Encuentro con Justicia Global

A few blocks away from where I'm living there is an office/ community hang-out center of a social justice organization called Justicia Global. The way I found out about this group is a funny story, not the first time I must credit my friend Greg Woods and his mad connections in random countries around the world. Basically, Greg has a friend from Earlham College, Tim, who has been working for this group for several years, and living in the community house. Greg introduced us through email, and shortly after I arrived here I got an email invitation from him inviting me to this "Encuentro" ("meeting", for lack of a better translation). Tim explained that his girlfriend, Alicia, is a professor at Ithaca College, and she was taking a group of students from one of her classes down to the Dominican Republic for a few weeks. The students were to have a day-long "Encuentro" with the (mostly Dominican) members of Justicia Global, with the theme of "juventud", or youth. Tim invoted me to attend. "It will be a good opportunity to get to know some cool people right off the bat," Tim said.

At this point I should probably say something more about this organization and what they do. The group's focus is working toward social justice through creating community awareness, through youth organizing and community education. It is not a government-funded group or NGO, but rather it is self-sustained through contributions from volunteers, most of whom work other 9-5 jobs. People in the group can choose their own contributions based on their own skills and interests. Some people, for example, are part of a theater troupe that does street performances and also performs at schools and in rural communities. Others write poetry, or articles for the independent newsletter, or, like Tim, organize encuentros or workshops. The main goal of the group is to empower people to think for themselves and to organize for change with other members of their community, instead of accepting a corrupt system.

The activities of the day really got me thinking about the nature of working in groups. I tend to get frustrated group activities, and avoid them at all costs. In social situations, I usually prefer to focus on talking to one person at a time and feel overwhelmed hanging out in groups of more than 4 or 5 people. I can also, as most of you know, be pretty sarcastic at times. So when Justicia Global started up an icebreaker game with all the Ithaca students, my first instinct was resistance. My initial thoughts were something along the lines of, "This is sooooo summer camp in 5th grade" and "I'm never actually going to get to know anyone this way, why don't we just stop wasting time?" The next activity was a conversation (translated by Tim from English to Spanish and Spanish to English) about "What it means to be a young person", and again in my head I was saying, "Oh, come on, we are all adults here." Slowly but surely though, people started bringing up really interesting issues and before I knew it the whole group of about 40 people was involved in a substantive conversation about the advantages and disadvantages of being young, and how best to take advantage of youth to create change. It was an amazing thing to see so many people participating.

Next was a discussion on being a young person specifically in the DR, which turned into mainly a discussion of the education system. The most shocking thing about the Dominican educational system is that while private school kids attend school for an entire day, public school kids only go for half the day. The immense divide that this system must create is difficult to fathom. Another issue brought up was Santo Domingo's recently constructed subway system. Of course, it's great that the city now has a subway system, but what about all those hundreds of thousands of dollars that could have gone to education? Many people feel that the subway system was an attempt by the government to create the appearance of modernization while not actually helping the general population in any meaningful way. And, if you consider that the management of the city hasn't gotten its act together enough to prevent daily large-scale power outages, those people probably have a point.

After that discussion came lunch (the food was delicious) and I got a chance to chat a bit more with some of the Dominican Justicia Global members. I am still having a little trouble understanding people here (there are some I understand perfectly, and some I have to ask to repeat every other sentence) but I was happy to make a couple connections and write down a couple people's email addresses. I also talked to a few of the Ithaca students, and even met a girl from Vermont who used to be babysat by Professor Losano at Middlebury. It's a small world.

The next activity of the Encuentro was another group-building game in which each person received a match, and we were instructed to create some kind of pattern or structure in the center of the floor, each putting down our own match and not moving anyone else's. But just to make things harder, we were all supposed to come to an agreement on what we were going to make. Once again frustrated by the large group activity, I consciously removed myself from the decision-making process, just observing from the sidelines, mostly to repress my other extreme, which is to become a complete control freak. Eventually the group decided to make a mandala, and someone drew the general idea on the board. Then after a lot of arguing about how to go about it, everyone came and placed their match on the floor individually. We ended up with not quite enough matches to make the envisioned image, but the unfinished one was the best we could do before our time was up.

The activity wasn't all that new, but the conversation that followed was what made it worthwhile. One Ithaca student raised his hand and objected to the method that had been used to construct the mandala: "Why did we focus on the concept instead of the creative process?" In other words, why couldn't we all have just put our matches where we wanted to instead of doing it according to one person's drawing on the board? Thereby followed a discussion about the difficulties of group organizing. If there are group leaders and/or and overall vision, there is always the risk of excluding some people who may not agree with the goals of the rest of the group. But if there is no collective vision and no collaborative strategy, everyone is on their own, and the final product of our match-construction would have been nothing but a mess. How can we create a middle ground, a situation in which everyone sacrifices a little of their individual interest to arrive at a supposed common good? Again and again, I was floored by the intelligent contributions of both the Ithaca students and the Dominican activists. In moments that I thought would have led even a class of Middlebury students to an awkward silence, someone always had something original and insightful to add. And almost everyone participated--even me, for God's sake, and God knows how I hate speaking in front of people. I then realized, somewhat cornily, that the group of Dominican and American youth, light and dark-skinned people, from all different walks of life, some of whom could be considered bi-cultural and some of whom didn't even have a language in common, had all connected in a way that was truly unusual. It sounds cliché, but it was one of those cliché moments that gets to you. And I also realized that I was amidst perhaps the most intelligent and intellectually diverse group of people I had ever been with. Everyone cared and everyone had something to add to the discussion. It takes a lot to derail my sarcasm, but this Encuentro did it.

The whole thing made me think about individualism. I think in the United States individualism is practically a universal religion-- it is almost taken for granted that we all have the right, as humans, to say what we want, do what we want, and, let's face it, get what we want, whenever we want-- as long as we work hard enough for it. In other cultures, though, including latino culture, self-sacrifice (often for family) is a given, and people tend to be a lot more fatalistic. I myself wouldn't hesitate to identify as an individualist; it's an idea that's been deeply ingrained in me since birth, and on top of that I think it's part of my nature to want to do things my own way. On the other hand, my politics border on socialist. That's not to say that I think socialism and individualism are mutually exclusive, but they are two ideals based on pretty different assumptions, right? I like the idea of socialism, and I recognize the importance of collaborative group work to accomplish things, but when it comes down to it, I'm not good at working in groups, or acting according to anyone else's idea of how I should act. I'm not good at it and I don't like it. It's something I need to work on, and something Americans in general need to work on, I think. To try and break out of the mindset of die-hard individualism, in which individual goals and desires are valued often without concern for the well-being of the community. We don't live in a just world, so we cannot assume that everyone will prosper by living according to a rigidly individualistic philosophy. What I'm saying, I suppose, is that individualism is a privilege.

Anyway, the discussion went on for a good three hours. Then the day was summed up by a couple short theatrical productions put on by Justicia Global, and everyone shook hands and thanked each other for a day well spent. The best thing is that I already feel like I have a solid group of friends waiting for me, and I've only been here a couple days.