Tears during a Guatemalan Honeymoon

Upfront a note indicating the graveness of the things to follow: this writing is based mostly on my, Mr T's, experience, and does not necessarily reflect Mrs B's experience or opinions!

One would have thought that spending two years at an international boarding school and four years living in Canada would have taught me a reasonable degree of intercultural competence. Well, the last few months have left me to doubt that, as Guatemala puts me to the test as nothing else before. Furthermore, I would see the following not merely as a story of bad personal experiences, but it strikes me as a tragic commentary on the very stringent limits of international and development cooperation.

I am working in NPH Guatemala at the English Department as a teacher. I am not a teacher by profession but while teaching here I naturally developed some ideas about the way children could/should be taught and treated by teachers. Some time ago then, when I thought a fellow Guatemalan teacher's punishment for a student was exceedingly harsh, I told my colleague so. We had a short but intense discussion, in which the teacher explained to me how deeply offensive the student's comments had been. According to this person, teachers needed to shape students' morals and attitudes to prepare them for the world out there, which tolerated no disrespect or upspeak whatsoever. Well, I argued that the harsh punishment only taught the student to behave properly out of fear, rather than through true comprehension and understanding of the need for good behavior. The discussion ended in the conclusion that I clearly didn't understand the Guatemalan situation and that things need to be done differently here than in Germany or Canada.

A few weeks later, another Guatemalan colleague of mine had a long chat with me, explaining to me various incidences in which I had unknowingly ignored and thereby offended other teachers with my behavior. I was advised that here in Guatemala one needs to always communicate one's ideas and plans to everyone before doing anything. Also, any professional critique was to be kept to oneself, especially among colleagues and teachers. I took the advice/critique and apologized for the unintended offenses. Since then I have obligingly shut my mouth over discipline issues and fared well in that area.

Finally, in most recent developments, I had some concerns about some urgent matters at the English Department not getting dealt with sufficiently, plans being made but not implemented and general morale sagging. Anyway, I sought a talk with my boss and laid out some of my concerns and offered to help more with the tasks that needed to be done. I was certainly firm in my suggestion that certain things needed to be improved but tried mostly to say - let's do something about this together. The result has been a complete breakdown of all communication between us for the last couple of days. Apparently my comments were extremely offensive, maybe less in content than rather by the fact that I made them at all.

Now, this lamentable situation shows of course first of all my lack of preparation for the Latin-American experience. I was not sufficiently prepared for the special sensitivities here and have stepped on a great many toes in the process, I am sure. However, this happened not for lack of trying to be culturally sensitive! I have attentively observed and copied many Guatemalan cultural norms from greeting everybody on the street to having long formal introductions to my comments in any meeting. Despite these attempts at cultural adaptation I came to the point where I felt I had the choice of either settling for friendly nods to everything that happened or actually trying to get things done. As I certainly didn't come to Guatemala to just show my passively-smiling face around, I went for the latter and it's gotten me into unexpected realms of trouble.

This takes me to my point of pessimism about development cooperation. Of course, everywhere in the world someone might get into trouble for trying to get things done, especially if this affects other people doing the things they wan to do. That's normal. However, having the argument of cultural differences thrown at me whenever I try to make a disagreeing comment of substance makes me feel like someone just does not want to hear anything what I have to say. Of course developed nations have a shameful history of ramming their unadapted development theories down poor countries' throats like it was nobody's business. But my recent experiences make it seem the other way around now: the argument of cultural relativity and differences makes for a neat brickwall to keep most intellectual development advice out of developed countries ears and conscience. Of course, "hardware development aid" like cash and technology transfers are still warmly welcome, but how many donors will still be willing to give money if they are told to shut up about any "soft" aspects of its use? Also, can we really do without this "software development aid"? What about the important global flow and exchange of ideas - should that be limited to camera manuals and DIY instructions?

Well, my suspicion is actually that it's still flowing as before, only now rather than just between countries, it flows more between "common interest groups". So the Guatemalan evangelical Christian might listen very well to an American or European evangelical Christian, but has learned to deeply distrust liberal "Gringos", whom he might disagree with on many fundamental points. Thus, I might be more in tune with a Canadian Inuit, than with my next-door neighbor in Germany. Cultural differences are real and important. But they are no longer at the heart of explaining bad- or misunderstandings between persons from different places.

If this is what is happening that would be an understandable and only logical development of intellectual history. Nation states' identity-supplying power is waning as individual identity is shaped more by one's tastes, preferences, and political opinions. This trend is maybe stronger in developed nations, but it definitely seems to have taken hold in developing countries like Guatemala as well. So then we bloody need to stop throwing the smokescreen of "cultural differences and misunderstanding" at each other! Only then can we get at the real issues as fast as we need to because they are what's ripping the world apart from abortion debates to the Kyoto protocol discussions.

ps.: i apologize to those who read this and are more versed in international cooperation, as thes will probably seem to them some very naive and badly overgeneralized observations.