"ONE" Guam my Dagan

The Minagahet blog posted an entry regarding poor attendance at the legislature’s last decolonization forum (the one where attorney Therese Terlaje presented). He’s right. The amount of people in the audience was disappointing. The content within the forum was impressive, but many people missed it. Luckily, copies of the presentations have begun to make their way around the internet and transcripts are being circulated for wider readership. The sharing of the forum’s content within other contexts has allowed people who did not attend to access the information. Thank God for alternate media and the internet.

I guess you can’t expect much when you tell people a few days before the event and hold it in the middle of the day during a work week. The majority of this island is trying to put food on the table by working jobs that do not allow for escapes to hotels or the legislature for educational forums. I’m sure that this is the case with most communities. You would think that an island full of people who so effectively pull together huge gatherings would know how to put on a simple event and execute it successfully.

I think that if they applied the same culturally informed party planning formula they used when coordinating fiestas and huge (pointless) political fundraisers, they might be more successful in filling up a room. One of the things that bothers me about the whole “attendance” discussion is the way in which the people who host poorly attended events blame the empty room on the community’s “apathy” or “lack of interest.” I used to work as an event planner for a large, successful company. I knew that if my event was poorly attended, it was usually my fault. I knew that the event’s advertisement, content, or the date I selected wasn’t ideal. I didn’t frame my event as well as I should have. I didn’t circulate word through the right channels to bring in the right people. Whenever one of my events didn’t go as planned, I would slowly shuffle into my boss’ office, ready to explain what I could have done better (and what I promise to do better) the next time around.

Miget’s blog made me think of some of the comments that Celeste Warner, a Matrix Representative, made during a CSS “work shop” hosted by the One Guam campaign. Before I share Celeste’s comments, you should know that the “Work Shop” was facilitated and advertised by Matrix, a group contracted by the Government of Guam and the Department of Defense. Matrix is getting a whole lot of money to bear the bad news to the people of Guam and facilitate the formality of gathering “help and feedback” in order to better inform DoD Plans. I found out about the “Work Shop” via my twitter feed two days before the event. (I put quotations around the word “work shop” because anyone who knows what a work shop is would have immediately recognized that this event was not a work shop.) When I clicked on the PDN tweet regarding the event, I was immediately confused. The PDN published that it would take place in one area of the University, while the One Guam web-site listed a different lecture hall. At the time, it didn’t bother me much.

I simply copied the information from both online announcements and sent it to all my contacts. I also posted the information on We Are Guahan’s facebook wall. Shortly after my posts, a few of my contacts responded with questions. They hadn’t heard about the work shop and wanted to go. They promised to try their best, but weren’t sure they would be able to swing it. It was just too last minute. I thought it was strange that these people hadn’t heard about the event, particularly because they are individuals who follow build-up discussions closely. If anything, I thought they would be the ones telling me.

The next day, I rushed from work and went to the University of Guam. I thought I was late. When I entered the huge lecture hall, I was surprised to see about four people in the huge room. I said “hello” to a friend in the front row and took a seat with a girlfriend. As the Matrix speakers began, a few more people trickled in the room. I laughed when my friend, Kisha, came running into the presentation. She was obviously flustered. I didn’t think she would be able to make it. She explained that she left work but had to return immediately after. The CSS Workshop was the same, vague and insulting pile of mumbo jumbo that is usually presented at these build-up related “community forums” paid for by the Government of Guam and the Department of Defense. It was the same dog and pony show. I didn’t learn anything except that they still think the people of Guam are dumb.

They presented 15 ways in which the island of Guam was going to be impacted. A string of paid statesiders stood in front of a text-filled power point, calmly articulating that our water, air, wild life, culture, health, safety, and infrastructure were in jeopardy; and we need to figure out how to basically make the island “compatible” with military plans. The people speaking made all sorts of ignorant comments. One of the men compared our concerns about water with the feelings he had toward water conservation in his home, Arizona. Celeste also compared the island to the states, claiming that people in the states are trying “really hard” to “hold on” to the military activities in their communities. I counted a total of four comparisons to the Continental US. Not a single one of their comparisons were accurate parallels with our current situation. They reeked of the US’s inability to view other places outside of their own cultural framework.

It was ethnocentrism at its worst, particularly when a heavy-set and annoyed Matrix rep told an audience member, who was frustrated that “no one was representing the people of Guam,” that our “elected leaders” represented us. He obviously didn’t understand what the man was trying to express. Our elected leaders are part of a mock government. Anything they say (and anything we vote for) can be overturned by the DoD and US Congress. His lack of cultural sensitivity prevented him from understanding the deeper meaning within the older man’s question, which was obvious to locals in the room. The Matrix rep also had a hard time focusing on actual questions, diverting into small, pointless debates on trivial things. When a man tried to make a point by expressing that “there are two school systems on the island: DoD and Civilian,” the Matrix rep felt the need to interrupt and rudely say, “No, there are THREE! There are private schools too!” The Chamorro man kept trying to make his point, which was also obvious to other locals in the room, but the Matrix rep couldn’t seem to abandon the debate on how many school systems were on island. My friends and I laughed at how silly, petty, and rude the “fat guy” was. My friend jokingly pointed out that there might be four, “sa home school umbi.”

To rub salt into the wound, one of the presenters kept stressing that creating greater areas of compatibility were important for “tourism,” skipping over the fact that preserving our environment and cultural spaces might be important for other, more important reasons. When he was later called on this, a colleague swept in to rescue him. She explained that the people of Guam were “very” important and that there were just “so many” important things that they couldn’t fit it in one presentation. I looked at the person next to me and she immediately rolled her eyes. When there are many areas of importance, you usually showcase the ones you prioritize. Tourism was prioritized.

When the Matrix presenters opened the floor up for questions, they were immediately fired with inquiries from the small and visibly annoyed audience. The few people there were looking for real answers, not the the watered down, vague rhetoric that we are usually fed. The question and answer period started to look like the killing of the messenger (Matrix being the messenger). There were no elected leaders who informed the study or DoD representatives there to help address questions regarding the document’s content. Every question was responded to with a polite reminder that the idea expressed would be better placed on a nice “comment and suggestion card” available at the back of the room. I could feel myself becoming more frustrated with each half ass response. My friend, Kisha, raised her hand. She asked a question that I found amusing at the time. She explained that she ran away from work and didn’t hear about the session until the day before. She raised her hands, calling attention to the empty room and said, “You said this session is all about the youth, for the community? Where are they? I don’t see anybody here!”

When I heard their response to Kisha’s comment, I was immediately blown away by their arrogance. Celeste Warner let out a surprised sigh and claimed that they hosed it here because the last time they tried to host one, no one attended. They were told it wasn’t done in a way that was accessible to “the youth.” She looked at a fellow Matrix presenter and said, “We just can’t win.” When I heard her say that, I considered leaving the presentation entirely. “You can’t win?” I thought to myself. “This lady has no idea how hard it is for the people of Guam to win,” I thought angrily. “We always lose!”

At that point, I was so insulted and irritated, that I wasn’t sure I wanted to subject myself to another build-up related “forum” wherein the people of this island are reminded of their unimportance.

Celeste explained that they sent out a press release on Friday and had been running a string of One Guam commercials during peak hours on the radio and television. These people are getting paid A LOT of money. As a former event planner, I immediately recognized that no normal client would have accepted their response. When you plan an event, you’re supposed to look closely at those you hope to have attend. It’s pretty obvious that sending out a press release on a Friday (when the event takes place the following Wed) is not ideal. You don’t need to be a genius to know that if you send something out at the end of a work week, most of the people you sent it to will not be able to examine the release more closely until the following Monday. On Monday, when the information is received, the people who get it will work on sending the word out to their respective circles. If received on a Monday, the information will not be posted on official institutional and organizational information feeds until Tuesday. Unfortunately, releasing information on a Tuesday (for a Wednesday event) doesn’t give your target audience (who they claimed was the “youth” and college students) enough time to coordinate getting there.

Celeste explained the empty room with much confusion, saying that she really didn’t know what happened, especially since they encouraged the Presidents of both the College and University to have their faculty offer students “extra credit” to attend. This Celeste lady seems sweet, but I suspect she isn’t half as dumb as her answers were. A simple overview of our island’s young adults will show you that no matter how much “extra credit” you offer a student, the majority of this island’s students are working, young adults who are often struggling to juggle school, parenting, a job, and even their military commitments. How are high school teachers going to coordinate a trip to the University lecture hall with a day’s notice? I was also irritated that she mentioned “extra credit” at all. As if the people of this island would only show up if we were offered some kind of reward. The content within the CSS is overwhelming and it has profound impacts on our home, health, and security. If the people have not yet figured out that the content within this document is life-changing and important, then it’s because they haven’t been effectively informed of the gravity of the situation. We don’t need “extra credit” to attend an event in which the future OUR LIVES and OUR HOME is being discussed.

When the session ended and Matrix announced that they had to move on to the “next work shop in Sinajana,” I looked at the disappointed, unimpressed, and unsatisfied faces in the room. No one got anything useful, no one learned anything, and no one felt like “military relations with the civilian population” improved. I criticized it with my friend for a few minutes before leaving. I listened as the small handful of attendees pointed out the same inadequacies my friend and I were. On my way out, a Matrix employee politely smiled at me. She gestured toward a platter full of snacks. “Would you like some empanada? Please, have some empanada,” she said, smiling. I mustered a painful smile and replied, “No thank you.” “Are you sure?” she asked one more time. “No, I’m fine,” I said, walking out of the lecture hall.

As I started my car, I laughed about the tray of untouched empanada and the way the attractive Matrix employee offered it to those who attended, receiving one polite refusal after another. As I backed out of the parking stall, I rolled my eyes. “This is not 1940-something and Chamorros are no longer impressed with your plethora of snacks and your vague, fancy presentations. Now we know that ‘work together’ means the same thing as ‘give us everything and shut up’; we can speak English now, remember? It’s our primary language here,” I thought angrily to myself.

Here is Information for an upcoming meeting for the community regarding the CSS. It's being hosted by We Are Guahan this time around. Luckily, they're telling us about it more than a day in advance. (And look, they didn't even need to spend tons of money to fly in insulting people from the states to do it.)

Time	Wednesday, November 16 · 6:00pm - 8:00pm
Location	Yigo Senior Center
Created By	Leevin Camacho
More Info	WE ARE GUÅHAN (WAG) is organizing a village meeting for Nov. 16 at the Yigo Senior Center from 6 to 8 p.m., to educate and gather input on the Compatibility Sustainability Study, or CSS. The purpose of the CSS is to protect the quality of life for all residents of Guam. The village meeting is an opportunity to learn more about issues discussed in the CSS such as land use, noise, health and affordable housing. You can download a copy of the CSS at: http://www.one.guam.gov/ Comments on the Draft CSS are due by Dec. 9, 2011. Hard copies of the CSS will be available for review at the village meeting, as well as strategies that have been proposed by both GovGuam and DOD.