“How do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same times remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?”
--Bell Hooks

I’ve been sitting in this question, feeling it enveloped and sometimes paralyze me in its inaccessibility and sometimes apparent impossibility. I ask it not only on a broad scale but also a narrow scope: in the classroom, in the field, and on a continuum of humanity and human nature. Well, I sure as hell don’t know the answer to this question, not that it actually does exist and is hiding from me, counting to ten and waiting for me to find it. One day I’ll find it, at least that's the hope.

Jeff, our in-country coordinator, told us something I found to be pretty profound at our last retreat. I haven’t been able to get it out of my head. In essence: the existence of ‘a scale of suffering.’ We as Americans are, quite obviously, on the far end of the spectrum. We live most of our lives at a 7 (or around there). Our day to day difficulties and struggles often materialize themselves in traffic jams or quarrels, copy machine jams and long lines. People living in poverty, like Belizeans, live most of their lives at a 3. (Refugees and Internally displaced people probably live around a 1 or a 2. I think we’d be nauseous if we truly comprehended how many endure lives at a 1 or a 2). When we experience a death or other similar tragedy, we get lost in it. Not that it’s not valid, but because we’re not used to the 3’s, so it’s hard. We are dropped down to a level of suffering that is not only foreign, but is therefore traumatic.

But people who live in the 3’s, when they experience death or heartbreak or tragedy, pick themselves right back up, most of the time, from what I am gathering. I witness this so much, as I hear my girls constantly speak to death, and gunshots, rape, and violence as just another factor of the day, almost like brushing their teeth.

I say this not to invalidate my own or anyone else’s feelings, but only to remind us that other realities exist. I find this to be so important. It is a moral and ethical imperative, I feel: to remind ourselves that other realities exist, not to invalidate our own, but to know that other people live, and to learn from it. No, our religion is not it, nor is our lifestyle, our clothes, our customs. They are not all that is out there. We are constantly needing to remind ourselves that other realities exist—that ours isn’t it, or the best. It is our biggest challenge, I think. And I fear, the most unattainable.

I’ll be honest and say that teaching these girls is probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I wanted them so badly to see me, but I’ve realized that was pretty selfish. It’s not their job to know and see me, but I’ll know them. Just like it’s not a child’s job to love a parent; it’s a parent’s job to love the child. It’s not their job to love me; it’s my job to love them. I’ll bravely admit that sometimes it’s really hard work to love them. Sometimes they’re mean and vindictive and seemingly evil. Some days I don’t want to love them, but I try anyway.

It is so much harder to be with people and love them. It’s hard work. And not because it’s hot and there’s bugs and I’m sweating and I’m thirsty, but because it’s hard work to love people sometimes. It’s the hardest work there is, most days. Some days, I’ll be honest, I’m awful at it. I fail. I succumb to fear and frustration.

Some people deem accompaniment to mean complacency. It is the exact opposite, I’m learning. It’s so much easier to sit in a classroom and intellectualize it all and sit and talk about “the poor”; it is so much harder to live inside of it. Some say that it’s idealistic and naïve to think that any of it matters at all. Some may roll their eyes at about being with and doing for, someone else, but to them I say: as Paulo Freire writes: “Some may think that to affirm the dialogue—the encounter of women and men in the world in order to transform the world—is naively and subjectively idealistic. There is nothing, however, more real or concrete than human people in the world and with the world, than humans with other humans.”

These young women, their battles are incredible; suffering which I’ll probably never in my lifetime understand, let alone endure. I’m learning so much about suffering, and what it means like to accompany someone else in their suffering. I’m not there to save them or protect them; I’m there to be with them. I’m there to listen and support; but I’m also there to encourage, challenge, discipline—TEACH. And sometimes being these two people, a counselor and a teacher, feel like mutually exclusive titles. I’m not sure I’m doing either of them justice presently, but I sure am trying. We’re all still feeling each other out, even after four months. All this time I’ve wanted to be alongside them, not in front of them. But that’s not my job; I am supposed to be in front of them; I am to teach them; I am to love them while I teach them, though some days it feels like an impossibility.

The injustices that once infuriated me, have become a reality that I must accept. No, this doesn’t mean we accept it, or shrug our shoulders or sit and hug our knees to our chest and wait; it means we pull ourselves up and persist. That’s what they have to teach me, I think. We don’t just sit and whine and become angry. We pull ourselves together and take care of each other. We don’t become complacent, we don’t accept the world as it is; we challenge it. We fight like hell for something better.

“Life is, in fact, a battle. Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting but rare; goodness very apt but weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense is small, and mankind is generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no narrow illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of the night; we wake up to it again forever and ever, and we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense it.”
-Henry James

YES, we’re struggling, but we’re fighting like hell. Miss Karen in her floral print dresses and her slippers. Some days a wig accompanies her golden hoop earrings, other days a weave. She is our warrior, our leader; a woman whose brilliance conspicuously radiates out of her like a fog machine. The room’s atmosphere fundamentally changes upon entrance. A woman who has been the director of YES, not accompanied but created its movement, even as diabetes take her toes like conquests. Her body moves slow, off balance a bit at their recent loss; she’s still readjusting to their absence, still feeling out this body that feels foreign. How it must feel as one grows into body that doesn’t match its spirit. Something we’ll never understand until we get there, I imagine.

YES is presently in a financial hole. We’re digging like hell, though, sweat dripping from our brows, still trying to catch our breath, I think, praying we’ll make it. It’s a shame—YES is such a presence in Belize. It has made unprecedented strides in the field of women’s advocacy, teen pregnancy, and human rights in Belize, not to mention the individual lives it has changed by its training center. Our fate dangles in the hands of others, as we desperately beg for funding. The fact of the matter is that it’s not only the ngos that are struggling these days, but also the very foundations that support them. We’re one of many, I fear, all of us chomping at the bit, competing for the little money that is still available. Everyone’s fighting for a small piece of money in Belize. Some achieve it through grants and donations, others through robberies and murders.

Prime Minister Dean Barrow just declared a recession in Belize in October, so it seems that despite the Christmas season, the spirit is a bit down, as we can all testify as well in the states. Christmas in Belize, I’m told, is a time of celebration and hope, but also a time when crime is often at its worse.

A time when people want to fix up their houses by painting them and buying new curtains; they want to give gifts to their children. When you don’t have the money to do this, you find a way, don’t you.? Yes, Belize isn’t in a dire state, in relation to its Central American counterparts, in terms of poverty. In terms of danger, however, it has mountains to climb. Belize has enough development, media infiltration and gun imports to create danger, but not an environment to compete with it. Sometimes I fear Belize City is losing itself to danger and violence and shootings, no different than parts of the United States, though.

The injustices that reveal themselves in Belize are present everywhere else in the world. They are just as prominent in the states; I have just been fortunate to have been shielded from them-- to have been held in a blanket of security by my socioeconomic status. There is rape and poverty, shootings and hunger. It’s easier to call poverty and injustice by name when you’re entrenched in and engulfed by it, but it’s a lot easier to exist in a state of being where we look the other way and pretend it doesn’t exist. I’ve done that a lot in the states—maybe out self preservation and the need to live the day to day. Maybe we all have to ignore some of it, or we’d never make it through a day.

Belize is no different than any other country; we’re all working towards the same goals; our work just looks different sometimes. Belize looks a lot like the states in so many ways; it has been completely infiltrated with American culture and ideals; sometimes I feel like it’s a child imitating her mother-- trying on her dresses and putting on her lipstick. But it doesn’t fit quite right. The similarities mask the differences, making life as a foreigner hard. We think it’s the same because the language is the same (minus the Creole) and imported goods dominate the market, but the culture is, indeed, markedly different.

Belize is a country the size of Massachusetts with as many cultures and languages to match the states in almost its entirety. It’s only had its independence since 1989, but I am a firm believer in the hard work that’s being done, and the progress that has been made. I like to think that so many of the ngos are responsible for this; they’ve at the least, had a hand in it: advocating for those who aren’t able to advocate for themselves-- from the disabled to the psychologically ill, the abused and neglected, hungry and unhealthy. Belize is fighting like hell. No, I’m learning, it’s not the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps mentality”; it’s a lot different than that. It’s not about climbing the ladder or efficiency, it’s about the process, and the baby steps that it takes to get there (though sometimes it comes at a price, and feels painfully inadequate).

I admit I only see a small snapshot of Belize. I see Belize City and witness its reality from a small smudged lens. I see the northern highway each day, but only from the dusty bus window. I only see the realities of my 25 girls, and a handful of others with whom I share stories and realities. There is so much more to learn about this place, I’m realizing. Belize City is just a small facet of this small, diverse country, and is certainly not representative of the country as a whole. Sometimes, I forget that, I think. Belize City is not Belize country.