Exercising in Nicaragua (2013). While I have many photos with my Nicaraguan host family, after this class I no longer feel it would be appropriate to post them on the internet without their permission.

Amigos de las Américas gave me my first taste of Nicaragua.  The summer before my senior year of high school I lived in a rural community in the departamento of Madriz through this amazing organization. Along with another American Amigos volunteer I spent six weeks teaching health and safety classes to local youth and organizing a community based initiative project. With the $400 that Amigos provided, my community built a communal kitchen at the local elementary school so that classes would not have to end for the children to return home for lunch.

It was an unparalleled experience.  I was living and working in a community that could not have been more different from my comfortable life in San Francisco.  From my host family I learned so much about hospitality, family, hard work, and perseverance.  Yet returning home I was uncertain about the efficacy of our community development. We had developed real relationships with community members and our host families, but I did not know if local leaders would continue our work after we were gone. In 2013 Amigos de las Américas was transitioning to focus more on developing local youth leaders and partners in the communities American volunteers were assigned. This was not the primary emphasis at the time, however, and I do not believe my partner and I had found someone willing to fill that role. I have no idea if the community kitchen is still being used or if the community that built the kitchen continues to collaborate on other communal projects.

When I was in Nicaragua, I once joked with my host sister about being princesses.  She looked at me and replied, this is not a castle, this is the house of a poor person.  Up until that point, I had almost not noticed the poverty.  There was food to eat and a bed to sleep on.  I felt like I was in an entirely different world, not an impoverished version of my own.  My host sister’s words made me realize that while I was enjoying my escape from reality, she had ambitions that transcended her rural community.  Maybe she wanted running water and a hot shower.  A computer at home.  A job outside the home.  In that moment I was flustered and frustrated because I knew that she would probably never have those things.  Systemic poverty runs deep and there was nothing I could do to change that.

Coming into this class, I was thus very skeptical about the effectiveness of global service learning.  I suspected real change could only come from large-scale societal transformations.  On the other hand, I was uncomfortable with just letting Nicaragua suffer in poverty.  In high school I wrote my final AP US history paper on the United States’ relationship with Nicaragua so I was familiar with American culpability.  We must have some responsibility to clean up the mess we made.  Yet how to do so without repeating the crime of unwanted intervention?

For the first couple weeks of the term I remained a skeptic.  Our readings and discussions dissected the many problems with short-term service trips, voluntourism, “good intentions,” public health, foreign aid, etc.  With so many challenges and obstacles to success, was there really anything we could do?  Perhaps staying away and not making the situation worse was the best course of action.

Fortunately, the tone of the class got decidedly more optimistic over time.  We looked at non-profits such as Bridges to Community and Compas de Nicaragua that have been extremely successful.  Instead of trying to tackle problems from the outside, these organizations are community based.  By building leadership structures and community engagement over a long period of time, they give communities the tools to create their own sustainable development.

On the scale of international development, I was extremely impressed by Michael Rich’s description of Partners in Health.  Their “Secret Sauce” tackles public health from a holistic approach.  By addressing and negotiating the many challenges to health care, Partners can (and has) fundamentally changed the health of a population.

The final presentations were also very inspiring.  My classmates’ came up with extremely thoughtful and viable projects to promote community development.  For example, locally sourced chicken feed and introducing camote to create a more nutritious diet were creative solutions.  While it is unlikely any projects we could implement would radically transform the lives of poor Nicaraguans, small-scale programs could slowly improve their standard of living.

After taking this class, I think the premise of Amigos de las Américas is fundamentally flawed (at least in terms of community development).  While Amigos volunteers try to build local leadership in Latin American communities, there is only so much they can do over the course of a couple months.  Non-profits should be based in communities and supplemented by foreign volunteers, not the other way around.  Amigos is still an amazing organization and incredibly successful at its goal of cross-cutlural exchange and youth leadership.  It struggles, however, to create sustainable community development.

Ultimately, I am optimistic that thoughtful development and global service learning can be successful and worthwhile.  I am very excited to return to Nicaragua this winter for the CCESP, especially to work in a different region of Nicaragua and within a different model of community development.  There is still so much to learn and do.