What I Did On My Summer Vacation

 

By Andrew Walzer

 

    Like so many of you, as a part timer I rarely manage to  find the time or money to take a summer vacation. Since I’m only paid about  two-thirds of what a   full time instructor is paid for the same amount of work, I have to teach both summer and winter  intersessions.   In addition, since I teach on both a quarter and a semester campus, I rarely get a winter or spring break. 

    However,   this summer I managed to squeeze in 13 precious days at the end of August to travel down to Guatemala.  I wanted to get away, far away, from school and thinking and grading and the injustices of  college life, and all the complexities that often times leaves me overwhelmed.  Guatemala sounded far enough away so that I could just escape, and forget all about the travails of a freeway flyer activist.  Well, it didn’t quite work out that way.

    I ended up in a beautiful town by the name of Antigua, which is situated just outside of Guatemala City.  Antigua is a center for Spanish language learning in Central America.  For about $20.00 a day, you can study Spanish one-on-one with a language instructor.  I decided that my Spanish needed a brush- up, so I went around visiting the many Spanish language schools that are spread throughout the city. 

    I eventually settled on a Spanish instructor by the name of Antonio who was an independent meaning that he wasn’t actually employed by a Spanish school but rather freelanced.  As a freelancer, he earns much more because the school administration doesn’t take a cut. 

    I settled down for a couple of  days of Spanish language conversation, but one day, I couldn’t help but inquire about the working conditions of Spanish language teachers in Guatemala. Well, it turns out that the situation

 

 

 

in Guatemala is not much different than here.  One of the problems that the Spanish language teachers face is that they are employed part time and thus don’t receive benefits!  In addition, they are paid very poorly and there are very few professional standards.  It was a painfully familiar scenario. Injusticia, injustice, knows no national boundaries.

    One thing led to another, and I started talking to my new friend Antonio about organizing.  I told him that here at Santa Monica College we part timers have managed to successfully do some organizing and have found a voice in our union, and that as a whole we’ve managed to improve our working conditions.  We have better pay than most colleges, some job security, some access to health care, and some paid office hours.   We need to

improve conditions in all of these areas, but we have made progress.  

    He listened intently to what I had to say, and seemed fairly interested.  But, he responded, here in Guatemala our heads are hanging pretty low.  We’ve just been through thirty years of civil war, and we’re afraid of forming anything that sounds like a union (syndicato in Spanish).   He also said that people wouldn’t want to pay union dues.

    But I was undeterred.  I encouraged him to bring the teachers together and talk about their working conditions, even if it didn’t result in forming a union right off the bat.  The more we talked, the more encouraged and interested he became.  By the time I left, he was talking about meeting times and places!. 

    There’s a lesson here worth remembering. Wherever you are, organizing involves courage.  It involves breaking out of accepted patterns of thinking and behavior.  I tried to explain to Antonio that even here in the United States we face complacency and often feel discouraged, though the comparison is strained given that the problems that we face here are nothing compared to what has occurred in Guatemala in the last decades of political repression and violence. 

    So how do we go about taking advantage of our liberty here in the United States?  Sure, there isn't the explicit political repression here that there is in Guatemala.  But there is something just as insidious, which is complacency and hopelessness.  As I've mentioned in past articles, we have got to take a leap of faith and step outside our accepted patterns of behavior. It's a world-wide problem, and it won't change unless we change it, one step at a time, one conversation at a time, one meeting at a time -- and one election at a time.