For Sustainable Development Nerds and Insomniacs

I'm no longer in Guatemala or even Central America, so I'll keep this short. If you are interested in alternative financial services provision in rural agricultural communities, or are simply having trouble falling asleep, my Master's Paper is now available online here. Thanks to everyone who has read my blog over the past eight months! It's been surprisingly fun writing this blog, but I'm going to end it here--somehow "Emily in Suburban California" just doesn't sound quite as interesting. By the way, if anyone has a job lying around that they would like to give me, please let me know! I'm going to close out this blog with the best quote I've found on the true meaning of sustainable development.

"The startling truth is that our best efforts for civil rights, international peace, population control, conservation of natural resources, and assistance to the starving of the earth--urgent as they are--will destroy rather than help if made in the present spirit. For, as things stand, we have nothing to give. If our own riches and our own way of life are not enjoyed here, they will not be enjoyed anywhere else. Certainly they will supply the immediate jolt of energy and hope that methedrine, and similar drugs, give in extreme fatigue. But peace can be made only by those who are peaceful, and love can be shown only by those who love. No work of love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now."

-Alan Watts

From San Salvador to Playa Conchal

Since I got back to Portland from Guatemala, I've maintained a grueling schedule of napping, eating, and playing with my parents' cuter and hairier children, the Dalmatians. Today I took a quick break from not working on my thesis to upload photos from an amazing two weeks of travel through most of the rest of Central America. After finishing my internship, I spent a relaxing few days in El Salvador and Honduras, and then my friend Jacky and I braved the 100 degree heat, three hour immigration lines, and $90 taxi rides of Semana Santa to see Costa Rica and Nicaragua. A photographic tour from the Bay Islands to the Monteverde Cloud Forest can be found here.

Adios, Guatemala

Today is my last day of work here in Xela. Over the last couple of weeks I've been oscillating between incipient nostalgia and a near-physical urgency to get the hell out of here. Looking back, I can see that spending so much time in a country to which I felt no immediate connection has taught me some profound and unexpected lessons. More than anything, I've been able to see the ways in which cultures construct themselves with a logic that is rarely comprehensible to the outside observer. I feel privileged to have gotten beyond the tourist's "Guatemalan cultural experience" that includes one ride on a chicken bus, a photograph of an indigenous child, and a few handicrafts. Living here has helped me understand how, in a thousand subtle ways, the safety of family and tradition counterweighs the physical and psychological insecurity that are a part of every Guatemalan's life. My initial frustration with the conservative social values here in the highlands has slowly given way to a respect for the fact that Guatemala's indigenous cultures have been able to maintain their identity and their dignity even after 400 years of assaults on their cosmology, their languages, their economics. I will probably never identify with the Guatemalan culture on a personal level, but what started out as tolerance, that cloaked synonym of misunderstanding, has slowly given way over the last six months to admiration.

At the same time, I'm tired. Traveling alone throughout rural Guatemala and Chiapas as a tall blonde woman has been exhausting in many ways. Beyond the vegetarian's search for food, or the risks that any woman takes walking by herself at night, I am tired of always being noticed. Maybe this comes off as disrespectful of what, for example, minorities suffer every day living in the US. Well, if you are a transgendered Vietnamese woman living in Hartshorne, Oklahoma, you probably know what I'm talking about. It's impossible to go anywhere without people talking to me, staring at me, touching me. There is something beautiful and even soothing about the anonymity of walking down the street in any multicultural North American city.

That doesn't mean that there aren't things that I already miss about Guatemala. I love the sound of Spanish, the slang, the way it feels to speak it. It has been an amazing experience discovering the endless layers of fluency, the idioms and gray areas that before only existed for me in English. I miss the quiet generosity of the friends I've made here, the fact that I can walk to work, the sangria and wireless internet at Las Lagartijas that helped me finish my thesis. And of course, I know I am going to miss some of the mundane facts of life that I disliked most while I was here: the rickety, overcrowded chicken buses and the eggs-bean paste-tortilla meals. My internship will be over in an hour and fifteen minutes, I've already turned in the first draft of my thesis, and my bags are almost packed. But in December, when I swore I couldn't wait to leave Guatemala, I never realized how much I would want to come back.

Before I head back to the States I'm going to be traveling for two weeks, first by myself in Honduras, and then with my friend Jacky in Nicaragua and Costa Rica. I'm sure that I'll have time to at least post jealousy-inducing photos of gorgeous tropical beaches. But in the meantime, it wouldn't be very culturally-sensitive of me to sign off without the standard Guatemalan goodbye: ¡Adios, Guatemala, que te vaya bien!

"La Revolución es la unidad y la justicia"

Access to land was one of the defining issues, if not the central conflict, during Guatemala's 36-year armed struggle. Hundreds of thousands of people died during this period, and yet even after the signing of the Peace Accords in 1996, very little was resolved. For many rural indigenous people, life is still governed by the rule of the patrón, or plantation owner, who controls everything from wages to access to education. In spite of the many promises left unfulfilled by the government in the wake of the armed conflict, it seems that a quiet revolution in rural land distribution may be within reach. The unlikely agent of this transformation is, in fact, the government itself. Through Fontierras, a land fund whose creation was mandated by the Peace Accords, the government has begun to facilitate loans to indigenous farmers who want to purchase productive land.

This week I worked with the APODIP cooperative in Alta Verapaz, a department in north-central Guatemala. This group has united isolated communities of Q'eqchi' Maya farmers living in the buffer zone of the Sierra de las minas Biosphere Reserve. Over the last couple of years, more groups of ex-plantation workers have begun to join APODIP and to produce organic coffee on their own land. I visited two groups that have worked with Fontierras to buy plantations that were abandoned by their owners during the coffee crisis of the late 1990s.

The manager of one association told me that two years ago, he was living on a large plantation where the owner refused to build a school because he wanted the workers' children to start picking coffee as soon as they could walk. Out of desperation, he and other coffee farmers contacted the patrón of an abandoned plantation to see if he would sell it. With the assistance of Fontierras, the group managed to lower the price from 12 million quetzales to two million, and to obtain a low-interest loan. Now, they are rehabilitating the plantation's lands and processing facilities, and transitioning to 100% organic production.

During my tour of their facilities, the group took me into the attic space above their processing plant. They had obviously had a party the night before, as chairs, beer bottles, and pine needles were strewn across the floor. Above a pile of sacks of coffee they had hung a banner that read: "Welcome to the community...The revolution is unity and justice." In so much of Guatemala, revolutionary dreams have given way to resignation. I felt very moved to see that hope for a better future is still alive in some of the country's remote mountain communities. And, that this revolution holds the promise of a peaceful and just resolution.

My photos from this field visit, as well as the rest of my photos from my last six weeks in Guatemala, are here.

Marketing The "Real Story"

What does it take to market someone's life story? How does a non-profit sell itself? Who decides what the public gets to know? Collecting quotes from coffee cooperative members to share with Foundation Finance supporters and donors seemed like a simple task back in August. Soon enough, however, mundane considerations like transportation and accurate translation started to assert themselves. And then, to my surprise, questions of morality began to make my job much more difficult than I had ever imagined.

Foundation Finance, like almost all non-profit organizations, needs funding from individuals and foundations in order to continue its work. The best way to secure this is by demonstrating positive impacts, by showing how the organization has changed people's lives for the better. One of my main responsibilities during my internship has been to produce "testimonials" from coffee farmers about the positive impacts that their cooperative and Foundation Finance have had on their lives. But out in the field, sitting in dim, smoky, one-room shacks and talking to the farmers directly, I've found out that packaging someone's life experiences is far from easy. Actually, it's fairly simple to take a quote out of context and stick it next to a photo of a farmer standing in a field and smiling. But the words, the emotions, the whole truth that people entrusted to me, those have been difficult to discard.

While none of the testimonials I've sent to my boss in Boston have been fabricated, they are far from the full story. This process of editing out the inconvenient hardships, the discontent, is absolutely commonplace in the world of non-profits. I don't know how to go about altering the strange hierarchies of the social change machine, but I do feel a responsibility to let some of these farmers speak for themselves. So, without further ado, I present the real "real story," in the form of quotes and photos from my work over the last five months. I bet you won't have a hard time picking out whose words became official Foundation Finance testimonials.


"The credit through Foundation Finance helps us with school expenses, since we have two children in primary school, one in high school, and the rest in technical school...We thank ADIPSA firstly for looking for support for us. The association is really important for us all. And then also we thank the organizations behind ADIPSA that provide credit funds to help us improve our situation."

-Oliva Albizures, member of ADIPSA

“Now I’m a little old, and I’m getting tired. I have children, but they’ve moved away. But I keep on fighting here, old man that I am, as much as I can.”

-Raymundo Veracruz Gonzalez, member of Selva Negra Zoque

“We have one child who is studying in El Progreso. This is what has taken up almost all of our life. The year before last, two kids were still studying, and it was really difficult. This is what has prevented us from getting ahead in life, from living in a decent house, because we are spending so much to educate our children...Because we make our living only from coffee, we have no other resources...When the last kid graduates, our troubles will be over...And then bigger troubles will come! Our problems will never end.”

-Felix Cruz Jacobo, member of ADIPSA


“Growing coffee independently, we sold our coffee too cheaply. If we had any urgent needs, we went directly to the middleman. And when they saw that we were in trouble, they paid us even less. Now that we’re organized, it’s different. We can take a loan from the cooperative to keep from selling to the middlemen...With capital from the cooperative we keep up our shade cover, pruning, and weeding. And then, when it comes to storage, paying producers, drying the coffee, all of this is thanks to financing from Foundation Finance.”

-Abundo Virgidio Ramos Angel, member of Finca Triunfo Verde




“The problem is that right now we need money to pay our workers, and we don’t have any...The workers want their payment right away, and if you’re late by even one day, sometimes they just walk out. It’s hard for us.”

-Hermelinda Morales Martinez, member of Finca Triunfo Verde






“When I joined Maya Ixil, I had a house that was a roof over our heads, nothing more. By saving up my checks from the cooperative, I was able to build a house and terrace my land. Being part of the cooperative has been a blessing for us...I have two sons, one who is a teacher and one who’s still in high school. The cooperative has always helped us with the school fees, and my family has seen the benefits.

-Juan Ordoñez Perez, member of Maya Ixil



P.S. Realizing that this post could mean an early despedida from my internship, I've gone back through the blog and changed the name of my employer. So much for my ethics, right?

Decompression

After over 80 hours in transit, I arrived back in Xela on Wednesday afternoon. Visiting so many different places and distinct cultures in a little over two weeks was a surreal experience. I was never sure if I could drink the tap water, if I should be covering my head or taking off my shoes, or whether or not I ought to pick up a fork at meals. The whole time I was in India, I kept speaking to taxi drivers in Spanish. But when I got to the Guatemala City airport, I opened my mouth and said something in Hindi to a surprised customs official.

Lying awake with jet lag at three this morning, I felt like an accordion that had been expanded and then suddenly compressed in a rushing wheeze of discordant notes. The trip happened so quickly that I barely had time to truly experience any of it, and as I stared up at the darkened ceiling and counted the minutes until dawn, a disordered and extravagant river of images, sounds, and smells washed back over me.

More than anything else from the last few weeks, the wedding itself still seems like a mirage. The process started on Friday night, with a puja at Kunal's parents' flat that filled the apartment with smoke, chanting, and the insistent call of a conch shell. The next day began at 4:15am, when Kunal's aunt woke me up to spoon-fed me sugary gruel on the floor of her hotel room. I then had several hours to wait before being dressed in a bright yellow sari for a lengthy ritual focusing on our fathers asking for permission from their ancestors for the marriage. The ceremony culminated with family members and friends smearing both of us with a paste made from turmeric and mustard oil.

The main event occurred in the early evening, starting at the astrologically auspicious time of 4:52pm. Kunal arrived in a horse-drawn chariot while I remained inside on a throne, weighed down by silk and gold, hiding my eyes behind two large leaves. I can only imagine the fear and anticipation that a woman would feel waiting to see her husband for the first time. Fortunately or unfortunately, I had already met Kunal once or twice, so I knew what to expect. Once my parents had paid Kunal Rs. 1000 ($26.32) to seal the deal, he was lifted from the chariot and my Mom led him inside. Four lucky friends then carried me above their heads and circled around him seven times. They set me down and I was finally able to remove my blindfold, and Kunal and I exchanged thick garlands of jasmine. During the final ritual, Harmony participated as my moral support as Kunal and I cast various symbolic plants into a fire. At last, we walked around the fire together seven times, dazed from the smoke and from exhaustion, and emerged into the cool night married, again.

The intensely ritualized wedding in Kolkata felt like the perfect counterpoint to our celebration in Oregon last summer. Very often I had no idea what was going on, but it was reassuring to think of the millions of people who had performed the exact same ceremonies over the centuries. The wedding not only involved our family and friends, but unnamed and uncounted gods and ancestors who were asked to give their blessings. And although I'm only now starting to understand the experience, I'm grateful for the opportunity to participate in such a beautiful testament to the force of the past in the elaboration of an emblematic present.

In my next post, I promise to get back to the point, i.e. Guatemala. In the meantime, my photos from the trip are here.