The Power of the Imagination

As we explore and learn about the educational system of Guatemala, read articles about the educational modalities often used, and see first hand classes being given, we have come to realize, as mentioned in my previous post, that imaginative play and practice of creative thinking skills may not often be seen within the school system or even within the home. Bear in mind this is simply a perceived generalization rather than something we have discovered through our research, nevertheless it is worth contemplating.

This idea of the lack of opportunities to practice using the imagination, creative play, or critical thinking inspired a bit of reflection on my part in ideas of the imagination and its importance.

Take a moment and imagine if using the imagination were not revered or encouraged, and looking past reality to pretend were an unfamiliar exercise. Imagine if you were not taught to practice using creative skills to believe in a better tomorrow, to believe that you could be unique and anything you wanted to be, but rather you were taught to simply memorize the reality of the present given to you by those around you. Imagine if your innate human ability were to be suppressed by a hostile fatalism. Imagine if your future were determined by options defined by others, potentially others who do not want you to succeed, rather than your own dreams and ingenuity. Imagine if you were told that your fate was to be poor, and then you were never even given the practice, let alone the opportunity, to believe in the possibility of an alternative. Imagine not being able to experience even this simple exercise because you had never learned to suspend perceived reality for a moment.

The power of the imagination lies in its ability to look beyond the perceived present, liberate the

Kids Restaurant

mind from perceived restrictions, and allow a view of the world from a different angle. From childhood we pretend. We create worlds without rules or at least only with the rules we want. We create friends who are purple and tall with five eyes and tiny feet. We apply only the limits we define for ourselves.

"Freedom of choice does not constitute the basis of real power; rather it is the faculty of defining possible social choices that is the main source of power in any society." (Mulot, 2004)

Macadamia Nuts

It is in learning to define our own limits that we experience the freedom to imagine our future in whatever light we see fit. Our belief in a malleable future pulls us toward achievement, creativity, progress, and social change. Imagination allows us to live in a mentality where the answer to "What do you want to be?" and "What can you be?" are the same.

Imagination is what allows us to create organizations with radical ideas of changing the world, protecting the earth, or simply providing macadamia nuts to undernourished Guatemalan children. It allows us to believe in ourselves and our ability to design our own future.

Imagination allowed young activists to believe in civil rights and the potential for their realization within the United States using creative, imaginative, and non-violent stands against injustice. It is the imagination that allows someone to have the silly idea of making a bathroom into a garden. Young entrepreneurs, today, seeking new, sustainable, and beneficial services to provide the world are using their imaginations to believe in and work toward a better tomorrow for themselves and their community.

With the power of the imagination, we gain the countercultural idea that we can step outside the individualism, selfishness, prejudice, and stereotypes perceived as normal today in order to believe that we can care for someone, who maybe we never expected, more than ourselves. In all of this I came to realize, that it is from our innate ability to imagine that we also gain the experience of love.

Reference
Mulot , E. 2004. A historical analysis of the educational modalities of inequalities management in Costa Rica, Cuba and Guatemala. Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 34(1), 73-85.

Occupational Imprisonment

The NAPA-OT Group

The idea of occupational imprisonment emerged from a discussion of the daily lives of those we are observing here in Guatemala as well as the impoverished in general. Occupational Imprisonment arises when an individual's occupational "need-to-dos", those tasks that we all must participate in to survive (e.g. finding/growing/earning and consuming food and drink, maintaining shelter, sufficient clothing), overburden all other occupational opportunity.

In a sense naming this phenomenon occupational imprisonment is a bit ironic in that many who are currently imprisoned within the penal system are in fact experiencing occupationally deprivation, having little opportunity to participate in meaningful activities, the exact opposite problem I am attempting to describe.

If someone is experiencing this occupational imprisonment, there is little opportunity to diversify the occupations performed by that individual, little room for Miss Frizzle's favorite advice, "Take chances, make mistakes, get messy." For example, an indigenous woman in Guatemala who is responsible for cooking tortillas, cleaning the home, caring for children including getting them to healthcare, weaving to earn an income, pleasing her husband, and abiding by social requirements for community ceremonies has little space or "occupational opportunity" to make progress toward something like women's equality or organizing communities to prevent land loss.

In the same way, a poor ladino man who wakes early to collect firewood for the breakfast fire, works all day in a construction site, returns to his own small rented plot of land to tend his own garden, and works to maintain their small casita has little opportunity to further his education so that he can acquire higher paying and more stable job opportunities. This also occurs in the United States. A homeless man who wakes at 4:00am under a thunderous overpass from a sleep only coaxed into existence through exhaustion works a day labor job all day to pay for his dinner, walking 6 miles to and from the labor office, has neither the energy nor the time to lend toward properly advocating for affordable housing in the urban center.

Because the systems are built in such a way that leaves no room to explore adaptations to these occupations without severe sacrifice and risk, it is nearly impossible for the impoverished to explore potential new methods or technology to increase resources or time. A woman making tortillas will not attempt a new method or a different meal because failure means her family does not eat that day when they need to, so she maintains the routine and never tries to innovate or imagine something different.

Those with the privilege of already having a surplus of technology and resources attempt to step in with NGOs or Non-profits and insert a solution that did not emerge from the people, that was not born of the native culture and customs. Therefore this new synthetic solution doesn't work or at least work well because it did not organically grow from the imaginations and hearts of those who need it. 

The oppressed become imprisoned in an impoverishing routine of their own necessary occupations, leaving no opportunity for imagination and innovation.

Then we, as the privileged, are able to step back, watch the systems and impoverishing routines, and say, "Work harder and you will make it. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps and you can be successful. You are poor because you are lazy and not working enough." When in reality they are poor because they can do nothing else but work.

Week 2 - Guatemala

After two weeks here in GA, I am absolutely loving this field school. We have performed over 25 observations of social work visits and educational promoter observations. Our research is based in a small town called San Miguel Milpas Altas, a mostly sustenance farming village further into the mountains. We visit for approximately 4-5 hours a day and I and my partner follow an educational promoter around within the classrooms she is working or hike up and down the very steep streets to visit different homes and check on families and children with a social worker.

We have visited multiple levels of the tiered Guatemalan Health System and I believe I am beginning to understand some of the many barriers to health care delivery. The complex system of State organizations and NGOs create a healthcare system that is often inefficient and not client centered. However, on paper, the healthcare system and educational system look fantastic with multiculturalism, equality, and equal opportunity built right in. The caveat to this paper paradise is the actual enforcement and implementation of the laws that have been put in place. Based on different sources, somewhere between 2-5% of homicides are investigated, let alone convicted. This statistic parallels the implementation and resources allocated to the education and health care system by a largely corrupt government.

We began the process of Qualitative Data Analysis this week by forming the beginning ideas for a code book. We still have some data collection to finish up next week but because we have little time we are beginning early. We will be producing a 60 page written report from our findings hopefully at the end of the 4 weeks.

This week we spoke with the dean of the college of social sciences at a large university in Guatemala City concerning the history of structural violence in Nicaragua and the niece of a former president of Guatemala who is doing anthropological (and in my opinion occupational) research into safety perceptions and environmental risks for young girls. Her project is actually very interesting in that it first has multiple levels. She has a complex process of finding and working with women and young girls who have experienced domestic or sexual violence. Using the occupation of not only documenting the issues facing these girls but also allowing the girls to tell their story on a larger scale through videos this anthropologist is empowering and rehabilitating. 

The second level of her project is something they have named Safe Scaping. The young girls take GPSs throughout their town and mark down coordinates of where they feel safe, mildly safe, and unsafe. Using this activity the researchers have been able to pin point locations that are problematic for young girls and are now taking steps to alleviate those problems.

Ashley and Ryan

Also this week, I was indigenously married, for the second time. This is what I get for always being one of the only boys in this profession.

My best moment this week probably was discussing within our smaller group  a seeming cultural norm that may be impeding huge amounts of progress for Guatemalans. In reviewing and  discussing our observations within the classroom, we have realized that critical thinking and imaginative play are severely lacking within the education system as well as in general. Granted a generalization at this point, but it seems that ingenuity and imaginative thinking are simply not taught or at least not taught often. The main technique is rote memorization. For this reason, Common Hope has made it a particular goal to increase critical thinking within the school setting. 

The most exciting realization then was that the educational promoters, after looking back on our notes, were actively working to resolve this problem. For example a teacher asked questions about a book, "What color was the lion?", "Where did the mouse like to run?", whereas the promoter stepped in and began asking questions like, "If you were the mouse what would you have done?", "If you were a hunter and saw the mouse eating the rope, what would you have done?". The promoter then praised those students who were able to think outside the box and create answers that weren't based on pure memory of the story.

Worst moment... definitely tripping in the street and straining a tendon in my knee. It definitely reminded me of the many physical accessibility barriers that are still very present within Guatemala. But before we make Guatemala wheelchair accessible, we may want to also focus on decreasing barriers to actually receiving a legitimate wheelchair through the Guatemalan health system.

This is a very typical dilemma of a socially or otherwise oppressed group. The sufficient provision of resources is being prevented not only because resources are scarce, but also because the systems (international and domestic) are built in such a way that removes the power from the oppressed, effectively creating a web created to keep them trapped. 

We have learned that this can be referred to as the "core" and the "periphery". For example, countries who are part of the "core" hold the power to manipulate and form structures that then affect the periphery. An example of this might be CAFTA. Much of Central America currently could not function without the aid and economic interaction from the US. Therefore they have no ability to refuse or bargain for a more appropriate agreement that does not tip the scales in favor of the core. Because the oppressed countries are functioning on a baseline of survivorship, they have no room to take risks or make bargains. Literally, one day of bargaining or community organizing for some members of the community we are working in would mean no food for the family sometime later.

We are exploring and attempting to understand how the complex systems of economies, politics, healthcare, and education negatively affect the ability of everyday Guatemalans to perform in meaningful and sometimes even necessary areas of occupations.

Week 1 - Guatemala

After a hectic trip of 18 hours due to delays and then the airline delaying my bag, I finally arrived in GA Saturday morning July 13th at 7:00am. I spent the weekend with a friend visiting a variety of groups of people affiliated with different organizations here in GA. I also made a connection that I hope to use to go into La Limonada one of the most impoverished portions of Guatemala city.

I arrived at my home stay on Sunday night and met my family which consists of two parents and two young boys as well as another OT student in the field school. They are in GA terms around middle class and the mother loves to cook and explain her cooking for us. We began the fieldschool on Monday and I don't know that I have ever been more excited for 4 weeks before in my life. We are a group of OTs, anthropologists, a biomedical engineer, and a doctor who are first and foremost attempting to understand Guatemala from a holistic and structural perspective.So far we have had lectures looking at its history and health systems from a birds eye view. I am learning a lot of big picture systemic reasons why occupational therapy meets barriers in its delivery as well as the cultural differences that face potential therapists or other healthcare workers.

An interesting factor is the historical memory of the recent civil war and the desire to remember what happened has created a distrust in medical workers because many who reach out to the rural communities are employed by the government, a government, supported by the rich, that committed genocide during the civil war. Many indigenous are fearful of any interaction with government workers therefore they choose not to receive medical care.

Another interesting cultural difference is that, in many ways, humoral medical beliefs still permeate the populations, both indigenous and ladino. This can sometimes cause confusion or distrust of certain medical interventions because from this perspective they may seem counter productive

Our fieldschool is divided into three groups researching a different topic. One group is researching infant nutrition and cultural norms relevant to it. Another is researching the systemic barriers present to surgical referrals and reception. And finally my group is partnered with a pretty great organization called Common Hope and we are researching how social workers are supporting the progress of children's education within the program by visiting their families and how educational promoters (pretty much teachers teaching teachers better classroom management techniques) are being received by teachers. We talk a lot about the occupations these two groups (Social workers and educational promoters) use to create effective results and change within each of their respective settings.

 It is a wonderful exercise in using occupation to create social and structural change on an individual level as well as within the classroom as a whole. My job within this group is to do qualitative observations of educational promoters interacting with the teachers and students and social workers interacting with students and their families. I am responsible for taking notes on every single conversation that occurs within the class and between the teacher and the promoter.

I have 3 hours of one on one Spanish class/ 3 times a week with a Guatemalan Spanish professor. That can be pretty tiring but I have found my professor to be a rich resource for understanding structures and norms relevant to medical service delivery.

I have been surprised at how well my Spanish has held up, I have also been wonderfully surprised to find a great group of OTs who are really ready to think outside the box from the occupational perspective. I was pretty tired after the first week for sure and slept for most of Saturday morning.

I am ready for the next week.