This has been an interesting day, and it's only 5:40pm. Office hours are 10am-6pm, but since I live in the office, the hours are now, later and even later.
An email appeared in my inbox this morning. The subject: I wrote about your blog. As I have two blogs, technically (this one and that one), and I generally have multiple gmail accounts open, I though he was talking about the VEBlog, which is a work in progress. At an admin meeting last night, I told our Formation Director that my goal was to start updating that blog daily, eventually getting comments, etc. His response was: "Lauren, en serio? Diario?.....pucha." This can be loosely translated to "sure.......ok."
This blogger, Chileno, was talking about ATGD. Woo-hoo! His words were flattering, and he seemed to get the point. However, I took a look at the other blogs he'd reviewed and I started to feel guilty. I don't blog about travel, because I have little time to travel. I don't blog particularly about poverty and my work (it's more anecdotal) because my position somewhat precludes my ability to openly discuss, negatively I suppose, the organization I work for. The founder once came upon a post I wrote last December about an event we put on. It wasn't overtly negative, but I used the phrase "not a well oiled machine." I mean, we're not, but we're getting there. It may have rubbed him the wrong way. Plainly, as I officially speak for the org in a professional sense, I can't speak for them here, however unofficially. Therefore, I haven't tried very hard to publicize this blog at all.
I started this as a way to explain to my family and friends what the hell I'm doing in Chile. I'm not in love with the place (if you read Chileno's blog, he does a fine job of explaining why I wouldn't be). Being in a place that has all the appearances of a fine, upstanding member of the global community doesn't seem to make sense, considering the conditions in which we work. Having a higher literacy rate, or per capita GNI doesn't mean that the children I work with can read, nor does it make them any less poor.
More than that, I don't want to beat people over the head with poverty, and how a small group of volunteers in Santiago think that they can change the world. I'd like for people to see how fulfilling and frustrating it can be to try to get people to work together, exist within an imperfect social service system, not speak the language perfectly, and try to help a new non-profit grow. (For the record, I didn't start it...I arrived on the scene two years in)
I just found out that a grant that we applied for (painstakingly, in three stages) did not ultimately get funding. We submitted it as a long shot, but with every step forward (we were one of 30 finalists out of 545 applicants) we got more and more hopeful. This would have been our first major source of funding in Chile, and the reading program that we designed was, and is, very personal to me. Books are unbearably expensive here, and the school where I volunteer doesn't have any. I read to the kids once a week, and that it possibly the only time that they come into contact with books at all. There is simply no access. I wish I knew how they measure that magical 99% youth literacy statistic.
We created something replicable, that brings families into the mix and that focuses on pre-readers. We read the needs of the kids, how they like to get up out of there seats and put things on the blackboard, and how they like to point out every strange picture in the book as I'm reading aloud, as we mapped out what kids of things we'd do with them each week. We talked to the tias about what they needed to get out of the whole thing.
So this was a blow. I went to school to tell the director and she wasn't there. I practiced what I would say in Spanish, and how I would explain that I was going to focus on U.S. funding sources next. It makes me uncomfortable to tell her that, because of the pre/misconception that all of our volunteers are independently wealthy and can fix all problems with American money.
Of course, if I went into a depression every time I didn't win a grant, I wouldn't have made it through 2004-2006. So we move on. To the next foundation, the next group of volunteers. Our tour is moving along, so we could just make enough money to do the program outright. How great would that be?
An email appeared in my inbox this morning. The subject: I wrote about your blog. As I have two blogs, technically (this one and that one), and I generally have multiple gmail accounts open, I though he was talking about the VEBlog, which is a work in progress. At an admin meeting last night, I told our Formation Director that my goal was to start updating that blog daily, eventually getting comments, etc. His response was: "Lauren, en serio? Diario?.....pucha." This can be loosely translated to "sure.......ok."
This blogger, Chileno, was talking about ATGD. Woo-hoo! His words were flattering, and he seemed to get the point. However, I took a look at the other blogs he'd reviewed and I started to feel guilty. I don't blog about travel, because I have little time to travel. I don't blog particularly about poverty and my work (it's more anecdotal) because my position somewhat precludes my ability to openly discuss, negatively I suppose, the organization I work for. The founder once came upon a post I wrote last December about an event we put on. It wasn't overtly negative, but I used the phrase "not a well oiled machine." I mean, we're not, but we're getting there. It may have rubbed him the wrong way. Plainly, as I officially speak for the org in a professional sense, I can't speak for them here, however unofficially. Therefore, I haven't tried very hard to publicize this blog at all.
I started this as a way to explain to my family and friends what the hell I'm doing in Chile. I'm not in love with the place (if you read Chileno's blog, he does a fine job of explaining why I wouldn't be). Being in a place that has all the appearances of a fine, upstanding member of the global community doesn't seem to make sense, considering the conditions in which we work. Having a higher literacy rate, or per capita GNI doesn't mean that the children I work with can read, nor does it make them any less poor.
More than that, I don't want to beat people over the head with poverty, and how a small group of volunteers in Santiago think that they can change the world. I'd like for people to see how fulfilling and frustrating it can be to try to get people to work together, exist within an imperfect social service system, not speak the language perfectly, and try to help a new non-profit grow. (For the record, I didn't start it...I arrived on the scene two years in)
I just found out that a grant that we applied for (painstakingly, in three stages) did not ultimately get funding. We submitted it as a long shot, but with every step forward (we were one of 30 finalists out of 545 applicants) we got more and more hopeful. This would have been our first major source of funding in Chile, and the reading program that we designed was, and is, very personal to me. Books are unbearably expensive here, and the school where I volunteer doesn't have any. I read to the kids once a week, and that it possibly the only time that they come into contact with books at all. There is simply no access. I wish I knew how they measure that magical 99% youth literacy statistic.
We created something replicable, that brings families into the mix and that focuses on pre-readers. We read the needs of the kids, how they like to get up out of there seats and put things on the blackboard, and how they like to point out every strange picture in the book as I'm reading aloud, as we mapped out what kids of things we'd do with them each week. We talked to the tias about what they needed to get out of the whole thing.
So this was a blow. I went to school to tell the director and she wasn't there. I practiced what I would say in Spanish, and how I would explain that I was going to focus on U.S. funding sources next. It makes me uncomfortable to tell her that, because of the pre/misconception that all of our volunteers are independently wealthy and can fix all problems with American money.
Of course, if I went into a depression every time I didn't win a grant, I wouldn't have made it through 2004-2006. So we move on. To the next foundation, the next group of volunteers. Our tour is moving along, so we could just make enough money to do the program outright. How great would that be?
2 comentarios:
Nice post. How long have you been in Chile?
I'm on month 14 right now. I initially came for 6, starting in June 2006.
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