What are we doing here?

We are visiting a Peace Corps couple in this little town of Matehuala. This is our site visit, where we are supposed to get a chance to see what actual volunteers are making of their assignment.

This couple is assigned to a government office here, but have found it difficult to make their jobs work. It comes back to the question of our mission here - are we working to preserve land as part of the park system, or are we here to do community development. Of course it's not either/or but I feel as if Peace Corps has encouraged volunteers to do projects that are more like the general community development programs in most countries. This couple has found that their boss is the only parks official looking out for a very large area. She saw them as clerical help and tried to get them to do her job, including lots of paperwork and menial tasks. They had to set boundaries which they seem to have done pretty successfully.

Now they are working on a project to bring desalination distillers to a small town. They have applied for a grant for the equipment which will allow each family who participates to have a few gallons of clean water a day. This will be huge for them. It's a really good project. Their boss sees it as indulging them, which is interesting.

This couple also are both enrolled in one of the masters' programs in the US and need to come up with theses while they are here. She's been doing baseline documentation on the vegetative communities in the park, which will certainly be a valuable addition to the knowledge base for park management even if her boss thinks that's also not all that helpful.

This has been a good lesson to make sure our expectations of what we will accomplish are reasonable. However, I still have questions about whether we are here to do community development or to help preserve critical habitats.

In some ways the best option to preserve these critical habitats for posterity would be to relocate the villages somewhere where they would have more options for self-sufficiency. This area is pretty remote and with the water table falling it's hard to see that there are viable options for people to continue living in the parks. However, the government has nowhere near the resources that would be needed to relocated them successfully. 

So I still ask, what is our goal here? Maybe it is goals two and three of Peace Corps - increasing understanding of the US and increasing our understanding of another country. I certainly already feel that I have learned so much about Mexico. I want to keep thinking about goals as I continue along in this adventure.