From Skeptic to Convert, from (Short-Term) Service to (Long-Term) Witness: Toward Pedagogies of Witnessing on International Service Trips

Abstract

In January 2003, I traveled as a faculty coleader with the director of community partnerships at Sarah Lawrence College, Irene King, and 13 students on what would be the first of many trips to Nicaragua. Slipping out of New York City in a predawn ice storm, leapfrogging through Miami, we landed a few hours and two worlds later into the Hollywood-cliché decrepitude of a Latin American airport, passing broken-down Soviet planes and helicopters as we taxied to the terminal. Our in-country contact ushered us quickly through the airport and into the heat of Managua and waiting taxis that hurried us away. The caravanning cars quickly crossed town, cutting a path through the heat rushing over us from open windows, the acrid fog of burning garbage, a chaotic melee of street vendors and window washers that flooded our cars at each stop, the bleating of horns, and clouds of black diesel exhaust. We apprehensively absorbed a cityscape still bearing scars of a decades-old earthquake and revolution. This, it seemed, would be the adventure to write home about that many of us were looking for, the travel narrative of exploration and exotic difference that we do-gooders from the North expect when we volunteer as students, mission workers, or aid workers.

This essay has been an iron in a smoldering fire for too long. It was first presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology in 2003 as part of an early attempt by ethnomusicologists to grapple with issues of running classes “in the field.” Next, at UCLA in the spring of 2004 it was part of the second specific conference to take up issues of ethics, impact, advocacy, and responsibility in my discipline. Finally, from a very different field (dissertation fieldwork on classical music in Vienna, Austria), I flew in 2004 to the Musicological Society of Australia’s annual meeting to speak at the first national conference that directly took up issues of disciplinary self-critique through the explicit lens of social justice: “Music and Social Justice.” I benefited greatly from conversations with colleagues on each occasion and thank all the organizers as well as Elizabeth MacKinley, Deborah Wong, Jason Stanyek, and Michael Quintero. I wish to thank the students who inspired me during those years I was lucky to land a gig at Sarah Lawrence while awaiting a dissertation fieldwork grant and, of course, Irene King, who first drew a Europhile to Central America. I am grateful to Katey Borland and the participants of the Good Works in Central America conference at Ohio State in May 2012 for allowing a disciplinarily and academically adrift carpenter to sit in on their extraordinary conversations. Finally, I thank the coconspirators, organizers, teachers, musicians, activists, and hosts in Nicaragua, ProNica’s then director Lillian Hall, the communities of Rio Arriba and Achuapa, especially Juan Bravo and Brigido Soza, Philip Montalban, and, finally, Salvador Cardenal, an extraordinary musician, painter, and human being to whose memory I dedicate this essay.