What challenges and/or difficulties have you encountered and how did you go about resolving them? Speak to a specific challenge you have encountered and some of the ways that you tackled the problem.

As I continue working in towns around the peninsula, I've been persistently concerned with how I can best give back to the communities I engage with. Working with people who have much more experience (lived and professional) than I do has taught me a lot, but also made me wonder how much I am really able to contribute. I've struggled to find a balance being a "leader abroad," as Laidlaw encourages, and also learning as much as I can in a context where I am almost always the least-experienced person in the room.  Beyond these individual worries, I've also discovered some very practical barriers which limit the corpus's effectiveness. For example, I've met a few people who don't read fluently, and also a few people who don't have stable internet access; how can the information in the corpus, which is stored online and in written form, reach these individuals? My supervisor is interested in eventually adding voice-recognition technology to the corpus, but this would take some time. For now, my best option has been suggesting work-arounds as I interact with community members. For example, if someone isn't able to read the corpus website, I will make sure that I also explain the project to a member of the household who can read the website. It's been a little frustrating to encounter these barriers and not have a more effective solution, but I understand that this is part of the process.

On a similar note, I've been surprised sometimes at peoples' reactions to the corpus, and to my role in the project as an American student. I often feel unsure of how I should react or respond, and this has been a major challenge for me. For example, many people are very interested in the fact that I speak English, and they often want to practice their English with me, or ask me questions about the language. Given that these reactions occur in the context of Maya-language documentation, and that I'm acting on behalf of a project that aims to encourage widespread use of Maya, this has struck me as ironic. I've also noticed that in Merida, there are far more resources to learn English than there are to learn Maya, and although ~30% of Yucatan state speaks Maya, there is comparatively little interest in learning it as a second language. As a result of these interactions, I've become more conscious of how English's hegemony threatens Maya's growth as a language, and more self-conscious about my role here as a speaker of English.

I still don't really know how to handle this issue, or what to say in these situations. I don't want to dictate peoples' life and linguistic choices, and I don't want to discourage interested students from learning English, especially given that knowing this language often does have tangible career benefits. At the same time, my role here is primarily to support the Maya language, and to spread enthusiasm for using that language; the fascination with English that I've encountered is something of a limiting factor. For the time being, I've found a lifeline in the commonly-held belief that English speakers have an easier time learning Maya than Spanish speakers. Whether that's true or not from a linguistics perspective, it is a very widely-known idea here, and in these moments I often use it as a segue to share my enthusiasm for Maya. I talk more about my experience of learning it as a second language, and the motivations which pushed me to do so in the first place. My hope is that by showing how I, an English-speaking foreigner, have put time and effort towards learning Maya because I find it interesting, valuable, and worthwhile, I can slightly nuance peoples' perceptions of the language.