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Two years in Guatemala and Chiapas have
injected me into an experience so
incongruous with my comfortable Silicon
Valley childhood; Swarthmore academia; and
former Washington, D.C., government
contract job that I'm still trying to
figure out how these worlds can coexist on
the same planet.
In my second week of working for
Witness for Peace, a social justice
organization that educates U.S. activists
about the effects of our foreign policy
abroad (and stores its archives in the
Peace Collection of McCabe Library), I
visited survivors of one of Guatemala's
626 government-sponsored massacres of
civilians during the 36-year
counterinsurgency war that ended in
1996.
I thought the first time hearing
massacre testimony must be the hardest,
but it wasn't. I got to know the survivors
as people I could joke with later that
evening over a meal of beans and tortillas
around their kitchen fire and came to
think of them as no more deserving of
tragedy in their lives than I. In Acteal,
Chiapas, a Tzotzil Maya village that was
the site of Mexico's worst recent massacre
in 1997, I was pulled into a throng of
dancers bouncing to a buoyant cumbia
pumped out by the same local band that had
played at a mass for the 45 victims a few
weeks earlier. "Long live human rights!"
they sang. These expressions of defiant
joy and fun made their losses most human
to me, not just woeful headlines from some
underdeveloped country, where these things
just happen and will probably always keep
happening.
For about a year, my main reaction to
hearing about human rights violations was
a low-burning, self-righteous outrage.
This was evil on a scale I had never met
face to face in the United States, I
thought. How can people who shoot their
neighbors go home to their families? But
then, knowing my family's tax money funded
U.S. military aid to Guatemala based on a
policy of fear, how can I? My anger became
more diffuse and personally uncomfortable
as well as tiring. Anger was inhibiting my
ability to joke with friends over beans
and tortillas and kitchen fires as well as
my ability to enjoy life in general.
Although anger was powerful motivation
for peace work in the short term, it
blocked my ability to see the humanity in
the people behind the guns as well. When
one family of survivors still lives in the
same community with the family that
attacked them--not an uncommon situation
in Guatemala--fear and anger can prevent
communities from healing and becoming
functional again in the postwar era. In a
more global sense, the people who wage
these wars in Guatemala City; Mexico City;
and Washington, D.C., are my own
neighbors. And they fight these wars in my
name.
It's difficult to forgive, but to build
a functional global community, what option
do I have but to find the courage and love
to do so? I mean courage in the sense of
looking violence in the face and searching
out the role my own lifestyle plays in
supporting it, and love in the sense of
believing I have enough common ground with
my enemies so as to make dialogue
possible--having the faith in them to
believe that they can eventually hear my
voice, whatever form it might take. I also
seek the courage and love to create the
peace I would like to experience in the
world within myself.
These are new ideas to me and more
easily imported into my life in the
comfort of phone conversations with my
senator's foreign policy aide than in the
raw reality of returning to Guatemala City
to find friends sweating under new death
threats. Most of them keep working;
dealing with fear is part of the job
description of Guatemalan activists. I've
heard that courage is a muscle that
strengthens with use, but I haven't
undergone this sort of conditioning. I
feel my muscle is weaker than theirs.
During my sophomore year at Swarthmore,
I attended a talk given by an Argentinian
human rights activist about how she
struggled through fear, political
repression, and even physical pain and
torture to continue to raise her voice and
speak out about her beliefs. The woman
expressed a respect for her own
self-expression that startled me at the
time--how could she think her opinions
were worth so much personal suffering? I
personally don't know how much I would be
willing to withstand for the sake of being
able to express my voice. Luckily, I don't
have to know.
All I need is the courage to read the
newspaper in the morning without skipping
over the articles about war refugees,
famine, homelessness, shootings in
schools, or dire predictions of global
climate change. All I need is the courage
to look closely at the roots of suffering,
to believe that I am a person with a voice
that counts to speak out against it, and
to use that voice in the most effective
ways possible.
After breathing the diesel fumes of
Guatemala City for two years, Kirsten
Schwind is starting a master's program in
natural resources management and
environmental justice at the University of
Michigan. She is already plotting how to
return to Guatemala next summer as well
and still learning how to pack
lightly.
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