Madeleine Andersen '06.5 took time off during her junior year to travel to Guatemala for the first time and realized something - though "it was such a gift to be at Brown, to be reading all the time," she felt like she "was always reading these beautiful things and never doing them."
In a few months, she'll be going back - this time for two-and-a-half years, to start an English-language instruction program at a school run by a women's cooperative outside of Guatemala City.
Andersen said her decision to work in the school stems from something her father always told her: "Leave your campsite cleaner than you found it."
That advice has taken her from Brown to working for a local labor union to her upcoming project in Guatemala. She said it has made her realize that "my work didn't have to have any classification other than 'will produce some kind of social good.' "
Andersen, who currently holds a position with Service Employees International Union Local 615 in Providence, said she fell into labor union work - "very luckily fell into it." Last fall, she helped the Student Labor Alliance and SEIU fight during contract negotiations for Dining Services workers during her last semester at Brown. She took a job at SEIU in January, which she said has "felt really right" as a "way to leave the campsite cleaner."
In Guatemala, Madeleine said she found another way to leave the campsite cleaner: Unidas Para Vivir Mejor, or United To Live Better, a group of women "affecting change in a beautiful, progressive, whole-hearted way," she said.
UPAVIM was founded by women in a poor neighborhood outside Guatemala City. The women formed a cooperative to sell handcrafts and now have a distributor in the United States and a "pretty good international market," Andersen said.
The women, many of whom formed the group after being widowed during the Guatemalan civil war, are "kind of subsidizing the community," Andersen said - they've set up a health clinic, a dental clinic and a Montessori school for children up to age 12, where Andersen worked when she took time off from Brown.
The women provide scholarships for students at the Montessori school to attend more expensive middle schools in Guatemala City once they graduate. But they noticed that the other middle school students in Guatemala City already had backgrounds in the English language, putting "our children, who already have enough of the world against them," even more behind, Andersen said.
UPAVIM had been looking for someone to start an English program for several years when Andersen told them that she'd want to work with them again in the future.
She visited Guatemala again the summer before her final semester at Brown to prepare for her upcoming project. "I spent three months exploring, trying to look at other elementary schools and what they were doing in terms of English programs," she said.
Andersen said she is excited to work at UPAVIM again, though she said she's also found an inspirational struggle in the American labor movement and could see herself continuing with labor rights work in the United States in the future.
But for now, Andersen is focused on her work in Guatemala and the chance to help a community she loves and to travel in Latin America. She said she's still "a little terrified" of the English language curriculum and has been asking everyone she knows about English as a Second Language tapes and elementary school projects, but she's excited for the work.
"The majority of these women have not gone past sixth grade and they can run an international business - we can get these kids to speak some English," she said.
