Accompaniment and conversion

We are scheduled to fly to Atlanta on June 3, and the proximity of our departure date has provoked a good deal of reflection on the 9 months we have spent here with the health promoters.

When we arrived in San Lucas, I had expected to spend the year investigating etiologies of child malnutrition in the health promoters’ catchment area. It became clear very quickly that this would be difficult, if not impossible. The parish expected us, as foreign visitors, to do nothing more than “accompany” the people we met—that is, observe their work and their lives and ask a few questions, learning about another people mainly for our own edification. Attempting anything more would mean we were trying to “become indigenous” (a preposterous but perplexingly real concern of the parish; I never got up the courage to point out to the gringo priest and co-administrators that, as a Bengali, I am, in fact, indigenous); or that we were “interfering” (I learned not to ask, “with what?”) or “generating dependency” (similarly, “how, and on what?”). Ultimately, I agree that my research plan was naïve, over-ambitious and, if actually executed, would have been potentially disruptive of a locally driven program whose broader objectives I did not fully understand.

Moreover, it seemed that my attempts to fulfill the most basic requirements of critically engaged, quality ethnographic research—learning the preferred language of the communities, living in an indigenous aldea, and responding responsibly and justly to the petitions and opinions of my indigenous colleagues—engendered passive-aggressive and patronizing skepticism towards me and, more importantly, towards Vicente and his team of health promoters. The treatment we received, and the overflow to Vicente, was confusing and painful for all of us, and I decided that insistence on my part could endanger the program.

Despite the apparent failure that this “research year” has been—my mother has been asking all year when I will start my study, which was supposed to be the basis of my MPH thesis—I think that we have done something infinitely more valuable than a limited, qualitative study on child malnutrition. In light of the parish administration’s hostile perception of our activities, it is ironic that the best way I have of describing what we have done here is precisely what they told us to do—“accompany” Vicente, Dominga, Rosa, Abelino, and the rest of our friends and colleagues living and working in the aldeas around San Lucas.

The “accompaniment” prescribed to us by the parish co-administrators is inspired by the philosophy guiding organizations like Peace Brigades, International. Such organizations focus on situations (such as exhumations of mass graves) where marginalized actors are predisposed to acute, severe human rights violations. The role played by international “observers” in such instances is a very crucial one; even if the “accompaniment” required amounts to little more than physical presence, the transfer of our symbolic power confers protection to otherwise vulnerable individuals.

Nonetheless, the “nonpartisanship” and “objectivity” that are a part of this sort of accompaniment cannot be applied beyond the limited involvement of short-term accompaniers. In forging substantive relationships with the people we are accompanying, and in coming to a fuller understanding of the milieu in which we are working, we would have to suspend our intellects and/or our hearts to continue a shallow and ultimately inconsequential form of “bearing witness.” And in our particular situation, we are faced with morally clear decisions when our new friends ask us to contribute our relevant skills and resources to support their work.

It is hard to define neatly the kind of accompaniment we have been engaged in here. For me, it has involved learning to communicate in Kaqchikel, and living, working, eating and recreating with our indigenous colleagues and friends on a daily basis. It has meant talking with Vicente in the small anteroom of his house, discussing his dreams, both for the community health program and for his life. It has meant sitting with Rosa working on her backstrap loom on a cloudy day, listening as she weaves personal concerns into conversation about her community and family. It has meant being woken up in the middle of the night to attend to neighbors’ medical emergencies. It has meant frustration and anger at the care that our friends are forced to beg or become indebted for at health centers and hospitals. It has meant being acutely aware of my deficiencies—in speaking Kaqchikel, in speaking Spanish, in providing healthcare, in learning from and teaching others. It has meant becoming acutely aware of how distracted I am by mundane and selfish concerns.

In short, our “accompaniment,” while profoundly fulfilling, has been quite nebulous, variegated, and difficult. It is difficult because there is no endpoint. We cannot exit the friendships we have made and experiences we have had—we could try to suppress the memory of them, only to suffer pain when they resurface. It is difficult because we have, in some way, begun to see our lives as dictated by the experience of communion with our neighbor. How can my life remain unchanged by the encounters we have had? It becomes increasingly more difficult to consider a life that is dedicated to something other than the people whose lives have become so tangible to us. This, I think, is the beginning of the “conversion to the neighbor” described in Gustavo Gutiérrez’s spirituality of liberation. How much can I really rejoice about studying medical anthropology (a strange area of study to most of our friends here) next year at Harvard University (which, similarly, none of our friends here have ever heard of), when that year of study means that I will not be here to continue helping and will be simultaneously postponing the completion of training that will allow me to provide effective, pragmatic services to the poor?