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Widening the world
Study abroad introduces Bethel students to issues of justice and challenges of peacebuilding.
by Melanie Zuercher
For Bethel students, spending a semester studying abroad means meeting new people, seeing exotic sights and immersing themselves in a second language. But it also raises profound questions about social and economic justice, often for the first time.
Three students who spent a semester in Ecuador got together over dinner recently to recall their experiences. Rachel Gaeddert, junior social work and Spanish major from Larned, and Victoria Janzen, senior history and Spanish major from Wichita, were there in fall 2009, and Maya Kehr, senior English education and Spanish major from Goshen, Ind., in fall 2008. They were enrolled at the University of San Francisco-Quito (USFQ) under the auspices of Brethren Colleges Abroad (BCA) and lived with host families in Quito.
“The BCA host families are middle- and upper middle-class and the university is located in Cumbaya, one of the wealthiest sections of the city,” Maya says – in contrast, she adds, to what they saw on the streets every day: “Stray dogs, people digging through the trash, children selling chiclet [chewing gum] or washing car windshields when they should have been in school.
“USFQ is essentially a commuter school, so you’re not ‘forced’ to build community,” she adds. “It was interesting to take the bus every morning, and to see this one beggar outside the university gates every day, and as soon as you went inside, it was a different world.”
Rachel was struck by the separation between the minority of indigenous students at USFQ and the majority, who had “gone to school with people like themselves their whole lives” at a handful of exclusive private schools, or colegios.
“We went to university with the children of some of the wealthiest people in Ecuador,” says Victoria. “We didn’t see a lot of concern for social justice. But we did learn a lot, because our program director, Daniel Bryan, was interested in social justice issues and many of our trips dealt with them.”
Among the exposure trips BCA students take is to visit Bomboli, a bosque de nubes, or cloud forest.
“We met a couple who own land there and are trying to grow all their own food organically and to preserve the area,” Victoria says. “They talked about their struggle [with] the Ecuadorian government [that] wants to build a tunnel under the land, because the main highway to a popular tourist destination is closed for several weeks every year by mudslides.”
For Maya, the visit to Bomboli pointed out to her that a commitment to peace means living nonviolently in all aspects of life, including in relationship to la naturaleza – the natural world. “We learned about how much of the land is being destroyed, for example, to raise beef cattle,” she says. “You see mining happening – these beautiful mountains being torn apart” – largely for the benefit of foreigners, she says, particularly North Americans.
Both Maya and Rachel shared their experiences with others while in Ecuador through Bethel’s student blog, “Beyond the Green,” (see blog.bethelks.edu, “Authors”) After her visit to Bomboli, Maya wrote: “I know there are small things I can change about my lifestyle to create a more peaceful relationship with the environment. It will start with recognizing the impact of my actions on the world, something I think study abroad experiences help with greatly. I’ve been given the chance to evaluate my culture in comparison to another.”
Another place the students visited was Yachana Lodge, a sustainable eco-tourist destination in the Amazon rain forest. The lodge is part of the Yachana Foundation, which a Kentucky man started in order to benefit the indigenous people of the community around it and thereby help to preserve the rain forest. The Yachana Foundation includes, in addition to the lodge, a medical clinic, a technical high school for local youth, and micro-enterprise projects such as cacao cultivation.
They also saw an example of non-sustainable development: a hospital boat, sent by well-meaning U.S. donors, which was not engineered appropriately for the river that provided access to the community for which it was intended. “So it’s just going to ruin,” Victoria says. “That’s what happens when you don’t take the community into account or ask the people what they need.”
The three students also got to observe the U.S. political process from a different vantage point. Maya was in Ecuador during the 2008 presidential election. “I talked to a lot of taxi drivers about it,” she says. “They seemed generally supportive of Obama, but the strongest feeling was dislike of George Bush. My host dad thought the U.S. was ‘too racist’ to elect a black president.
“There was an election process going on at the same time in Ecuador,” she continues, “to affirm a new constitution. It was interesting to see all the government propaganda on TV each morning.”
When Rachel and Victoria were in Ecuador, President Rafael Correa Delgado’s government passed a “vaguely worded” law giving the government “the authority to improve schools,” Victoria says. “USFQ was afraid their high standards would go down if the government was in charge. There was another law that gave the government more control over communication and media. So the school labeled the government ‘communist’ – equated Correa with Stalin, Mao, pretty much any communist leader. It seemed like a pretty big leap, since the Ecuadoran government is socialist, not communist.” Rachel adds, “I was ready to come back to a campus not plastered with anti-communist signs.”
Now, whether it’s a few months or more than a year later, the three are still pondering what they learned from this intense experience in another culture.
Part of the challenge is dealing with “guilt over being an American,” Victoria says. “I realized how detrimental free trade is to the Ecuadorian economy.” Or, since Colombia and Ecuador have a tense political relationship, “when there would be news about the U.S. sending new military equipment or weapons to Colombia, it makes it seem like the U.S. is an enemy of Ecuador.”
“I feel like [my country] has messed up a lot,” Maya says. “It was overwhelming to realize the gravity of the injustices, the poverty in Ecuador, and the role [the U.S. has] had in those. It was also hard to note that I got numbed to [seeing poverty every day] – I realized that’s often why things don’t get done.”
“I was surprised and dismayed by how easily I could be robbed,” Rachel adds, “yet I tried to understand where people were coming from.” “I asked a fellow student, a German: How do you deal with the guilt of the Holocaust?” Maya says. “He said, ‘We can’t change the past, but it’s up to us to make sure it never happens again.’”
In the end, as Maya noted in her blog post, building justice and peace is largely about small, everyday things. Being in Ecuador, she says, “what struck me most was my privilege and my materialism. After living out of a suitcase for [five months], I came home and looked at all my stuff and couldn’t believe it. Accumulating more than I need is a poor use of resources and an injustice to others.”
“I learned more about what it means to love freely, without holding back,” Rachel says. “That’s how Ecuadorians are.”