If nothing else, a better night's sleep

Moments ago, I sent the following email to Louis Bachicha, executive vice-president of sales for Sealy Inc. in North America.
I don't know if I found the right email for him and I have no idea if he's the right man to ask for help, let alone if he'll even read this. But I came back from my usual weekend craft day at that sad, fetid foster home that I have had the great misfortune to stumble upon and I just felt like I had to do something. 
Sealy is the biggest manufacturer of mattresses in the world and has plants in El Salvador and Guatemala, both of which border Honduras. Like I told Mr. Bachicha, better beds for these kids will not turn their lives around or save them from what I fear will be much sorrow and deprivation to the end of their days. But it's something, isn't it? 
If you read this and know of a better way to make this happen, a better person at Sealy Inc. to contact, a better mattress or grade of plastic that I should be looking for, I welcome all practical advice. 


Hello, Mr. Bachicha. I'm a Canadian currently living and working in Copan Ruinas, Honduras, as a Cuso International volunteer. I have recently begun helping at what is essentially a permanent foster home for 30 children here in Copan, and I am writing to ask for your advice and guidance. 

Given that Honduras is second only to Haiti in the Americas in terms of poverty, I'm sure you can imagine what state these children live in. I go up there every weekend to do crafts and such with the children, who are desperate for activities, and many days I feel completely helpless to do anything more meaningful for these kids than to sing songs (they love the Hokey Pokey) and make paper garlands with them. This is not a place of hope, and I am quite sure there will be no happy endings for most of these children. 

However, there is one thing that I think I can do that will improve these children's lives a little every single day, and that is to secure 15 of the most durable mattresses out there wrapped in industrial-level plastic, and at least give them a little comfort every night when they go to bed. Right now, the children all sleep in a single room on 15 bunk beds. But in fact so many of the foam mattresses are either shredded, filthy and wet, covered in excrement or otherwise in a state of complete ruin at any given point in time that on Sunday when I was there, I saw that only three beds actually have mattresses on them. 

Three beds for 30 children, which has to mean that most of those children are sleeping on the filthy concrete floor. Even the wood struts for the bunk beds have been broken by heavy, heavy use and no money for repairs, making many of them unusable right now no matter what.

I can figure out how to get those wood struts repaired. I can also raise money for 15 mattresses, and I hope I can also deduce what kind of plastic you'd need to wrap them in to protect the mattresses and make the beds easy to  clean regardless of whether they were assaulted every night with the nervous fingers, restless sleeps, poor bathroom habits and the various illnesses of children ranging in age from infancy to 14 and growing up in intense poverty and deprivation. 

But what I can't figure out is how I'll ever source 15 mattresses close enough to Honduras that I can get them here, or how to get the best price so that I stand a chance of raising that money among my friends in Canada. I need help to know what type of mattress I'm even looking for - I think probably a variety they use in prisons would be most suitable! This foster home/orphanage has virtually no operating funds and is essentially a private facility run by one woman. If I hope to do this, I need to make a very careful purchase that can last for many, many years, because there simply isn't any money in that place for anything beyond the (very) simple diet that these kids eat, and certainly not for replacing mattresses.

And so I'm writing to you. I don't know what you can do, and I'm sure Sealy hears pitches like mine all the time. But I see from your Forbes profile that you're roughly the same age as me, and that we have the shared experience of working in Canada. Perhaps you're a parent, as I am, and regardless I'm sure you're a person whose heart would break just like mine does at the sight of these 30 children growing up in atrocious conditions. You know your business, and perhaps you also know how I might go about finding 15 mattresses that can withstand everything that those children will subject them to.

I hope you can help me get them better beds. It won't change the course of their lives, but I would certainly sleep better knowing that I did something to ensure that at least 8 hours of every day of these kids' lives is a little more comfortable, a little less submerged in filth and disease. Thank you for your consideration. 

Sincerely, Jody Paterson

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.