Unearth what you used to know, and revel in it.

Human interaction is a great part of teaching. The relationship I have with students is the ultimate textbook. Why? Because not one day lapses and I find that I failed to learn something new about myself – about my strengths, weaknesses, self-deception or the truth. And today, I learned something new.

I remember being 15-years-old. I remember pretty well the feelings, the learning that accompanied each new day. But most of all, I remember having a horizon chock-full of promise. All I had to do? Keep my nose clean and get the led-out.

But as the years grow so can the weight of the problems we have when we find ourselves in unforeseen situations and commitments. Yet I think Carl Gustav Jung said it best: “Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”

Today, a day just before my sister turns 23 and concelebrates her date of birth in memory of my maternal grandfather, a 15-year-old young man taught me something very important.

Profe Mateo, ¿tú eres de Barce, o pa’ Real Madrid?

Comfortable enough to speak, invoking my first name, and, moreover, using a looser, colloquial grammar to get his question across, the student wanted to know my side: the club soccer team for Barcelona, or for Real Madrid.

Most of the time it isn’t okay to ‘fudge’ an answer; this was sheer opinion-seeking, so that the student could have access to a little bit more of my personal background. So, I did some investigating. When I found that the student preferred Barcelona, I admitted that I did too – and, I do. But I wasn’t ready for what followed.

Profe, ¿te imaginas jugar pa’ Barcelona?

I wasn’t 100% interested in what the student was saying, and I responded in Spanish saying, “Impossible. I’m 24, and those guys played soccer all their lives.”

I’m a little disappointed in myself, but I learned; now I know better. My student was sharing a dream if even just a fleeting fantasy of his own. I wasn’t listening; I was ignoring what he communicated.

He looked me straight in the eye and unearthed something I learned at age 15, but years of life since have covered and occulted with the debris from the process of growing into adulthood.

Mateo, nada es imposible en esta vida.  

No. That’s precisely the truth. Nothing in this life is impossible.

Beyond our differences in privilege, our countries of origin, our age, our education, psychological or motor skill differences, this young man reminded me that being human means having dreams no matter how farfetched; not letting what seems to be ruin or preclude what we might choose for ourselves.  

What is there to achieve?

Not only as volunteers but as human beings must we not regard our work as something commendable. By all means we ought to laud each other for various feats and deeds, but are we disposed to finding these among the quiet and often desperate moments of friendship, the fleeting acts which true neighbors express? Or, do we find the estimable, the meritorious, to be what society deems successes and achievements to be?

I am admittedly uncompetitive. I have upon rare occurrence experienced a competitive impetus which lasted longer than a flash, and which subsequently wielded me to compete for praise and honors. I share, however, that when successful, competent people find themselves for the first time as directors of a classroom, an easy and comfortable space we can revert to is one of competition. But with whom then does competition arise? If there seems a natural hierarchy in student-teacher relationships, I offer that maybe individuals elect to compete with themselves.

Something must also be said of culture and the classroom. For better and for worse, people cross cultures and do so perhaps needing approval and praise to redeem our work’s value. I haven’t studied Psychology at all, but I suspect that this is a screwy, cultural thing. I cede that in this experience and maybe in others like it, were there an empirical way to measure our achievements or successes, if that is what we really needed and wanted (beyond what we think we need and want, in the context of the actuality of real circumstances), it would only be self-serving – even if ultimately for the right reasons.

Expecting to benchmark a student’s or students’ progress if only to then attempt an internalization of said progress – as a skewed personal indicator or asset – is left-handed at best! Nevertheless, this auto-competition would have each of us step foot into the classroom and put our hand to mapping-out the student’s progress as a measure of us personally.

Students are not mirrors which tell us anything about how we are in the world. In fact, they are much more than this. They are like the shadows flickering on the cave wall in Plato´s Simile of the Cave: students can help forecast who we might choose to become. This does not involve our knowing at the end of the day just how much a student knows. That is tantamount to opting out of the gift of free relationship with the student. Are we building knowledge together in the classroom, or are we allowing students to know things?

This issue of auto-competition in the classroom pushes us reflect critically: why is it not enough to see “the wheels turn” upon viewing that look, that disposition which every teacher recognizes (and would be absurd to deny) as it overcomes the student’s face if not their entire being? That change in the student when the thought process begins and critical thinking explodes like a supernova behind the student’s eyes and in between his or her ears.

We do not gift the student things he or she must know in order to advance and to progress; we are teachers. Teaching on principle categorically negates pride and egotism. Why then, we might ask, do teachers continue to falter and commit these sins in the classroom? One answer is that we are human beings and prone to suffer even in the classroom from social ills such as these. The other answer is perhaps that we simply choose not to be the best that we can be, as good as the student deserves.

I propose that there is a solution to a somewhat inevitable auto-competition for volunteer teachers. Put out of your mind the idea that there is progress to be made. Why? Do so because you have faith in that there is progress to be made. Trust a little more in another human being´s ability to grow, and have a little understanding and compassion for the rational and thinking being’s ignorance which teems inside each one of us. Most of all, consider students and people to be more like photographic equipment and less like packing boxes in which to store things.

Consider the daguerreotype. The daguerreotype was the first commercially successful photographic machine. It would reflect an image onto a silvered copper plate, allowing the camera to make a direct positive on the plate. Using the Becquerel process, a heated pool of mercury exposed the silvered copper plate to mercury vapor creating what is believed to be a development of a silver and mercury alloy. The image is not stable and can be easily rubbed off by a finger and readily oxidizes. Just like progress with a student, the photo from the daguerreotype is an exposure, not a permanent etching.

Will a student remember everything? Will I remember every detail of a photo I took some while ago? The answer is: probably not. So it is absurd to think a child will recall a cached bit of knowledge and often think privately, Oh, I rather enjoyed that success we achieved with learning in the classroom!  If some agree that this problem exists in the classroom and that we create it so, but yet disagree with the proposed solution, well, why don’t we ask whether or not our students hope we view them, treat them and consider them as our barometers for personal successes and achievements? We don’t ask this because we were students (and are) and we know the answer. And we know how that question would make us feel. We cannot afford to teach while conflating our desire to succeed with a dedication not to fail.

Let us not take the magic out of learning and turn learning into a paucity of what we think we can weigh as a testament to our own prides, a gauge of how far each of us have come in our volunteer experience as teachers. Rather, let us look forward hopefully and let us imagine the state the world would be in if we worked through things together, and if students knew we were in their corner always, forever willing to work through things with them. Adults, we, would not feel like we had to go out into the world to achieve success and combat failures on our own. We wouldn’t feel this plight because we would have no cause to believe that we were alone in our successes and failures, accomplishments and achievements. That wouldn’t be the game we play; we might actually start to view the world as a community, to laud each other for various feats and deeds that we readily find among the quiet and often desperate moments of friendship, and the fleeting acts of true neighbors. In this way, teaching or not, we would already have it all, and every possible accolade would be at our doorsteps immediately. This would be the achievement of our lifetimes.

Never let your language languish

I don't believe our world exists to provide us with words; our world is our words, and our words constitute the fabric which tethers our life to that of others in a seamless way.

We may look at the buildings around us for a comparison to see if indeed words are a construction of something, our life and world. A building can truly be a testament to the defiance of which man is capable when he/she needs to alter the existence of things all around. We are capable of both temples and shelters.

Words are much like buildings, but only words can be said to be truly magnificent. How can we honestly compare the things we construct and erect outside of ourselves when we have language itself with in us. Our language: the unrivalled source, our commodity of words inexhaustible.

Some look at the bigger picture like I cannot help but do. Just as our imagination runs amok if we attempt a comprehension of the multiverse (engulfing our planet and who really knows what else), one can get lost by trying to serve up a reduction of how it is that the world turns, and on whose watch and dime. It begets a desperate nightmare at times.

But, if you can speak or listen, invent words or sing the quotidian with the cadence of a bird, you can reconstruct the world itself as many times over as your waking hours or even your wee small hours allow. Maybe you don't believe. I believe I can change the way someone fundamentally lives, and only by speaking my piece.

The person, this human being is the fundamental cell in a living body which constitutes the world. The world is comprised of people who, without even the slightest scintillation of the unimaginable, they can invoke the "never-having-been-before", the creation of existence within another being who, not only turns with the world in synchronous rotation, but also, according to my life and my argument, makes the world turn.

If you have lost faith in everything imaginable and then in even the mud underfoot, dare to tell yourself the lie that your language is ineffectual and not sufficiently amplified to make things anew amongst us all. Even as I say this and yearn to believe that the world is in our hands (some sort of metonymy or synecdoche I know, an expression meaning that our voice, our human voice, reins as it is the supreme expression of our volition), I may not always listen myself. For this I truly am human and apologize.

Which is the temple and where is it, the one we built outside ourselves, built to a god or goddess who did not first speak and utter unto us even their existence? Anti-theists would recognize that powerful -- in whichever sense of the term -- religions communicate to god(s) with their human words.

This week I'm in a classroom at 12,000 feet in altitude, and my words are not so effortless. I am no longer managing in my own, native language, or my second language. And the transference and construction of knowledge requires of me for the benefit of my students/teachers, most of my speaking capability. Even though the studnets/teachers are speaking to me in Quechua, I'm trying to build and trying to listen.

We're all someplace and we should talk like it.

A Princess of Spain Visits Us At School

A Year in Review

And so one year has come to pass for me here in Perú. There is ultimately too much for consideration to summarize it here. But, were there a space allotted to absolutely everything I would recall, then the unifying leitmotif would invariably be growth.

There was no way of knowing the outcome of this seemingly short year. I am privileged by the growth I've seen. My students, community, friendships (both near and far), family, and myself – I have experienced the existence of growth everywhere.  I greatly anticipate the coming thirteen months as an opportunity for more uncharted growing.

Before embarking on this journey I wrote to myself in a letter, writing that what I owed to the future was "self-trust." I wrote also that I ought not to lose a firm grasp on my principle belief that love is "the absolute pretext" for any relationship, journey, action, thought, or, what have you. This year has been a test of this conviction, in perhaps every way that was possible. I have graciously learned much through my tests this passed year.

I am edified by the human spirit, the human being, always taking that leap of faith, always striving against the odds and conquering, even, the possibilities of failures or impotence; we are a species that is never in remission, but we are altogether wonderful. My year here has embodied this exact sentiment in both people and abstractions, and now so in memories I have stored like treasures from various experiences and encounters.

If at times I forgot this feeling, this notion of growth and love, then I slowly reminded myself that a little slack and "self-trust" — while all along being open to growth — allowed for me the enhancement of my purview. At the most difficult moment I challenged myself, recognizing that I could either grow or not. The choice was always entirely mine, and the outcomes were a mixed bag of blessings and burdens. Whatever the case, I was committed in my small way.   

This year I have often revisited a quote from Helen Keller, social activist and human right´s champion. She averred that, "No pessimist ever discovered the secret of the stars or sailed an uncharted land, or opened a new doorway for the human spirit." Being open to growth leaves no room for pessimism. What is more, a dedication to growth also means a dedication to progress and action. But, we need not challenge ourselves on progress or action if we are pessimistic about growing.

We are so capable of more. I have to believe that we know we are capable of more. It would be impossible to think that humanity admits of unfurling growth while, at the same time, ‘settling’ and aligning ourselves with things as they are (in community, in society, etc.)  It is as Frederick Douglass illuminates for us too: "...what man can make, man can unmake." This is no small insight. A man who was once a slave tells us that there is no need for pessimism, just as Helen Keller does. Our charge to be more — when coupled with a more radical openness to growth — ought to daunt us should we truly comprehend it. There is no place for fear, however, because we are capable of being just this extraordinary.  

I am hopeful not only for this next year, but too for every moment left of my 2.5 billion seconds on Earth. So, let it be with us that we advance by immediately unmaking what is awry, and that we really fall in love with one another so as to grow together in this way. In times of great difficulty let us remember the fullest extent of our capacity to grow, and to dispossess ourselves of things that make us unfree, all the while laboring to disburden those who will never experience a privilege tantamount to our own. Let us choose for ourselves what it is we truly want for humanity, and, subsequently, our entire environment. Let us be more to each other.

Labor Day

Today I write about some of the many visions of individuals and their labor here.

The pueblo that surrounds us abounds with labor. The air itself inflates with each work, and life here teems with the physical evidence of human labor-power.

To immerse yourself in development you need only walk down the street from the flagship plaza. You pass by the familiar variegation of adobe-brick homes as you go. You arrive at the speedway and then cross it. Follow the tracks in either direction and let your senses covet the production.  

The simplest change of aforementioned 'evidence' is perhaps the burning cornfield. Cow and sheep will manage what is left of the blaze. Now is the time to fatten the herds and to graze them.

The rails of a once-upon-a-time, coal-powered transit adopt you. Two rails make for a very prepossessing guide. Should you be attracted to the open expanse of the sunlit valley to your left you will find the people who thrive on the river and the fecundity of its beds. However, should you continue on to your right, the mountain folds will shrink you and chew you with trees where people gather wood for fire.

The open valley railroad path is prestigious and knows the favor of the sun. The system courses every which molecule through the Earth's surface, like a tiny lattice-work of scars or veins. The people who interact and feed on this relationship are perpetually bent or bending over. The sun only sees their backs. Their hands are browned by mud and chapped with wind. They are blue and brown and yellow and green all at once. They toil indeed, arranging the many roof tiles like worker bees perhaps arrange their cells: structured to support and on which to build more and more. The breeze under their nose is saturated with river life and river death.

Under the cool and shady tutelage of the mountains, the eucalyptus and poplar trees perfume the air. They do it to intoxicate you. You walk for hours and meet the children who have taken their livestock to graze in an ephemeral and ethereal spot. The animals are the grazing type and pay no heed to the rails. From across the river shouts in Quechua beckon your attention to a pair of brothers struggling to catch a trout, to taste the rainbow-y skin after it has been seared on a black iron skillet. Dinner tonight is also today's work. And, along the hills the people stipple their brown and chewed-up Earth, contemplating and feeling the possibilites of next year's crops. All the while a late-season fire burns what might be returned to the dirt. 

If you choose the valley to the left you know you will walk until you happen upon a bridge. You might walk until you reach a community without electricity but with greedy amounts of starch-buttery potatoes. You also choose a sunburn. And if you choose the arroyo and the mountain pass, you will end up in another town, which lends itself as host to swarms of people and is a conduit for commerce. You choose a chill, too.

Hello Again Everybody!

Albeit few months have passed since April, much indeed has happened. I have in store here a few brief explanations of some photographs to whet your curiosity! And, hopefully next time the blog will be more deliberative.

Learning the art of corn-harvesting. Good luck can be had by finding the ears which aren't white.

Retreat and mini-tour of Perú's 2nd largest city: Arequipa. Home of the Nobel Prize winning Vargas Llosa. The backdrop is a snow-capped Andean cordillera and the notorious volcán Misti.

A 10 mile trek and 3 miles in altitude. The Peregrinación: Señor de Qoyllurit'i.

Inti Raymi: Festival del Sol. From atop the Jesuit (tallest) templo in the main zócalo of Qosqo (Cuzco): the Plaza de Armas.

Not featured in the photographic diary above: Private concert for the lugareños of Andahuaylillas by the Cusco Symphonic Orchestra. Performing a baroque piece (hanaq pacha)written on the organs (oldest in the Americas) in the temple. Also missing, photos from the retreat with the Tacna volunteers to Ocongate: a town at another 3,000 feet taller than Anda. I chanced to eat the most delicious potatoes and fried vicuña I've had in Perú.