory agent, 85, 190 University, critique of, 50, 104 USS Honduras, 146, 148 Vandalism, 29, 134–135, 138 Villanova University, 82, 217 Villanueva, Honduras, 126–128, 131–133, 139 Violence, in Honduras, 141–144, 146–149, 153 Violence, 2, 18, 159, 162, 187; gangs in El Salvador, 73–74; structural, narratives about, 17, 62–63, 100 Volunteer vacations, as tourism (see also Voluntourism), 1–2, 8, 20; fostering global citizenship, 68; reinforcing privilege, 105, 166, 191 Voluntourism, 1–2, 68, 96, 157–158, 161–163 Voluntourist, career of a, 67 Water contamination, 128 Water trucks, 126–127, 134–135 Watson, Lila, 84 Williams, Robert, 146 Witness for Peace, 17, 105, 141, 143 Witness, prophetic, 41–43, 48 Witnessing, 15, 73, 93–94, 96–97, 102–104, 120–121, 151, 194 Womack, John Jr., 149 Work projects, 67, 81, 84, 86–88, 90, 108, 127–128, 163–165, 193 World Bank, 12–13, 21, 94, 132, 147 World Social Forum, 43 Zelaya, Manuel, 133, 148–149 Zogby, John, 162