Accompaniment or Charity?
By Shirley Novak
How fitting that I received the "assignment" to write this article late one night in El Salvador. How fortunate that I was able to give thought to this topic in the midst of the very people I have been accompanying in one way or another since 1984.

“Accompaniment is mutual respect and walking alongside each other; giving and receiving; learning from and sharing with each other; and working toward social justice to change the unjust conditions that allow poverty and injustice to exist. ”
As I thought about it, I divided charity into two categories: passing over material goods to those in need and making monetary donations so the receivers might make their own purchases to provide for their own needs. These may be one-time acts or continue for an indefinite period of time.

With charity, one person or group-the giver-always walks in front of the other-the receiver. The very act of receiving a handout keeps one above and the other below. Quite often the receiver does not even come in contact with the giver; they are not equals and there is no partner relationship.

Shirley Novak, laying brick alongside community members to help build the kinder (CIDI-Center for Integral Child Development) in La Estancia, El Salvador, in 1996.
We often give something away and there is no further connection, as when we donate clothing we have outgrown or household items for which we no longer have a need. Although these things have value, it would not usually be categorized as a loss or hardship for us to part with them.

Accompaniment involves much, much more. It suggests a strong pueblo a pueblo (people to people) connection that may or may not include an exchange of material goods. Accompaniment is mutual respect and walking alongside each other. Giving and receiving. Teaching, learning from and sharing with each other. Working toward social justice to change the conditions that allow poverty and injustice to exist in the first place. Accompaniment empowers individuals, groups and communities. It means sharing at many levels and making certain that all are included in the decision-making process every step along the way.

I offer the example of Peace Brigades International (PBI) to show that accompaniment need not-indeed must not in this case-involve any monetary exchange at all. This international NGO offers unarmed bodyguards to accompany locals around the world who have received death threats as a result of their political, religious or social struggles. Over the years, PBI has saved many, many lives in El Salvador, Guatemala, Sri Lanka, Palestine and other areas of conflict. PBI operates on the principle that when internationals are present with locals, there is a level of protection from violence. Military and government officials know that PBI workers would spread the word of human rights violations quickly to the international community, and embarrass the local regime.

Another clear example of accompaniment is found in the way DGH has been walking with our Salvadoran, Guatemalan and Mexican project communities in a very specific way outside of each country's borders. Following the example of hundreds of other secular and religious NGOs, DGH wrote a policy statement in 1998 advocating for the close of the US Army's School of the Americas (SOA), and updated it in the year 2000 to reflect the institution's name change from SOA to WHISC (the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation).

The SOA/WHISC is a US military training facility located in Columbus, GA. It has been documented that tens of thousands of foreign soldiers from Latin American countries have received training in low-intensity warfare there over the last 50 years. Training manuals in torture techniques and repression of local populations used at the school have surfaced. Returning home, these soldiers have committed numerous human rights violations, including the assassination of Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero in 1980; the massacre at El Mozote in El Salvador, where 1,000 mostly women and children under the age of five years were brutally murdered in 1981; and the murder of six Jesuit priests at the University of Central America and their two housekeepers in 1989.

Accompaniment may begin as an act of charity that gradually, either quickly or over time, moves on to a new level. This is reflected in DGH's involvement in Santa Marta, El Salvador.

“We know that poverty, war, racism and all the other 'isms'' threaten poor and marginalized populations all around the world. But what accompaniment helps us to realize is that we are not immune to these 'isms' either. They also threaten us with death of body and spirit.”
We began our work there several years ago by responding to a financial crisis created by the serious illness of Brenda Hubbard, a physical therapist from the US who had been living in the community for many years and had founded a rehabilitation clinic there. Facing a six-month period of surgery and recuperation, Brenda would be unable to continue her work as a translator when delegations came to El Salvador, and therefore would be unable to keep her Centro de Rehabilitación open. In what could be termed an act of charity, DGH passed over a $1,000 donation to cover this short-term need. DGH received favorable reports on the use of the money and several board members traveled to Santa Marta to visit the facility during this difficult time.

Months after that single act of writing a check, DGH was moved to make a commitment to accompany the work of Brenda, the Centro and the people of Santa Marta with no end date in sight. This struggling community now welcomes DGH volunteers to work alongside them, both in the Centro and in the nearby community health facility.

Now let's look back in time to the two devastating earthquakes that shook El Salvador in January and February of 2000. In the name of DGH, three physicians, two physician assistants and a teacher, joined local Salvadorans in several medical brigades to attend to people's health needs, mostly in the Department of Usulután. Bringing their expertise, DGH money and backpacks loaded with donated medicines could certainly be labeled charity by many. But DGH involvement grew to the deeper level of accompaniment when the project was expanded to develop a training program for health promoters in the rural area of Usulután, which had been completely flattened by the earthquake and was a desperate part of El Salvador.

What accompaniment offers us is the opportunity to really get to know the people. Once we work along side them and join in their joys and disappointments, it is impossible to not become aware of the fact that people do not simply happen to be poor and in need. We come to understand that their poverty is largely a product of the way society is organized. We already know that poverty, war, racism and all the other 'isms' threaten poor and marginalized populations all around the world. But what accompaniment helps us to realize is that even in the richest and most comfortable of countries we are not immune to these 'isms' either. They also threaten us with death of body and spirit. They are the evil against which we must all organize.

When drought or heavy rainfalls cause crops to fail in Chiapas and La Estancia and Mbarara, Uganda, charity would send more seeds. But to accompany these communities means that we will not only send the necessary seeds if the community makes that request, we will also join thousands of others worldwide in protesting corporations-like Montsano-that produce genetically engineered seeds (seeds deliberately manufactured so that they will not reproduce next year's crop, forcing poor campesinos to go into debt to buy new seeds year after year-contrary to the successful, generations-old custom of reserving a few of the biggest ears of corn for seed for next year's planting). It also means buying from fair trade cooperatives that pay campesinos a fair and living wage for the products they produce.

DGH board members, Denise Zwahlen and Guillermo Hidalgo, rushed to El Salvador after the earthquakes to accompany the communities with which we work as they rebuilt.
There could be a great deal of sadness and anger in recognizing that to improve life for the poor and marginalized of the world is a struggle that must continue well past our own lifetimes. But, in spite of all the sadness, the violence, the evil and injustice in our own country, and the world in general, there is tremendous hope.

Hope is found in the very groups that we accompany, the marginalized who are organizing and struggling against these injustices: The Maya of Guatemala. The Zapatistas of Chiapas. The Lencas of El Salvador. Resistance groups in East Timor and Burma. The mothers and grandmothers of the Plazas of South and Central America, and Iraq. Native Americans, refugees and other immigrant groups right here in the US. Accompaniment is essential for all people everywhere who are demanding an end to all forms of government oppression, violence and injustice; for those who say "no" to oppression, who say "yes" to liberation and social justice; for those who stand by that declaration even if it costs them their lives. All need our accompaniment. All deserve our accompaniment. And we need their accompaniment as well.

To those who argue there is a place for simple charity in combating the steady stream of injustices, I would agree that material donations are often a necessary part of accompaniment work. But I submit that the end result of charity alone will be no change in the systems that create those injustices, and the need for intervention will continue. Charity is simply not enough. Simple charity is not capable of producing lasting results.

Accompaniment, that act of being with the people, will have long-term effects. The act of socio-political formation, interpreting reality from within and from the outside and responding to it, will empower and support those in need. This will help to create changes that have the power to endure. There really is no other way. DGH takes pride in its place in that process and invites others to join in.



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