Accountability for people in crisis

Update: A reader pointed out this May 18 story in the Georgia Straight - certainly adds some interesting B.C. context to my post! 

The organization I work for here in Honduras took me along to a rendición de cuentas yesterday – loosely translated, a surrendering of accounts. It’s basically an exercise in accountability intended for the people who are receiving services.

The practice is common in Honduras, where non-profits like the Comisión de Acción Social Menonita are considered to be serving an impoverished population in a near-constant state of crisis. CASM and its major funders belong to an association that requires its members to adhere to strict standards of accountability and transparency, in recognition of how important those are when delivering aid to impoverished communities during times of crisis and disaster.  Things could go badly wrong after an earthquake, for example, if aid agencies gave first priority to friends and family.

It’s not a process that sees much application in Canada, where mega-disasters are thankfully scarce. But as I sat there watching my co-worker’s PowerPoint yesterday in La Cuchilla (baby turkeys underfoot, projector running off the battery of the truck we’d driven up in because the electricity was out for the day) it struck me that perhaps it ought to be for agencies serving people living homeless, who certainly meet the test of being an impoverished population in a near-constant state of crisis.

When I was doing work with the issues of homelessness in Victoria, one complaint I heard repeatedly from those living on the street was that a “homeless industry” had sprung up around them. Rightly or wrongly, people on the streets were of the opinion that too much government money was being channelled toward well-paid jobs for those tasked with solving homelessness rather than into housing and services for those in crisis.

I had no idea how to respond to such accusations, because who could say? Non-profits in Canada have to release a yearly financial statement to the public as part of their annual general reports, but not in the kind of detail that these people were looking for.  And there’s no denying that opportunities for favouritism exist in the delivery of crisis services to Canada’s homeless population, where staff perceptions of “bad” or “undeserving” behaviour in a client can literally leave a person out in the cold.

In a rendición de cuentas like the one I attended yesterday, the people receiving services get a detailed presentation on how project money is spent, right down to the salaries of project staff and how much of the funds were spent directly on services to the people. If anyone wants to get even more specific, my co-worker had an itemized list specifying the benefits received in that community during the two years of the project. Families A, B and C got help to build new wood stoves. Families D, E, F and G got chicken coops.  Senor Valdez got a biodigester. Senora Machorro got a pen for her pigs. You get the picture.

I know, I know – no confidentiality. Canadian social-service organizations are very big on confidentiality. But it’s hard to be truly accountable to the people you serve without some specifics. When homeless organizations in Victoria start talking broadly about how they helped 1,500 people get off the street in the past year, you can hardly blame the ones still out there for wanting to know just who got housed. They’re looking around and not seeing much change, which just fuels their suspicion that something funny’s going on.

I’m not suggesting that something funny IS going on, of course. Non-profits work hard for the money, and have to be accountable to their funders and donors.  But public accountability to the people you’re serving – that’s a heck of a good idea.

Charities are expected to hold themselves to a higher standard of accountability when serving poor, distressed people in the developing nations of the world. Why shouldn’t the same be true in wealthy countries like Canada? Those living in poverty and crisis are literally at the mercy of those funded to provide aid. Let’s get those cards on the table.

Dear world: Send money

This is "home" for one ill, impoverished woman in my community

Every day brings new revelations when you live in a foreign culture. And when it's a developing country, the learning curve is just that much steeper. 

Even calling Honduras a developing country  is something of a misnomer, seeing as the country has actually lost ground in recent years. Perhaps a more apt name is an “unravelling country.” But at any rate, I had a certain expectation of what it was going to feel like to live in such a place, and I was wrong.

Back in my Canada days, I would have presumed all impoverished countries needed stuff. Indeed, stuff is what countries with money most like to send to impoverished countries: Notebooks and pens for youngsters; clothing; medicines; school desks; blankets.

And in times of natural disaster - when access is severely limited or there’s a need for huge quantities of certain things all at once - I’m sure such donations are very useful. But having wandered through some of the giant superstores and high-end malls of San Pedro Sula and Tegucigalpa, I now understand that in the day-to-day lives of impoverished Hondurans, it isn’t really stuff from developed nations that they're lacking – it’s money to buy the stuff that’s already here.

I imagined that poor countries were places without the capacity to make their own stuff. Wrong. Honduras has lots of capacity, because it’s got a significant population of wealthy, very comfortable citizens who have created a market for all the same things that Canadians are accustomed to having access to. You can go to a department store in one of the major centres of Honduras and find pretty much everything you’d find in any Canadian department store. There's an Ikea-size prescription drug warehouse in San Pedro with every type of medicine you'd need to fix all the sick, suffering people of Honduras. 

So the stuff is here. The problem is that most of the population can't afford it. 

This is a country where some people live like kings and the majority live in abject poverty. I sense there has to be a better way to help that segment of the population that doesn't involve incurring massive shipping costs to send things that are already available right here.

An example: my boss at the Comisión de Acción Social Menonita asked me to look around for help for a school that’s having a heck of a time providing desks and basic materials for its 160 students. So I put out an exploratory email to one of the B.C. groups that specialize in shipping such things to poor countries, only to discover that to get a container’s worth of school furniture to Honduras I'd first have to raise $6,000 to cover the shipping costs. 

That is a phenomenal amount of money in Honduras. The woman in B.C. said the shipping costs pale in comparison to the value of the goods, but I suspect that’s true only if you calculate the costs of such things in Canada. Here in Honduras, $6,000 would go a very long way if used to buy locally made desks, and would create jobs right here in the country for a significant number of carpenters as well.

I get why people like to ship stuff rather than send money. It feels more real. It feels more certain. There was a story in the Honduran papers a while back about a maternity ward that was wrapping newborn babies in paper for wont of sheets, and a few weeks later down came a big load of little baby blankets from the U.S. No worries about someone misusing your donation if you send desks and baby blankets instead of money.

But that’s really about the needs of the donor. If you’re looking at it from the perspective of the receiver, money makes a lot more sense. It wasn’t a chronic shortage of baby blankets in Honduras that led to those newborns being wrapped in paper, it was a lack of money for public hospitals.

Outside my workplace, six giant barrels of notebooks and pens shipped from the United States sit waiting to be distributed to young Hondurans. It must have cost a lot to send them here. I can’t help but wonder how much further those dollars would have stretched if those good-hearted donors had sent a cheque instead and the supplies had come from the well-stocked stationery store down the road from my house.

What this country needs – what every country needs – is a better way of assuring donors that their donations are being used wisely. We need more strategic responses that get beyond a feel-good moment of charitable giving and down to the brass tacks of economic development. I'd also like to see democratic countries that trade with developing countries turning up the heat a little to encourage more civic-mindedness in countries like this one, which appear to take so little responsibility for their citizens' well-being.

Until we figure that out, we’re just nice folks with too much stuff feeling good about sending our surplus somewhere. It’s a kind but inefficient gesture that skirts the bigger problems.  Struggling countries like this one need so much more than that.

The Kids of Angelitos Felices

In my next life I hope I get to make movie soundtracks, because there are few things I like better than finding the perfect song to fit with images. I have a little hobby of putting some of my photos to music - here's my latest work, which combines photos from the orphanage/foster home I'm helping out at with a fine tune from U.S. singer-songwriter extraordinaire Mary Gauthier. 

Hope it breaks your heart just a little, like that sad place breaks mine every time I go there. No happy endings in Angelitos Felices, I fear, but there are more smiles and love radiating from those little faces than you'd ever think possible in a life that difficult. They hope, and I hope with them. 

Access to morning-after pill hardly biggest issue for Honduran women

I want to stress right off the hop here that I am not, in any way, in support of a law that would prohibit the morning-after pill in Honduras. But if almost 700,000 people around the world are ready to help Honduran women, they could do a lot better than just to sign a petition protesting something that's not even close to the most pressing problem facing women here.
I wouldn't want to speak on behalf of the women of Honduras, but I suspect a sizeable majority of them would be delighted if the biggest thing they had to worry about was the legality of the morning-after pill. I think they've got bigger things on their mind.
Poverty, for one thing. Almost two-thirds of Hondurans live in poverty, but the level of poverty for women and their children when a husband abandons his family or gets killed  (which happens a striking amount in Honduras) is profound.
Here in Copan Ruinas, I know a number of women who've had to hand off one or more of their children into a kind of indentured servitude with another family just to be able to survive the financial devastation. They scratch by on almost nothing, living in shacks without doors and selling bags of homemade horchata by the roadside. Three of the four staff working at the local orphanage would be on the streets if it weren't for being able to live at the orphanage with their children in exchange for looking after the 30 children in care there.
Then there's the issue of violence. A woman is murdered in Honduras every 48 hours. More than 2,400 women have been murdered in the country in the last eight years, with women ages 20 to 24 at the greatest risk.
And that's just the ones who get killed. Domestic violence is still a routine occurrence in Honduras, and in the poorest communities women are so controlled and isolated by their husbands that they don't even feel able to seek medical care for basic health needs.
How about maternal care? Barely a third of impoverished Honduran women who give birth have somebody with any kind of skill alongside them to help, compared to 99 per cent of the richest Honduran women. One in 240 women die during childbirth, 10  times the rate of countries like Canada. Lack of access to standard, inexpensive preventive care like Pap tests - or HPV vaccinations - has resulted in cervical cancer becoming the most common fatal cancer in the country for women.
Education: Just 36 per cent of young women of secondary-school age are attending school. Why? Probably because a lot of them are working to help support their families, something that many Honduran children have to start doing when they're as young as five.
So yes, it's outrageous for a democratic country in this day and age to be prohibiting access to the morning-after pill. Let's hope the petition is a success and the government backs down, not that there would likely be much enforcement of such a law anyway based on the vast number of unsolved and unpunished murders, assaults and robberies in Honduras.
And seeing as so many of us seem ready to be up in arms, how about we do something about the real problems here? It'll take more effort than signing a petition, but anything worthwhile does.

I'm talking - but is anyone listening?

Communications was a tough sell in Canada, but at least the organizations I worked with had a general sense of it being a good thing for them to be doing more of.

Not so in Honduras. There must be some kind of communications industry somewhere in this country, but it’s pretty clear at this point that the work isn’t even on the radar of any of the non-profits that are on the ground doing virtually all of the social-service work in Honduras.

As I’m sure I mentioned before, my title for the purposes of this Cuso International posting is “communications and knowledge management facilitator.” The idea is that I will help the Comisión de Acción Social Menonita here in Copan Ruinas develop fabulous communication skills over the next two years, which will then be put to use in the other five offices of CASM around the country.

But as I learned the hard way in my own country, there’s no way to develop fabulous communication skills if you’ve yet to acknowledge that talking about your work and sharing your successes, your challenges and your frustrations are desirable things. I’m not at all convinced that CASM was clamoring for a Canadian volunteer with communication skills, although I do think that whether the organization knows it or not, they really need one.

 One of the Cuso reps here in Honduras told me when I arrived that people here followed an “oral culture” and my challenge would be to help them understand the value of putting things in writing. But the truth is that Honduran NGOs – non-profits for those of you still getting the hang of “non-governmental organizations” -  are really just accustomed to getting their work done and not talking about it at all, orally or otherwise. My challenge isn’t just to teach them about the tools of communication, it’s to convince them that it’s something worth thinking about in the first place.

In a different age, just doing good work was enough. But these little Honduran NGOs are heavily reliant on funding from the big faith-based development organizations of Europe – Christian Aid, Diakonia,  Holland’s ICCO.  The goal of those organizations is to plant seeds, to fund good works that model a new way of doing things: Better agricultural processes; more preparedness for floods, hurricanes and all the other weird weather that happens down here; greater awareness of human rights; more diversity for subsistence farmers so they don’t starve to death in a year when the corn crop fails. They don’t want to be on the hook for solving every problem in Honduras, they just want to pony up in a few key areas and let the country take it from there.

But you can’t model anything if communications isn’t part of the plan. It’s the thing that cranks up the volume on whatever an organization is doing.  Just like NGOs in Canada, Honduran organizations need to figure out ways to share stories about the impact they’re having or risk starving to death themselves when the big funders go looking for louder voices.

It’s hard to separate the personal from the professional when you’ve been living and breathing communications for as long as I have, so I’m acutely aware that everything I post on my own Facebook site or my blog is another facet of my role with Cuso International.  I’m trying not to become acutely self-conscious of every post – sometimes a picture of a corn field is just a picture of a corn field – but I do feel something of a responsibility to show a different side of Honduras. The country has the worst PR in the world outside of North Korea, and I figure that as long as I’m here I might as well try to highlight through my own experiences that there’s more to Honduras than just murder and mayhem.

As for the impact I’ll have with CASM, I guess we’ll see. I just finished a PowerPoint – “Por Qué Comunicar?” – that I’ll be presenting to the management staff of the organization at the end of the month. Between my mediocre grasp of Spanish and their indifference toward this thing called communications, I’ll count myself lucky if they adopt even a couple of the ideas I’m throwing out there.

But hey, that’s communications for you. You just have to keep talking and hope that somebody listens.