MIP Participant Perspectives

Brendan Jon Brink-Halloran is a Virginia Tech MIP student currently participating in the field service of the Peace Corps. Brendan has shared his perspectives with us, below.

Toward the end of August, 2006, I left the United States to begin 2 years of living in Guatemala as a Peace Corps volunteer. I had a number of ideas about what this experience would entail. I imagined that I would be some kind of development guru to some group of impoverished villages, helping them take their development into their own hands and not be held at the mercy of heavy handed, bureaucratic NGOs and other development agencies. I didn't, however, want to be another foreigner come to tell people how they ought to live their lives, nor define “development” in the narrow, technical sense in which we often think of the term in the West. No, rather I was committed to living amongst these communities, learning from them, and helping them engage in a participatory community led form of development. Along the way I would travel with notepad in hand, as I looked forward to doing some on-the-ground research to expand my understanding of development and the situation in which impoverished communities find themselves.

Now in my 24th month of my 27 month commitment, I obviously have a somewhat different perspective on my role, shaped by my time here, but also still by the ideas that I carried with me as I got onto that plane, what now seems ages ago.

Let me tell you a little bit about where I live. The municipality of San Miguel Uspantán lies in mountainous north-central Guatemala. This rural municipality is large by Guatemalan standards in terms of total area and number of individual villages, of which there are 190. Furthermore, given its mountainous geography, half of the population of the municipality live more than 3 hours in a vehicle from the municipal seat of government, with some communities as far away as 8 or more hours. Uspantán is also a culturally diverse municipality with major populations from the K'eqchi and K'iche Mayan language groups, as well as a significant ladino (mestizo) population, and smaller groups of several other Mayan linguistic groups including Uspanteco. While Uspantán was not as hard hit as some other areas during Guatemala's 36 year civil war, there was a significant army presence, a smaller guerrilla presence, and resulting violence, of which the civilian populace was the recipient. All this means that there are physical, cultural, linguistic, and historical barriers which divide the people served by this unit of government and which likely impede contact and cooperation between different communities as well as between communities and the local government and other organizations.

What I have found in my work in the Municipal Development Office, have been efforts by a variety of institutions, governmental and non, to increase standards of living amongst this rural population despite the impediments. These efforts, rather patchwork in nature, are mostly dedicated to providing physical infrastructure (roads, water, schools, heath centers, etc) in these communities. Little attention is paid to trying to increase incomes, although the difference between households with an income stream from selling coffee, cardamom or fruits and vegetables and those relying solely on subsistence farming is inescapable. This constant stream of development projects, many unsolicited, arriving in these communities (I shouldn't exaggerate, though at any given time there are many projects being carried out, given the number of communities not nearly every community is receiving a project at any given time) has exacerbated a situation of dependence already created by centuries of colonial and paternalistic governance. Not exactly the participatory development I had in mind. This is despite a system of community development councils legally put in place in 2002 throughout Guatemala. These councils, and their municipal, departmental, regional and national equivalents, are supposed to put communities at the forefront of development, both in rank ordering community needs and carrying out projects and programs. I have actually spent a lot of time working with these community councils. Unfortunately, it is much faster and easier to create a set of laws than in is to help communities understand and take advantage of those laws. And even then, the prevailing conception of taking advantage of the laws is to solicit as many projects as possible and then show up to all meetings, to the planning office, and to the mayor's office as often as possible to apply pressure so that the projects get high priority. However, given the limited resources available in Uspantán, this generally leads to frustration and distrust of the municipal government for failing to carry out all the projects which have been requested. The idea that there might be a role for these community development councils outside of requesting projects exists in only a small minority of communities. In these
communities committees have been organized by? school, to train guides to take the occasional tourist on hikes, to maintain small irrigation systems, and to bargain collectively for prices for coffee or other products sold by the community, to name a few.

While many theorists of development exaggerate the power of communities to engage in development, there are specific areas in which community organization is a distinct advantage. The community development council system in Guatemala sets a framework for such organization, I have found, but it remains up to the leaders of the communities themselves to take advantage of this space. The idea of the Councils is that once people have become accustomed to participating in development activities and decisions they might go on to take a more active part in the local governance resulting in a more participatory democracy. And while that might be a long way off, the spaces which have opened up have allowed those communities and individuals that have been prepared to take advantage of them the foundation on which to build a more inclusive and participatory organization.

My experience “doing development” here in Guatemala, as well as simply seeing the situation of “underdevelopment” first hand has had a significant impact on me professionally and academically, not to mention personally. I had known for a couple of years before I signed up for the Peace Corps that I wanted to work in the broad area of international development. And every year I gained a little bit more specific idea of what it was that I wanted to do. But that being said, I still left Virginia Tech with a lot of ideas, but few specifics. Working with communities to help them take part in the decisions affecting them and the building of civil society, at times from the bottom up, has been a rewarding experience and has helped me see the problems and opportunities associated with participatory forms of development. I will take what I have learned with me as I pursue my next step, and hopefully my next adventure.

Would you like to communicate with Brendan regarding his experiences in the MIP and Peace Corps?  Send him an e-mail: bbrink42@vt.edu