I have always known that being careful about language is extremely important when discussing developing nations and our involvement in other countries, but it wasn't until sitting on the other side of the table that I truly grasped the offensiveness of the ways that we describe our work abroad. We have all heard it, and I have certainly used it. "I want to help people" and "I want to make a difference in the world" and in trying to improve those phrases and be more conscientious we use phrases like "I want to help people help themselves" or "I want to empower people." I can say with a fair amount of certainty that I have used all of these phrases at one point or another. And at the end of the day, I do want to help people, to make a difference, and empower others. But who am I to do that work?
There is an NGO in my town that will receive 12 students from a university in the U.S. for a month. These are mostly engineering students who will be working on improved technologies (the focus of the organization) such as improved ovens and stoves, biodigesters, and drip irrigation. I was asked to support the project by translating, helping with host family training, and whatever else may arise during their stay. There are five volunteers that will be staying with members of my extended host family meaning that I was there also listening as if I was a host family member. As they put up the profiles of each student who will be visiting, I read the profiles from a completely different lens. Thinking as a host family member, I kept seeing those words "help people" and "empower" feeling the awful taste in my mouth. These same words that I have used on similar applications now seemed so demeaning, so evident of the developed triumphs over developing relationship.
It is not bad to want to help people nor is it a negative quality to want to use the skills of host country nationals to uplift their own people. But to the average person who lives a fairly comfortable life in Nicaragua for example, those words sting, and even more than that, they don't make sense. Why do they need all of this "help" that these people from the U.S. keep talking about? On a large scale, Nicaraguans know that they live in a poor country. They know that people in the U.S. have more resources and are familiar with projects here where they receive many different kinds of "help." I was too caught up in my own processing of these thoughts to ask if my host family members felt the same about these words. Based on conversations I have had with them since that day, I would say that in general they were too focused on who would be staying in their house to problematize those terms.
Life here could be improved. Health here could be improved. Education here could be improved. But how do we overcome this relationship of "helping those who have none?" There certainly are people in Nicaragua who don't have a home, food to put on the table, or shoes to send their kids to school in, like everywhere in the world. But that doesn't mean that that Nicaraguans have nothing. After living almost nine months in Nicaragua I have learned to see the beauty of a family reunited outside of the house instead of the fact that the wooden door is falling down. I see the kids playing in the street, covered in mud, and smile instead of questioning if the reason that they are barefoot is because they have no shoes. I see the beauty in the process of a grandmother who comes to make the enchilada mass, later to be pressed by my host sister, then to be thrown in oil by her mother instead of the poor nutrition habits.
Again, this is not to say that life is always a piece of cake nor that things like nutrition and the economic situation of many don't need to be improved. But that's the importance of language. Before throwing out the word help we need to ask, how will we help these people? Do they want and need to be helped in the way that we want to help them? What does the word help mean?
This cuts deep into my roll as a Peace Corps volunteer. I have nothing figured out, but what I can say is that I keep learning. I may have been sent to this country to "help empower" people, but I am leaving with lessons that will forever change me. If I learn how to better interact in this world from this experience, who is really being helped during this process?
