My conflicted relationship with the first lady

This weekend two students in my journalism class and I participated in a workshop sponsored by the Office of the First Lady, or the Despacho de la Primera Dama. Held in Santo Domingo, it brought two journalism professors from the University of Miami to give two-day crash courses on community journalism, with the aim of creating local sources of news and expression in rural communities where there are Community Technology Centers (Centros Tecnologicos Comunitarios).

We slept in a nice hotel with hot water and air conditioning, right next to the Colonial Zone. We ate lasagna for lunch. We used the beautiful facility of the new children’s library. We were taught by two elite professors. All of it was paid for by the DPD. And still I felt bitter.

Since we were told that the budget of the first lady’s office is bigger than the entire Secretary of Education’s, I’ve had mixed feelings toward the many initiatives she has started, the biggest and most visible of which are the CTCs, one of which is in El Limon and I am assigned to. It’s been clear that the office is overflowing with money since the beginning, too, as the DPD always has its meetings in fancy hotels and loves to give out shwag, like flash drives with its logo, travel toiletry kits, and giant umbrellas. They are always randomly bringing supplies to the CTC, like last week, when they suddenly showed up with about 100 books for a small library. Before that, it was a shipment of giant posters promoting the DPD’s programs, and a giant, presidential-looking portrait of her highness, Dr. Margarita Cedeño de Fernandez. Here it is in case you´re curious.

There are many, many complaints among us volunteers assigned to CTCs about the program. They pay their employees, who they refer to as volunteers with stipends to avoid labor issues, a ridiculously small amount of money. Their management is terrible – for example, they will often notify the centers of obligatory meetings in the capital on extremely short notice, of sometimes just 12 hours, and do not properly implement a lot of their initiatives (trying to be hip to technological trends, the DPD’s web page now prominently features Facebook and Twitter, both of which were blocked at my lab last year as part of an old policy and should have been allowed months ago). They´re behind on catching up with connectivity advances in the communities, too – we still rely on terrible, extremely expensive satellite internet when broadband via cell phone signal has been available in El Limon for almost two years. The cardinal sin, though, in my opinion, is that they have no oversight of the education that is being given through the CTCs, their primary function, through the computer classes given. There is no curriculum, no standardized test, and no review of teachers´ performance, leading to abysmal learning results in my center, at least, and I have to imagine many others. So you have a hugely expensive project that is supposed to be closing the digital divide, and instead you have a facility that provides access to computer games, wannabe DJ-ing and chatting.

But maybe what drives me most crazy is that the DPD seems to have no interest in fixing any of these problems. Like much of the country, the DPD seems more interested in saving face than facing the reality of their project in hopes of improving it. One sinister reason for this, as some cynical volunteers have noted, is that many think the first lady is positioning herself for a presidential run. I wouldn´t doubt it, considering how much self-promotion she does.

The conference this weekend was a reflection of much of this. The professors were professional, knowledgeable, and very well-intentioned, but seemed out of touch with their audience. One kept using phrases in English that were unintelligible to my students, at least, and used examples from the United States that were unknown to the audience and even more, irrelevant to them. Overall, I think the workshop is a worthwhile effort and the students, if they weren´t just admiring photos of themselves on Facebook, learned a lot. But I got the sense that, like the DPD, the Communicators for Development program is more interested in feeling good about its accomplishments than understanding the real issues of doing community journalism and trying to improve upon the programming to better prepare the students. For example, a lot of the emphasis in the workshop was on web journalism, like blogging and uploading video and photos, when hazarding a rough guess I would say 1 out of 20 people in El Limon knows how to use the internet, and of that number, most would have trouble doing something as simple as checking their e-mail. For me, a better medium to use for community journalism is the radio stations that are part of each CTC.

But, at the end of the day, of course I would rather these programs exist than not exist. Contrasted with the Secretary of Education, I often think to myself that at least they have a vision. The CTCs, while offering generally poor computer instruction, at least provide the resources for interested youth to connect to the internet and learn whatever they are self-motivated enough to study. The manager of my center, my dear friend Lorenzo, is an example of someone who has become worldly, tech savvy and well-educated through the CTC. But being an American in love with efficiency, I can´t help thinking of all the ways their program could be closer to what it should be. The only problem is that no one ever asks for feedback.