High Expectations

I came into my experience with high expectations. Very high expectations. Coming to Chile, I knew what I wanted to do. Although not exactly the nation which comes to the top of one’s list when they think of nations battling the HIV/AIDS epidemic, I knew that an indigenous population in Chile—the Mapuche—had been named a population vulnerable to the epidemic by the Chilean government and UNAIDS. As part of my SEE! the World service experience, I hoped to work with an organization that dealt with HIV/AIDS and hopefully with HIV within the Mapuche population.

Instead, I found myself, as part of my program, working in a school for mentally and developmentally disabled children. It was a very hands-on experience and for three hours each week, I spent time developing relationships with the kids, helping them out with crafts, and quite often, playing with the students. Because their school is meant only for handicapped children, my time there was perhaps the only opportunity the students had to play with a “normal” kid outside of their family. We ran around playing “pinta” (Tag), I read fairy tales to the students, and the students threw me into “la carcel” (Jail) at least once a visit. Each week, I left the school feeling a little more content and much less stressed than when I had entered.

And yet this experience wasn’t what I had hoped. When I joined SEE! the World, I wanted to find an organization with which I could work and gather the tools to continue my work or create some sort of parallel operation after I had returned to Duke. To do this, I had hopes for some sort of position with an NGO—one with some official sounding name that implied an actual function or the goal of the organization… something like an “Initiative” or “Fund.” Though I thoroughly enjoyed working with my students, I wanted something more applicable to my interests and so I set upon finding the perfect group for this. Eventually, I found the “La Corporación de Apoyo y Educación en SIDA,” (CAES) or in English, the Organization of Support and Education in AIDS. The name sounded official enough to me. Its aims seemed in line with my goals for SEE! the World and perhaps future work. My stay with the organization would be short—just a few hours a day over several days—but I hoped that my time with CAES would allow me to get a view of the work being done to create and support AIDS prevention strategies in and around the city of Temuco in Southern Chile. And most helpfully to me, this service could serve as a companion to an independent project on HIV/AIDS prevention for the Mapuche on which I would work in Temuco. Armed with my do-gooder attitude and eagerness to see CAES at work, I was ready to witness and help out with the organization.

At the CAES office, however, things didn’t quite pan out as hoped. My first day at the office, I sat around with the two directors and two other volunteers. Little work was accomplished. The most we did was sort a few pamphlets into a folder in a storage room—a quick five-minute chore. The rest of my hours there converted into social hour as I listened to the directors discuss the lack of coordination between individual HIV/AIDS groups and the government, as well as the lack of governmental aid to fund their projects. I thought perhaps this inactivity was just a first day fluke, but in the following days, nothing changed. One day, I was able to witness a seminar led by students of a local school, an activity which was part of a project led by a university volunteer at the organization, but this hour-long activity was the extent of my viewing of CAES’s service to the community. The rest of the time, my hosts chatted, smoked, or checked email, telling me that “there just aren’t any ongoing projects.” My high expectations were sadly left unmet.

So now, as I return to Duke after study abroad, I’m left wondering: Where do I go from here? With an enjoyable but unrelated service activity that I did not choose and another that I did choose, but which was a large flop, what do I make of my experiences?

As I reflect on this predicament, I know that there’s not much else to do but to take these experiences for what they were and, as says the cliché, “learn from them.” Although I might not want to devote my life to working with handicapped children, I can use my limited insight gained from the school to support programs that bridge gaps that I witnessed while there—such as the lack of interaction between these children and their “normal” peers. And in terms of CAES, I can take a lesson in the running of an NGO—that opportunities to do good work don’t just fall into one’s lap, but that they have to be found. In an issue as crucial as HIV/AIDS prevention, hard work is needed, creativity required, and initiative a must. These lessons will serve me as I go forth from Chile and attempt to use the knowledge acquired from my independent project on HIV/AIDS for a tangible good. Now, my high expectations for finding insightful, enjoyable, and effective organizations for my SEE! the World experience have converted to high expectations for my own actions—that I take my experiences and run with them, using what I have seen and heard to create my own initiatives and develop my own effectiveness and leadership abilities.

-Evan Stewart, December 2006