Part of my duties here with MPI is to post on their blog once a week. I was particularly fond of my post this week so I've decided to repost it. I apologize if any of my readers feel slighted by the lack of original material today. =P I'm aiming to post again tomorrow morning with a more thorough update on what's happened since my last post.
As I sit down to write this, I've just eaten a delicious bowl of pasta after arriving home from our second Salsa lesson. According to our teacher, we're all progressing nicely, having reviewed everything we learned last week while adding the "dile que no" to our repertoire. Hopefully by the end of our stint here we'll be fluent in Spanish AND Salsa.
Besides tonight's Salsa lesson, things have been pretty low-key since our return from San Pedro this weekend. Yesterday we finished up presentations about the bottle-stuffing competition we're having between classes in Central. The kids generally seemed to have a healthy amount of enthusiasm, however the fifth graders couldn't contain themselves and began beating each other with the bottles we brought for them to stuff. After threatening to remove them from the competition, they regained some semblance of composure. Hopefully that translates into lots of stuffed bottles, which will in turn translate into more classrooms for the school.
Today, since health classes have finished for the rest of my time here, I spent the day around the house doing a lot of extremely fascinating reading. Yesterday I grabbed Buried Secrets off the communal shelf and have since commenced devouring it. I'm a little over halfway through its 280 pages and am totally loving it. It was written by Victoria Sanford, an extremely accomplished anthropologist who focuses her work in Latin America. The book is about her experience working on exhumations of clandestine graves that were the result of massacres during the Guatemalan civil war. Part of her work was doing actual excavation but she mostly conducted antemortem interviews, giving survivors and family members a chance to share their stories while contributing to the exhumation process. Portions of the book are the testimonies she bore witness to, while the rest of it is the history of the civil war. She was able to compose both the testimonies and existing record in addition to an explanation of how genocide is defined in the international arena and her argument as to why the massacres that occurred during the war should be classified as genocide.
It's heartbreaking to read of the torture sustained by the Mayan people during the war but I can see the extreme value of investigating the war in this way. Sanford has given the Maya a voice and is refusing to let them be silenced despite the efforts of Guatemalan and US officials to discredit their testimonies. In one chapter, she focuses on the experience of women, citing Rigoberta Menchu and Deanna Ortiz as examples of women who spoke out about the violence they experienced and met with attempts of defamation. In Menchu's case, army officials claimed that her story was false and that those killed in her village were only eliminated because they were collaborating with the guerrilla and threatened violence. Ortiz was a nun who was kidnapped and tortured for months and after her release, one US official tried to argue that she was lying about the torture she had endured and stated that the doctor's examination happened too far after the fact to be able to confirm that her scars were a result of torture. It was later revealed that the doctor's report was dated only a week after Ortiz's release.
It's disappointing to think of members of our own political body trying to cover up such serious human rights violations. But this book is making me think critically about the importance of giving a voice to the wounded. It's invaluable to examine history from multiple perspectives and we do populations like the Maya a disservice when we fail to seek their side of the story. As she spoke to her village on the 20th anniversary of the massacre, the granddaughter of a victim told her people, "Nunca más." I hope that as Guatemala continues to work through the aftermath of its civil war, this will be our wish, too; not just for Guatemala, but wherever basic human rights are being stolen.
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