panajachel

On Tuesday, we worked on cross-cultural communication and learned about our personal conflict resolution and working styles, and identified the ways other cultures communicate with people and resolve conflict. Guatemalans are emotionally restraint and indirect when resolving conflict, Americans are emotionally restraint and direct, and French and Israeli are emotionally expressive and direct. Knowing this stuff might help us understand and deal with conflicts that may arise during our internships better and with more patience. We sort of experienced the frustrations that come with working with another culture this morning while taking a Mayan painting class. Our painting teacher was Gaspar, and he had a very formulaic way of teaching. I’m used to mapping out the entire picture before, instead of going ahead and painting things as they come, to figure out all the color and shape balances. He would only explain or demonstrate one thing at a time so that we constantly had to ask what was coming next, which ended up taking a lot more time, and we were paying him by the hour. I really had to push to let him let me take my own initiative and do what I wanted. If something wasn’t the way he liked it, he would say, no no no I fix. It was amusing after a while but we all had to overcome initial frustration over the way he was teaching.

After the painting class we left San Pedro for Panajachel, the most touristy town on the lake-the locals call it gringotenango. It’s been interesting getting to see all the touristy places because I have rarely been there throughout my travels in this country, now I get to see what's the big deal and what it's all about. At the same time it’s weird because, for example, in San Pedro I saw more gringos than Guatemalans, and people just want to sell a lot of souvenirs and stuff to people- there's no integration or feeling of being welcome. 

Upon getting to Pana, we had a meeting with an organization called 13 Threads, with whom I was almost going to intern, had we decided to do the internship program on the lake. 13 Threads is a Mayan women’s educational project that was started in 2004 by 2 fair trade organizations: Mayan Foundation Tradition and Mayan hands. They empower 20 organized groups of indigenous women artisans through different educational workshops and exposure to bigger markets in order to alleviate the adverse effects of poverty and improve their quality of life. The goal is for the organization to be completely run by mayan indigenous women from the various rural and more or less remote communities. Programs include Artisan Skills, in which women learn new skills and improve the ones they already posess, Health, in which trainings provide information on traditional and modern healthcare systems in order to improve the health of these women and their families, and to reduce work time lost due to illness; Small Business Skills and Micro-Credit Lending, in which courses provide basic business and administration skills to oversee personal finances and to promote the sustainability and self management of groups, this program uses a store as a tool for the women to practice relations with customers and marketing; Democracy and group organization, workshops include self esteem and leadership, team building, gender issues and women’s rights, so women become more active in their cooperatives, families and communities.    

            We met with a very friendly lady from Vermont named Andrea. She’s been working for 13 Threads for 1 ½ years, and told us about the cultural barriers and misunderstandings of working with a different culture, how the organization functions, their vision, fair trade and bargaining, their funding, and  bit about Obama’s Global Health Initiative and how that would affect, or not, organizations like 13 Threads.

            The organization hires facilitators from the communities, they have 20 groups from different communities and language groups composed of 15 to 35 women, who speak the indigenous language, so facilitate the understanding and translation of workshops. However, because of illiteracy and language barriers, workshops have to be repeated, and sometimes the women don’t understand something but don’t say it because they are embarrassed and because they don’t want to be bothersome to the organization, however as Andrea said, this is for them and they have to understand that. The organization does a needs assessment every month to get feedback from the women to know if the workshops fit their needs, if they do want more water filter workshops for example or if water isn’t one of their priorities. They also provide workshops to build the women’s confidence and self-esteem so they can be able to look at customers in the eye and greet them. 

The groups come from the organizations that founded 13 Threads and they’ve got 4 new groups: the more advanced and self-sustainable groups help the new ones integrate or leave when they don’t need 13 Threads anymore to make room for new ones. A community was relocated by USAID from the Pacific Ocean region to the mountains after Hurricane Stan devastated their homes. A lot of women from that community are widows from the war, surviving their husbands who died fighting in the guerrilla. In the Mayan tradition, the land where you’re from has a history, those roots are sacred, but they had to move to the houses built by USAID that had no electricity or water. A group within 13 Threads was from that community so the organization provided them with candle making workshops and many NGOs settled there to help this hurricane-victim community. A lot of aid came for free and so the community got used to receiving materials-shoes, clothes, food, water- from NGOs and volunteers. This type of aid doesn’t promote self-sustainability but is definitely easier and short-term. 13 Threads would come to give meetings and workshops but only 2 people would show up because everyone was busy getting free milk, or would ask the facilitators or Andrea where their gifts were. It’s hard to explain to these women that in the long run, free things won’t keep coming and they have to learn to become more self-sufficient and sustainable: facing the daily struggles of poverty doesn’t permit the privilege of thinking and seeing long term.  That’s exactly what 13 Threads is trying to fight by giving these women the capacity and their right to work for long term goals, have aspirations, dreams, a further perspective in life and larger prospects. Ultimately this group reduced in size little by little until only 2 ladies were left, and they were joined by new women to revive the group-they were actually group of the month this month.

            There are only 2 foreigners working there but their vision is for the organization to be entirely run by the indigenous women. However, there's a lot of work to be done still as the women are just learning about grant writing and have only started to enter the international market. Market opportunities for the ladies have began to expand beyond the local and national level. Reef, a big sports/surf wear company ordered weavings for sandal straps, they’re trying to support fair trade, but ordered 800 of a certain weaving within a short time frame, an order impossible to accomplish for 1 group of women within such a short amount of time. They are trying to figure out if that group can teach their weaving techniques to other groups to spread out the work and coming up with other creative solutions to be able to answer to such demands. They are also experimenting with a new strategy called asset management, which values what the women have rather than evaluate their needs, to promote creativity, innovation, and opportunities for the women using their skills at full potential. They’ve taught the women to create logos to put on tags of products and have introduced them on the international market. Another thing they struggle with is how to explain to them the aesthetics of international customers without insulting what the women view as beautiful and without changing the weavings.

            They get funding and grants from foundations and individuals, NGOs, the UN Indigenous Counsel. Andrea also told us about Obama’s Global Health Initiative. It chose 8 countries in the world, and Guatemala was the only country in the Americas to be chosen, to give aid to promote health projects. The problem is that, although that initiative is going in the right direction, municipal governments will handle the money, which means there is a risk of corruption and the money never actually reaching individual effective projects. Colom has the 2^nd highest presidential salary in all of the Americas and the country receives international aid, but very little trickles down. So there is a risk that although money from such large initiatives is meant for projects like 13 Threads that promote education for sustainability, and health education in particular, provision of medicine and better access to doctors and medical care, none of it actually reaches them. To know more about the Global Health Initiative, I found this really informative pdf: http://www.theglobalhealthinitiative.org/documents/report_summary.pdf

And to know more about 13 Threads, see http://www.oxlajujbatz.org/. It's a really amazing project.

On a lighter more amusing note, when we got back to our crumby hostel, an old British man came out of his room and asked us if we were Canadian. We answered that we were from the United States and as he was seemingly quite pleased with that answer, we asked why. He answered that he hated Canadians because they were socialist. He then asked us if we had a TV in our room and if we thought he could get Fox News down here, he needed his dose of Glenn Beck and Bill O’Riley. It was hard for us to contain our laughter, and as he went back into his room, we saw a book by Rush Limbaugh on his bed. What an odd encounter to have in Guatemala!