Bird Suits and Development

When my son was one month old, I packed up my whole dance studio – floor, bars and mirrors – along with the rest of my belongings, and drove it all to my new rural home in a big truck that I had spent the last of my pennies on. I didn’t bother trying to sell my dance school - I just closed it down. A few months earlier, after I had received the letter of approval for my grant, I decided to go ahead and build a studio next to my country house. It was a small piece of land, in the middle of nowhere and with no electricity.

Project activities started two months after we moved, and consisted in getting the local children to come in for dance, theater, painting and music classes. There were about five workshops a week. During the first week of running the project I met a couple – Chilean and Australian musicians – who jumped right in and started helping to promote and teach the workshops.

The children had never seen a ballet or a circus. Most of them didn’t know what theater was. They didn’t know what I was talking about. They knew gathering firewood, farming, taking care of younger siblings and helping their families survive. They knew terrible teaching methods, repetitive memory-based learning, and verbal abuse from teachers in a school with no windows, no books and not enough desks. They knew alcoholic parents and domestic violence in overcrowded, damp homes.

I’ve been living here for seven years now, amongst Mayan people, in the country I was born in - the country that was taken away from them by my ancestors. One of my great-great grandfathers was a low-ranking soldier in the Spanish army who came and settled in the countryside, the other was either a bookkeeper or an architect who came with a contract to build and establish the post-office building in the city. We’re not one of the families whose last names can be seen on the list of men who signed the Declaration of Independence of this country hundreds of years ago. We might look like them, but rank much lower socio-economically. They have been marrying each other for hundreds of years, maintaining wealth and power within their families. They are less than ten percent of the population who own ninety percent of the land. I am descendant of everything that came to destroy the original way of life here. They call us ladinos.

Much of my work involves me (ladina) getting the kids (Mayan) informed of what my ancestors did to theirs. Most have heard something about it, but are for the most part unaware of some very important things like: Mayans had their own religion before the Spanish came and imposed Catholicism; most ladinos have no interest in making a fairer society for the indigenous people; and, the education that indigenous youth aspire to is designed by rich ladinos to keep them oppressed.

We are going about development in the wrong way. I don't think that poverty is the issue. I have known poor people with higher incomes than me who live in terrible conditions not from a shortage of money but from a lack of knowledge on how to invest it, as I have also known people with almost nothing who travel around the world and have a great time. This village has been classified as one of the poorest towns in the country, yet mothers buy their children little plastic bags of chips that cost the same as three bananas or eight corn tortillas. I’ve seen infants drinking the dark fizzy waters of imperialism in their bottles while held by barefoot mothers. Here, you can buy a pair of shoes for the cost of one fizzy drink, never mind the fact that the baby only needs to breastfeed and shouldn’t under any circumstances drink sugar filled, caffeinated fizzy drinks. People grow coffee here. It’s one of the main sources of income. At the end of the season you can see six-year-old girls carrying sacks of coffee down the mountain. Yet most of the people sell all their harvest and buy really bad quality instant coffee for their homes, and feed it to their children before they can walk.

During the first year running, we mostly worked with younger children, not teenagers, except for one group of young adults. They were a group of siblings and cousins that live near our center. Their leader was a young man called upon by the community as a sort of medicine man, to perform ceremonies (others say witchcraft), mostly to try to heal the dying. He was a couple years younger than me, which made him about twenty-five. He got his sisters and cousins to form a group that would come on Saturdays. Many of them had dropped out of school before they were ten, and worked in anything from collecting wood, to fishing, cooking for their families, and farming. Some of them could barely speak Spanish. Most of them, if not all, were severely traumatized by alcoholic fathers, uncles, brothers and even mothers who insulted and beat them.

In the second year running, I convinced the relatively progressive middle-school director to have his students come up to the center once a week to participate in theater workshops. The students started coming and the Saturday group slowly stopped. I couldn't understand why. We had a good time with the Saturday group. We put on a performance for the town, the project's first, with the participation of 100+ children, and the Saturday group. For the children it was great but the older kids were later taunted and harassed by their peers, families and neighbors to the point that they stopped coming.

Later I would learn that there is a huge division between those who stay in school and those who drop out. The dropouts don’t learn the official language as well as the schooled and therefore cannot get better jobs and are forced to take very low pay. The dropouts are usually from poorer families and often drop out because of teasing from other children at school. Even adults who were able to finish their studies make fun of the adults who weren’t, and laugh at the way they speak Spanish, even though they might be very well spoken in their Mayan language. The social divisions within the community are as bad or worse than the ones I knew between ladino and indigenous people. There’s the gender division - still pretty standard for most places in the world; the socioeconomic division - as always, everywhere; and, the religious division. There are two religions practiced here. All of one group pretty much lives on one side of the valley and the other on the opposite side. There are only about fifteen last names in the whole village, they are divided up into five bigger clans – families that live close together and watch out for each other. Things get ugly when mayor elections come around. About 1,200 adults, who are already very divided, have five candidates for mayor in a town with two policemen. It is a system that provokes conflict. Of course the clans are going to fight for it, because with a mayor in the family, the whole clan (one fifth of the village) gains power. It is only the youth from the clans of elected mayors that have the resources to continue their education, and the gap grows bigger and bigger.

On top of it all, more and more international cooperation agencies are demanding relationships with local authorities from applicants. So, even if you’re doing really great work, if you don’t work with the local authorities (because they’re way too corrupt) you won’t get funding from these organizations.

Two years went by before we got electricity. We had no computers of course. It was simple in the beginning. The project is much bigger now. It went from those first 120 participants to 3,000 in less than three years. I miss the small and simple times, when we would dress up in bird suits to go up to the barrios, liked pied-pipers, to call the children down to the workshops. I've tried not to institutionalize the project, but it's impossible past a certain point. The more students we get, the more money we need, the more gadgets we get to convince people to give us money, the more time spent in front of a computer screen, the more electricity required. I can't say my life or the project's is better with electricity and computers. It's different, but not necessarily better. I've seen plenty a school around here with a room full of computers even though there aren't enough desks for the students, or decent bathrooms. Some big organization probably donated them without even visiting the school first. They probably didn't ask if there were teachers who knew how to use the computers, or if there was any money to fix them later on when they start having technical difficulties. Should we be focusing on getting computers in schools, or learning to be creative with whatever resources we have? The computer won't live very long, because it doesn't get proper maintenance. Wouldn't the money be better invested on training programs for teachers or basic infrastructure? The answer is obvious, to me anyway, but photos of Mayan children with shiny new computers are more impressive to the funders I guess.