ABOUT FULBRIGHT

My Fulbright Life

Transcript For: Fulbrighter Fiona Laurie to Guatemala.

Fulbright Fiona Laurie, Current Fulbrighter to Guatemala, discusses her Fulbright experience.

My Fulbright Life - Fiona Laurie, Guatemala, 2008

Lee: Hello and welcome to My Fulbright Life. I’m your host, Lee Rivers, and joining me today is Fiona Laurie. She’s a recent Fulbrighter
in Guatemala. How are doing today, Fiona?

Fiona: Great.

Lee: Wonderful, thanks for joining us. So, tell us a little bit about where in Guatemala you were studying.

Fiona: Well, I was focusing in a couple of regions. The Ixel region which is the San Juan Cotzal, the town I worked with a lot. And the other region is in, around Lake Atitlan and the surrounding rural community.

Lee: That sounds great. OK, so, Fiona, what was the nature of your project. Can you speak a little bit about your initial interest in the Fulbright program and specifically working in Guatemala?

Fiona: My background is Art History and my mother is a textile artist, so I’d grown up appreciating women’s work, producing clothes for their family, spinning yarn, and weaving fabric. And, so, I went to Guatemala on a vacation in August of 2006 and while I was there I met some Maya weavers who spoke to me about their difficulties in marketing their products and selling them so that they can send their children to school. So I came home and applied for a Fulbright grant to work with them for a year and my project developed into creating a manual or guide that would be an educational set of materials for organizations to use so that they can teach the Maya women how to market their products and control the quality of their final good.

Lee: That’s incredible. And so, you created a manual to help them, is that correct?

Fiona: Yes. My original project was teaching them how to set up exhibitions. I worked in an art gallery for a year before and the main principle that the art gallery uses is that if you educate the clientele on what they’re looking at, they will be more likely to support the arts and to purchase the art. So I tried that with these women, talking to them about how they can educate foreign visitors who come to their cooperative, and teach them about the traditions around their weaving so that they can sell more of their products and raise money for their families.

Lee: So you started off teaching the community of weavers. Speak a little bit about how familiar you were with the Spanish language. Is there a different dialect that’s spoken in Guatemala? And how comfortable were you with the language?

Fiona: Well, that’s an interesting question. I didn’t know Spanish until the summer before I applied for the Fulbright grant, although I spoke French. So I learned Spanish; I was at an advanced level the year after the application and I came to Guatemala thinking that everyone speaks Spanish there. That’s actually one of the difficulties of my project that I faced, that there are over 20 Maya languages in the country and most of the women haven’t been educated in the Spanish language. They speak a little bit, but it was more just basic Spanish for them. So what I did to resolve that problem with my project, was to work with the Oxlajuj B'atz' Organization in Lake Atitlan which has field workers that are native Maya speakers. And we developed training sessions for the weavers that were given to the field workers. So I actually didn’t train the weavers myself, but had native speakers train them. And that’s why I ended up creating a manual, to pass on all that information that I knew to other organizations that have that structure.

Lee: That’s excellent, that’s excellent. And so, you talked about the native speakers that were kind of on the ground level there, working with you. Who else helped you get this project off the ground?

Fiona: Well, I thought that it was best to prepare for the Fulbright grant by arriving in the country with a list of contacts. So I spent the first couple of months just talking to people, and interviewing them, making sure that my project was solid, and also that it was information that the weavers actually wanted. I didn’t want to just do a project that I thought of, and not have it be useful for them. So, I had people from USAID who were working there, my advisor , from University de, which is a private university in Guatemala City—he’s worked a lot in development—as well as directors of fair trade organizations and directors of weaving associations. I tried to get the gamut of people associated with working with weavers in the field.

Lee: Very good. And so talk to me a little bit about what a typical day was like for you, how much time you spent with the community of weavers, and how much time was actually spent writing out this manual. Just try to give us an idea of what a daily walk in your shoes was like.

Fiona: Well, it depends. Depending on where I was in my project. At one point in my project, I would leave, wake up at 5:30 in the morning and leave on a chicken bus to go to a little community and be there by 8. And then I would meet the field workers who would be giving the training sessions for the weavers, try to observe how the weavers reacted to the information- if they were understanding it or not. And then come home and write up my observations and make corrections to my guide that I was writing at that point. Other times, I would spend the whole day writing my guide.

Lee: Oh, wow.

Fiona: I had to translate it. I had to write it in English and translate it. So it was a quite a lot of work at one point. I felt that weaving would be a viable way for the women to be making money while they could stay at home and take care of their kids. These Mayan women have historically been not allowed to go to school or the male children in the family would be more likely to go to school and be educated, so these weavers don’t have a lot of opportunities to earn money except for working in coffee plantations or doing some other kind of work. But I felt that if they understood a little bit more about how to finish their products, how to market their products, how to teach visitors that are coming to their cooperative, that that would be a way they could supplement their family income.

Lee: You mention that you were taking quite a few pictures as you were there. I’m actually looking at a few of your pictures right now and one that really jumps out at me, that I really like, is one of these young ladies named Teresa. And I know you know this picture, but what is she doing in this picture? And kind of speak to the audience about why you chose to take this shot.

Fiona: Well, I spent a lot of time working with a cooperative called the Tejidos Cotzal cooperative in San Juan Cotzal in the highlands of Guatemala. And my friend Charlie Schneider and I took photographs and did an exhibition at the John Natsoulas gallery in California in June and this picture was for the exhibition. What our goal was, was to teach the weavers how to create a line of products that was ready for an international market, and also to teach them what sorts of things interested foreigners about their lives.

Lee: Interesting, very interesting. And so if you were to take a highlight from your project from your time in Guatemala, maybe a snapshot, what would it be?

Fiona: What comes immediately to my mind is sitting around the kitchen fire at my friend Pedro’s house. I spent a lot of time in San Juan Cotzal with these weavers and they would invite me home to their houses for coffee and tamales. And just that whole- the smells of the wood, and the darkness of their houses, and just the quietness of sitting there and just listening to them speak their languages and taking in that feeling that this is a way of life that will not necessarily be around in 10 years. It’s felt like going to a different world when I think of growing up in California and for some fortuitous reason ending up sitting next to a fire eating homemade tamales and tortillas with my friends. It’s a feeling that everything that’s unnecessary has been taken away. And we only need fire to make our food, and ultimately a stone to grind the corn to make the tortillas that we eat. And I think a lot of us just in our lives here in the US- they’re so complicated! Not that their lives aren’t complicated, but it’s a different way. But they have a lot more contact with nature, with that tradition, and with traditional ways of thinking and living. One of my greatest moments down in Guatemala was to meet Professor Mohammed Yunis who won the Nobel Peace Prize and who also was a Fulbright Scholar. And he developed the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh that’s helped millions of women get out of poverty through microloans. And I was able to spend a couple of days with him and see him giving money back to the women borrowers, the Mayan women borrowers in Guatemala. It was definitely an exciting moment. If I could have chosen one person to meet it would definitely have been Professor Mohammed Yunis. He’s a wonderful man.

Lee: Just some of the skills that you learned while you were in Guatemala and how you can apply them today.

Fiona: OK. I thought that the Fulbright grant gave me a lot of independence and so I was able to change my project as I saw the needs change as I learned more about the weavers. So at first I thought that they would benefit from learning how to exhibit their products to foreigners and create exhibitions so that people could learn about the different techniques and styles of weaving in the weaver’s particular village. But then I realized that they needed basic training in marketing and finishing their products so that they could be sold. So, a skill that I’ve taken from my Fulbright experience has been to come with a plan and a plan B and an open mind so that I can change my project however I saw to make it the most useful use of my time and also the Fulbright grant and energy working towards helping these weavers. I found that I have stronger research skills, better at setting a goal and achieving that, and finding the people that could answer my questions. Or just the general independence of research skills.

Lee: You know one of the goals of the My Fulbright Life podcast is to offer insight to individuals who are currently in the process of applying for the Fulbright grants. In addition we really want to reach out to those individuals who are thinking about applying for the Fulbright grant. Fiona, would you offer some suggestions to our listeners who are considering applying for the Fulbright?

Fiona: My biggest piece of advice for people who are writing their applications is to pack in as much information as possible into the proposal. My brother gave me that advice and I took it and I’m so glad that I had that because I think it’s important to let the commission know that whatever happens, you’re the type of person who will create a solution and sort out problems by yourself. The Fulbright is so independent, as I said before, that is a challenge but also such a blessing because one is able to not be tied to their original project idea. So, I just took my proposal and made every word important, and put in as much information and research as possible into every part of the proposal. And at the end I felt like it was as packed as I could possible get it. And within that research period of devising my project, I learned a lot and talked to a lot of different people and had a lot of insight from researchers in the field before I even submitted my application. So I could feel that once the proposal arrived in Guatemala, they wouldn’t say well that project’s been done already and it hasn’t worked.

My other piece of advice would be to make sure that you talk to as many people as possible who have worked in that country to make sure that the project is coherent.

Lee: What were your plans? What were your future plans and now that you’ve had this experience as a Fulbright Scholar what are you planning on doing now in the future?

Fiona: Well, before I was planning on working… I had an internship at Christie’s Auction House in London the fall before going to Guatemala. And then when I went to Guatemala I realized that my skills would be much better used in helping indigenous weavers instead of working in the art business. So I applied for the Fulbright and spent the last year in Guatemala working with them and now I am applying to do international development. I’m applying to programs, graduate schools in Public Affairs and trying to find out if there could be an alternative to NGOs in development, the development field. One of my major interests is creating a social business sector instead of a non-profit sector, or a hybrid so that people can have businesses that will make money and also solve a social problem.

Lee: Fiona, I just want to thank you so much, once again, for your time and just sharing your experiences with us. We really appreciated hearing from you.

Fiona: Well, thank you very much for interviewing me.

Lee: Well, thank you once again Fiona, and that concludes this episode of My Fulbright Life.