“There’s some colonial in my postcolonial”: Community Development Workers’ Perspectives on Faith-based Service Learning in a Guatemalan Context

Abstract

Faith-based relief and development organization Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) has been involved in the country of Guatemala since 1976 when they responded to relief needs in light of the devastating earthquake at the time. Since then MCC has invested in a number of communities throughout Guatemala in various capacities, one of which has been the development of service and learning opportunities aimed at exposing and connecting students/participants in the global north with the people and issues within the global south. As researchers of service learning, who are also committed to a faith tradition and have participated in or have been in relationship with MCC in some capacity, we are interested in evaluating how their faith tradition has helped to both construct their practice as well as critique it. One of the aims of our research is to collaborate with MCC practitioners in assessing and examining their current practice of service/learning in Guatemala in an effort to discover ways in which they are creating opportunities for positive societal change -both in the lives of the student/ participants and the communities in Guatemala, while critiquing the traditional colonial and neocolonial approaches to development.

Decolonial Experimentations in International Service Learning Research and Practice: Learnings from Mayan Indigenous Host Communities

“…Examples such as this are of paramount importance when considering bringing outsiders such as Northern ISL participants into these communities. Interconnected and further problematic is the growth of the development industry in the last decades in Guatemala, sometimes responding to the injustices created by resource extraction (Balzer & Heidebrecht, 2017), accompanied by the growth of ISL programs that focus, sometimes myopically, on student experience (Jefferess, 2012;Mitchell, Donahue, & Young-Law, 2012) and too often cater to the objectives of NGOs and their stakeholders rather than the trajectories of, for example, Mayan communities reclamation efforts. This kind of development work could be likened to "colonialism in sheep's clothing" (Walsh, 2014, p. 9), and within the context of Guatemala, it is also hard to ignore how entangled this work is within the history of U.S. interventions (Grandin, 2004), the exclusion of Indigenous voices within the Guatemalan national education curriculum, and the previously mentioned experiences of deception some communities have encountered.…”