Teaching

Wash your hands

When I was little and would use the facilities so to speak, I would wash my hands with soap if it was #2 or simply rinse them a bit for #1. Those were the standard operating procedures for Little Luth. I never really thought about the science behind why hands needed to be clean or how one methodically went about ensuring they were so.

Now my hygiene habits weren’t particularly worse than anyone else around me on a typical day back in the states, but they probably weren’t as clinically sterile as they could have been. How often did I rub my hands on my pants and then take a bite of a sandwich or open the door of a Chipotle before enjoying a burrito? (Mmm…burrito…wait, what are we talking about again? Oh yes.)

In the past year and a half my hand-washing habits had gotten worse. Even now I’m sitting in my house, a head cold and nervous it might be hep A since a bout has been going around my village lately picking off one student after another. The opportunities for hand-washing are greatly decreased here due to lack of running water and hand-washing stations posted around plus the cultural habit of shaking every man’s hand no matter how soon you need to be eating something. That’s one more incentive to ‘get it right’ when you do have the chance.

A health volunteer friend of mine, Tori, came out to my village earlier this winter to do a couple of health lessons for my students, one being hand-washing for the adorable second and third graders. Or at least I considered them to be adorable until my counterpart decided it was a good idea to stuff 90 of them into a classroom for the lesson. It’s easy to have a less gracious view of 90 little snots all talking at once and shoving each other to get as close as possible to the front of the room.

imageSaving the world, one pair of hands at a time

I listened to her lesson in between breaking up fights and rerouting attention and realized, “Wow. I’m learning something.” There’s a kind of technique to hand-washing that goes beyond just letting water run over your hands. I was especially impressed by the double fingernail scrub (picture a row of choir kids singing with their hands clasped in front of them) and the thumb wash (picture milking a cow). I was going to be so much healthier from her on out, and a lot more happy each time I washed my hands singing the full ABCs before I walked away.

The neatest thing about the training though was how memorable it was. To this day I still wash my hands differently because of that training. And this is what any of our trainings focus on: behavior change. Just how you can get someone to change risky behavior for healthier behavior is a tricky task set before volunteers on a daily basis.

So thank you Tori! My hands have never felt so clean, nor have I had so much fun washing!

Health volunteers are doing amazing things and are making a big difference in communities around the world. Remember to thank a Health Peace Corps Volunteer the next time you see one!

Delegate

Bread

  • ½ kilo of flour
  • 150 mL of water
  • 1 Tbs sugar
  • ½ Tbs salt
  • 1 Tbs oil
  • 2 Tbs yeast

Put flour in large bowl. Make a well. Stir in all ingredients with water. Work in flour. Add additional 150 mL water, work in. Flour bowl. Cover by heat 30-60 min. Punch down, flour again. Bake in oven. You didn’t forget the yeast again, right?

My baking has improved. It’s incredible what a little help from Jamie Oliver can do. (Don’t tell Peace Corps I’m using a Brit’s recipe.) I’m learning to put all the ingredients together in just the right ways and let them work their own magic.

I was talking with my Grandparents on the phone this past weekend, telling them about the different projects I have going this semester and how classes have started. I’ve started to get a handle on how to delegate, which is amazing since it’s something I should have come in being able to do. We’re inundated from Day 1 with words like “sustainability,” “skill transfer,” and “capacity building.” Every era has its code phrases—you know, the ones you want to list on your grant applications for high visibility—and these are the ones that we’re immersed in even before we meet the culture. Delegation would seem to be step one in these code-word endeavors, yet there are several things that make delegating difficult.

It is really tempting to want to do everything yourself. When you do something on your own, you don’t have to try and explain it to anyone—in English that is, much less another language—nor do you need to depend on someone who might not come through with their end of the job. When you work by yourself, you’re the boss, middle management and common laborer and no part of the vision gets lost in translation. (Figuratively and literally.) Delegation can also be difficult because sometimes you assign tasks to people who don’t care about the project at all. And then there’s the amount of time to consider. If you delegate work out to someone, it might take a week for the task to get done when you could have done it in an afternoon.

This all might seem like a waste of time at first, but in the long run you are going to be able to accomplish not only a lot more in terms of volume but in efficacy of your projects as well. There are two things at work here: felt need and ownership. On some level delegating can seem like “kindly forcing” but when done correctly the delegator should be a catalyst for already existing potential energy.

First do your homework. The Peace Corps calls this “Participatory Analysis for Community Action” which is a complicated way of saying, “Ask a lot of questions.” Who are the movers and shakers in the community? If you’re doing a project at the school, what’s their calendar like for the year? Are there times where people will be on vacation? Harvesting potatoes? How is the community physically laid out? Can mothers get their children to the proposed kindergarten and pick them up again? What are the priorities? Does anyone even care if the volleyball court falls apart? This is how you discover what the members of the community want to do, not what you think it needs after your initial bleeding-heart dash through the neighborhood.

If you set this up correctly it will be much easier for the community to take ownership over the project. I used to say, “Oh, I’ll do that, don’t worry about it.” But then I would end up with a business plan in English and an owner who couldn’t read it, or a teacher who couldn’t check her e-mail account because I was gone on vacation. Spend the extra agonizing hours helping your counterpart double click icons and type in her password and I’m telling you, it’s going to pay off. Not only will you be able to say, “Hey, can you check on that e-mail?” and it will be taken care of, but after you leave she’s going to keep doing it on her own for her own purposes.

Which is the entire purpose and point of our existence as Peace Corps Volunteers. We fall out of a plane, wander around in the woods for awhile, then barely after finding our bearings are spotted and pulled back home. Two years can seem like a lifetime, but when compared to the actual lifetime of the people we serve, it becomes a brief window in which to get anything done.

That “anything” turns out to be not what projects you can lay claim to after you’re gone, but the skills your counterparts gained, the knowledge your students gleaned, the confidence of leaders, and all their own personal successes that will give them a better chance at actualizing their own dreams.

“It’s like leavening bread,” my grandpa said over the phone, “All the ingredients are there. You just have to make it rise.”

See people as people

If you haven’t yet read the book, Kabul Beauty School, pick up a copy this week. It should be required reading for any Peace Corps Volunteer or development worker living abroad.

In this true narrative, Deborah Rodriguez, known in her beauty salon as Crazy Deb, volunteers for temporary disaster relief in Afghanistan. After arriving with a group of health professionals, Deb starts to question why she, a hair stylist, was put with this group. Not feeling capable of contributing to the plans for clinics and medical care, she ventures out of the compound to make friends with local people. Her honest and sometimes brash interactions with Afghans gets her in trouble initially with her organization but allows her to form deep, lasting friendships with people. This ultimately leads to her launching and managing a beauty school in Kabul, the first since the topple of the Taliban, giving graduating students income for their families and hope for the future.

In a revealing episode early on, Deb is walking with her friend Roshanna looking at all the different people in the streets of Kabul. She starts to ask who these different people are and Roshanna tells her some are Uzbek, Tajik or Nuristani and some are Pashtun like herself. Deb thinks this is odd because she had always thought of Roshanna and everyone else as simply Afghan.

In the book Deb’s heart for all people in Afghanistan burns brightly through the audacious and bold ways she loves people practically, both in her friendships and in her work. Crazy Deb sees people as people.

I grew up in St. Paul, MN going to an elementary school with a large African-American and Hmong population of students. Now, I am a white, blonde-haired, blue-eyed, boy of Norwegian decent who grew up eating lefse and hot dish. Our family was not exactly a veritable United Nations; however, my school was quite a bit more diverse. I remember as a kindergartener walking to school in the morning holding hands with whomever and never thinking once about the color of his or her hand. Then one day all of that changed.

We were sitting in the corner of our kindergarten room on the carpet having a little discussion with our teacher on being clean; washing our hands, brushing our teeth, those kinds of things. The teacher asked, “What would happen if you never took a bath?” I thought about this—how if you didn’t bathe after playing outside, you would have dirt on you and eventually you would get blacker and blacker with dirt, and so I raised my hand and said innocently, “You would be a black person.”

The teacher snapped.

“Black people have pigment in their skin!” She shouted, “You would not be like a black person. That is a horrible thing to say.”

That day I learned to fear the topic of race, my ears burning with shame as I wondered why different colors made my teacher so angry.

Our education continued throughout those elementary years with more conversations about different people and different cultures. As a white, middle-America boy, those conversations always came with the caveat that I “need to be careful to treat minorities as equal.”

“Treat everyone equal now, especially people who are different than you.” Even at that young age I can remember thinking, “Since we are already equal, why do I have to be so careful to treat them equally?” I learned to see people who looked different than me as different, and though I couldn’t put it into words at the time, it always bothered me.

There is a problem when our cultural education goes so far that we end up focusing on our differences instead of what binds us together as humans.

This can happen with development workers too, who, for very practical reasons receive cultural training in order to be effective within a culture. But sometimes the well-intentioned efforts to be sensitive keep us from focusing on the human level which is the only place where one can truly reach another human being.

I’m not saying unique cultural differences should be forgotten; we should celebrate who we are and who our forefathers were because this can bring us great joy and identity. What I am saying is that we’ve become much too sensitive which has resulted in an emphasis on the differences. This ultimately creates more division as we define people by their culture rather than their humanity.

Today, in the United States, is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. We share a name, Luther, given to each of us in honor of Martin Luther, the great reformer of five centuries past. Martin Luther fought for the truth that we are all loved by our creator, and from this truth Martin Luther King, Jr. fought for justice amidst the horrendous segregation and discrimination pervasive in his day.

In our day, we still haven’t yet realized a world where freedom rings from every mountaintop. It is my hope and prayer that each day we would proclaim this by the way we treat people—as people. Then maybe some day the dream will come true, where we can walk hand in hand, not because we’ve forgotten what color we are, but because we are defined by our common brotherhood.

imageHow will you help realize the dream?

I am America

If you’ve done a little bit of digging into becoming a Peace Corps Volunteer you’ve likely come across the Ten Core Expectations. Think the Ten Commandments but rendered much less memorable through the government’s uncanny ability to make simple communication incomprehensible.

It’s the kind of stuff that seems profound and important, but for the life of you, the moment you’ve set the list down, you can’t recall a single expectation in any detail. You know there’s something in there about being a good person and serving well, so thinking that’s enough you put it aside until you’re told to read it again. Unfortunately this usually doesn’t come until a warranted prompting from persons somehow aware of what you may or may not have been doing the other week when you thought no one was watching. And then you’re like, “Hmm…maybe I should have paid more attention to that bit in #5 about being responsible 24/7…”

Since we’re talking about slaps-on-the-forehead, let me now recall Core Expectation #9: Recognize that you will be perceived, in your host country and community, as a representative of the people, cultures, values, and traditions of the United States of America.

Note the polysyllable, representative. It’s nice to think that people will see me as a delegate, a passageway so to speak, through which American culture and values freely flow allowing perceptive considerations and weighing of differences through acute perspective. But in reality, my relationship with America is much more intimate. I am America. For many people in my village I’m the only American they have ever interacted with, and every little quirk about me gets laid on every other American like a kind of itchy, stereotyped blanket. “Why are all Americans a bit pudgy about the middle? Why don’t Americans iron their shirts? And why do they look so funny riding horses?”

My only redemption lies in the fact that the good things can settle too. Maybe I am a bit weird. Maybe we all are. But if after I’m gone people think, “Americans aren’t so bad. In fact, despite their inability to slaughter sheep properly, they are kind of nice and helpful,” I’ll consider my Core Expectations fulfilled.

imageWear them proud

It’s about the people

As Peace Corps Volunteers we sometimes find ourselves saying, “I could do my job if it weren’t for these damn people.” It’d be so much funnier if we could catch ourselves in the irony. But we get caught up, rather, in the frustrations of trying to get things done in the ways we want to do them, on our time, under our conditions, for our own goals.

I believe every volunteer is here because they want to help people. I can think of about 187 other places I could go to take a two-year vacation, and despite their obvious draws and benefits, I’m also not here for the sheep fat dinners, pit toilets or bi-monthly bathing sessions. But I do enjoy shooting the breeze around a meal, digging a hole with a neighbor and the occasional back scrub at the local sauna from a newfound friend.

The give and take is found here too – it starts here in fact, in the day-to-day stuff that makes up so much of our experiences. In order to help people we first get to know who they are, what they want and how they want to go about getting it. It’s their goals we’re after, and if it’s through our methods, then we have adapted them to make sense to the people whom they benefit. The Peace Corps wouldn’t be here if there weren’t things that needed to be changed, but we have to remember that in the end it’s not about procedures but about relationships. Yes, it’s going to be frustrating at times. But that’s because we’re working with people. And that’s why we’re here.