La Vida Idealist

Every month we’ll be posting an entry from a guest contributor who has some advice, resources, information and/or inspiration they want to share. This month’s guest contributor is Tom Hemingway. Tom Hemingway has explored the outer limits of Latin America from the U.S. to Argentina through many years of travel, study and work, including seven years on ethno-linguistic projects in Guatemala. He has managed health projects among migrant farm workers in Michigan, served on projects with a Spanish language church in Texas, and now volunteers for an NGO that sends teens to service projects across Latin America. Tom enjoys chance encounters, reading Ivan Illich and contemplating how big—and how small—the world really is.

One of the biggest challenges in our lives was to settle in a mountain village of Tacaná in western Guatemala with my wife—and eventually two children—to learn a Mayan language and assess the viability of mother tongue education. I had already learned Spanish, had a degree in Latin American Studies, and did graduate work in sociolinguistics. Yet, to actually live in rural Latin America was far beyond just knowing about rural Latin America.

I soon learned that I was not prepared to deal with blind spots in my knowledge or the challenges to my intellectual security. I knew poverty statistics, but by befriending a lame beggar I learned something of his moral and emotional struggles. I knew literacy statistics, but had not anticipated how effectively entire communities could function without the printed word. The village became too complex to be a just a grayscale textbook illustration.

We all have blind spots and biases. As long as we’re aware of our biases, we can try to keep them in check. This is much more challenging, however, when as volunteers we’re adapting to a new culture: we want people to see that we have something special to offer, we want to dive in and do something, often before taking the time to really see the new world around us. After all, volunteering is about action, and if we waited until we knew everything, not much would ever get done.

Wikipedia has a fascinating list of cognitive biases, with more than a hundred ways that we can misinterpret our experience. I’ve committed many of these biases, but I’m learning now how to catch myself in the act and adjust my direction. During one of your reflective moments, go through the list and see if you find yourself among all those blind spots. Encourage other readers here by sharing with us how you overcame them.

I’ll go first:

According to the Wikipedia list, I had a deformation professionelle, the “tendency to look at things according to the conventions of one’s own profession, forgetting any broader point of view.” I needed to get outside my own professional discipline and admit that I couldn’t use my old paradigms to explain the holistic problems of poverty and alienation. To understand why the Takaneko language was vanishing, I had to look into economics, political history, and even physical geography. Even more, I had to know Takanekos themselves, as unique, complete and complicated individuals.

How about you? How have you overcome a blind spot?

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