Each year, the Joseph McKeen Center for the Common Good sends a group of students to Guatemala City for Spring Break. The students spend a week working with Safe Passage, an education nonprofit founded by the late Bowdoin alumna Hanley Denning ’92. In the community, Safe Passage works in and around the largest Guatemala City garbage dump. It provides educational support and English instruction for the children of the community and extracurricular clubs to nourish students’ interests. For younger children, the organization provides schooling full-time, and it will soon expand to provide full-time education for many older children as well.
It also runs community and economic development programs that provide alternative opportunities for the mothers of children enrolled in Safe Passage’s programs. It would be hard to find fault in Safe Passage’s work, and to say that the organization does not have a tangible positive effect would be to ignore visible changes in the community.
I was one of the students who spent a week with Safe Passage this past Spring Break. As you might imagine, my time there both moved me and informed me about the lives of disadvantaged people so far removed from our world. I learned a lot, saw a lot, and understood a little. What I did not do was help the situation.
I went into the week assuming my presence would not magically shift the sands of Guatemala City and empower the least fortunate in the region, changing the pace of years of war, systematic oppression, and political and economic disenfranchisement in the country. I’m sad to say I was right. My accented Spanish and awkward participation in preschoolers’ educational songs and dances may have brightened the day of a couple small children, but my participation during that week did not change the circumstances that those same children face today, tomorrow, and later in life. In fact, our presence in some classrooms may have done more harm than good. It often felt like we were disrupting the classroom dynamic and preventing teachers from doing their jobs.
The structure of the weeklong program reinforced my views on most of the community service we engage in during college—that we are observers and nominally participants, and we are largely preparing to do something more meaningful later. A portion of the volunteer fees we pay must go into Safe Passage’s budget, providing some immediate inflow of cash. That goes to sustain the organization.
Participation as a short-term volunteer on a “support team” includes learning a lot of facts about the area as well as about the organization. Participants are told about long-term volunteer opportunities as well as sponsorship opportunities. In short, they are being groomed to provide either time or money to the organization sometime down the line, ultimately sustaining the organization and its mission.
Our trips and our projects do not work miracles. They are more for us than for any of the communities in which we work. Through our experiences, we gain knowledge and awareness which encourage us to take action in the future. We should not expect that our actions will have a real impact, and if they do, we should not expect that impact to be substantial. Undoubtedly, some students are able to bring about projects or programs that have a visible effect on some aspect of the world. What the rest of us can do, however, is learn.
We can make ourselves aware of the world around us and how we fit into it. We can learn what we can do down the line to promote positive change. We can be encouraged to donate, especially once we have real jobs, and choose to put our money somewhere it will promote development and sustained community growth.
A dedication to the Common Good must necessarily go beyond “doing your part.” Not everyone has to dedicate their lives solely to the betterment of others—I certainly don’t plan to. The important thing is to be constantly cognizant of the world at large and the situations facing those outside our own communities.
But it is potentially destructive to think that most action we take now makes more than a microscopic difference. There are certainly exceptions, and Bowdoin students have proven themselves time and time again able to make those exceptions happen. But generally, for now, we are learning. Our knowledge gained both in the classroom and on trips such as ASB Guatemala will make us better citizens in the future. We cannot all be Hanley Denning, but we can, in some small way, help further her legacy.