Kelly and Ben in Honduras

What We Have Been Doing NEW

March 18, 2007

If you have already looked at the photos you have seen that we had a few visitors over the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays, and Kelly’s Birthday.  It was great to be able to see and spend time with family and friends after being here for a year now.  Having people visit makes us miss home a little less and made the holidays almost like being back in the US.  Well maybe not quite like being in the US, but they were much more enjoyable for us.  It has also been nice to introduce people to our life here and to Honduras.  So thanks to everyone that has come down so far—we know that where we live is not exactly an easy place to get to

Peace Corps generally encourages having visitors as part of the cultural exchange that the program supports.  At any one time there are 200 or more PC volunteers in Honduras.  If they each have just 5 people visit during their service that is 1,000 people who would otherwise probably never have come to Honduras.  Hopefully they go back to the US with a favorable impression of the country and the region, and tell their friends.  And on the flip side, the people in the villages and the cities here that meet the volunteers during their service, and their friends and families when they visit, perhaps walk away understanding that people from the US are not really like what they have heard, or seen in the movies, or read in the newspaper, and they tell their friends.  And then we can all hold hands and sing songs together.

Another nice part of having people visit is that it gives us a chance (or excuse) to travel around a bit.  Although our photos show a lot of fun vacation like stuff we actually do work quite a lot, including the occasional weekend and late night.  However, we usually don't take photos of meetings and sitting at computers working on water system designs etc.  Perhaps one of these updates we will devote a page to what a rural drinking water system is or something—take photos of water tanks and catchment dams, and throw in some design drawings.  To date we have worked on projects in 10 or so villages that have resulted in about 2,000 or more people receiving clean water for the first time. 

Funding for our water projects comes from a number of different sources, primarily Non-Government Agencies (NGOs) and charitable organizations.  The municipalities themselves don't really have sufficient money to pay for the projects that we work on in the villages.  I read recently that the combined economies of all the Central American countries is roughly equivalent to that of New Haven, Connecticut.  Which means the country of Honduras has an economy probably about the size of an average size town in the US.  The Hondurans do pay taxes here but it does not add up to be all that much money so most of the water projects are donated.  We work quite a bit with Agua Para el Pueblo (Water for the Village) who is a Honduran NGO that works almost exclusively on rural water projects.  We have also worked with World Vision who is a charitable organization based in the US and also receives support from USAID.  There is also a Mennonite funded organization named CASM that we have worked with a little.  Right now the largest funder of out projects especially for Kelly is Rotary Club.  There is a Rotary Club in Copan who receives money for projects from a couple of clubs in the US.  They have funded a lot of projects in Copan and will be funding their first project in Santa Rita this spring.

A water system for an average size to smaller village (about 300 to 700 people) will cost about $15,000 to $30,000 or $40,000 depending on the location of the water source in relation to the village and how dispersed the houses are.  Kelly is working on some larger multi–community projects, one of which will cost more than $100,000.  The majority of this money goes to materials because the community themselves do all of the construction, under the direction of a paid mason.  For various reasons funding has really not been a problem in Copan where Kelly works.  For one, Copan is a touristy town so when a Rotary Club member, for example,  is passing through they enjoy the area and want to help with the local villages.  The city of Copan is also a comfortable place to live so there are a number of NGOs that have decided to open a local offices here in town to help the communities in this area.  Santa Rita where I work is a little less appealing to live and have an office and there are less NGOs actively working there, but finding funding for water projects has not really been that difficult.  The reality is that we have a lot more funding in both municipalities than probably any other volunteers in country.  This region is about the poorest in Honduras and there are a lot of organizations working here.  Most people in the water and sanitation program in Peace Corps spend most of there time working on water system designs and see very few if any of them actually get constructed.

July 11, 2007

The end of April marked our 1 year anniversary of moving to Copan, and the time has really been going quickly.  The weeks and months have been flying by and it will not be that long from now that we will be starting to write about our plans on coming back to the US.  With a little less that a year to go the next year is bound to pass by at least as quickly as the prior year.  We don't really know what we are going to do when our time in Peace Corps is over.  The only thing that we really know for certain is that we will go back to Colorado and CSU to defend our research by fall of 2008, and then graduate which will be December 2008, hopefully. Beyond that we are not really to sure just yet. 

We have become more and more involved with working for our respective municipalities with water projects and the development work that is going on around here in general.  After being here for a year and interacting with a wide variety of NGOs and aid and development agencies you really start to get a sense of the development problems that exist for a country like Honduras, and getting a first hand impression of what works and what does not.  Many projects or ideas that many well intentioned people or groups have we just shake our heads at a say that will never work, or that will just make things worse.  The only easy and accurate thing to say is that there are no easy answers.  The problems that exist in Honduras, and most of the developing world, are deep and very complicated.  It is common to try and simplify the problems coming from a wealthy place like the US or Europe and start to think things like ‘these countries just need more money or need better planning at the government level’, both of which are true but are usually only a small part of the problem.  Many people think that they have the answer, but really nobody does, at least not yet. 

The largest problem that we come across on a regular basis is education, both formal and informal.  Most NGOs and agencies do not really fund educational programs very well because it is difficult to quantify your successes.  It is easy to say that we donated x number of thousands dollars, or we built a bridge, or a water treatment system.  Really anything that you could take a picture of is the preferred type of development project because at the end of it all you have something concrete to show the donors.  With education it is different, you can say we educated 4,000 people about the importance of brushing their teeth but there is no way to take a photo of the success or be able to show the donors that it is working, or at least it is not easy.  It takes a long time to educate, and it takes many years if not lifetimes to fully be able to show that it has been successful — and there are always a lot of failures along the way.  Thus people are hesitant to invest in such programs.  It is much easier to build a bridge and then walk away from it with your picture and move onto your next project. 

It would seem that education should not be that difficult—you just show up in a community tell them to brush their teeth (or whatever you think they should start doing) and explain that it prevents tooth decay, gingivitis, etc and assume that the people are going to believe you.  Then you hand out your donated toothbrushes and expect that the community is going to take your advice and start brushing their teeth twice a day.  But it wont happen.  The people will likely not understand what you are talking about, they will not necessarily see the need, and it is difficult to change the mind set and habits of adults.  Long term planning and thinking about the future is also something of an abstract  idea to many villagers.  If the majority of your day is spent working to make sure that you will have food for the next day the effects of something that might happen in 10 years does not really seem so important.  If you are lucky and do a great presentation they may brush their teeth for a little while and then over time stop because they don't see any real difference that it has made.  Let alone if the tooth brush breaks or gets lost they may not be able to afford to buy another one.  In the US it takes parents years of nagging their kids to brush their teeth, along with fear of the dentist, in order for it to sink in by the time they are teenagers, and even then not everybody brushes twice a day every day like they should, at least I don't always.  In the developed world we have the benefit of years and years building upon themselves to engrain habits and lifestyles from generation to generation, it is difficult to try and create that from scratch.  Brushing your teeth is kind of a simplified and relatively unimportant example of a topic (there are not a lot of programs to promote teeth brushing in the rural villages here), but if you really want them to brush you would need to return to the same village on a regular basis to continue your education program and monitor your progress.  With topics even more complicated like family planning, or sustainable or improved farming practices, children's nutrition, or prevention of stomach parasites and diarrhea, malaria prevention, protection of forested areas, or operation and maintenance of a water system it is even more difficult to educate because the concepts can be even more abstract. 

For us the most obvious example of the lack of informal education is with the rural water systems that we design and help construct.  It is pretty easy to go out into a community and design a system and get it funded and constructed.  That is because a water system, when completed, makes for a pretty nice picture to show people at the funding agency.  But once it is constructed the project does not really end, at least it shouldn't, there needs to be a pretty intensive education component as well.  The people have to learn how to chlorinate their own water to make it safe to drink, conserve water so that everyone will have enough, learn how to maintain the system and replace parts that wear out over time, learn what they need to do to protect the water source to keep it free from contamination, figure out what to charge themselves in the village to have enough money to pay for the chlorine, replacement parts, a plumber, or a new system in 20 year when they out grow their existing one.  All of which are things in the developed world that most people have no idea how to do, let alone a relatively uneducated villager in Honduras.  (Most adults we work with in the villages don’t know how to read or write– the younger generations are better).  We see it all the time that a system gets funded and constructed, then the agency takes their photos, does a little education program, and then leaves to go onto the next project.  Then after a few years the system starts to fail because the village has not been able to maintain it properly because nobody has really taught them how to do so, or better yet the agency has never been back to check on the system to monitor progress in the community.  And then, with the system having failed, the best the community can usually hope for is that another agency comes in and repeats more or less the same exact thing the last agency did.  We are probably guilty of contributing to this problem.  We also tend to prefer and focus on the design and construction oversight side of things rather than education.  It is a lot easier for us and we have been better educated and trained to build systems rather than support them.  Plus, there are certain language and cultural limitations make education difficult for us.

A second relatively large problem that we see is the idea of just handing out free stuff - charity with no strings attached.  There are programs and people that pay for and construct houses or schools and community building; or to hand out medical supplies, school supplies, shoes, etc.  All of these things are obviously needed but by just giving these things away it creates a dependence on foreign aid which can be very detrimental to the village or community you are trying to help to help in the first place.  The idea the village develops is ‘we are poor and these people will just give us these things that we need, and we don’t have to do anything for them’.  The people become accustomed to the charity and dependent on it.  Even with the things that a person needs to live, if you don’t have to work for it you tend not to value it as much, and you don’t act as responsibly with those things that are just given to you (I am kind of sounding pretty right-wing here).  For people in a developing to appreciate donations they need to have a vested interest in it, they need to have invested some amount of time or effort into its acquisition.  There is obviously a place for straight up charity, a kid with an eye infection, distributing wheelchairs, making sure teachers have the supplies and books they need to teach, etc.  But the idea of a bunch of people from the US getting together and coming to Central America to buy the supplies and build homes for everybody in a village is a generous idea but a little misguided (there are lots of people that come down to do this—the projects make for nice photos).  For one, people here already know how to build houses they don’t really need the help of some accountant from the states to show them how to do it, most likely they know more about building things than the accountant does.  It is also not realistic to think that anyone would take care of something that somebody else paid for and built, some of course will but many will not.  I was working in a village that happened to be having a school built for them by a church group, which was great, the village needed a new school, the old one was made of mud a sticks, the roof leaked, and it was falling apart.  But, one of the days that I was there I counted 16 gringos working on the construction and 5 people from the community (of a community of 1,000 people, about 100 able bodied men).  The community was thinking ‘hey, if these people are just going to build the school why should I help’.  A better model for building the school would have been the community should have put up some nominal amount of money so that they would have felt that the school was paid for at least in part by them.  Also the community should have been required to have provided at least as many or twice as many people as there were gringos.  Or even better somebody from the community or general area should have been in charge of the construction and the gringos should have been the ones helping them.  Or the gringos should not have helped at all and maybe visited the school being built by the people in the village (but that does not make for good photos).

I guess this does not really leave very much room to let you know what we have been doing but hopefully the photos and other text can convey that.  Our work continues to go well and we still really enjoy living in Honduras.  There is a lot that we miss about not being at home but we realize that if we were back home there would be a lot that we would miss about being here.  After a year our original group of 50 has shrunk a little.  13 people from our training group of 50 have gone back to the states, mostly for medical reasons but a couple because for whatever reason it just was not working out.  Leaving for medical reasons basically means if the volunteer gets something where treatment is not available here in Honduras, and treatment in the US will take greater than 3 months, they get what is called medical separation and have to leave Peace Corps.  We are still in contact with the people who have been medically separated and they are all pretty much fully recovered.  The beginning of we had our mid service medical examinations and we both passed everything with out problems or complications. 

We have both started work on our thesises and over the next year that we are here it will progressively become a more significant portion of our daily work.  When we get a little further along with them we will include a summary of what we are working on in an update.  Our Spanish skills continue to get better and we are more and more comfortable working and interacting socially in Spanish.  But after being here for more than a year there is still a lot that we have to learn.  Educated people from the cities are much much easier to understand than the people that live in the villages who have very strong accents and use a lot of slang, and dont necessarily speak grammatically correctly.  You can learn text book Spanish but if the people you are trying to talk with dont speak that way the text book is not really that much use.  Our Spanish will definitely get a lot better over the next year as well but even when we leave there will still be stuff that we still dont know.

December 20, 2007

So coming up for us is what is known is Peace Corps lingo as our COS, which stands for Close or Service.  The COS process is what you go through to finish up Peace Corps.  It really just consists of extensive medical examinations to check and kill any parasites living inside of you. After which, rather unceremoniously, your service is over and you go home.  Our date of completion is June 20th.  This may sound like it is pretty far off but for us it is rapidly approaching.  After that date we will travel around Central America for a month and a half and will be back in the States the end of July or so.  We are not really sure what we will do afterwards but we will first go back to CSU/Fort Collins and defend out research to graduate.  Fort Collins is also where our storage unit is keeping all of our belongings, hopefully safely—although at this point we have forgotten what we even have there.  After that we have not a clue, however it is something we talk about quite a lot. 

It is a little weird to start to think about going back to the US.  It really is hard to believe that we have been here in Honduras for 2 years already and just have a few more months to go.  Pretty soon we will start the search for a job and re-enter the “real” world.  Using the internet we can kind of start the process from here searching out opportunities but we would not be able to interview or anything until we are back in the states.  Which means that it could be close to a year before we will actually be able to start working full time.  Where or what that might be, we are still trying to figure out.  Through working in Peace Corps we have preferential status when applying for jobs with the federal government which means working for places like the US Geological Survey (USGS), US Agency for International Development (USAID), Bureau of Land Management (BLM) or the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), or NASA (as an astronaut of course) could all be possibilities.  The work might be interesting but there are some drawbacks to working for the government.  We could always go back to working for a consulting firm but that is not necessarily a top choice at the moment.  There are lots of NGOs and nonprofits out there as well but there is some inherent instability and they generally don't have too many technical positions like what we would be looking for.  And there is always going into business on our own—also has obvious drawbacks.  So we don't really know other that we would like to find something with some international component.  So we are open to any suggestions.  

There have not been any dramatic changes to our lives.  We have continued our work with the design and construction of water systems for the villages.  Every project is different as are the problems encountered so the work is always interesting.  We have also started working more on our research for our masters programs which will take and increasing amount of time as we get closer to leaving.

We have talked to our Peace Corps project managers and they are going to send 1 new volunteer to Copan to replace the two of us—which will happen in May.  There is pretty high demand for water and sanitation volunteers and there are never enough to fill all of the requests.  As of right now there will be 11 new wat/san volunteers in the next training class which will start in February.  It is likely that there will be a few more by the time training actually starts but it will probably not be more than 15.  There are currently 35 requests from prospective host agencies for a wat/san volunteer so there will be at least 20 requests that go unfulfilled.  So in our case they will try to consolidate the work of both of us for just 1 volunteer. 

It also happens that volunteer host agencies become too dependent of Peace Corps (or other) volunteers.  The ideal situation is that the host agency has a volunteer for a few years and then at some point the host agency is able to do that work on their own and they no longer need the volunteer—this is “sustainability”.  The reality is that this may not happen.  In the case of wat/san work some of it is pretty straight forward which pretty much anyone can do, and then other portions of are technical which takes a pretty technical education background to be able to understand it.  So much of the work that we are doing is something that the counterparts would have to otherwise hire an outside engineer or something to complete.  This is something that most counterpart agencies do not have the money to do.  So they get into this cycle of constantly applying for more volunteers—and they are never able to do the work on their own.  Peace Corps generally says that there should not be a volunteer in the same project with the same counterpart for more than 6 consecutive years.  By the end of 6 years the host agency should be able to either do the work on their own or at least figure out how to get around it.

We run out of stuff to talk about so to continue on a theme of Latin American immigration to the US that has come up in past updates I read an interesting article recently.  It talked about the what has happened to the Honduran economy as a result of people going to the US and sending money home to family etc.  There are about 7 million people in Honduras and it is estimated that approximately 1 million Hondurans live in the US (legally and mostly illegally).  Practically all of that 1 million are between the ages of 15 and 49 and half of them are between the ages of 20 and 30—the prime years of productivity.  So Honduras loses a huge portion of its most capable, educated, accessible work force.  Which may be fine because it is difficult to find good jobs here, but to loose that portion of the economy to overseas stagnates the domestic economy.  It is kind of a chicken and egg thing—which comes first the jobs or the people to do the jobs.  Without the jobs nobody is going to stay, and without people staying there is not going to be any jobs. 

It is estimated that 4 million Hondurans (out of the 7 million population, including kids) benefit from money sent to them from family working in the US—this is known is Spanish as a remesa and there is not a good word in English for it.  The average remesa is between $200 and $300 a month which does not sound like that much but to give it some perspective PC volunteers in Honduras make slightly more, and have a comfortable lifestyle.  It would be kind of like getting $2,000 or so a month as a US equivalent, roughly. (the remesas are not really taxed either) That money coming down here is a good thing—it goes to buying food, clothes, homes and education the Honduran population.  But having that steady money coming in has had a further negative effect on the work force here in Honduras.  Approximately 10% of the people who receive the remesas from the US do not work.  Partly because there may not a job but often it is a choice to no longer work. 

There are lots of other social impacts as well.  The break up of families and the prevalence of single parents.  Or situations when both parents leave and leave raising children in the hands of extended family.  Keeping up with the neighbors who are receiving money from the states when your family is not increases the inventive to go to the states yourself or send your kids—or getting involved in narcotics trafficking or other illegal activities.  

So, Honduras looses a large percentage of its most capable work force to the US, and as a result a portion of the population that stays at home exits the work force as well.  The economy here never really improves and there are social problems that occur.  But with all the people going to the US to work at least the economy does not completely collapse either—unless that were to happen in the US.   

(I should disclose that I am in favor of a pretty liberal immigration policy)      

A couple of weeks ago one of the banks in Copan was robbed—one of the 3 banks that are here.  A small town with three banks is slightly unusual but the banks here are used for a lot more than just where you have a checking account.  Everyone pays all of their utility bills at the banks—electric, phone, water, etc.  There are a number of reasons for this—as best we can tell at least.  People here don’t have checking accounts and virtually all transactions are done through cash.  Given the insecurity of the postal system here (things get lost frequently), and the outright theft of items, mailing bills is not really an option.  One could surmise that an envelope going to the phone company might contain cash and could easily steal it (this includes postal worker theft).  Also the people on the receiving end of the bills at the phone company could easily steal the money.  Corruption and theft is very prevalent here and the chance of mailed cash making it to the desired party is low, somebody would steal it before it would get there.  Although not everybody trusts banks to the point of having savings accounts and checking  accounts (because the banks get robbed of course) people do recognize that the bank is the safest place to transfer money.  So by paying your phone bill at the bank the money essentially goes straight into the phone company’s bank account—it cuts out all the middle people and reduces the risk of theft along the way.  Additionally, your account with the phone company is immediately credited and you get a receipt to prove it, which you don’t get by mailing something.  With the money safely in the phone company’s bank account the only people who would be able to steal the money would be the head people at the phone company—and they often do steal the money through corruption and embezzlement etc.  But at least your phone account is credited as being paid. 

So one of the 3 banks in Copan was robbed.  Although bank robberies are common in Honduras it did get a mention on the front page of the newspaper in San Pedro Sula.  The article went into a full step by step detailed account of how the bank was robbed (apparently as some kind of how-to lesson for the next person that wants to give it a shot).  In reading about the heist it is apparently quite easy to rob a bank here.  It was a group of 12 guys dressed as security guards who managed to get access to the banks safe through the manager, using his wife for ransom.  The oddest part is that after they robbed the bank they told the bank employees not to call the police for at least 2 hours.  This gives them enough time to cross the border to Guatemala or get by any of the police check points in Honduras.  The bank employees apparently listened to them and did not tell the police right away and the robbers got away with 4.5 million Limperas cash, which is about $250,000 (a whole lot of money here—using my previous math it is like $1.65 in the US).  I suppose the bank workers correctly felt that if the police could not prevent the crime for happening they probably could not prevent any retribution if the robbers got caught as a result of their calling.  It is all somewhat ironic because the government has recently increased the police force for the holiday season here, and there are a lot of heavily armed police in town in additional to the army—none of which was a deterrent to the thieves.  Every bank is also guarded around the clock by at least 2 guys working for independent security companies with machine guns, also apparently not much of a deterrent.  Nobody was hurt which was good and it was seemingly not that big of a deal here.  People talked about it for a day or so then it was forgotten.  I guess everybody expects it to happen from time to time.  The lesson of it all is that I guess when you pay your bills at the bank it limits the chance that somebody will steal the money in route to the phone company—but with all that cash at the bank it increases the chance that the bank will get robbed.  But at least that way the heads of the phone company are not getting richer through embezzlement and your account at the phone company is still credited as being paid.  For Honduras that is as flawless an operation as exists. 

It should be noted that they bank that was robbed is in fact owned by General Electric.  I am sure they can cover the loss and/or have some sort of insurance coverage.  I checked GE stock and it did not really take much of a hit as a result of the theft.  Take what lesson you want from that one.