LETTER 9

19th July 1994

I spend quite a lot of time here in Mexico working with a group of young Guatemalan refugees, aged between about 18 and 23, in producing a newspaper specially for the group that's planning to return to Petén. The name of the paper is El Porvenir, which means The Future. It isn't a daily by any means. In fact over the last year they've produced only six editions. But it's become extremely popular and extremely important to all the people who read it.

El Porvenir tries to provide people with the most up-to-date news about the return, and also with an idea about what people are doing and thinking about in the refugee camps. Its secret, if it is a secret, is that almost everything in it comes from tape recordings of interviews with the people themselves, so that it speaks to them with their own voice.

The danger, which the team of young editors feels as a weight of responsibility, is that El Porvenir is taken so seriously by everyone. Some of the refugees in the camps even treat it as a sort of Bible in which all the 'truths' about the return are written.

Apart from that, it goes to friends of the refugees in Guatemala and in many other countries in the world. So there's a lot of pressure on this group of five young people, four men and one woman, three indigenous and two of mixed race, to do their homework properly, get their facts right and to provide the sort of final polish that a newspaper needs: well-presented photographs and drawings, good lay-out that's easy to read by people who don't read very well, and no spelling, grammar or punctuation mistakes.

A year ago, when the El Porvenir project first started, there was this group of just three young people, all keen to try to produce a newspaper. They had none of them had much more than primary school education. They had never touched a computer, and hardly touched a typewriter before. None of them had conducted an interview on tape and none of them had ever written an article or an essay on a serious subject.

When we talk about "less developed countries", one of the most obvious differences between people there and in more privileged countries is the question of educational opportunities. Whether you like it or not, most of you by the age of 16 will have had ten years of education, will have done some exams in English and at least have had some practice at stringing a few sentences together, even if you don't feel ready to edit a newspaper. When they started, the El Porvenir team could all read and write, and not a lot more.

Producing a newspaper was not just an idea of theirs. It was something which the refugee organisation wanted and needed at that moment. I have said to you before that the refugees in Mexico are scattered over an enormous area, and one of the organisation's biggest problems is keeping in touch with them all, so that their return can happen in a well organised way with as few problems as possible. It was considered very important to publish a newspaper of some kind to keep all the refugees in this group informed as well as to send out to people in other places to tell them what was going on.

The meeting which produced the first edition lasted for the better part of a week. They were floundering. They had to go out with tape recorders and talk to people. They had to come back and write down the interview. They had to beat down a half-hour interview (about 3000 words) to a short article of 300 words. They had to think of headlines and captions, where to put photographs, how to do the lay-out, the design of the whole paper.

Two non-refugees - I was one - with two computers worked with them and at that point gave them an enormous amount of help. That first edition of the newspaper had to be good. One organisation had put money into it, and many more people and organisations were watching with eagle eyes to see what it would be like. The team was given a lot of advice by a lot of people, and quite often one piece of advice clashed with another piece of advice. It was a bewildering time.

The first edition appeared. I think it was the first of its kind. Refugee groups had produced bulletins and news-sheets before, but never a full-sized paper, with photos, and laid out by computer, even if it was only a tiny lap-top in someone's house.

Since that first venture, when their hands were guided at almost every move, they have been learning at an enormous speed. It has become for all of them a demanding, unpaid part-time job. All of them now use the word-processor themselves, and they have recently taken on the more complicated challenge of laying the paper out ready for print.

But the technical tasks have been moving side by side with the far more difficult business of hunting for news and interviews, typing it all up, summarising the important parts and producing script the right length and in the right kind of language for people to understand. I said before that practically all the material comes from refugees themselves, but occasionally too they have to interview the United Nations or the government and even on one occasion the Guatemalan army.

The Guatemalan refugees have been living in camps in Mexico for nearly twelve years. I have described to you before in other letters the reasons why they had to flee, and just at this very moment those reasons are being recalled dramatically in the discovery of mass graves in Petén, where hundreds of bodies are being unearthed, often bodies of their own relatives, many of them small children, brutally slaughtered by the army a dozen years ago.

Think for a moment. The young people now working on the newspaper were between, say, seven and twelve when their families fled from Guatemala. They were only children, and although they have memories of atrocities which most of us never dream of, they were very young, and it didn't perhaps mean the same to them as it did to their parents, the older generation.

When they eventually settled in the camps in Mexico, which took quite a while and a lot more problems along the way, and when it became clear that they would be there for a long time, they began to fall into the Mexican way of life. The children went to school and received a few years at least of primary education. Some managed to go on to secondary. They had contact with youth culture, clothes and music, all strongly influenced by the United States, which came to them in the usual ways, over the television and through their contact with the local towns. As they got older a lot of them went out to work and started to earn money.

It was a big change from their previous life. It meant that many of them grew up into young adult people who were very different from their parents, and now that the return is about to happen, they are faced with the biggest decision they've ever had to take, which is whether to go back into the rain forest and start again from scratch, without shops or schools or electricity or television, or whether to stay and be Mexicans and live in the town and try to continue their education or find work and earn money.

Before they fled from Petén they all lived in very simple country communities, fighting poverty and hardship and brutal treatment from the government and the army. The most deeply held desire of most of the people was just to have some land of their own to cultivate and be left to get on with their lives in peace. Practically no-one had the chance to become a doctor or a lawyer or an airline pilot because these opportunities were simply not available.

Many of them now have seen a different way of life - not that camp life has been anything more than basic - but they've had a chance to learn to read and write, to speak Spanish, to learn about the law and human rights and to pick up some of the skills which the church and various other organisations have taught them. Their life has changed, and most of all for the young. The adults may be willing and able to take the risk of going back to an isolated life in Guatemala, but many, many of the young people have already opted out.

I used to think that in England the 'generation gap' as we call it, the big gap which there is between young people and their parents, was far wider than here. In Mexico I think that's true. Families seem to be much closer than they are in England. But amongst the Guatemalan refugees the gap is often very wide indeed, for reasons which you now perhaps understand.

Two of these reasons I've already mentioned. One is that young people want to carry on with their education and have the chance to better themselves and possibly become professional people. The other thing is that young people don't necessarily want to go back and be farmers on a patch of land in the rain forest. Many of them, no doubt like you, want a paid job and some money in their pockets.

There's another big issue as well. In country areas in Guatemala young people get married very young and start families. Often a woman in her twenties might have as many as six children. But quite a number of young people now are beginning to think differently from their parents.

There has been a lot of training for women over the last twelve years in the refugee camps. We sometimes get blinded by all the horrors which happened to these people in the years leading up to when they fled the country, and there's absolutely no way in which we should forget that or push it to one side. But we mustn't think that apart from that life was easy or fair for them.

In reality the lives of campesinos (peasant farmers) in many less privileged countries have been unbearable for centuries, because of the way rich people have always treated poor people. There's nothing recent about that, and it's a vicious circle they (and we) have to fight to break if we believe in simple fairness, and that somehow everybody should have an equal chance.

Unfortunately however it's not as simple as that either. Even inside these communities, just as happens inside every community, there have always been stronger people and weaker people, more and less privileged people - and women have always ended up at the bottom end of the pile.

This is one of the things that the last twelve years have begun to correct, or at least to make people more conscious of. Women are beginning to realise that changes are needed inside their own families as well as in the bigger communities where they live, and some young women and men have started questioning the custom of starting families young and thinking about all that that implies in terms of sex education and family planning.

What triggered the flight from Guatemala to Mexico was a ghastly human crime, and the people who ordered the murders have still not been brought to justice. But the disaster gave birth to new developments, some good, some bad, some welcome and some really hard to cope with.

It wrenched a whole community out of a traditional, agricultural way of life and hurled them into a very different kind of world, with many disadvantages but with many attractions. And now they're going back. To what kind of future? And what will they be leaving behind this time? It obviously wasn't easy to leave Guatemala, but, not quite so obviously, it won't be easy to return there, especially for the younger generation who seem to have grown up on another planet.

The challenge of the return is different for every section of the refugee population. Many just want to get back to their own land and live and farm there in peace, but many others want to return to try and change things in Guatemala. For the younger generation this is the real challenge of the times to come, though without any doubt there are many who have chosen to follow another track.

It was the young editorial team of El Porvenir who decided to give the paper its name: The Future, and, most especially now, as the community awaits the return, it's the mists of the future that everyone is most apprehensive about. The same army is there and the same kind of government is in power. Petén is an enormous untamed place without many roads and without much in the way of services, a rain forest full of snakes and mosquitoes.

What would you do?

LETTER 10

11th August 1994

Now things have started moving. After all this time of waiting, quite suddenly and quite smoothly, a week or two back, it seemed as if the return of the Guatemalan refugees to Petén, the real thing, was going to start at last.

Over the last few months we have been trying to explain to people why things were taking such a long time to get started, and the trouble is that, now they've started, it's going to be quite a long time, several months at least, before the people can get up and go. So what's the hold-up now?

Don't you find that when you're trying to do something or plan something that there are always snags that get in the way? Suppose you want to go on a cycling holiday somewhere. You have to get hold of the money you need. You can't rush that. It takes as long as it takes. So you have to be patient, maybe take a job, maybe go and be nice to some member of the family who's richer than you.

Then you have to decide where to go, so you get maps and guide books and find out all you can about the place you're going to.

Then when you reckon you've got the money your mum gets ill and asks you to stay at home and help until she gets better. That too takes as long as it takes.

And then when everything seems OK, you have to get yourself prepared, and pack, and oil the chain on your bicycle, all of which is much easier and more predictable, but still takes time.

Then at last you're ready to go, but the weather is foul and you think you might wait a day or two till it clears up.

Planning the return of 2000 people to Petén is a lot more complicated than planning a cycling holiday, but in many ways the same kinds of problem exist. We reckon there are four quite different processes, all trying to happen at the same time. We have started to talk about them as if they were a family of frogs trying to get from one place to another, but I'll explain that in a moment.

First of all there were many obstacles which were right out of our control, a bit like your mum's illness. The refugees had to wait while the long process of trying to get the land was going on, and I've said a lot about that in other letters. This we call the political process, or, in private, the "mad frog", because it jumps about all over the place and you can never tell what it will do next.

Then there's never enough money, and all the time people are trying to raise the funds to pay for the new settlement and the return. You can't rush that either. It's what we call the financial process, or in frog-language the "slow frog".

Next of course, like getting your bike ready for the road, there are lots of jobs to be done, clearing the land, putting in the streets and the houses, the shops, markets, schools, churches, health centres and so on. That's the real business of moving, and people enjoy it, but it too has its own pace. We call it the technical process, and because it's sensible and clear it's been named the "sober frog".

And last of all there's a thousand things that people have to learn before they go, how to live in the rain forest without damaging it, how to organise the new town, how to see to water and drainage and rubbish disposal. All this means a great deal of training and studying for everybody, like buying the maps and guide books before you set off on your holiday. While it's going on, people are also being asked to help decide about what sort of town they want, how they want to live and who will be in charge of what. So this is the training and consulting process, which hasn't got a frog's name yet.

All these processes, three frogs and a frog without a name, are the things which have held up the return so far and will go on holding it up for a while until they have finally chosen the spot for the new town and built enough of it so that people can go there and start living in reasonable comfort.

Just over a week ago, anyway, a group of six refugees, chosen as representatives of all the people returning to El Quetzal, set off from Mexico to Guatemala to go to their land and decide where to put the new town or settlement.

It takes a long time to get there, and the last eight miles or so have to be done on foot, with horses carrying the luggage. It was late afternoon at the start of this last stage, and in the end we had to trudge for two hours through the forest by torchlight in pouring rain, hoping we wouldn't tread on any snakes. (I did catch sight of one long green one slithering off into the undergrowth.) But we reached there in the end bitten by nothing worse than the normal million mosquitoes, flies, ants, ticks and so on.

Our group was accompanied by some very impressive people, usually known as 'experts'. They were coming with us to give advice on where to put the settlement, on the use of the land, on the availability of water, on drainage systems and so on. They came with some very expensive equipment, one machine which links with a satellite and tells you exactly where you are, another which tells you your height above sea-level, another which tells you the angles of hills and gradients, and another which measures the quantity of suspended particles in water. They came with maps and documents and diagrams. They talked of aerial photographs and computerised designs and used a lot of language which most of the people couldn't understand.

I'm not saying that these experts with their machines weren't useful. I'm sure they were, and I'm sure the machines could do measurements a great deal more accurately than anybody there could, but their problem was that they couldn't communicate, and although they were experts they didn't manage to explain to the refugees what exactly they were up to.

The other problem was that they had a lot of quite strong opinions about what people should do, which trees they should cut down and which not, where to put the houses, the water tanks and so on, and the general result was that the refugee group felt they were being pushed around by a load of people who couldn't even explain in plain Spanish what they were on about. In no time at all the experts had almost been branded as the enemy.

After staying in the rain forest for less than a day, the experts decided it was time for them to go home. So off they went, perched on some bony and not very hi-tech horses from a neighbouring village.

No sooner were they gone than one of the refugees produced an enormous ball of twine which he had bought at a market during the journey, and with the help of a three-metre tape-measure we divided it into 50-metre lengths. We split into two groups with a compass and several machetes in each, and set off, hacking our way into the undergrowth to do some 'real' measurement.

All day they hacked their way through, measuring the size of the future settlement with twine, studying the ground with their own eyes, assessing where the flood land and the dry land was, taking in every hill and mound. At the end they felt they really knew the land, and we drew a rough sketch-map to help them describe it to the refugees in Mexico when they got back.

I'm not trying to argue that a piece of string is better than a computer or a satellite, but I am trying to say that sometimes it can be more appropriate. We in our countries tend to be taken in by gadgets of all sorts, without really thinking about what is the best way for us, the people that we are, to solve our problems.

I'm also trying to say how important it is for so-called experts who have special skills to be able to talk about them in a language which is appropriate, having a bit of respect for their listeners and not imagining that everyone who can't understand them is an idiot. (I'm afraid that teachers are sometimes guilty of this!)

I fell into the same trap myself not so long ago when the refugees returning to Petén had to produce a census, or a bank of information, containing certain essential data about themselves. Roughly speaking there are three thousand of them, and there were thirty bits of information wanted about each one of them (age, ethnic group, health record, schooling, training and so on). Total: 90,000 pieces of information.

It was suggested we should put it all on to a data base, and somehow or other I became responsible for it all. It's a long story, but it cost me hours of work and frustration, and the worst of it was that since practically no-one knew how to use a data-base, or even what it was, I was soon branded as the 'expert'.

After a while people began to think that I had the secret key to all this knowledge about them which only I controlled and only I could get at. In reality, having very little computer competence myself, I could very often not get at it and a lot of it was quite out of control. But the result of my inexperience was that they even thought I was keeping the information from them deliberately.

Let me tell you that being considered an 'expert' was one of the most horrible experiences I can remember, far worse than dark jungles and snakes.

The other aspect of all this is that the information which the refugee leaders themselves have in their note-books or in their heads is far more up-to-date and accurate than the census ever was. So, apart from the basic list of names and dates of birth, which the authorities need to have neatly printed from time to time, we're happily scrapping the data-base, and I can become a normal human being again.

The sober frog, the technical process, the business of starting to build the new town, has started its long journey at last, but more of these problems will occur. I mentioned to you in my last letter how the younger generation of refugees is coming to grips with a different kind of future, a world which contains cities and jet planes and high technology as part of its very existence. All the refugees, young and old, will be confronted with that world sooner or later, especially if they're serious about building a community which provides them with opportunities for development along modern lines.

It's not as easy as deciding between satellites and balls of string, or between data-bases and ball point pens. Part of the challenge is to bring the two worlds closer together, but the important lesson is that no-one should try to rush the pace.

A word I've used here a couple of times is the word 'appropriate'. What it really means is finding a way of doing things which is right for the people concerned. There never is an absolutely right way. If we've got computers these days to help us run our lives, it doesn't mean that ten years ago people who didn't have them - because hardly anyone had them - were incompetent, or that people in the Guatemalan jungle have to learn to use them straight away.

The experts may know things that the refugees don't, but it's worth remembering that the refugees know more about the rain forest than almost anybody. What I'm hoping is that between the two of them they will be able to find the right track and the appropriate pace.