Dania wrote to us this past week to tell us that Javier was gone. In a few days, I will try to find his inspirational Quotes page that he gave to each of us, and I will post the Welcome Letter that I just found in my Gmail account that he sent us a while ago.
Supposedly when B-47 came, he had a bone to pick and so he tried to shake things up before he left. He held us to a high standard: many people had to retake his Handbook quiz before he let them swear in, though most people did badly because some of the multiple choice questions were poorly done. So while we didn't get to know him in the gentle way that other people knew him--while he was loved in the Dominican Republic, supposedly he told our John that the Washington lawyers would not let him swear in if he didn't rat out another volunteer for chewing coca--I can tell by reading his obituary that he is a man that cared a great deal and spent his life in service to others.
I have two specific personal memories of Javier. The first came when I was AWOL from my language class because my debit card had been eaten by a Banco Bisa ATM machine. After an hour of walking lost in Cochabamba, I came upon the PC office, and stood outside about to go in. I knocked on the door, and ... voila , the man that opened it was Javier, wearing his signature rims that seemed almost to be a frame for sunglasses with clear lens put in.
It was two days before my birthday, and after I explained to Javier what I had come there for (I was nervous because I'm not sure if I called the office ahead of time, though my language professor knew I was on my way), then he called me up to the top floor presentation room where there was a row of saltenas and pastries lined up on the desk, with two at the end and candles sticking inside them. It was Doreen's birthday, and another man! Not only that, but the day after was my APCD's birthday, and the day after mine it was the birthday of one of the secretaries. So it was a giant celebration with a half dozen Pisces folks, both American and Bolivian. And the candles were stuck in each pastry in order for them to have a wish when they blew it out. I had only been there 6 weeks, and this was the first time I had anything like that. I didn't get to eat the saltena because of the meat, but I tried the cheese kind and put plenty of Aji on it. And so from then on I happily associated Javier with that little bit of sneaky business, of being away from Spanish class and invited into a surprise celebration that also included me for my birthday!
The other thing that happened then which I remember about Javier was his attempt to scare some of us from swearing in. On a piece of paper, outside at the Huayani training center, we all sat in a circle around him and we were supposed to write in one column who we thought was most committed and on the other side who was the least committed. This, then, was a big deal. Would that mean someone would be booted because of our writing their name on the wrong side? I believe the trouble was already on the horizon about the member of the earlier group being sent home over coca, and he clearly wanted us to rat people out.
We instantly revolted, and for thirty minutes people fought him over what they thought was extremely unfair. Some were more philosophical--"Who are we to know what is in the heart of another? What is commitment mean, anyway?. Others were more reactionary: This is bullshit!
I thought deeper, into why he wanted us to do this. For one thing, it is a very serious thing to join PC for 2 years, and he had a right to turn up the heat on us. We were supposed to deliver speeches about our level of commitment, some of which were hilarious and others were deeply moving. I said in my speech that commitment to the people is only something that grows with time, so I said I was far less committed after meeting my town members for only 1 week than the much higher level of commitment I would feel after living among those same folks for a year or two. It's the same reason why we are less committed to somebody we see across the bus from us, than to our family.
Writing now, I feel that he wanted to scare us some, to place before ourselves the fear that this thing might not be given to us, and so we'd value it more once we got it. This is how I explained Javier and this situation to my family in an email:
I had an interesting moment earlier this week (most days of most weeks are interesting, duh). But this was especially good.
We had a day where the country director Javier came by to visit us. He´s from Texas and he did 3 years of work in the Dominican republic before he came here and shook things up, to make the Bolivia post something more than just a drinking hole like it had been called in the past. So, he´s doing some pretty radical things, and one of those he presented to us on Wednesday at the training center.
In the past, in the 70s, he was a volunteer in Peru. One time since then, he met the Peruvian president, who was a guest lecturer at his university. He asked the man what the Peace Corps meant to him.. ¨It was a bunch of people that wanted to drink and that disappeared in the woods and were never seen again.¨ Javier got really sick after 14 months, he lost 35 pounds and he returned ´early termination´.
The point of what he did on Wednesday was to pass out blue cards while he spoke about commitment. He consistently tells us trainees that ´this is not right for everyone, and if you don´t think it is the best thing for you to do, then go home.¨ So, he has a reputation for bullying people into taking the airplane ride home. ( A funny thing, when they asked us to rank our 4 favorite sites to work in, a friend of mine Peter said that his were these : 1) Tarija, 2) Tarija, 3) Tarija and 4) American Airlines.... luckily, he got what he wanted.)
On the blue paper that he gave us were four categories: Most Committed, Least Committed, Most Outstanding, Least Outstanding.
What Javier wanted was for us to write on there the names of our fellow trainees, and where they fell in those categories. ¨You don´t have to do this, but if we never know who is lagging behind, then either we will help those people or remove them from the situation.¨
Just before he had quoted Warren Buffet, saying that ¨It takes 20 years to build trust, but only five minutes to lose it.¨ Looking at the stunned faces of the other volunteers, I could tell that he had lost all of their trust!
And, so, shocked and confused, when the Q&A came, there were about 10 people that began to explain how uncool this was, that we shouldn´t rat on our friends and that ´we can´t really know how committed a person is because it is so internal that we´ll never know.´
SO, everyone revolted against this idea and nobody wanted to turn in their paper (though some people asked if they could email the names in, yikes). BUT, this didn´t seem exactly to me as shallow and dense as it appeared to all of the other people. So I had to ask him about this.
Instead of chastising him for inter-group espionage, as this seemed to the others, I said: ¨I hate to second-guess you, but rather than collecting a list of names, it seems that instead you are trying to provoke us into thinking more deeply about what commitment means.¨ What I felt was that this exercise had a secret intent, something meant to show us through the little piece of paper, that there were real consequences for the way we acted. Those can be good, as the most outstanding column indicates, and they can be on the fast track home, like the least outstanding.
Javier heard what I said, and he blinked and told me: You´ve read me perfectly.
This made me very happy! I did something good in front of the most important person here. It made me feel good, but it also made the other people think that they had fallen into his trap. Thinking about it now, in the way that he made us confront each other, he was also able to bolster our commitment to each other. We don´t want anyone to go home because we wrote their name on a piece of paper. And we really can´t understand how they feel about this process, even if they are unhappy with the site they get or this and that. But another thing I realized about commitment isn´t something that you wake up with one day. Instead I feel that commitment is something that grows with time. I´ll be more committed to Bolivia the last day I am here than the first weeks or months that I´m here. Because it becomes part of you and grows on you. I could easily come home now, but if I get to know a community and grow crops with them and work and play and teach and learn from them, then I´ll wake up each day after those things and I´ll be more dedicated and everything.
Well! The cows came home. The family is driving them through to the back yard garden. It´s also very dark now, I had better get on the public bus and go towards the city to the bus terminal for my ride to Sucre.
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Javier Garza, from the Austin American-Statesman newspaper
When Javier Garza took over the Meals on Wheels and More Austin chapter in the late 1980s, volunteers for the fledging organization were making lunches for needy residents mostly in church kitchens all over Austin. When he left 16 years later, he had overseen construction of the agency's first central kitchen, and the number of clients had grown from a few hundred to about 1,700. On Monday, Garza, 60, was among 11 people killed in a bus crash in Saltillo, Coahuila, after a drunken driver lost control of his tractor-trailer and slammed into the bus carrying American and Canadian tourists, police said. Garza's sister was critically injured in the crash. Meals on Wheels and More officials notified organization supporters in an e-mail Thursday. "Javier Garza was a man dedicated to making the world a better place and he had a positive effect on it and on everyone he met," President and CEO Dan Pruett said. According to reports, the swerving semitrailer demolished the driver's side of the tour bus. Seven Americans, three Canadians and the bus' Mexican driver were killed. They were on the first day of a four-day excursion to Zacatecas and Real de Catorce. Mexican authorities say the truck driver, Julio Cesar Rodriguez Garcia of Saltillo, was intoxicated and will face manslaughter charges. Garza left Meals on Wheels and More in 2003 to join the Peace Corps as director of operations in the Dominican Republic. He had served in the Peace Corps for two years in Peru after college. Garza had been living in South Texas, caring for his elderly parents. He has a daughter, a recent graduate of the University of California, Berkeley. Pruett said Garza particularly valued the many clients who had contributed to the community throughout their lives. "So many of them served in the military, worked all their lives and raised their children and raised families," Pruett said. "Javier knew as a society and as a community, we needed to take care of these people, and he knew we needed to do it in an efficient way." Sam Houston, a Meals on Wheels and More board member, said Garza thought it was especially important that clients access other social services through Meals on Wheels and More. He put a program in place to help them do so. Houston said Garza lobbied the community for donations to help build the agency's current headquarters on East Fifth Street near Pleasant Valley Road. "It's a tragic loss," Houston said. "Javier was one of the most outstanding people I've ever met in my life. Just an incredible leader, a fine human being. He will definitely be missed."
There's more about the wreck at this link from My San Antonio.com... and a picture of the bus. It seems they were in Mexico using a tour company that has 1 fatal wreck per year average, and a tractor trailer hit them.
http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/At_least_10_dead_in_Mexico_bus_crash.html
Here's a great, sad Italian song in case you never heard any pop music from there. Serena sent it to me. It talks about 'mi inferno privato', my private hell. It's good!
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