Access to a Future

This is an op-ed piece I wrote at the request of someone at the embassy and I figured anyone who has followed this blog might like to read it, too:

One of the unexpected benefits of service in the Peace Corps here in Nicaragua is the opportunity to observe other U.S. government development programs operating in my small part of this poor country.  There are USAID initiatives, embassy-sponsored agricultural projects, and all kinds of internet education possibilities, but the program closest to my heart here is Access, a program which provides free, intensive English education to poor but motivated Nicaraguan students. One of those students is Einer.

I met fifteen year old Einer the first week I arrived on site to begin my work as an English teacher and teacher trainer.  Every day he sought me out, asking about the meanings of English words and expressions.  Nicaraguan students wear uniforms to school and for this reason it is sometimes hard to know how they fit in the socio-economic picture, but Einer’s mom, who came to school for a parent event, let me know.  He is among the poorest students at the school. The family lives on about $40. per month in a community a distance from the high school.  Their adobe house is without electricity.  Einer’s mom hauls water from a community well for bathing and laundry.  However, someone gave Einer a Spanish/English dictionary, his prized possession.  Einer’s mom told me that he studies it as late as he can every night, looking up new words and trying to pronounce them.  “Me encanta el inglés,” said Einer.

After the first year in site I volunteered to teach at a week-long camp sponsored by the Access program and there I learned that Access offers classes in many cities in Nicaragua.  Students apply to the program, submitting personal essays and electricity bills, the latter I think as an indication of family financial status. If accepted, they study two hours a day, five days a week for two years with an excellent Nicaraguan English teacher.  The classes are held entirely in English, as is the camp which students can attend once during their two year course.   The students I met at camp were amazing for their ability to communicate in English.  The Access approach obviously worked.

Back in my site I received word that Access was opening a new program in a city a half hour bus ride from Einer’s community.  I told him and four other eager students about the classes.  They applied and were accepted. Most Access students live in the cities where the classes are given.  But my students lived in outlying communities.  It would cost about $7.00 a week each to get to and from classes, something my students could not pay.  When I explained the problem, Access found a small fund from which it could pay the transportation cost.

Einer and his classmates have been faithfully going to class. After just six months of Access instruction, Einer speaks  only English with me now.  His fluency is so good and his pronunciation so clear that he outstrips the abilities of most of the English teachers in the high school he attends.  His story is a lesson in motivation, but also in the efficacy of well conceived and executed government programs.  “I love the United States,” says Einer.

What Can Be Done

A draft of this entry was started, but not finished, 5 months ago:

Six volunteers gathered recently to say good-bye to two of our number who are COS-ing (PC jargon for close of service, i.e. going home having completed a two year commitment.)  That leaves 5 of us up here in the north, all in various stages of our service.  I am now the most senior and there’s a brand new volunteer in the group.  Whenever a bunch of volunteers gets together, try as you might to avoid it, the conversation turns to the difficulties of service. I try to be careful of the conversation when there is a newbie present.  Everyone arrives on site with stars in her/his eyes to some extent, that is, scared but ready to go, looking for the challenge, expecting to make some changes, to make things better. After some time it becomes apparent that not all is possible and that realization triggers an initial disillusion which most people work through with a degree of pain and a dose of courage.  But it seems only fair that new volunteers have some time disillusion-free.  By the same token, it also seems only fair that when you get to hang out with other volunteers, which in places like mine doesn’t happen too often, you can vent a little. Hence a tension.

The truth is that the challenges make the job here, in the education sector, close to undoable.  The institutional difficulties are overwhelming.  Example: school gets canceled all the time.  Next month—July—there will be only 11 days of school.  And on those days, if things run true to form, at least 2 classes per week will be cancelled for a meeting or other reason.  The classes that are held on those 11 days will start 10-20 minutes late and/or will be interrupted for any number of reasons.   Three of my teachers never studied English in college.  They taught other subjects until they were assigned to teach English by the principal who had no trained English teachers.  They took a crash 6 month course sponsored by the department of education (but not before they were already teaching) and passed a test.  How, I don’t know since I tutored one of them and know her ability. There are no books or instructional materials to help. The students are charming and nice but noisy and there is no standard for classroom behavior.  Most of the teachers never learned how to control their classes although some few do.  This makes it hard for students to learn. You want to hear more?

The truth also is that progress is possible, small steps, 2 forward, one back. I am close to the end of service, and may be trying to protect my fragile ego from thoughts of ineffectiveness, but I can see improvement. One teacher writes on the board and explains to the students what they will learn during class.  Big step forward.  Another uses English a little during every class.  Big improvement.  A third reads the sentences in an exercise with the students to be sure that they understand them before they are asked to fill in a blank or complete them in some way. Progress. All more or less get the idea that students need to practice what they are taught. Yes, there is massive backsliding (a tired teacher puts up a paragraph in English and tells the kids to copy it and to translate it while she sits down to rest for the period.  A few kids do the translation, more or less, and the others copy their work.) And I worry what will happen when I am no longer here to remind people to do what they know they should do but which the press of life makes hard to do.  But I can say it’s better right now, on the whole.

This is the lesson the new volunteers will learn, all of them the hard way.  I’ve talked about this with other volunteers.  In training, should new volunteers be given more modest aspirations, be told how difficult it will be?  We conclude, no.  Better they should learn than self limit to begin.  But we need also to be able to say how damn hard is the work and how disillusioning and frustrating it is. In a word, to vent a little.  We’ll give the newbie a few months, and then she’ll be glad we’re around to hear all about it. 

Painting the World

Peace Corps tells us not to start new projects in the last 3 months of service, but I paid no attention and I’m glad I didn’t.  I’ve been wanting to do a world map since I got to site.  The world map is a signature PC project.  It was started by a PC volunteer in the Dominican Republic about 30 years ago.  There’s a manual that tells you just what to do and provides 18 pages of the world, all laid out in nice little grids which you copy onto an enlarged grid wherever you can find space.  I am painting mine on the outside wall of the little library in town.  The upside of this location is that kids pass by the library, the de facto youth center in my town, all day long.  It sits behind a fence which I hope will give my map some protection from random acts of vandalism which we sometimes see here in Nicaragua just as we see in other parts of the world.

Originally, I thought kids would want to help draw and paint the map. I was wrong.  I’m not alone.  World maps appeal to volunteers, not necessarily to kids and so after trying my best to acquire a crew, I resigned myself to drawing the map and painting it myself. This has turned out to be a long contemplative job for which I am grateful. I have to paint in the mornings because the afternoon sun bakes the wall.  I also teach in the mornings, so I’ve been pouring it on weekends and a few stolen morning hours before class.

The work is slow and meticulous, made more difficult by a bumpy stucco surface.  But the paint is good.  It is thick and doesn’t run or drip. I paint one color at a time, for example all the red countries at once.  So far I’m through the red, yellow, blue and orange countries.  Still to go are the pink and purple countries and white Antarctica. It’s coming along.  When I’m done, I’ll paint a border, touch up the ocean blue I laid down under everything and proudly paint the Peace Corps symbol in the upper right hand corner and the Nicaraguan flag in the upper left.

Sometimes I have company while I paint. People stop by to watch.  Once in a while they ask a question.  Nicaraguans appreciate an artistic effort. Drawing is popular, decorating more so , (anything—buildings, notebooks, fingernails, hair, walls).  So people admire what I’m doing.  I get the usual complement, “Es bonito.”  It’s nice. I tell kids the name of the country I’m painting.  Adults sometimes give me advice. One guy helps me move my chair so I can reach a new map section.

Painting for hours at a time frees the mind to reflect.  I reflect on the countries I’m painting. Niger.  Wasn’t that where uranium was allegedly being exported from before the Iraq War?  Benin.  A family from Benin rented my house for a year while I was in Nicaragua.  Indonesia.  Isn’t that where Barrack Obama’s mom worked?  Ruwanda.  The genocide, of course.  Somalia.  The pirates. I’m struck by how little I know about the world beyond a single association or factoid, even about the places I’ve visited. Happily there’s still time to remedy some of that.

I also—inevitably, constantly-- think about my service here for the last two years.  For some reason I’m kinder to myself while I am filling in the countries with color than when I’m when I’m stewing in my room.  I wasn’t the most brilliant or effective volunteer Nicaragua has ever known but I was a good enough volunteer and will leave content with my service—and I say that having done my best to filter all judgments for all those self serving glosses humans are prone to. I did a hard, hard job more or less well. And from my own perspective, I had the best, best time—the time of my life. Thank you, Nicaragua, and thank you, USA.

About  11:30 this morning, the sun was making me sweat lots and fatigue was cramping my right hand, when two of the kids I asked to help with the map stopped by to see how I was doing.  They are brothers, both acknowledged artists in town. They watched for a while and then asked to help. My first response was proprietary.  Are you guys careful enough not to mess up my map, I thought.  But I gave each a jar of paint and a brush and they did a great job for the half hour before the sun became impossible.  I minded sharing only a little. Maybe they will come back another day.  If not, I’m easy.  I’ll be back in solitary map-painting, ruminating, summing up mode, a happy place to be.

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