I’ve been a Co-Counselor since 1984. I have taught and led RC off and on during those thirty-six years but have not taught formally since the 1980s. This has been due to many factors—disability and illness; the logistics of access and transportation; and a series of major medical crises, my own and those of my family, that have just made it too hard to take on. Also, in the past I felt like I was supposed to teach but didn’t actually want to. I preferred to talk about RC as part of my public work as a writer and speaker. 


I recently returned to my childhood home in rural Puerto Rico. I now live in a small community where I have many ties. The community is in the midst of a major disaster because of ongoing earthquakes, escalating extraction of resources, the corruption of the colonial regime, and racist U.S. policies. This is two years after a devastating hurricane from which we have not recovered. 


My community and many Puerto Ricans have learned a lot about leaning on each other more. People are openly acknowledging the emotional traumas of our situation and asking for help with the anxiety caused by constant quakes. I have been informally counseling people, and it’s been much appreciated. The timing feels right to offer RC to my neighbors. I now have access to community spaces that are accessible to me, and I could teach people who live within walking distance of where I live. 


These are the external factors that make teaching RC easier than in the past. In addition, leaving the United States to be in my own culture, not having to push back against patterns of individualism and privacy, and being in the midst of a shared crisis with my own people make teaching RC seem way more [much more] fun and also much more immediately and obviously necessary. 


I have a good grasp of RC theory. I have been thinking for years about how I might teach in a rural Puerto Rican way, less modeled on school and more on other ways that people connect and learn. We need to develop a range of ways to teach RC that fit different lives and local cultures. I also take seriously the need to spread RC tools more widely as we take on the global ecological crisis.


Randi Freundlich, my former Area Reference Person, will reference me while I stay connected with the San Juan RC Community and with my International Liberation Reference Person for People of Puerto Rican Heritage, Maria Judith Colón.