Diana Oughton - Guatemala

Guatemala

After receiving her B.A. degree from Bryn Mawr in 1963, Oughton spent the next two years in Guatemala with the Voluntary International Service Assignments program (VISA). Nearly half the women from Oughton's college senior class had gone on to graduate school. Oughton was assigned to Chichicastenango, at that time an isolated Indian market town. Oughton went to Guatemala as a liberal, believing that the problems could be identified and solutions devised and carried out. Eventually, she became a radical, and began to feel an urgency to change everything at once. While there, Oughton worked with young adults and older indigenous people to teach them to read. She helped local Catholic priests implement nutritional programs and edited a left-wing Guatemalan newspaper. Oughton lived in a small house with a dirt floor and a little outhouse. During this time, the questions with which she had struggled with came to a head. Oughton questioned what to do about poverty, social injustice, and revolution in the world. Oughton came to the conclusion that no matter how many hours were spent working to feed and educate, there would always be more people than jobs to earn wages, inadequate food supplies, and never enough shelter to protect people from the elements.

According to Thomas Powers, the author of Diana: The Making of a Terrorist, the more Oughton learned about the hard life of rural Guatemala, the more she reflected on the affluence of the United States. In Chichicastenango, Americans seemed an alien presence; the fact of their wealth was almost an insult to the impoverished Indians. In her mind, confusion emerged that lasted the rest of her life: she had rejected affluence (at first almost unconsciously) to work among the poor, but poverty, clearly, was nothing to be envied. She hated poverty, but she hated affluence, too. Oughton left Chichicastenango with a new view of the problems that undeveloped countries like Guatemala faced when in struggle with the United States.

Those who knew Oughton recognized this period as the major turning point in her life; according to Powers, Oughton came to feel something close to a sense of shame at being American. In Fugitive Days, Bill Ayers writes that Oughton "had had an abundance of experience in Guatemala, a torrent, almost more than she could endure. She now sometimes suffered the full flood of her experiences." Oughton became much more aware of the United States' impact on foreign countries, and she did not return to Philadelphia the same Midwest Republican. Oughton's old friends from college noticed upon her return to the United States how she had matured, while also displaying sadness regarding the poverty she encountered in Guatemala in the previous two years.