Author Archives: mercedes

” On the woof and warp of reality, tangled though it may be, new
cloth is being woven from threads of many radically different
colors…The process is anything but spectacular and it mostly
happens at the local level, where across the world a thousand
and one new forces are emerging. They emerge from the bottom
up and the inside out….they shoulder the task of reconceiving
democracy. Nourishing it with popular participation and reviving
the battered traditions of tolerance, mutual assistance and
communion with nature”….(p. 321)
“Living wherever, living however, living whenever, each person
contains many possible persons. Every day, the ruling system
places our worst characteristics at center stage, condemning
our best to languish behind the backdrop. The system of power
is not in the least eternal. We may be badly made, but we’re not
finished, and it’s the adventure of changing reality and changing
ourselves that makes our blip in the history of the universe
worthwhile…” (p. 329)
Eduardo Galeano (2000)
Upside down: A primer for the looking-glass world
15

  An excerpt taken from Sociology 301, Development and Globalization

This year I took a sociology course that really changed my life, and the way that I see and understand the world.  In starting to explore the historical context for inequity in the world, I saw that words and thoughts have been powerful instruments in creating realities.  These are some thoughts I recorded for a blog post for sociology: The context is about ‘development’ being at a crossroads where its definition and implications change.

Written by Lana McGuire

 Why does it appear that development is at a crossroads?

….the process of transformation is something that happens through relationship, over time, across cultures, values, and different perspectives. The term “development” should really be dismantled, and replaced with a stark admission that we as humans should not attempt to position ourselves above another. Rather, our greatest strength in walking towards a more whole, healthy, and free humanity is to serve one another in love, and to dismantle systems of oppression.

I think that one factor that has brought us to this turbid ebb and flow of change in the understanding and implementation of development is crisis; looming and present. There is an increasingly steady influx of problems that are not solvable using one dimension alone. Furthmore, the former framework for development has been a huge contributor to many of these problems.  Conflicts, environmental mysteries and enigmas, political tensions, and the increasing urgency of chronic poverty, disease, and inequity have brought us to a place in which critical reflection and a renewed framework for engagement are vital. Furthermore, I believe that we have come to recognize that the whole of a person is far more complex than one discipline alone, and to hope to see true change in the nations, we must learn to collaborate. The fact that we have come to a place of incredible sophistication in the realm of technology and information, yet the state of our humanity is worse than ever on many levels is an unavoidable indication that something has been missing in the past approach to development, and that to recover that which is lost requires that we embrace new modalities and lenses through which we see the situation.

In conclusion, a crossroads is both a terrifying and exhilarating place to be. It is a place in which the ability to humbly admit our ineptness and seek to discover truth and beauty amidst chaos and ashes is present, for we are no longer under the illusion that we have the answer.

….We discovered that being able to proceed into the obscurity of the
unknown is not always congruent with the reality of logic, reason and predictable outcomes.  The challenges that we faced became a classroom that taught us to work through conflict, mediate and appreciate differences, evaluate the feasibility of ideas, and ask the ultimate
question, what is education for (Orr, 2000).

While it is easy to talk about our relationship to the earth and to the food that we eat, it is more difficult to talk about the relationships that happen behind food, between farmers and buyers, between activists and politicians, between educators and students, grocery-shoppers, multi-national corporations, scientists, and families. That is when things become messy. It is within those relationships, between our community partner and their community partners that we need to work through, between group members with differing opinions and styles. Perhaps we accidentally discovered one of the reasons why our current food system is in crisis; we have been trying to accomplish a task without seeing that everything must operate through
relationship and process, and when that principle is compromised, there is a breakdown evident in everything from the soil to the air.

An exerpt from our final group paper, LFS 350, 2011.  Group 09. These are my reflections, integrated into the whole, on the process of working through process to reach a goal.

(A blurb taken from the final paper, LFS 350, 2011, Group 09.) My reflections on community service learning.

”Our CSL experiences gave us a unique exposure to another component of the overall food system, which contributed to a greater understanding of the intricate connections between land, food, and community. The value and opportunity of community service is that it creates a real life context for academic learning, and re-instills the reality that our education must be for more than our own self-improvement. Ultimately, we as students need to learn from our communities as much, if not more, than our communities need us to help them. Furthermore, it helps us as students to realize that while knowledge is invaluable, it’s worth hinges on the ability to successfully
communicate and relate to others in a mutually beneficial way.”

I think that sometimes we spend all of our lives preparing for one moment.  A moment in which the struggles that we face, the unseen victories that we win, and the mundane experiences lived in love are suddenly transformed into a glorious expression of who we truly are.

I was reflecting the other day about my life, my studies, my past, present and future.  I began to feel as if I was in the middle of a vast ocean, the shore from which I came is a memory, and the shore to which I am going a hope and a thought, yet remains unseen.  I felt lost, and  somewhat afraid, and suddenly my bearings, my vision, my motivation, were under attack.  All I could feel was the struggle of journeying to a place I have never seen, save in my mind’s eye. 

You may ask, or you may not, how this pertains to Global Resource Systems.  I think that it pertains more than many things, because it is a letter of the heart written from the journey.  I am here as an academic student, yes, I am enrolled in courses, and working towards a particular degree.  Yet, I am intrinsicaly aware of the fact that it is my character, not my grades that will sustain me and enable me to walk into the very thing for which I am preparing for by studying.

Dealing well with these moments of discouragement, when I feel like I am in the middle of nowhere, and cannot see the ocean for the waves, is a test of equal importance as the many midterms we all know and love.  What is the key? I believe it is rejoicing, and trusting that trials, seen with the right eyes, are the greatest opportunity to grow and to develop the character necessary to be the person I am meant to be.

I am thinking about how being a student could become an opportunity to be a catalyst for change.  One of my classmates took great initiative in creating a mini enterprise to raise money to send a student in Sudan to school.  Not a number, not a good cause, but a friend.  I chatted briefly with him, and another friend about how development is so often viewed with a negative lens, I thought about how sometimes our education gets in the way of our learning about how to become people of change, people of love, and people of hope in a dark world.  I started to think about how it might be possible to think about our situation as students differently, we consider ourselves to be poor, when really we are the most privileged and resource rich people alive.  Sometimes we just don’t know it.   I bought a T-shirt, paid 20$, and realized that although I sometimes feel as if I don’t have a lot of money, I can’t afford not to invest in things that carry a glimmer of brilliance such as this. What would it look like if a bunch of students took ownership of our learning in a really unique way, thought of ways to save money, to slow down, to live a life of meaningful intentionality?  I pay nearly 80$ a month to have a little piece of metal as an appendage that is constantly interrupting me, filling me with information that overwhelms, and bringing me into a world in which I am constantly available…and busy.  I don’t like it, not one bit.  Imagine if I found other students who felt the same way, and we all threw out our cell phone contracts, or reduced them, pooled our money and our space, lived in community, and got a landline costing 30$ a month.  Overall, even if we each paid 20$/month on a cell phone, if there were five of us, we could save 60$ each, 300$ total/month on cell phones alone!  This is more than 3000$ a year! This small amount of money could pay for lots of people to do lots of new things, to have new freedom in new ways—this could be development from the inside out, embracing a life that is not focused on our own development, and our own comfort.  Imagine!

Imagine if we talked, and realized that together, we have so much, and that learning to share could be amazing.  We could live lives of simplicity, each one offering what they have, be it cooking skills, nutrition, micro enterprise, business savvy, and engineering.  I feel like I am surrounded by brilliant people who are simply waiting for an opportunity to be brilliant.

School has a funny way of getting under my skin.  Talks given by professors months ago ruminate in my mind, and suddenly, my somewhat foolproof worldview has been dismantled piece by piece.   Maybe I am exaggerating.  Then again, maybe not.

A vein of thought that has recently been distilled for me into a clear realization is that I don’t believe in international development. I believe in relationships.  Months of questions about international engagement have brought me to this place in which I am forced to reject the current model of “international development”.  Feeling rather as if I am in a hot air balloon, without much control yet on an amazing adventure in which I am learning to see things from a brand new perspective, I have suddenly floated into a new place.  Development- does that have a place in friendships?  Do I seek to develop my friends, my family?  I know that when I do, it ends in failure, and usually I walk away feeling remorseful because of my own pride.  If ‘development’ has no place in the most intimate of relationships in my life, how can I muster the pretense that it has a place in my relationships, or complete lack thereof, with people whom I have yet to meet and nations that are not my own?

When I look at the world, what I see is dependant upon my eyes.  Are my eyes awakened to the reality of right and wrong, measuring everything as black or white, good or bad?  I am starting to really see that this will bring death, and a grey bleakness to what is beautiful.

This week, I had an overload of bad news- child labor, migrant workers, corruption, and that biology midterm… I started to give way in my perspective to one that rather than being alive in love and hope, was tainted with despair.

The object of someone’s love is perfect.  There is no fault, no blame, and no accusation against love.  Love hopes all things and believes all things.  I believe that eyes that see even the darkest of histories with the hope of love will be eyes that will also see the redemption of those histories. 

Back in the day, the Beatles sang a song that all we need is love.  While I have to admit that my musical taste veers more towards Jazz than the Beatles, I wholeheartedly agree.  When I start to see the nations, and the history of our humanity, stained with hatred, torn with evil and corruption, my heart begins to reflect these things, and they have won.  I want to see in love, because love is what we need.

What does it look like for our dreams to become reality?  Tonight, I saw the inner workings of some of my fellow students as we cooked and shared a meal in my home, and had the opportunity to go back to something so fundamental; conversation.  I was in awe of the depth of thought that these people had put into the issues that we talk about every day, sustainability, the environment, the world!  It was so refreshing to see those same things discussed in a new light.  They had been digested.  These topics had been mulled over, probably through sweat, tears, and blood, because the result is a lifestyle that reflects their words.

I am both challenged and encouraged, because I see, alongside of the seemingly huge “issues” of our day, people everywhere who are not willing to be a part of a system that doesn’t work. They are re-inventing it, one day at time.

I am going to air on the side of presumption, and speak of the beauty of what I saw, because truly, our words are empty and hollow if our lives don’t illustrate them.  I often feel somewhat at a loss because I wonder, what is it about my life that is any different?  What does it look like to live differently?  What are the challenges, the obstacles, the joys, and the beautiful moments of such a life?

While I have been asking more questions than answers, tonight, it was revelational to see from a new perspective, and begin to see some new layers and angles.