This job is challenging me in a way that I haven´t yet experienced. Today, I am in love with the opportunity. Yesterday, I was worried that maybe my perspectives have come too far from the mainstream, and that maybe working with teenagers fresh out of high school is not where I´m meant to be.
I`m struggling so much with how to facilitate the conversations...moving away from the superficial connections and obsessions with technology, the clique'ness of teenage girls, the back-stabbing cattiness that so stereotypes females. We have had to work so hard, and so intentionally with this group as they broaden their awareness from an individual perspective to a broadened look at how to take into account the needs of the group first. Its little things like not taking the largest piece of bread if you´re the first person in line, picking up after each other, supporting the last person in line. Why is it so difficult for those coming from our society to broaden our focus - to see the community as what suports the individual?
We are in the middle of our homestays in a rural indigenous village. We have been wrestling with a definition of poverty, and true to my background and permaculture slant, I´ve laid heavily into the idea of self-sufficiency. But its gone a bit too far, as the girls are now at the point of talking about how happy people are in their poverty, romanticizing the notion of subsistence farming. I find myself frustrated at trying to figure out how to find the balance of both. I want them to recognize that the individuals of this community are empowered, but also struggle, deeply. I want them to see how romanticizing it lets ourselves offf the hook as consumers, materialists, participants in a global economy.
What else can I tell you? We`ve toured a rose plantation, gone to an indigenous wedding, visited the middle of the world, weeded for hours, had history class on the steps of the capital building in Quito, re-invented the scientific method to understand it as CURIOSITY FIRST (about the world around us)...i´m often quoted as saying ¨This is absolutely fascinating!¨and ¨Negative ghost-writer¨...We`re studying dollarization in Math Apps, and language diversity in Spanish. The girls are learning Kichwa phrases, we hiked a river bed to a waterfall in the cloud forest...oh so much. I forget that this is my day to day existence here. It becomes so normal, so intense, that the day to day drama of the fact that theres not enough tuna for everyone at lunch is hugely signficant, because it seems like what we can control. So in writing this I guess I talk myself to the point of realizing that to me there is nothing more important that I can be doing right now, but in depth working with the girls who have chosen to step out. For whatever reason, they´ve decided that they´re looking for something else. They dont entirely know what yet, or why. Hence the purpose of the blog perhaps, to think, deeply. To dig.
What more can I be than entirely present?
All my love to all of you.
Heather
p.s. photos!
http://www.koda
