Young Woman on a Mission

Abby Weil’s summer in Guatemala isn’t about ecotourism and exploring the Mayan ruins. It’s about human rights.

Weil ’06 is working with the social justice organizations Advocacy Project and ADIVIMA in Rabinal, where genocide during the 1980s decimated the population by as much as 20 percent, according to ADIVIMA.

Weil’s desire to help the oppressed blossomed after a trip she took to Peru as a UT student.

“I had the opportunity to volunteer as a tutor in a shantytown in Lima for a summer with children who didn’t have books, uniforms, or food to eat,” the Franklin, Tennessee, native says. “When I saw firsthand the poverty and human rights violations that occur in Latin America, I knew it would be something I would devote my life to.”

To be selected for her Advocacy Project post, she competed with 187 applicants for about 30 fellowships. “The Advocacy Project works with many community based organizations all over the world to provide fellows each summer to help organizations get their messages to an international audience,” she explains.

Weil says she’s been inspired by Guatemalans, who are “fighting for their human rights and for their loved ones that were so mercilessly massacred in the acts of genocide.

“As I was leaving the office at ADIVIMA on my first day of work, forensic anthropologists were bringing small coffins filled with the remains of those indigenous Mayans killed by the army in the ‘internal conflict’ and buried in clandestine mass graves,” she writes on her blog. “The relatives of the deceased were gathered around the coffins placing flowers, burning incense, and holding pictures of their loved ones.

“This scene is not uncommon here, and the massacres occurred over twenty years ago, in 1982. So many years later the residents of Rabinal are still experiencing the horrors of the violence and the loss that the internal conflict produced. The numerous orphans, widows, and incomplete families that the internal conflict produced are those that ADIVIMA supports and wants to advocate for.”

Weil intends to become a nurse practitioner and work with underserved populations.

At UT she says her favorite class was the Poverty and Development sociology course taught by Dr. Jon Schefner. “It had a profound effect on the way I view the world and helped to encourage me to work to change inequalities.” She also recalls favorite professors David Anderson, Hector Qirko, and Murray Marks in the anthropology department.

She says adapting to the slower pace of life in Guatemala has been interesting.

“I have learned many lessons…the greatest being patience. I had to learn that, coming from Washington, D.C., where everything is incredibly fast-paced, things just don’t operate that way here,” she says. “We are definitely on Latin American time, but it has taught me to slow down and really savor the small things in life."

See more photos at Abby Weil's Flickr site