If the Man With No Name was a woman...

 

   I’m fascinated by my new boss, the presidenta of Femuprocan.

     She’s a hard-core campesina and colectivista, of an era that would have known the revolutionary years of Nicaragua’s Sandinista movement. Whenever I see her, she’s standing off to one side of the group, cigarette in hand, observing the scene with an impenetrable gaze. Cue the theme song from “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.”

     She intimidated me when I met her on my first day of work this past Monday, me in my summer dress and sandals with my hair up, her in what I now think of her uniform: jeans; long-sleeved shirt suitable for labouring in the fields; worn sneakers. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and not of the flippy, going-to-the-mall variety.

     She gave me a good once-over and declared in a deep, union-president kind of voice that Femuprocan was an organization of el campo – of the countryside, which I understood by her tone to mean not the kind of place where women with girly hair-dos wore summer dresses and sandals. I told her I loved working in the countryside and had better shoes at home. That seemed to break the ice.

     Her name is Martha Heriberta Valle. I don’t know her age and wouldn't dare ask, but I would guess somewhere in her 60s. She has led Femuprocan since the women’s agricultural organization first broke away from a mixed-sex agricultural group back in the 1990s, the women having decided that they would never be heard as long as they belonged to an association where men were always listened to first and priorized the projects. Part of my orientation this week included watching a video with photos from the early days of Femuprocan. There was Martha, looking exactly the same as she does now.

      By the end of this week, Martha appeared to be warming to me. I don’t know why. Maybe it was because I helped clear the table after our first group lunch together, demonstrating good colectivista behaviour. Maybe it was because I jumped right into the work - taking photos, chatting up the campesinas when we all went to a meeting out of town on Thursday, asking how I could be helpful.   As it turns out, Martha and I share a dislike for too much blah-blah-blah, preferring action over talk.

     Most likely it was because I told her she was welcome to come all the way into my little office even if she had a cigarette in her hand rather than stop at the entrance, as is her custom. “They say these things will kill me,” she joked in Spanish, gesturing with her cigarette, “but what’s more likely to kill me are the cars in the street.”

     I have long loved a good orator, the way the union movement used to grow them back when Scottish men with thick accents and big hand gestures ran things. Martha is all of that. She doesn't say much, but when she does, people listen. When I went to a meeting with my co-workers this week to plan Femuprocan's 17^th annual farm fair, several women shared with me in passing some bit of Martha wisdom: That a good productora is punctual; that power is in the collective, not the individual. I expect I’ll return to Canada with several Martha-isms added to my lexicon.

     The meeting was at a demonstration farm that Femuprocan has about 70 kilometres north of Managua. Martha was already there when we arrived. I later asked her if she lived in that area, presuming she would have driven out with us if not. She told me that she hadn't lived anywhere for 40 years, preferring to roam from place to place.

     “I can stay for two days somewhere, but by the third day I want to leave,” she said. “I've got my truck and my backpack. That’s enough for me.”

      Cue the Ennio Morricone music. Martha, I think I’m going to like you. 

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I'm on assignment with Cuso International. Please visit my fundraising page and support a great Canadian organization doing good work through volunteering in 17 countries around the world. 

Like everything else, international volunteering gets easier with experience

 

Home sweet home for the next four months

  Meet new boss: Check. Open Nicaraguan bank account: Check. Find place to live in Managua for the next four months: Check.
    And so we are ready, Paul and I, for whatever comes next.
As we had expected, we are settling into our Cuso International positions much quicker this time around, having been able to draw on our last experience in Honduras and get things done in a much more efficient fashion. There will be unexpected bumps and frustrations to come; there always are. But how different it feels to be a more seasoned Central American volunteer, not to mention being relatively fluent in Spanish, as compared to the rather stunned and stumbling first-timers we were three years ago.
     House-hunting was a breeze this time, what with us knowing that the only way to make it happen is to hit the bricks and ask anyone who passes by whether they know of a place to rent.
    We had a free afternoon on Thursday during our Cuso in-country training and seized upon it to walk around the neighbourhood near our offices seeking out for-rent signs. When a security guard in the 'hood spotted us looking uncertain and asked if he could help us with anything, we knew enough to just fess up that we were looking for a place to rent, and then follow him without hesitation as he walked us to a big shared house nearby with five habitaciones for rent. Within a couple of hours, we'd met the landlady, brought a Cuso staff member around to check the place out, and were set to move in (which we did today).
     What was even more different than last time was the meeting that same day with my contraparte, the vice-president of the Nicaraguan NGO where I'll be working, I had such little Spanish last time around that I could only sit like a silent lump last time around, saying a few sentences I'd rehearsed in my head but nothing more. Happily, two-plus years working in an all-Spanish environment in Honduras meant that this time out I could actually have a discussion with my new boss at the Federacion Agropecuaria de Cooperatives de Mujeres Productores del Campo de Nicaragua (FEMUPROCAN), and develop a work plan with her for the next four months.
    I think I accomplished a lot in my last placement in Honduras by the time almost two and a half years had passed, and never mind that I had such poor Spanish initially. But a four-month placement this time around means I have to be on it right from the start. I am grateful for the language skills acquired in Honduras that are going to let me do that.
     In the last posting, I was primarily working in communications. This time, I'll be helping FEMUPROCAN develop a database to improve their collection and reporting of statistics from the almost 2,000 women they work with in the country, and reviewing manuals that FEMUPROCAN believes are very important but under-utilized. Once again, I'm grateful for all the lessons I learned in Honduras around such things, the most vital being that in countries where literacy is a challenge for much of the population and oral communications are the norm, any written information has to be put together with all of that in mind if there's any hope of it being utilized.
    It'll be a challenge. But that's what I love about working with Cuso in developing countries. Can't wait to learn more.
     

Fresh from the experience of a lifetime - join us June 5 for photos and stories

   

    Picking the photos for our event tomorrow night has been like a kaleidoscope journey through our two-plus years in Honduras, immersed in all the memories packed into however many hundreds of gigabytes of pictures and videos we collected over that time.

   As always, I’m reminded that it’s the people that make a photo. In the moment I’m drawn to the scenics – and we’ll certainly be including a few of those at the Victoria Event Centre tomorrow. But the ones that make me smile are the ones with people: Bustling about in our little town of Copan

Ruinas; packing a gun in their back pocket to a farming workshop; lovingly tending the graves of their loved ones; horsing around on the beautiful beaches at Batalla in the Moskitia.

   What a place. What an experience. We have been home 2 months now, and I’m really feeling grateful to Cuso International and the Comision de Accion Social Menonita – my placement in Honduras – for such an amazing opportunity. It has been a time like the three-year period when I headed up PEERS Victoria a decade ago: Life-altering, in

ways that will shake up my opinions, decision-making, passions, work habits and approach to life for years to come.

   I hope you’ll join us tomorrow, June 5, 7 p.m., and share some of our Honduran stories with us. We’re raising money at the event for a group of abandoned children growing up in the little town where we lived, Copan Ruinas, but the night itself is more just a chance to share the experience of living and working in a Central American country for the past 28 months.

   I know there are many people out there wondering about work opportunities like this, wondering what it would mean to step out of their lives for a while and into something completely different. Please come to the Victoria Event Centre, 1415 Broad St., and let us fill you in. I find myself using empty phrases like “an amazing experience!” and “A fabulous opportunity!” when people ask me how we liked our time in Honduras, but I’m hoping we can get past the platitudes tomorrow night and impart more of what it really felt like to have this experience.

    We’re asking for $20 at the door, with all proceeds to Casita Copan and Cuso International. And hey, a bonus: Drinks, 20 or so terrific silent auction items, and a chance to meet each other in person, not to mention a guest appearance from the dog we brought back from Honduras, Maggie (aka White Dog). 

    Big thanks to Anne Mullens, Vivian Smith and  Sante Communications Group for organizing the evening!

   To Honduras With Love   7 p.m. Thursday, June 5   Victoria Event Centre, 1415 Broad Street

It's all about the little things. Or so I tell myself

  “Turn a bit more this way,” my co-worker advised Friday as he arranged a couple of us for a photo while we gathered for a goodbye cappuccino. “I want to make sure the light is behind me.”

    Music to my ears, my Copan friend. As I bid farewell to Honduras after more than two years of trying to help my workmates get the hang of good communications, I don’t want to just hear that they’ll miss me. I want to hear that they won’t forget all the things we’ve been working on this whole time.

    Better photos was a biggie. All the funders want their projects well-documented through photos, but my workmates are renowned for taking atrociously bad photos. So hearing Edy talking about repositioning himself to get a better photo – well, I feel really good about that, what with all the talks and training around photos during which I was never sure whether any of them were very into it.

    We did a lot of work around Facebook, too.  I think it could be an incredible tool for small development organizations in terms of sharing knowledge and information about their projects, and Facebook’s extroverted nature is a good match for Hondurans, most of whom who are exceedingly extroverted.

    I guess we’ll have to see whether any of that training sticks, though. While I’ve tried to keep the regions’ Facebook pages lively, there’s not much evidence to this point that anyone is going to pick such things up after I’m gone. But hey, hope springs eternal.

    Looking back on things, I really had no idea when we started in February 2012 what I and the Comision de Accion Social Menonita might accomplish by the end of our time together. There were times in the first year when I thought it was all going to be hopeless. But something started to click around the nine-month mark. I began letting go of my expectations, and they began thinking that maybe I could actually be helpful.     And away we went.

    The goal of Cuso International’s work is largely around building capacity – in other words, help people develop some new ways of doing things that they can continue doing after the volunteer goes home. Sounds good, but what I’ve found when it comes to communications – in Honduras and in Canada – is that it’s not just a task of teaching eager people how to tell their stories better, it’s about convincing them that they should even be interested in that.

    So any capacity-building work thus involves a good deal of salesmanship in the early stages, at least when the subject is communications. In fact I’ve had to remain a salesperson right through these two years, grabbing every chance to jump into a conversation with some cheery advice about turning a particular moment or bit of news into a communications opportunity. But in the end we got a lot done, from videos and web sites to easy-to-use guides on growing better cocoa, not to mention about a million photos.

    As I’ve discovered about development work, there comes a time when you look at the little thing you’re trying to do in the midst of profound, complex problems like widespread poverty, staggering levels of violence and murder, a completely inadequate education system and babies dying for want of basic, cheap medical care, and you think, Really? Getting these guys to post photos on Facebook more often is going to change the future for this beleaguered country?

    But on my better days I see that you can’t change the big stuff without changing the small stuff first. If CASM can talk more effectively about the work it does, it can attract more funding, which in turn creates projects but also jobs, something that Honduras needs most to start to turn things around. If CASM can document its work in videos, it can demonstrate conditions in its communities – the impossible roads, the lack of infrastructure, the challenges in getting goods to market - that might lead to more realistic interventions by funders rather than quite so much pie-in-the-sky projects that don’t take into account the reality of life here.

    If NGOs were to share the findings of their projects more widely, other NGOs could replicate the successes and avoid the failures, and together they could strengthen the social fabric and build economic networks rather than just do the same survival-based projects over and over again in isolation. (As one funder acquaintance noted, “We can’t just keep on doing beans and corn.”)

    But while I’d be happy to claim a tiny speck of credit for perhaps improving organizational communications in Honduras, one thing I became more convinced of the longer I was here was that it will take a lot more than cheery development work to turn things around here. This place needs an uprising. Were it up to me, I’d be fomenting revolution.

    There’s a lot of money at the top in Honduras, but most of it never makes it down to where it counts. It’s nice that the international community is here with all our dreams of helping Hondurans be less poor, but at what point do wealthy Hondurans and the government start assuming more responsibility for that? And what’s it going to take to get all the mistreated and neglected people down below to start making more noise about all of that?

    When the revolution does come, it’s nice to think that at least a few more of them now know to turn their backs to the sun when documenting it all in photos. When they’re ready to foment, I hope they call me – I've got all kinds of communications tips on that front.