Development encounters in international development volunteerism in Guatemala: Quiet encroachments in global street politics

Development actors

First, I draw from development literature to analyze the politics of the encounters of three actors in IDV. Scholars repeatedly documented failures of development interventions, through either top-down projects led by states of multilateral institutions or through bottom-up approaches by grassroots groups or social movements (Escobar, 1995a; Ferguson, 1990; Leys, 1996; Mosse, 2005; Rist, 1997; Sachs, 2010; Schroeder, 1999). However, a focus on top-down or bottom-up provided an incomplete picture of development institutions because they overlook subjectivity of some actors, disregard agency of some actors, present monolithic views of projects, or draw weak connections to the political economy (Agrawal, 2005; Asher, 2014; Ballvé 2013; Mosse, 2005; Wolford, 2010). More recently, some scholars researched institutions that are a combination of top-down and bottom-up. This is an attempt to address the complexity in the field, but also a response to a change in development funding and practices. Changes in funding occurred after the financial crisis in 2008 as austerity measures decreased funds for overseas development assistance (Haaland and Wallevik, 2017: 203).

Changes in practice occurred with an increase in individual citizens and nonspecialists who start or participate in initiatives to take action against perceived need (Develtere and de Bruyn, 2009; Richey and Ponte, 2011; Roy, 2015). This increased private initiatives is reflective of neoliberal times (Georgeou, 2012; Schech, 2017; Vrasti, 2013). In the literature this takes a variety of names like fourth pillar (Develtere and de Bruyn, 2009; Jackson, 2005), DIY development (McLennan, 2017), citizen initiatives (Haaland and Wallevik, 2017), MONGOs—My Own NGO (Polman, 2010), and Private Development Initiatives (PDIs) (Kinsbergen and Schulpen, 2013). These initiatives harken back to older models of charity in which Northerners feel the need to take matters into their own hands to “help” people in the Global South. The first actors I examine are development workers who are nonspecialists that work in MONGOs.

The second actors I examine are volunteers, who are also nonspecialized actors in IDV projects. Volunteers participated in the development projects from the beginning, yet these actors and institutions now operate with a wider scope of work (Baillie Smith et al., 2013; McLachlan and Binns, 2019; McLennan, 2017; Richey and Ponte, 2014). The transnational labors of the volunteers are emblematic of neoliberal governmentality because they are simultaneously individual actors who are entrepreneurial and also caring, responsible global citizens (Sin et al., 2015). Ordinary men and women choose to volunteer with nonprofits because they desire to contribute to the global goal to reduce poverty; yet through this consumption-based volunteer action the focus becomes an individual mission (Butcher and Smith, 2015: 6–8; Roy, 2010). IDV is a type of development intervention, yet the power relations, including the gendered dynamics and radicalized processes between volunteers and host community members, is under researched (Bandyopadhyay and Patil, 2017; Georgeou, 2012; Lough and Carter-Black, 2015).

The final actors I examine are homestay families. In general the IDV literature overwhelmingly focuses on volunteers instead of host communities (McLachlan and Binns, 2019). Yet, the interactions between these actors in homes is a unique space to examine the emotions and everyday understanding of development (Baillie Smith et al., 2013; Kapoor, 2014; Peck, 2015). In sum, I examine two overlooked nonspecialized actors in development, international volunteers, and workers in MONGOs, as well as the host families who take care of the volunteers, because together are part of a change in the geographies of development.

Development encounters

The second literature I draw from is encounters across difference. Encounters are the conjunctures of trajectories of people, places, and ideas (Massey, 2005: 139). They are constellations of processes, a “throwntogetherness” of stories-so-far, and a negotiation of relationships (Massey, 2005: 139). There is a recent proliferation of scholarly work on encounters in social science because they have potential to catalyze change (Faier and Rofel, 2014; Valentine, 2008; Wilson, 2017). Encounters “offer points of possible transformation and an opening to change” (Wilson and Darling, 2016). For example, Amin examines the collaboration of strangers and argues that they can generate trust (2012: 39). In this paper, I define encounter as “the everyday engagements across difference” (Faier and Rofel, 2014).

Other scholars write on urban encounters (Wilson and Darling, 2016) or encounters in capitalism (Tsing, 2005); I focus on encounters in transnational development work. Development increasingly involves multiple actors from around the world who work together to reduce poverty. Development scholars wrote about encounters as a way to go beyond the legacy of colonial encounters with “the other” to examine the construction of discourses and social differences (Escobar, 1995b; Roy et al., 2016). I draw from Lawson and Elwood’s the term “zones of encounter,” which are spaces of (re)negotiation of social differences (class, race, gender) (2014: 212) to examine the everyday (re)negotiation of relationships between transnational actors who meet through IDV. I propose the term development encounter, as a space of engagement between people with social differences who meet briefly in development work. These everyday encounters are the unseen, unplanned, unexpected activities that can be more transformative than the planned activities (Howard and Burns, 2015; Rigg, 2012). These encounters are important to study because the iterative interactions of diverse actors from the Global North and the Global South transform project outcomes (Beck, 2017).

I combine encounter literature and development literature to fill a gap to analyze a plurality of perspectives. Encounter research frequently focuses on the perspective of the powerful, like the colonizer, or tourist (Wilson, 2017: 11), so I include the perspective of indigenous homestays. In contrast, development research frequently focus on idealized concepts of subaltern groups (Narayanaswamy, 2014), so I build on relational poverty research to also include the perspective of non-poor actors, like volunteers (Lawson and Elwood, 2014). In brief, I examine the everyday relationships between three transnational actors in a development encounter in the Global South.

Stories of nonmovements in volunteerism

Finally, I draw from Bayat’s (2010) social movement theories of quiet encroachment and street politics, to examine how they might explain the encounters with IDVs as a space that may catalyze social change. First, Bayat’s term “quiet encroachment” (2000) means the silent, prolonged direct action by individuals in order to strive for a dignified life. Second, “street politics” refers to streets as spaces of flow and movement where people not only express grievances, but also where they forge identities, enlarge solidarities, and extend their protest beyond their immediate circles to include strangers (Bayat, 2010: 12). Third, Bayat examines the “story of nonmovements” because they are the stories of agency in times of constraints (2010: 26). Frequently social movement literature sets up dichotomies of active/passive or individual/collective, or essentializes choices by poor people as survival strategies, resistance, or political actions (Bayat, 2000). Instead, this approach enables an examination of unnoticed social practices that could be indicators of social changes. Bayat analyzes the social nonmovements and the street politics of subjects like unemployed people or housewives in the Middle East who use the streets as a space to communicate discontent because they lack institutional power of disruption.

I extend these theories to development encounters and propose the term global street politics; this term refers to flow and movement in transnational spaces where people work with strangers to reduce poverty and, in the process, alter identities and solidarities. I argue that the everyday encounters IDV projects detail a quiet encroachment in global street politics. Even though the term quiet encroachment was proposed for marginalized peoples in “Third World Cities,” (Bayat, 2010: ix). The work in IDV is a story of nonmovement, as opposed to a social movement that utilizes visible protests, because the intimate, quotidian moments of the encounter suggest how the collective endeavors of millions of noncollective actors could open possibilities for social change (Bayat, 2010: 26). Bayat’s theories of social nonmovements together with the development and encounter literature provide a framework to examine the iterative, overlooked interactions of multiple actors from the Global North and Global South as a space that can potentially lead to social change.

The space of this encounter

I examine encounters in IDV around Antigua, Guatemala. In Guatemala, the legacy of civil war, a low tax base, privatization, religious outreach, and neoliberal social policies contributes to minimal state funds for social programs and increases reliance on NGO projects (Moore et al., 2017). After the 1996 Peace Accord, NGOs were central to expanding social services to address inequality that contributed to the armed conflict (Beck, 2017: 46). By the late 2000s over $2 billion was spent on “peace,” through foreign or local NGO proyectos or projects (McAllister and Nelson, 2013: 34). This was a time of “magical abundance” when anyone, like an embassy, church, volunteer, or ex-guerilla, could submit the correct papers and begin a NGO (McAllister and Nelson, 2013: 34). Currently, scholars estimate that Guatemala has one of the highest concentrations of NGOs in the world with more than 10,000 NGOs (Moore et al., 2017; Rohloff et al., 2011). Guatemalans increasingly interact with these small NGOs, and they now represent the “face” of development for Guatemalans (Beck, 2017; Rohloff et al., 2011). Nevertheless, Guatemala is representative of many countries with a wide variety of development projects that failed to transform economic and political power structures (Beck, 2017: 8).

Foreign volunteers can be found throughout the country, yet they are omnipresent around the UNESCO World Heritage site of Antigua, located about one hour from the capital (Vodopivec and Jaffe, 2011). It is a town of 16,000 people in the city center and 46,000 in the entire municipality (SEGEPLAN, 2010). Little (2004: 64) describes Antigua as a town of contradictions: for tourists, the town is inauthentic because of the tourists, yet authentic because of the indigenous people and colonial architecture (cited in Vodopivec and Jaffe, 2011: 116).

At the time of my research, there were at least 20 NGOs in or around Antigua that accept volunteers. I spoke with six organizations in Antigua over two months in 2016. I applied a qualitative life course methodology to examine “perceived intentionality of individual action (agency) and to evaluate individual experience (subjective meaning) in the context of linked lives and changing times” (Locke and Lloyd-Sherlock, 2011: 1140). I conducted 14 semi-structured interviews, 9 informal interviews, and 4 site visits with development NGOs. I used a snow ball approach to find homestay mothers, volunteers, and NGO workers to interview. I conducted an hour-long interview in English or Spanish, recorded them electronically, transcribed them, translated the Spanish interviews myself, and coded them for emergent themes.

For the semi-structured interviews, I spoke with 15 people in total: 4 homestay families (4 women and 1 man), 5 volunteers, and 5 nonprofit workers. As for the homestay families, all the families identified as indigenous and lived outside of Antigua. Each family had a different quantity of volunteers stay in their house—one only had three in total and another family could not count how many volunteers lived with them over a 10-year period.

Of the five volunteers, all were middle-class women under the age of 25. This was not intentional, but is emblematic of broader trends. Scholars estimate that 75% of volunteers are women (Wearing et al., 2018). Three of the volunteers were white North Americans, one was Indian-American, and one Portuguese-Australian. There is a debate about stipends for international development volunteers, some long-term volunteers receive a stipend and others “pay to play” (Georgeou, 2012). The volunteers I interviewed are indicative of a wide range of labor experiences: two were paid a stipend but called themselves volunteers, one paid an administrative fee of $200 to the nonprofit, one fundraised $750 at home to fulfill the compulsory donation to the nonprofit, and one had no extra costs besides the travel and housing.

Of the four nonprofit workers, three were foreign born men, between 20 and 40 years old, who were in leadership positions of nonprofits that accepted volunteers. The other nonprofit worker was a 20-year-old, indigenous Guatemalan woman whose family periodically hosted volunteers.

This research is marked by its origins from a place of privilege (Kobayashi, 1994; Rose, 1997). I identify as a white, middle-class, American woman. I pursued this research topic because I lived on various sides of the development encounter. I volunteered internationally in weeklong trips, semesters abroad, and yearlong trips. I worked for NGOs, and I lived in multiple homestays ranging from weeks to years. Since 2010, I made multiple trips to Guatemala and lived there for more almost four years to date. I first came to Guatemala in the Peace Corps where I, like many volunteers, played the “good helper” role unintentionally. I fell into a role that white-middle class women played since colonialism; through the work of “doing good,” I gained agency and gave the empire a human face (Koopman, 2008). Now, I sit in a new position, as a researcher, and I take responsibility for my complicity while I examine these encounters. Even though I spent thirteen years on multiple sides of the encounter, I am nevertheless situated socially and geographically closer to the foreigners (Lahiri-Dutt, 2017: 328; Sundberg, 2004: 3). During my research, I lived with foreign friends, I took Mayan language classes with foreigners, and I went out in the evenings with NGO workers. These experiences shape my research questions and subjects. I made a strategic choice to research volunteers because they are closest to my own position, and this choice shifts the typical research focus from marginalized groups to the role of the privileged (Elwood et al., 2016: 5). Yet, because of my observations, I chose to go beyond a focus on volunteers because I do not want to portray the volunteer as the principal actor whose perspectives matter more than other actors (Laurie and Baillie Smith, 2018: 99); therefore, I include the perspectives of multiple actors.

Homestay families

The families I spoke with articulated two main motivations for hosting volunteers: exchange of money and exchange of ideas. One woman said, “For me it is an exchange. I can show them, teach them my language, my work and at the same time they are supporting my family to prosper.” First, the foreign guests paid the homestay families for food and housing. All of the families had children and stated that they used the money to buy better food, pay school fees, or to improve their house. The money was not regular for any of the families; they did not know when another volunteer would stay with them.

Second, the encounter is a way to exchange ideas with people they would not otherwise meet. The families were aware that it would be a challenge to travel abroad, and therefore enjoyed sharing meals with foreigners. The exchange of ideas that occurred could be simple discussions or learning something new. The homestay father said:

The volunteer is not a guest, but another member of the family. We never see them as a business, obviously they leave an income (utilidad), because we also can’t deny that, but that is not the primary reason, the income. The primary reason is what I already said, that we have learned something from each volunteer, and a lot of things.

In a concrete example, one Guatemalan woman told me the story of one volunteer that shared an idea with her, that still changes her every day.

The woman loved to make flower arrangements. I had never seen flower arrangements with wildflowers (flores del campo). She made them in vases. When I entered the room where she stayed, she had a small vase on the table. I said, ay, how pretty! And, can I make that with wildflowers? Yes, she told me. Ay, I had seen flower arrangements with very expensive flowers and [the volunteer] with her imagination, and creativity, made them with wildflowers, that are there close to my house … My little sister now loves them and she makes them.

Another host family explained the exchange of ideas with one volunteer. She said:

When a guest was with us, um, with him I could speak in English and that was good because it was free. So, I was practicing, and also, he learned from us. For example, he learned to kill a chicken. So, um, I’m always thinking that if the people worked in teams, and exchanged their knowledges, I think they could make something good. But sometimes there are people who are not open to this idea.

The literature on volunteers focuses on the transformative experiences of the volunteers (Gray and Campbell, 2007; Wearing and McGehee 2013; Hopkins et al., 2015), yet ignores the potential for change in the other actors in the encounter. The homestay families I spoke with presented everyday moments of change through exchange of stories across the dinner table, lessons in flower arrangements, and English practice at home. As one woman said: “For me it was a great experience to have them because I learned a lot with them … So I felt that my mind began to function in a new way.” Therefore, the stories of the homestay encounters could be a harbinger for social change as people learn across difference and distance.

Volunteers

Through interviews, I found that volunteers use their privilege to travel to the global streets to take action and in the process forge new identities. The volunteers grew up differently: rural, urban, Catholic school, public school, religious, and nonreligious. All of them volunteered before, either near their homes in a food kitchen, on spring break trips with Habitat for Humanity, or school organized service-learning trips. One thing similar about them is they identified themselves as middle class. Several of the volunteers mentioned that their parents grew up with less economic opportunities. Two out of five of the volunteers had immigrant parents.

All of the volunteers I interviewed spoke of their choice to volunteer as a change in their lives. Their choice to volunteer in Guatemala was a different choice than people around them, and this choice is now a part of their identity. For example, one woman said:

But I think that my parents see me here in Guatemala, and they think that I’m crazy. [ … ] So I want to be tell my kids that I think they’re crazy too. Yeah, I want to be able to tell them that, like I want them to be able to do things that are like interesting to them, that I think are crazy. 

Each volunteer expressed the desire to work, they want to “do” something, to improve people’s lives; yet they were aware of critiques of volunteering. No one claimed they wanted to change the world. They do not want to “give and run” (Develtere and de Bruyn, 2009), they wanted to “make a lasting difference.” For example, one woman who volunteered for six months with one organization said:

That’s why I wanted to like do something long term because I feel like on short term things a lot of the gain is more like personal and like the kids or the people you’re working with don’t change as much as you change in that week [ … ], and like I’ve done like one day, I’ve done like my fair share of like one day events or like one week events [ … ] I was like very conscious to choose something where I felt like I would be able to make like a lasting difference.

The volunteers lived with host families for at least a few weeks. In contrast to the host families who approach the homestay as a survival strategy, the volunteers approach the homestay as an experience. The reactions ranged from “the worst experience” to “my favorite experience.” Three out of five of the volunteers I spoke with moved out of the homestay into apartments with other volunteers after a couple of weeks, the other two stayed. The volunteers who moved out of homestays quickly stated that they like Guatemalans; but they wanted freedom, to eat at restaurants, and a cheaper place to live.

The volunteer who said the homestay was her favorite part of her trip to Guatemala so far, stated that her family in the United States is small; and the host family is an extended family that all live under one roof. She enjoyed that they share meals with her, included her in family events, patiently spoke Spanish with her, and watched television with her. She did not expect to connect with her family.

Them being so welcoming too has been such a relief. Because I think that was my, my biggest fear going into the trip was like not being welcomed and not being able to connect with the people I was going to be with and not being able to, like being more in the way than being able to offer something.

In brief, the volunteers forge new identities of travelers and volunteers; they took action in projects, and shared moments with strangers in homestays. For the volunteers, the experience of learning across difference motivates them to choose to live with families, and also to experience nonprofit work.

Nonprofit workers

The final group of people I interviewed were paid nonprofit workers. Like the volunteers and families, they took those positions because they wanted a dignified life. For the workers, their motivations were to contribute and learn. For example, one foreign worker explained how he moved to Guatemala after he graduated from college because he had friends who recently moved there too. He explained his motivation to work: “I ended up looking into Antigua and finding an organization that was focused on economic development, where I could live locally and get to know kinda the country and hopefully contribute in a meaningful way.” Therefore, he chose the organization and country based on friends, a desire to learn and contribute. Another foreign worker echoed this: “I just feel good because you see how in some cases you change people’s lives.” Each worker knew they could earn more money in other jobs, the foreigners could return to the Global North and the Guatemalans could work in call centers in the city, yet they wanted to work in Antigua because they could contribute to social change.

The second motivation for people to work for NGOs was to learn. All of the NGO workers I spoke with stated that when they started working for the nonprofit in Guatemala they had no NGO experience. They gained experience while working. For example, one Guatemalan worker I spoke with was a recent high school graduate and proud to be learning. She said: “[After starting the job] it’s been very nice, until now it has been very nice. One, I am learning many things. Two, my mind keeps opening more and more and more.” She expressed a similar sentiment as the homestays, as the work was a way to learn for future jobs and a way to learn about new cultures. In another example, a foreign NGO director told me that he learned from the community in Guatemala. However, when he arrived he had no work experience: “When I first got here, I was smart and did well in school, knowledgeable about the world, but I hadn’t had much experience in actual work.” At first, he arrived to volunteer and several years later he became the director of that organization. Instead of learning management and community development in school, or an established nonprofit, or in a corporation, he learned it working with communities in Guatemala. Both of these examples of learning demonstrate that work could be an opening to social change because they valued learning from Guatemalans. Also, this could be an example of a closing because the workers from the Global North is the executive direct and represents a dominant political group who directs development. This is the contradictory nature of the development encounter.

One overlooked effect of untrained actors, like volunteers and nonprofit workers, working together is they momentarily avoid the professionalization that occurs in social movements or nonprofits (Alvarez, 1999; Andrews, 2014; Beck, 2014; Mawdsley et al., 2005). Katz analyzed the effects of professionalization in NGOs and found that professionalization “compromises more radical agendas and blunts the power of opposition” (2005: 627). Katz argues that becoming a subject of professionalization, can possibly lead to a place where the chickens guard the chicken coop, but in the process, it also enables the dominant political groups to define the resources. Then, as more people are trained to be professional NGO workers, they are shaped by the demands of those in power. The fact these volunteers and workers lack training and skills could be an advantage because it provides a moment to learn from non-dominant political groups. In sum, the interviews with the NGO workers revealed that they have similar motivations to work in development as the volunteers: to learn and contribute to change. In the following section, I will analyze how these everyday encounters in IDV are both an opening and closing to social change.