On the inescapable privilege of privilege

   

Having worked in poor countries for most of the last four years, there’s a lot about The Guardian’s Secret Aid Worker feature that’s really resonating with me.

    Of course, I continue to attach the most value to pieces that bravely carry the writer’s name, because few things keep you more honest as a writer than putting your stuff out there with your name attached, for all the world to see. But sometimes it’s anonymous or nothing, so I’m cutting some slack to the unidentified writers producing pieces for Secret Aid Worker.

    I’m not exactly an aid worker in my current role of doing communications work for Central American NGOs on behalf of Cuso International. My work experience in Honduras and now Nicaragua has not been that different than it was in Canada, except for much lower pay and a dramatically different work culture. But both home and abroad, I do my work for aid organizations, whether it’s in aid of sex workers back in Canada, or women farmers scratching out a marginal living on tiny plots of land, as it is here in Nicaragua.

    At any rate, the moral dilemmas and ethical conflicts that the aid workers tend to write about in the Guardian feature strike a chord with me. Two recent pieces in particular caught my eye, one about how quickly a person’s idealism to help people in poor countries ends up corrupted by life as a privileged ex-pat; and the other a counterpoint noting that expecting foreign aid workers to “live like monks” is hardly a solution either.

    The Cuso stipend I receive in Nicaragua feels like more or less the going rate for a Nicaraguan communications consultant working in the country. I get the equivalent of about $1,600 CAD a month, which includes up to $585 a month for housing. (Cuso rates vary from country to country and town to town, depending on the cost of living of where a person is placed.)

    You’re working as a professional when you do a Cuso position, and getting a liveable stipend for the work you do is probably important for recruitment and retention. But at the same time, you take a Cuso position because you want to help, not for the money. I think Cuso does a good job of establishing a stipend level that keeps things real for volunteers while also ensuring their safety and comfort.

    But just because I’m paid like a middle-class Nicaraguan doesn’t mean anything else about my experience is the same as theirs. Even if I worked for free, I’d still be privileged just by dint of being born a Canadian.

    Sure, I'm opting to take the city bus to work, and walking in the heat and the dust to Managua’s sprawling public markets with just as much of a desire as any Nicaraguan to score a good price on tomatoes, cucumbers and limes. I’m not going to the pricey restaurants where the rich Nicaraguans eat any more often than my low-paid co-workers.

    But small stuff aside, my life isn’t even remotely comparable to the experience of an average Nicaraguan. (For starters, minimum wage here is less than $500 CAD, and a whole lot of people make nowhere near that much.) However long I might live in Central America, I will never be able to declare that I know how life feels for an average Nicaraguan any more than a comfortable Canadian who spends a night on the street pretending to be homeless knows about how real homelessness feels.

    If there were bugs in my bed, a sickness in my household, a crisis with one of my parents’ health, I could do something about it in an instant. If I hated my boss, I could quit. If I needed a holiday, I could pay for it. If I had to jump on a plane to anywhere in the world to help a family member out of a jam, I’ve got a gold-standard passport that nobody would question, and the credit card and line of credit to make it happen even if my savings weren't adequate.

    If life went sideways on me in Nicaragua, I could pack it all up tomorrow and come running home, to the land of public health insurance, pensions, and subsidized care and bug-free housing. It’s like that line from Pulp’s song Common People – “when you’re laid in bed at night watching roaches climb the wall, you could call your dad and he’d stop it all.”

    And there’s the dilemma. I’m innately privileged, with a comfortable Plan B. Yet if I’m here wanting to be helpful to impoverished Nicaraguans, I absolutely have to check my privilege at the door and consciously consider everything as if I were a struggling Nicaraguan with no safety net. Which I’m not.

     I try to remind myself of that every day, because it really matters. Otherwise, you risk being one of those awful people who forget how privileged their world view is and get petulant when the locals don’t see things the same way they do. Otherwise, you become one of those annoying development types who grows sour from years of disappointments and ends up living like just another rich person enjoying the perks of abundant cheap labour. (Check out "The Reductive Seduction of Other People's Problems" to understand more about why good people go sour.)

     I’ve visited some terrific international development projects. But I’ve also seen a lot that feel foisted on the locals because countries with money to spend presume that what worked in their land will work in others. There’s a certain flavour-of-the-month quality to much of the world’s development work, and much time, energy and hope is wasted trying to force square pegs through round holes.

     Ultimately, a country finds its own path toward change. Economic opportunity, revolution and protest, responsible government, guaranteed rights and a healthy justice system – that’s where real change comes from. Foreigners can play integral parts on all those fronts, but their contributions are most successful when they take their signals from those who live in the country.

     Aid works when it’s based on strategies that call on those with privilege not to come to other countries to implement their own ideas, but to walk alongside people who are already bringing about change in those countries and require help to get there. They need us; people of privilege not only hold the purse strings, but can recognize and develop opportunities that countries enmeshed in poverty don’t yet see.

    So yes, a person from a wealthy country who lives and works in a poor country is privileged. But that’s just how it is.  We can’t pretend to know how it feels to be poor and without a Plan B. I think the best we can do is keep that fact top of mind, and strive to follow rather than lead. 

Thanks for supporting our work in Central America with a donation to Cuso International. Here's our fundraising site. 

Nicaraguans can grow their own food, but not without land

     Who has the right to own land?

     In countries like Canada, we decided some time ago that it’s either government, aboriginals or people with enough money to buy a piece of tierra firma, and many of us get along just fine without owning land. While almost 70 per cent of Canadians own their own homes, it’s not a prerequisite to happiness.

     But the issue is more complex in countries like Nicaragua, where owning land can make the difference between being able to feed your family and going hungry.

     Subsistence farmers in Nicaragua can survive on the most minimal incomes if they own enough land to grow their food. Their basic diets of corn and beans may be monotonous and not diverse enough to guarantee good nutrition, but at least the calories are sufficient to keep a family going. 

     But that breaks down when a poor family doesn't own land or can't plant on someone else's land.

     If you have to buy your beans and corn at the local market, you’re going to need money – something that’s in scarce supply in much of rural Nicaragua. If you have to rent land to grow your food, every harvest has to be sufficiently productive that you don’t find yourself in the hole at the end of the day. With little access to affordable credit for land purchases and climate change wreaking havoc with production cycles in Nicaragua, these are difficult days for small-scale farmers. 

     Land ownership is a critical concern for the 2,200 women farmers that belong to the organization I work for here in Managua, a federation of women’s farming cooperatives that goes by the acronym FEMUPROCAN. Much of the organization’s advocacy efforts these days are focused on one section of an agricultural reform law that promises credit to women farmers so they can buy their own land, but has never been enacted.

     Only eight to 12 per cent of the country’s private lands are owned by women.  That places them at a huge disadvantage, not only in their ability to feed their families but to be able to participate in the country’s economic development. They’re up against the culture as well; even when a farming family does own land, more times than not the title is in the name of the husband only. In the event of his death, it’s not uncommon to see that title pass to his brother or other male member of the family, leaving the wife with neither land nor recourse.

     Without land of her own or her name on title, a woman in Nicaragua also struggles to qualify for credit – vital for small farmers given that they have to borrow against tomorrow’s harvest to be able to afford the seed today. Bank interest rates are brutal, upwards of 30 per cent.

     This year has been particularly harsh for FEMUPROCAN’s members in the parts of Nicaragua hit hard by drought, where some farmers who rent their lands are so afraid to lose what little they have that they didn’t even plant at the start of the second growing season in September.

     In Somoto, a particularly dry region, a woman farmer told me that with land renting for around 2,700 cordobas ($120 Cdn) per hectare, poor farmers risk ending up worse off financially than if they’d never planted at all if the rains don’t come on time. The owners of those lands expect to be paid regardless of how the growing season turns out.

     And with no additional money to buy more seed if the rains start late and the first crop dies in the field – as has happened this year in the country’s “dry corridor” – farmers are in some cases choosing to scrap the whole season and wait until next May to plant, hoping that the drought will be over by then.

     That means at least one member of the family will have to find day labour somewhere between now and then, because otherwise there’s no money for food. But day labour is in short supply as well, seeing as most of that work involves earning money by helping land-owning farmers with their own harvests. With the drought now in its second year, this is a tough time to be a small-scale farmer in Nicaragua.
     The solution is simple enough: Find ways to help women buy farm land. FEMUPROCAN's members have said over and over again that they don't expect to get anything for free, but they're going to need realistic interest rates, a generous amount of time to pay back their loans, and at least a little understanding that in a year when the weather doesn't cooperate, they're going to be strapped and might need a break. 
     It's all doable. Unfortunately, nobody's doing it, and probably won't be until Nicaragua works out the whole other complicated issue of a largely non-functional land registry system.

     But as I’ve come to expect from Central American farmers after almost four years of working here, they carry on. The Somoto woman I spoke to said all of 2015 has been a disaster, from the drought that disrupted both of the year’s two growing seasons to the community well that ran dry. But then she smiled, shrugged, and added that the women of FEMUPROCAN will just keep fighting the good fight. “That’s what we do,” she said. 

Thanks for supporting our work in Central America with a donation to Cuso International! Here's our fundraising site. 

Walking in Managua: Pedestrian tips from the front line

 My walk to work is quite a bit longer this time in Managua, about an hour each way. It gives me more time to reflect on all the ways I could be killed in traffic. 

     Managua certainly doesn’t have the craziest traffic I’ve ever had to walk through; I have, after all, lived to tell the tale of crossing the streets of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. But fresh from a summer wandering along the coddled streets of Victoria, Managua is quite enough crazy for me at the moment.

    So herewith, a few words of advice for those who would be pedestrians in a busy Central American city:

Cars rule. Never assume that any driver is going to slow down for you to cross the road. Never assume that they even see you at all, even if they appear to be looking right at you. Yes, every now and then you are going to spot a crosswalk, but you’d be out of your mind to think it means anything at all. 

Do way more than simply looking both ways. Approach every road crossing as if you were a CIA agent anticipating an assassin coming at you from an unknown direction. 
    Sure, the nice little green man is signalling that you can walk, but don’t trust him. Sure, the guy in the lane closest to you is smiling at you and giving you a friendly go-ahead wave. But what about the guy in the lane next to him? Or the motorcycle that is almost certainly coming straight up the middle of the two lanes? Or the guy turning left against the lights? Or the guy turning right from the street down the way – the one who’s gunning it to clear the intersection you're crossing before the light changes? 

    Think of it this way: If there’s a car anywhere in sight, it just might run you down. Act accordingly.

Always look behind you. This is probably my most common error. I look both ways, step into a side street to cross it, and boom, a car comes hurtling from behind me doing a high-speed left-hand turn to sneak through a big line of traffic travelling in the opposite direction.

    Equally deadly are the cars coming up from behind that are turning right into some parking lot or gas station whose entrance you are walking past. Back in Canada, such cars dutifully wait until you’re safely out of their way before turning in. Not in Managua.

Never assume that being on a sidewalk means you’re safe. Aside from major pedestrian hazards like cracked cement, giant open storm drains, tree roots, dangling electrical wires, dog poo and wildly uneven surfaces, it’s not unusual to encounter a motorcycle driving along the sidewalk toward you. A couple days ago, I had to jump out of the way of a small car making its way along. Do not allow yourself to grow comfortable.

And anyway, a lot of the sidewalks just end. And just like that, you don’t have so much as a gravel shoulder to walk along. All of a sudden you go from being a relatively happy pedestrian on a sidewalk to someone who’s scrambling to get out of the way of fast-moving buses that are pulling in to pick up passengers, or inching your way around a higgle-piggle of strangely angled parked cars, food vendors, and clamorous hordes of tired Nicaraguans trying to get home on those buses.

The safest place to cross is between stopped cars, not in front of them. Let’s say you’ve got a choice of crossing the street at a controlled intersection, or walking a few metres further up and weaving your way between the cars that are stopped waiting for the light. 

      Pick the weaving option. There’s just way less risk when you can pick and choose which stopped cars to walk in front of, and more chance of escaping unscathed if the line of traffic suddenly starts moving.

      But remember to watch for those motorcycles coming up between the lanes of traffic. Walk. Stop. Peek. Walk. Repeat.

Embrace medians. What lovely things they are, turning impossible four-lane highways into manageable two-lane chunks. And they’re great for standing on while you take a photo of all the traffic coming at you.

Get yourself a good pair of shoes. You do NOT want to be doing all this bobbing and weaving in shoes that are slippery, high-heeled, dainty, or otherwise unsuitable for a last-minute dash when all goes wrong. Never mind what the Nicaraguans are wearing – they’re experts at all of this. Get yourself a sturdy pair of runners and don’t worry about fashion faux pas.

Save the “empowered pedestrian” crap for when you’re back in Canada. You know what I’m talking about: Waving an angry fist in the air at a driver who came close to hitting you; thumping on the hood of a car as you walk past to signal your annoyance that he’s protruding so far into the intersection; fixing the driver with a steely, disapproving gaze to convey Just How Mad You Are; crossing the street at the speed of a tortoise just to prove the point that you’re the one in control.

     It’s hard enough to take empowered pedestrians back in my own land. Down here, they’d just be run right over. Come to think of it, that might be the one endearing feature of Managua traffic. 

Nicaragua: Developed but unequal

  It’s a typical Saturday afternoon at the flashy Metro Centro mall in Managua, Nicaragua, and the joint is jumping. As I watch a young barista crank out $4 iced cappuccinos at the Casa de Café kiosk, I find myself reflecting yet again on the mysterious phrase “developing country.”

  To those who don’t know this part of the world, the phrase suggests poverty and deprivation - chicken buses spilling over with skinny peasants making slow progress along dirt roads; neighbourhoods of rickety houses built from bamboo and banana leaves; poor people with seven or eight children scratching out meagre livings in tiny villages.

  Paul and I are just beginning our third posting as Cuso International volunteers in Central America. I suspect more than a few of our acquaintances back home imagine us living in just such a country. They assume that working with non-profit organizations in countries like Nicaragua and Honduras means giving up the good life.

  Yet the reality of life in a modern-day Central American city looks a lot like life in Canada in many ways. And the more time I spend in the south, the more my confusion grows over what we mean when we talk about development.

  All the stuff of “developed” countries like Canada exists here in Nicaragua, from beautifully maintained highways to fancy malls, big universities, well-equipped hospitals, 60-inch televisions, pricey iced-coffee makers, and luxury cars. The view from where I’m sitting as I write this is of attractive pink-plaster houses with immaculate gardens as far as the eye can see.

  But were I to walk a few blocks to the eight-lane highway that cuts through this part of town, I’d see a different view.

   I’d see wooden shacks with thin curls of smoke coming out from wood cooking fires inside. I’d see skinny dogs sleeping on dirt floors and families in worn hand-me-down clothes shipped in bales from the U.S., sitting in cheap plastic chairs in scrubby dirt yards. Employment is scarce and notoriously low-paid for families in those kinds of neighbourhoods.

  So the real problem is not a lack of modern conveniences, it’s that so many people who live here can’t access them. The problem is not a lack of development, but of inequality – both in terms of income and in having the political clout to be able to change that reality. The World Bank rates Nicaragua as the second-poorest nation in Latin America and the Caribbean, but that poverty definitely isn’t shared equally among the country’s six million citizens.

  The bad roads, rickety houses, and impoverished families that come to mind for those who haven’t been to Central America do still prevail in many rural areas. Rural development efforts tend to concentrate along three lines: Helping people improve food security through better agricultural practices and diversity; encouraging people to engage more effectively with their governments; and helping communities organize themselves better to prevent or respond to emergencies such as floods, mud slides, drought and other natural disasters. (I haven’t seen much development work focused on the needs of the urban poor.)

  It’s important work, of course.

  Better and more diverse agricultural yields can mean the difference between life and death for subsistence farmers, as can better logging practices that stop the deforestation that turn a regular rain storm into a devastating flood or slide. Democracy is still a fragile concept in Central America, and building a more informed and engaged citizenry is an integral part of sustaining that. Development work that improves the lives of women and girls is fundamental to improving a country’s economic performance.

  But can those efforts change the structural inequalities, cultural habits, and harmful government policies that feed the growing gap between rich and poor around the world? I don’t know. Like so any other global problems, it’s complicated, and there are many competing interests at stake – most notably, the interests of consumers in wealthy countries like my own.

  For instance, Central American farmers wouldn’t be nearly so poor if they got paid more for their crops. (The price people pay for the coffee beans in their iced cappuccino is about 100 times more than what the farmer got for growing them.)

  Workers in the giant maquilas that make clothing, auto parts, and electronics for the world would benefit immensely from higher wages. The countries that host those maquilas would have more money for infrastructure, education, health care, and social programs if the multinationals that owned the factories paid taxes, like they would have to do if the factories were located in wealthier countries.

  But in the global market, consumers demand low prices. Were the government of Nicaragua to take a stand on behalf of factory workers and farmers, corporations doing business here would instantly start scoping out even poorer countries where they could set up shop. The resulting loss of jobs and markets would be disastrous for the country.

  And consumers around the world would barely blink, because it’s our buying habits (which in turn are fuelled by our own falling purchasing power as the income gap grows in our own countries) that have led to this situation.

  What to do? Pay attention. Reject easy labels that hide what the real problems are. Come see for yourself. No country’s problems are ever as simple as they appear from a distance, nor are any of us as different from each other as we might believe.

Thanks for supporting our work in Central America with a donation to Cuso International! Here's our fundraising site. 

The life of an urban nomad

   

 This new "homeless" life that my partner Paul and I now live is marked by many moves during our times back in Canada, when we shuffle like urban nomads from one housesit to another. Since returning to Vancouver Island five months ago, we have relocated 10 times.
     It stressed me out when we first started doing it last spring after returning from two years in Honduras. But do anything for long enough and a routine seemingly always starts to emerge. We've now grown quite adept at constant relocation.
      We've been doing Cuso International volunteer work in Central America for most of the last three years, first in Honduras and now for shorter postings in Nicaragua. While we still have a small storage locker here in Victoria, we've mostly given up all our stuff so that we're free to go wherever a posting or a whim takes us.
     The periods in the south are relatively stable in terms of housing; we rent a place to live while we're there and stay put for the duration. It's the periods when we're back on the Island that are the most nomadic, as housesitting for people on summer vacation generally means stays of no more than two to four weeks in any one place.
     When we make our big moves between Canada and Central America - which we're set to do again in mid-September - we have two gigantic suitcases and two large backpacks to hold our worldly belongings. But we try to keep things tighter for the "local" moves, using only the backpacks and whatever else we can stuff in the car. (We've figured out how to live without permanent housing, but not without a car.)
      What I've most noticed about the new life is the need for a flexible wardrobe. Gone are the days when I would stand in front of a roomy closet contemplating which fashionable outfit to put on that day. I need clothes that will stuff into a backpack and come out looking not too disastrously wrinkled, and that serve me equally well for schlubbing through an ordinary day and on the rare occasions when I have to look professional or fancy. I need simple shoes that go with anything, because the bottom compartment of my backpack holds only three or four pair.
      While housesits are typically all-inclusives in terms of household goods like cutlery, bedding, pots and pans and such, there are still a remarkable number of things that the modern nomad needs to bring along.
      I have a small backpack filled with nothing but electronics chargers, battery chargers, and specialized cords for all our cameras, phones, e-books, and music players, for instance. We also pack a big blue tote full of basic items like peanut butter, olive oil, breakfast cereal and various other goods that can't be fully consumed in the course of a single housesit, and quite an alarming number of personal-grooming products.
     Then there are the books we're reading, the notebooks we're currently using for work (and the three or four others that you might need because you took notes in them for previous work); the random collection of "important papers"; at least a little jewelry, although it sure is prone to getting tangled and lost in this new lifestyle; the laptops, iPads and external hard drives; and whatever else didn't fit in our backpacks. We've also got two bicycles, but I'm in the habit of riding mine over to wherever we're headed just to relieve some of the packing pressure.
      Our rule is that whatever we're taking can't be more than one carload, and must require no more than two trips out to the car to carry it all into the new place. Otherwise, I think you could go quite mad just from the process of moving house so often.
     This new life has taught me a great deal about what really matters to me in terms of my living situation. Should a time come when we settle down in one place again, I will shop out housing options with much more insight into what makes me happy.
     For example, I now know I have a strong preference for houses that face southwest and have light flooding in through many windows. I need an outside space - not big, but sunny and private, with at least a few flower pots to tend.
      I need to be in a neighbourhood that has a decent grocery store within walking distance and an assortment of recreational options - pleasant roads leading off in all directions for cycling, maybe a beach, nice walks, birding options - close at hand. I need a decent internet connection and a comfortable place to play my accordion, ideally in a closed-off room where I don't have to feel self-conscious about interrupting other people's peaceful reveries.
     I need my own music playing on a decent sound system, which is why the little Bose bluetooth speaker we bought last summer has become one of our most precious possessions. And for at least some part of every year, I need my house to be located not too far from wherever my children and grandchildren are, because being able to hang out with them definitely makes me happy. (I also need my almost-90-year-old mother to continue welcoming two disruptive house guests who arrive regularly on her doorstep to seek shelter in gaps between housesits.)
     When those conditions are met, I'm happy.
     I thought I would miss having my own art on the walls. But I don't. I wondered if it would drive me crazy to have to do a wild search through every unfamiliar kitchen drawer whenever I needed a spoon or a whisk or a bottle opener. But I've gotten used to it. I wouldn't have imagined I could handle having all my clothes in a messy pile on top of my backpack due to the absence of closet space and empty dressers in other people's houses. But now I barely notice.
     "Flexible and adaptable" - the motto of the Cuso volunteer, and now the watchwords of our lives. Most days it's a pretty good life.

Thanks for supporting our work in Central America with a donation to Cuso International! Here's our fundraising site. 

The Cashew Girls of Guasaule

      

   I crossed back into Nicaragua from Honduras yesterday at dusty, dry Guasaule, on my way back home to Leon after a work trip. 
     Crossing a Central American border by bus is often a mysterious, confusing process that involves everyone getting out of the bus in a big herd and wandering to and from various unmarked buildings. So it was kind of nice to see the familiar face of Carmen the Cashew Girl as I descended the Tica Bus stairs yesterday.

     She was wearing the brilliantly coloured eye shadow and matching shirt that the Cashew Girls clearly favour as a strategy for getting groggy, overheated bus travellers to remember them. There is something of the sex worker in the visage of the brightly painted and sexily dressed Cashew Girl, who like a worker on stroll has only minutes to get you to take note of her and decide to buy her wares rather than those of her (friendly) rivals.

     Carmen and I had first met last Sunday, when I’d been a bus passenger heading into Honduras and had emerged from the bus into the stark, dry border zone for the first time. Carmen had blinked her vividly made-up eyes at me, touched my arm and called me amiga to be sure she had my attention, and urged me to buy some cashews from her.

     Marañónes, they’re called here. They’re sold unsalted and home-roasted in cheap cellophane bags at street intersections in Managua, but the Guasaule border crossing in northern Nicaragua appears to be a particularly popular place for hawking the nuts. Carmen says hers come from the Honduras side.

     The Cashew Girls come running when the buses arrive at the border, and there’s at least four waiting at the door by the time you get off the bus. Hence the eye shadow, layered on in stand-out hues of pink, purple and blue, the colours helping to distinguish one Cashew Girl from another in the minds of overwhelmed bus passengers (who descend into a clamorous crowd of money-changers, food vendors, cellphone chip sellers, and scruffy kids begging for money). 

     I don’t know if Carmen is particularly skilled or if her pitch simply works well with people like me; at any rate, I spent $5 last Sunday and again yesterday buying cashews from her.

     I resisted at first. “Not right now,” I told her that first time, distracted by the mysterious border crossing process I was about to undertake and unprepared to consider whether I felt like any cashews right now. “Me recuerde,” she told me as I made my way past all the other Cashew Girls vying for my attention – “Remember me.” The colourful eye shadow and matching shirt helped, I admit, and later I bought some cashews for the bus ride.

     Yesterday she was there again as I got off the bus. Once again, I wasn’t at all sure that I even wanted cashews. But she upped her game, guiding me from one building to another so that I always seemed to be at the front of the line for the bewildering process of crossing the border.

     What could I do? I bought some nuts.

     I would have liked to know more about her. How much money did she make in a typical day? Where did she live? Did she have children? Were the Cashew Girls an informal co-op that shared their profits, or was everybody in it for themselves?

     But just like any working girl, time is money for people like Carmen. She can’t afford to waste time chatting. Once she’d made her sale, she touched my arm one last time, told me to take care of myself, and started making her way toward an incoming mini-bus. 

The woman next door

 

  I’m raking leaves outside our house when she approaches me, carrying an empty garbage can that she says will make it easier to gather the leaves for garbage pickup the next day. Paul and I are renting a house for the month of March in Leon, Nicaragua, and the woman and her family live next door.

    At first, I think she has come over just to be nice, because she has lived a long time near this giant tree that constantly sheds leaves and branches and knows how to make the near-daily task of raking a little easier. But she later tells me that she always tries to engage extranjeras like me in conversation. Too many of us arrive in her country with no knowledge of Nicaragua’s troubled history, she says. She is on a one-woman campaign to change that.

    I don’t know how old she is – mid-50s, maybe? That would make her around 19 on the terrible night of May 4, 1979 when the Nicaraguan National Guard, under the direction of the corrupt and vicious president Anastasio Somoza, showed up at 2 a.m. to pull her two brothers from their beds and kill them in the street outside the family home. Right here in this very street, she tells me, pointing to the home a block away where her family was living when it happened. Right in front of her.

    Brothers Porfirio Rene and Oswaldo Jose Alonso Palma were among four young men killed by the National Guard that night. Within two months, Somoza would be gone – first to Miami, where he fled in July 1979, and later assassinated in Panama. The Sandinista revolution was already well underway by the time the four young men were killed, but victory came too late to save them.

    War and death was a Nicaraguan reality for much of the 1900s - first under three generations of Somozas, then during the Sandinista revolution in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and later through nine bloody years of U.S.- and Soviet Union-funded civil war in the 1980s. The good people of Leon – a community of rebellious university students and cultured, intellectual thinkers – were strong supporters of the Sandinista revolution, and would watch many of their children die in the streets before the fighting finally ended in 1989.

    The leader of the Sandinistas, Daniel Ortega, has been part of Nicaragua’s political scene ever since. He led the reconstruction of the country after the last of the Somozas was finally banished, then was elected president for five years in 1985. Then came 17 long years of political banishment before he was re-elected president in 2007.  

    There are those in Nicaragua nowadays who have been deeply disappointed by Ortega’s inability to deliver on so many of the promises made during those revolutionary years. But my neighbour isn’t one of them. She refers to the president and his wife as “Daniel and Rosario,” and it’s clear she feels a very personal connection to them. She says that those who criticize Ortega are either too young to remember how things used to be, or too impatient in their expectations for rapid change.

    In 1979 when her brothers were killed, this little two-block neighbourhood where we live was called Duque. But after that awful night, the city renamed it Colonia 4 de Mayo – the Fourth of May. A small plaque has been placed outside the woman’s childhood home at the end of the block, commemorating the murders of her brothers along with those of Roger Benito Morales Toruño and Noel Ernesto García Zepeda that same night.

    Remember them, she tells me. She scoops up the last of the leaves and returns to her house, called in for dinner by her young grandson. 

Reflections on the end of another adventure: There's no life like it

The loads are heavier in countries like Nicaragua, but the backs are stronger

A troubling aspect of life: You don’t know what you don’t know. As a person driven to know everything, I don’t like that.

I didn't  consciously grasp when we started this Cuso International work in Central America three years ago that I was longing to know more about what I didn't know. But I was. What stands out most as I wrap up my second Cuso posting is how exciting it feels to be learning again.

The role of a Cuso volunteer is essentially to take your professional show on the road and share your skills with people in less-advantaged countries, helping them improve their systems or their training or their processes in ways that ultimately address poverty and inequality.

But never mind the task. The bigger challenge is dropping in cold to another world in the employ of an organization that is happy to see you, but uncertain what to do with you. They will have no real idea or interest in your illustrious career back in Canada, so you’ll be proving your work cred from the ground up.

It sounds kind of scary, I know. I am 58, and once upon a time was a biggish fish in a smallish pond.  But when I first start a Cuso position, I am nothing more than an unproven and unknown older woman who may or may not have had a career as a journalist in some other country and in some other language. It is up to me to demonstrate that I have value.

But professional discomfort and profound humbling aside, this time with Cuso ranks among the most invigorating, challenging, memorable and life-altering years of my work life (I think my three-year stint as the executive director of B.C. grassroots sex-work organization Peers Victoria still wins out).

Some of the new learning is just straight-up communications culture. People like more colour and fewer words in their documents here. They’re lousy about answering emails, so you really have to try for face-to-face time. They like technology, but anyone over the age of 25 is going to need some time to figure out the wired world.

But a lot of our differences are also value-driven. In Canada, work demands often outweigh family relations. In Central America, family always comes first.

Canada’s approach gets you much better economic development, But Central America’s approach keeps people much more bonded and rooted to family – not just the nuclear family, but a hundred aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews, almost all of whom probably live nearby and drop by for a visit often. Who’s to say our way is better?

80-year-old Managua man who repairs and sells old shoes he
finds in the garbage. He gets by on 3 sales a week.

As I've said many times in my blog posts, I see my own country much more clearly from afar. On a lot of fronts, it’s an amazing place.

Our social programs are the stuff of dreams to Central Americans, most of whom will work until the day they drop dead and who are completely on their own when dealing with their disabled children, aging parents, health-care problems, and periods of unemployment. They would be agog at all our workplace regulations and benefits.

 But at the same time, it’s pretty cool to see a work culture in Central America that lets people put their personal relations first. Down here when I run into people I know on the street, I've learned to take the time to talk to them without even a twinge of thinking that it’s almost 8:30 a.m. and I should hurry into work. Work waits in Central America – and when you really think about it, that’s not so bad.

Are developed countries like Canada the gold standard? That’s probably been the question that has weighed on my mind most in these three years. I do have skills worth sharing with the non-profits I've been placed with, but I've also gotten so much value out of what they have taught me. More and more I see the richness of a “poor” country, and question my own Canadian work culture. There is a price to pay for efficiency. 

And while I like that I'm from a country able to give time and money to countries in need, I have a new appreciation for the many other ways there are to live a life - and much admiration for people whose resilience and resourcefulness is awe-inspiring. (Like the young Nicaraguan guy near Casares who fixed our broken-down car with a screw driver and a piece of discarded fishing line he found at the side of the road.)

Thanks to everyone who has supported my spouse Paul and I in our Cuso International fundraising, which is closing in on our goal of $7,500. It really has been a life-changing experience. And if you've ever wondered what it might be like to test your own adaptability by working in another culture, two words for you: Do it. 

I've just finished my second assignment with Cuso International. Please visit my fundraising page and support a great Canadian organization doing good work through volunteerism in 17 countries around the world. 

Live and learn, as they like to say

 

  I'm sure some people can share a house with people they don't know well. After four months of doing just that here in Managua, I'm now very certain that I'm not one of them.
    I thought I'd already learned most of the important lessons about life in a foreign land from our Cuso International placement in Honduras during 2012-2014. But it turns out there was one really big one still to come.
    I don't mean to suggest that the profound unpleasantness of this period of house-sharing is the fault of the two other Cuso volunteers who Paul and I share the house with. At this point, I'm quite sure they're as dismayed as I am at how it is that perfectly nice people can end up with a negative group energy that sends us all scrambling for our little hidey-holes when it all gets to be too much (which happens with increasing frequency as the Feb. 27 ends of our posts draw near).
     As the mother and stepmother of five children and the host-mom for all of their many friends during the teen years, I am well familiar with the difficult task of existing in a household full of people. Paul and I survived that period and figured that for a Cuso placement of four short months, sharing a house would be OK.
    But I guess the parent-child relationship is a different situation. You might not like that there are a lot of people in your kitchen chopping vegetables or hogging the stove, but at least they're your people. It's a whole other ball game when you don't have that family connection.
     One of the problems has been our landlady. Paul and I originally spent the first six weeks living in a room in the house where she lives, not understanding that she actually lived there and didn't just manage the place. That was a head-trippy experience of an entirely different kind, as the spacious "common area" was nothing of the kind, seeing as we couldn't sit out there or go into the kitchen without running into the landlady and being harangued about something we or another tenant was doing wrong.
     So then we moved into a house down the road that was managed by the same woman (Error! Error!), where two of our fellow Cuso volunteers were living. We liked the two of them and we all got along, and so the idea of sharing a three-bedroom house that would be totally under our group control seemed like a great plan.
     And for a couple of weeks, it was. We even made the ridiculously tiny fridge work, each of us claiming our little shelves and learning how to stack things strategically on top of each other rather than stand them in their own place. We took care to live collectively, washing our personal dishes immediately and not leaving our stuff scattered around the house.
     But hey, that landlady. She kept on coming by, usually with a poor sod in tow whose job it is to sweep the terrace, whack at cobwebs, and carry our household garbage to the curb. There is no schedule as to when they will show up, and they just walk right in without so much as a knock  - 6 a.m. while I'm doing my morning yoga, 8 p.m. when everyone's solidly into their evening routine, Sunday morning at 8 a.m. while you're sitting in your sleep clothes having a morning coffee. The other day she sat in our living room talking loudly on her cellphone for the better part of an hour while Poor Sod did his cleaning and we cowered in our rooms.
    Meanwhile, the honeymoon period of our placements came to an end and we all moved into the next stage, in which you are beset with self-doubt, angry at your workplace, feeling deeply displaced, and unsure whether you're making any difference at all. Paul and I were familiar with the feelings from our time in Honduras and knew that eventually you pass through that, but our housemates were experiencing it for the first time.
      We all react to stress in our own way. For a while, the group of us drew together as a unified force against the weirdness of the landlady and the many pressures of working in a new culture in workplaces that often seem baffled at what they should with this foreigner who has been plunked into their midst.
     But as the stresses mounted, the unity weakened and our relationships grew strained. We were having to cope with our personal stresses plus manage the way that others in the house coped with theirs, what with all of us living on top of each other. We were living too close and under too much strain to be able to maintain those polite facades that are so vital to collective harmony.

This sums up how I don't feel right now

     Then the landlady moved a young Costa Rican fellow into a shed out behind the house that we had no idea was even a room to rent. His room is so tiny that he spends almost all his time in the common space. His bathroom is mere feet away from our bedroom window, so that I have no choice but to know all the intimate details of his morning routine. No one should have to know that kind of thing.
     So now there are five of us - still sharing that same tiny fridge and small kitchen, and now feeling increasingly resentful for having to line up for stove time, bug somebody about whether they're hording drinking glasses in their room, jostle for our share of the common space. The Costa Rican isn't to blame for how things have turned out, but his addition to the household was definitely the straw that finished off the camel.
     Now, there are lots of times when we don't even pretend to like each other. I actually dread having to be at the house, and am counting down the days until it's all over with a sullen intensity that I don't like seeing in myself. I would like to be able to withdraw to some private space where I could play my accordion and work out my moods through music. But there is no private space.
     I wish I could say that I have been able to rise above it all and be the straight-shooting, collaborative problem-solver I like to think I am. But in fact I've been drawn into the petty dramas and us-versus-them intrigues as much as anyone. I have heard snide, provocative comments coming out of my mouth, brought on by an overwhelming urge I haven't felt since I was a bitchy 14-year-old to punish someone for getting on my nerves. Somebody could do a social experiment on what's happening to us.

     Am I whining? Yeah, I'm whining. But I'm also noting this life lesson in big red capital letters in my book of Lessons Learned: Never Share A House With Anyone But Family. 

    But hey, we're going to laugh about this someday. Maybe. 

Canada and Nicaragua: Different worlds, but not for sex workers

     I’m still shaking my head after two and a half enlightening hours yesterday talking with the local sex workers’ organization here in Managua, RedTraSex (Red de Trabajadores Sexuales). I’m not sure whether to be delighted or shattered by how completely identical the issues are for sex workers in Nicaragua as they are back home in Canada.

     Had it not been for us talking in Spanish, I could have easily been back in Victoria talking to my pals at Peers Victoria. I fear my new friends at RedTraSex were a little discouraged to hear that everything they identified as problems were also problems for sex workers in Canada – stigma, judgment and misunderstanding at the top of that list.

The swag from my RedTraSex visit, including a
key chain designed to fit a condom. Can't wait to 
wear my "I always use a condom" t-shirt.

     Up until we met, the group believed that a country as developed as Canada would have surmounted some of the basic prejudices, misconceptions and petty harassments that make the life of a Nicaraguan sex worker more difficult. But no.

     Case in point: The RedTraSex pamphlets, one of which is about their campaign to reduce stigma facing sex workers when they seek health care, and another whose title translates to “Sex work and trafficking are not the same thing.” The book documenting the work of RedTraSex - a network of sex workers in 14 Latin American countries - is titled “Ni Puta ni Prostituta: Somos Trabajadores Sexuales.” (“Neither Whore Nor Prostitute: We Are Sex Workers.”)

     You could produce those same three publications in an English-language version and they would be totally relevant to Canadian sex workers.

     Discrimination against sex workers at hospitals and clinics is a huge problem in Canada, to the point that many sex workers refuse to disclose what they do for a living and thus don’t get the attention they need for their specific line of work. Here in Nicaragua, almost half of the sex workers that RedTraSex surveyed about health-care access reported that they don’t disclose their line of work to medical professionals for fear of being judged. More than a third of those who did disclose reported feeling an instant and negative change in the doctor’s attitude toward them, and repeated attempts to convince them to quit work.

     The presumption that all sex workers are working against their will and thus trafficked became a big political issue in 2014 in Nicaragua, and led to the passing of a new anti-trafficking law. Having heard nothing about the new law until the first media reports came out, RedTraSex had to launch a major advocacy campaign to push back against the government’s attempts to treat consensual sex work and trafficking as the same thing.

     How completely unsettling that that very same year, it also became a big issue in Canada, the U.S. and Europe as the anti-trafficking movement launched an aggressive campaign to convince the world that sex work and trafficking are one and the same.

     As for the stigmatized and offensive language we use when we talk about sex workers, well, that’s one of the most obvious signs that sex workers continue to occupy a sub-human position in the minds of the general public, because while we no longer tolerate any number of derogatory terms for all kinds of other populations, describing someone as a corporate whore or prostituting their principles remains an acceptable way of condemning someone as the lowest of the low.

     One of the major struggles for Nicaraguan sex workers is government apprehension of their children, the presumption being that if you’re a sex worker, you must be a bad mother. I can’t tell you how many times I witnessed that same problem playing out for women seeking Peers support. 

     Lordy, how is it that the plight of sex workers is the same all over the world?

     On the upside, I had one of the most engaging conversations with some of the most passionate, powerful women I've met since starting to work in Central America three years ago. Unpaid and largely unsupported other than through a little money from Worldfund that covers the rent for their office space and some promotional material, they are kicking serious butt with their ferocious advocacy on behalf of sex workers.

     Other similarities: The women complained of constantly being put under the microscope of researchers, visitors, do-gooders and others who ask deeply personal questions about how much they make, what their spouses and children think of them being sex workers, whether they were abused as children. They complained that any organization that comes with offers of financial support or scholarships also attaches a non-negotiable rider: That if the woman hopes to receive this support, she must “exit” sex work. They complained of the double morality that allows so many of their customers – preachers, police, politicians – to campaign against the rights of sex workers while buying sexual services in their off-hours.

     And they complained about the presumption that all of them have tragic life stories that explain why they work in the industry. The reality is that just like the Canadian sex workers I've met, they came to the work for many reasons, including the fact that a single mother who is a sex worker is able to work fewer hours for higher earnings than many other Nicaraguans.

     “If you ask any of us for the stories of why we came to be sex workers, it’s different for every one of us,” says Maria Elena Davila, the national co-ordinator for RedTraSex. “But we chose this work.”

     RedTraSex has sex worker volunteers in seven regions of Nicaragua, doing what they can with limited resources to reach out to the 15,000 adult women working in the industry (RedTraSex currently doesn’t work with male or trans sex workers). The volunteers work in an informal style reminiscent of the 12-step movement to step up with personal support for other sex workers at any time of the day or night that someone calls with a problem. Condom distribution is a priority. Maria Elena says what the women most appreciate is that the support comes from other sex workers, who can be counted on not to judge them.  

     As is the case in Canada, sex work in Nicaragua exists somewhere between legal and illegal, a shadowy space that leaves workers without basic human rights and vulnerable to police harassment. Maria Elena noted that when some Managua workers recently reported an underage girl on the stroll – who turned out to have been put out there by her parents – police responded by coming to the area and arresting everybody working there.

     “Whenever that happens, you end up at the police station for five or six hours, not making any money,” she says.

     She recounted the extremely difficult moment when she was preparing for a press conference on behalf of RedTraSex and realized that seeing as she was poised to go public as a sex worker, she’d first have to disclose that fact to her mom and her children. Here or in Canada, telling your family the truth is one of the most painful memories in any sex worker’s life, a stark reminder of just how stigmatized and judged this line of work is.

     I’m both honoured and aghast to have heard in the stories of the strong women of RedTraSex virtually a word-for-word retelling of the stories I've heard in Canada. I’m struggling to process the new knowledge that two countries that are worlds apart in so many other ways both treat their sex workers with the same contempt and disrespect, denying them the most basic of rights as workers and as citizens. If ever I needed one more argument to confirm my opinion that this issue is one of the most important human-rights battles of this era, yesterday's conversation was it.

World peace, an end to poverty, and less garbage

Day after Christmas at Las Penitas beach

     Were it up to me to pick a project for Central America, it might be garbage.
    In countries with per-capita GDPs somewhere around $4,000, sub-standard education systems and virtually zero social services, I admit that garbage is not the most pressing problem.
    But it's the kind of project that is wide open to all ages and classes, in urban and rural areas alike. It provides instant gratification, and possibly economic stimulus as well if you pay attention to which types of garbage have value and set up side projects along the way. (I dream of bringing Vancouver's Ken Lyotier to the region to help the impoverished recyclers here improve their systems.)
      It's a perfect project for involving young people, offering the potential for a major change in habits and a much-improved environment in only one generation. Once habits are changed, they stay changed, meaning it's also a project that you can do once and as long as you're thorough in the execution, it stays done.
     Plus if this lovely part of the world ever hopes to really get things going around tourism, they're simply going to have to stop throwing their garbage all over the place. It was truly sad to wake up at our little Pacific Coast getaway at Las Penitas beach the day after Christmas and see a thousand styrofoam coffee cups, food containers and little plastic bags washing out to sea and strewn all over what had been a pristine area just 24 hours earlier.
    Garbage cleanups also lend themselves to developing a spirit of volunteerism. Kids from local schools could become stewards of a certain number of blocks around their schools, led around by socially minded locals to do routine cleanups while getting educated about the harm that garbage can cause. Meanwhile, they go home and lean on their parents about not just chucking their chip bags and empty Coke bottles into the street. At least, that's the hope.
     Of course, no one's going to get a high-cost blue box campaign going on in a country like Nicaragua, or implement posh, odor-free landfills with elaborate systems for capturing methane gas like the one in my home town of Victoria.
     But just bringing all the garbage together in one designated spot would be a big step forward. As it is, it just seems to spill out all over the place here. Somebody dumps a couple of bags somewhere at the side of the road and everybody takes it as a licence to dump more. Add in hungry dogs, opportunistic turkey vultures, and people who eke out a living selling what other people throw away, and it gets ugly fast.
    There is a very good network of recyclers hard at work already in Managua, as I'm reminded every

Beach on Utila Island, Honduras, that's a
magnet for garbage brought in by the sea

garbage day when five or six different people pulling wheeled carts pass by our house looking for aluminum cans, plastic bottles and anything else that has enough value to either resell or remake into something useful for their families. I watched one guy spend at least 10 minutes whacking a big piece of concrete construction waste with a mallet to free up the wire framework inside, which he was presumably going to sell to a metal recycler.
     Judging by how poor the recyclers seem to be, it doesn't appear to be a line of work that pays well. But there's potential there as well - to find additional markets, to outfit them with better carts so they could cover more territory, to get Managuans separating their garbage from the outset instead of leaving it to the recyclers to tear apart bags on the street and inevitably contribute to the mess.
     Municipalities need to get much more involved for this plan to work, of course. For one thing, you can go a long way without ever seeing a public garbage can in Central American towns, and that's going to have to change. Plus there has to be enough in the municipal budget to pay someone to empty those cans, or otherwise you'll end up with the problem we saw in Copan Ruinas throughout our time there, where the overstuffed, reeking garbage cans in the town park attracted flies and stray dogs. You also need a municipal commitment to pick up garbage in all the neighbourhoods, not just the richer ones. That stuff really travels.
    And styrofoam. Lordy, let's do something about styrofoam. Down here, it's the go-to material for all the little food stalls and comedores, and you can't walk anywhere without seeing styrofoam clam shells piling up against a fence where the wind blew them or clogging up some little waterway. Please, somebody, invent a cheap insulating material that deteriorates quickly and harmlessly, and save this planet a lot of misery. 

It takes all kinds to make a world

   An acquaintance made a comment recently to me about what it was like for me living in "the Third World." I've struggled for years to understand that term as something other than a euphemism for dirt poor and uncivilized, but it definitely isn't a phrase I'd use to describe Central America whatever the interpretation.
    Apparently the term was first used in the 1950s by people who grouped the world into countries that were leading the drive toward capitalism, those who believed in communism, and the "third world" that had not yet aligned with either side. But for most of my lifetime, it's merely been a way of summoning the image of a country with crushing poverty and little hope for a better day unless people from the other two worlds show up to save the day.
    Which is basically a load of hooey in the case of Central America.
    The countries in this little neck of land between north and south have definitely been shaped over the centuries by the demands and dreams of the First and Second worlds, mostly because Central America had something that a more powerful nation wanted (materials to mine, land for bananas, people to recruit to the cause, a willingness to consider vast canal projects that would serve the interests of wealthier countries).
     But the people here - the life here - do not much resemble the image that "Third World" brings to mind. I think it does quite a disservice to creative, resourceful and resilient countries to think of them that way.
    The modern world loves to measure countries like Nicaragua, and plot their statistics on scales like the Human Development Index to demonstrate just how far they have to go to "catch up" with countries that are deeply committed to the pursuit of wealth and thus perceived as doing everything right.
     I'm sure we have the best of intentions when we use such tools to measure this thing we call progress (although a cynic might note that the pursuit of international development is also a good way to leverage money and jobs in wealthy countries). A family in Nicaragua is just as eager as a family in Canada to prevent their mother, wife or sister from dying unnecessarily in childbirth for lack of good medical care, for instance, or to have their children end up disadvantaged, disabled or dead due to preventable diseases or poor nutrition.
     But at the same time, the way we measure "progress" for the purposes of development is very specifically about a certain understanding of that term based on the way rich countries see it. The measurements are virtually always connected to things that a dollar value can be attached to. They are often missing the analysis and context that would help the rest of us understand why a country isn't seeing more economic growth. They set the terms for how failure and success will be understood, and never mind that a particular culture might have a completely different interpretation of what counts as success.
     Nor are we very often transparent in our drive toward "development," hiding behind the needs of the poor to serve our own interests.
     When giant corporations come to countries like Nicaragua and Honduras to set up their factories, for instance, their real commitment is not to creating jobs in poor countries, it's to serving the constant demands of consumers in wealthy countries for cheaper and cheaper goods. The working conditions at many of these maquilas trouble me deeply as a Canadian, and the tax-free status that companies demand as a condition to setting up in poorer countries is loathsome.
    But don't go blaming the Capitalist Bastards. Those factories exist because consumers in wealthy nations like mine want cheap stuff without having to sacrifice their own wage levels or tax systems. Should anyone set out to improve working conditions or impose taxation on the international companies, the corporations will simply pack up their bags and find a more willing country. And they will always find one.
    On a purely superficial note, here's what I see around me every day here in Nicaragua: Modern cars driving on modern roads. Electricity, internet and good running water. Brie and baguettes in the supermarkets, and a whole lot of Nicaraguans loading up their shopping carts with such things. Comfortable houses built to make the most of a beautiful climate. Safe city streets full of people who make eye contact as you pass by and are happy to say hello or stop what they're doing if it looks like you feel like talking.
     I see people who are pretty damn healthy given that a lot of them can't afford better-quality private care and have to line up for public care. (I sometimes wonder if that's because the drive to stay alive at any cost that exists in countries like mine simply can't exist in a country like this one, and so the ones who have survived have stronger genetics.)
     In the countryside, I see farming families living on an astoundingly small amount of money in scratchy little houses, yes, but they're producing their own food. They're active citizens who are working hard to hold their governments accountable, and they've been doing that since long before the development agencies started coming down to show them how it's done.
     And the resilience - well, I am endlessly amazed by the resilience. One of the greatest conceits I've encountered since working in Central America was a European development organization's call for proposals to help people here develop resilience. Oh, please. These people wrote the book on resilience.
   One of my biggest learnings so far in this new life has been that just because a country doesn't look like ours doesn't mean it's a failure. I fear we disempower perfectly good cultures with our need to compare them to us and find fault, as if there's only one version of a world. I celebrate diversity.

***

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

The cost of development

Wealthy nations depend on poor countries to produce
cheap goods, in factories that enjoy tax-free status
in the countries where they operate.

     What actually works to "develop" a country? I think about that a lot in this work in Central America, but the answers remain elusive.
     Let's start with the most obvious issue: Who defines "development"? Do the people who live in poor countries understand what we mean by it, and that the price to be paid for it is essentially a total overhaul of their culture?
     At its essence, development is about an improved economy, both for the country and individual families. More buying power. Better health so you can stay active in the workforce longer. Improved conditions for women and other vulnerable populations. A bigger and better GDP.
     But sometimes I wonder if the drive to make that happen in poor countries is more about those of us from rich nations presuming that every culture not only wants the same things we want, but is prepared and able to change all the things about their own culture that get in the way.
     One of the issues faced by the organization I'm working with here in Nicaragua is a lack of commitment among its 2,000 members - who are women farmers - to grow crops large enough to both feed their families and sell at the markets. For true economic development, these farmers need to end up with money in their pockets that they can now spend on consumer goods, invest, or use to create new jobs.
     Nicaragua believes in farming cooperatives as a way out of poverty, especially for women. And all things being equal, I'm sure they would be. Women's economic power is critical to development. We may talk a good game about valuing the unpaid aspects of life as a woman - reproduction, child-rearing, housekeeping and so on - but the simplest way to improve a country's economy is to get both men and women into the paid workforce.
    But while it's all well and good to strive to empower a woman to see herself as the farmer and not just the wife or daughter of one, the fact is that Nicaragua is still very much a country where women carry a vastly disproportionate burden of household and family duties. That's not only a standard cultural practice, it's a necessity - if not for women, then for someone else in the family.
     There are no day care centres. No money for a paid housekeeper to make those 50 tortillas for your family every day. No government support for children with disabilities or aging parents unable to look after themselves. No old-age homes to tuck the ancianos into while you head off to sell your produce in the market, and a cultural reluctance to do that to a family member anyway.
     As was the case in Canada and the United States back in the 1940s and 50s, those very real barriers have to be dealt with before women can move easily into the paid economy. The women farmers who I meet through my work are already getting up long before dawn to get their housework done and their kids organized just so they can devote time to their farms. They don't have any more time in the day - let alone transport - to take their goods to market.
    To make development work for them, then, you need as much work going on at the level of government as you do on the ground. The many international organizations that work on development are clearly a critical part of the success of a country like Nicaragua, but there are no projects that will ever be enough on their own to break down systemic barriers to economic improvement.
     For that, you need a system of taxation. A responsible and accountable government. A long-term national plan. A government commitment to better education, because no economy moves forward on a mediocre Grade 6 education and significant functional illiteracy. Jobs that pay, unlike the $160 a month that Nicaraguans are earning to work six days a week in some internationally owned maquila. 
     (And for that matter, factories that pay taxes in the countries where they operate, rather than the maquila system that gives them a free ride in tax-free zones so they can make goods even cheaper for buyers in wealthy nations like mine.)
     Even then, a country also has to recognize what will be lost by taking a more aggressive step into western-style capitalism. One day over lunch hour, I listened as two of my co-workers talked about how hard it was to care for their aging mothers and get to work on time. But they were horrified to think that in other cultures like mine, old people were shuffled off into care homes because nobody in their own families had the time to care for them.
     To embrace the level of capitalism that has made Canada and the U.S. economic powerhouses, my co-workers would have to give up their two-hour lunch breaks during which they go home and prepare food for their families. In all likelihood they would also have to give up a flexible workplace that at the moment understands that sometimes, people are going to have to arrive at work late, leave early, or miss a day entirely to look after their old moms or their sick kids.
     Before Nicaraguan women can enter the paid workforce and become a society more like ours, their aging parents will simply have to be placed into someone else's care. Their children will have to go to day care, which means the wage level will have to be high enough to cover those costs and the family will have to be prepared to give up the cultural principle that a family takes care of its own. Their traditional foods will either have to be bought from third parties or let go of, because a person simply can't make several dozen tortillas a day from scratch for her family's consumption and also participate in the paid workforce.
      There's a price to pay for enhanced economic performance.
     I have no doubt that poor Nicaraguans would love all the trappings of a middle-class life, at least until they find out how completely disruptive that life is to family connections and household routines. But the longer I watch the world trying to bring on development with strings of one-off projects while disengaged governments sit idly by - the more I come to understand the "laid back" work styles in these countries as being about the necessity of taking care of everything back home that no one else is taking care of - the less certain I become that we can get there from here.

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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 volunteerism in 17 countries around the world.