Journal, October 8

            It has been a quiet week in Lima.  With a four-day weekend last week, and now a three-day weekend, I have had a lot of time to rest and prepare myself to start work this week at CEDEMUNEP (the Center for Black Peruvian Women’s Development).  I have been looking forward to Tuesday ever since I visited CEDEMUNEP two weeks ago.  It is a small organization with only two full-time staff members, who will become like family to me.  They are very active in the community, running workshops almost every week for women and youth on topics such as health, domestic violence, and self-esteem.  They also work at the national and international levels to advocate for Afro-Peruvian rights, and fight against racial discrimination in Peru.  At the beginning, while I am still learning Spanish, I imagine that I will work mostly in the office, assisting with research on violence against Afro-Peruvian women, and helping to organize programming.  However, I hope that my Spanish will improve rapidly so that I will be able to begin working in the community.
          Having volunteered for the last few years as a student organizer, I feel that I have some experience in community social and environmental justice education.  However, my experience is mostly in working with highly-educated, English-speaking, middle-class people whose life experiences are similar to mine.  It is quite another thing to enter into a community that is not my own and pretend that I know anything about racial discrimination or domestic violence.  What is my role in this situation?
           I have spent some time exploring this question this week, and have found a lot of wisdom in the writings of Myles Horton, the founder of the Highlander Folk School, which works to promote education and development in Appalachia.  In his account of the Folk School’s beginnings, he talks about how the staff—young, idealistic, university graduates—made the mistake of thinking that they could take what they had learned in university and “tailor it” to the needs of the community.  In Horton’s (1998) words,

We still thought our job was to give students information about what we thought would be good for them.  Whenever they had a problem, we would try to figure out what in our bag of tricks would apply to that problem, and we would adapt it and make it fit the situation.  We ended up doing what most people do when they come to a place like Appalachia: we saw problems that we thought we had the answers to, rather than seeing the problems and the answers that the people had themselves (p. 22). 

He goes on to explain that the teacher’s role is to help people respect, analyze and learn from their own experiences.  Once they can do this, they will be able to solve their own problems (Horton, Kohl & Kohl, 1998).  This is an important lesson, and I hope to apply it in my work at CEDEMUNEP.  It is a relief to know that I don’t have to have all the answers!

 Horton, M., Kohl, J., & Kohl, H.  (1998).  The long haul: An autobiography.  New York: Teachers College Press, p. 22.