Celebrating Languages Across The World With The Peace Corps

Tomorrow marks the last day of Peace Corps Language Week 2024. The theme this year highlights the Peace Corps’ commitment to volunteer competencies like diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility; International Language Week emphasizes the importance of language in fostering intercultural understanding. News Five’s Britney Gordon reports.

 

Britney Gordon, Reporting

The Peace Corps is a U.S.-based volunteer organization that partners with countries all over the world to assist and support developmental goals at the grassroots level. The Peace Corps in Belize is one of the longest-running programs in the region, operating since 1962 with over two thousand Americans who lived and worked in Belize as volunteers supporting projects in the health sector, agriculture, women’s empowerment, and education. Peace Corps Country Director in Belize, Nadine Rogers, told us more about their work in Belize.

 

Nadine Rogers, Country Director, Peace Corps Belize

“Since 1917, we’ve been supporting the Ministry of Education. They have a national literacy strategy and the goal of that is to get all standard one students reading at grade level. And so, we’ve got response volunteers that come and work with teachers to prepare them to be able to implement an illiteracy intervention with those Children that need the help. And then when we first came back after the COVID-19 pandemic we were working with a youth health and wellbeing project which this is its last year, but we’ve had volunteers working in that area they’re partnering with schools. It initially focused on the old health and family life curriculum, but now expanding into sports, exercise, nutrition, some of those other, broader, sort of health and wellbeing.”

 

According to Rogers, several initiatives that the Peace Corps participates in emphasize youth empowerment and well-being.

 

Nadine Rogers

“This past year we launched our new project in partnership with the Ministry of Youth, Sports and Transport and it’s called Youth Empowered by Sports. So, we’re partnering with the National Sports Council coordinators and sports coaches at a number of primary schools and they’re working to ensure that these young people can get the benefit of organized sports, the discipline, the skill the strengthening and the opportunity to engage and talk about life skills and other things through a sporting mechanism.”

 

Between March eighteenth to the twenty-third, Peace Corps partook in its yearly celebration of International Language Week. It was celebrated under the theme “Language & ICDEIA: Spotlighting Intercultural Communication”. This refers to the commitment to volunteer competencies such as diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility.

 

Nadine Rogers

“I think it was Nelson Mandela who famously said, if you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head but if you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart, right? And so at the Peace Corps, we recognize that language helps us to nurture, really meaningful connections and bridge differences and just live out the things we believe as an organization., live out our values. And so during Language Week, we celebrate the importance of language to our model of intercultural exchange. We have a development model that is not us pushing certain things. It’s an exchange and a learning and you can’t have that exchange if people are talking in different languages.”

 

Rogers explained that during language week, volunteers participate in several activities around the world such as virtual language lessons, live language cafes, and educational language booths. She said that here in Belize, the team in Belize is training new volunteers in Creole and Spanish.

 

Britney Gordon

“How do you feel that immersing yourself in a language helps assist the Peace Corps with doing the work that they want to do?”

 

Nadine Rogers

“Great question, Britney. Language learning takes great cultural humility, right? It requires you to give up the things you think you know, even the words you think you know and learn someone else’s words. But that approach is foundational to Peace Corps, way of doing development. It’s an invaluable skill that volunteers carry around with them. Long after they’ve left, they can still communicate in these languages. And language, it just goes beyond culture. It goes beyond what is on paper and what people say to each other in conversations, right? But it soaks up elements of culture and history. And you find that words, have meanings that carry through time and carry through place.”

 

Rogers further explained that immersing the volunteers in a language and culture also assists them in connecting with their host families. She said that as the volunteers move their work into more rural areas, the opportunity to connect with other languages that are less common and possibly endangered presents itself.

 

Nadine Rogers

“And as I mentioned, we’re taught, we’re teaching Spanish and Creole, but as we move into more rural communities, you may find that we would add other languages as well as those communities.” 

 

Britney Gordon

“So it could possibly expand to Garifuna or some Mayan languages as well.”

 

Nadine Rogers

“For sure and we’ve done that in the past. And so, it really just depends on where project work takes us, what the need is but yes, it could include those.”

 

Britney Gordon for News Five.