Development aid for the wealthy

 Development dollars understandably target the poorest people in countries like Honduras. It's human instinct to want to provide help where the need is most intense.
But the more I get to know the scene here, the more I think the country needs a project that targets wealthy Hondurans. I just don't see how there will ever be enough development dollars to lift this country out of its problems unless the rich people and the government here shift their thinking.

What do rich Honduras...

What makes the rich people of the world assume some responsibility for helping the less fortunate? Some just have big hearts, sure. But mostly they pony up either because they're taxed as a condition of living and working in a particular country, or because they see a benefit from donating.
In Honduras, there's little evidence that eitherof those motivations exist. In a country that essentially operates as an aristocracy, rich Hondurans tend to be connected people who are much less likely to have to pay taxes than their impoverished counterparts. There's no system for charitable tax receipts; even the system for ascertaining charitable status for an organization seems a bit suspect.

...owe to the poor?

And if there's peer pressure among rich Hondurans to give to the less fortunate - or even fund community projects - it's low-profile to the point of invisibility. Every now and then you read of somebody forking over a donation to a hospital, but you don't see the big gifts of parkland, theatres, memorial classrooms or grand bequests like you do in the U.S. and Canada.
So what you end up with is the rich living up there in the creamy layer, with their mansions and their Hummers and their armed guards, while down below the big aid organizations from developed countries in lands far away dole out hundreds of millions of dollars a year so that the nearly 70 per cent of Hondurans living in poverty can eke out the most pathetic of livings.
Something's really wrong with that picture. Thank God for development dollars - in many cases literally, seeing as much of the development work in Honduras is done by faith-based non-profits operating on funds from Christian aid organizations in Europe. But surely foreign aid is meant to be an add-on to a country's own efforts to set itself right, not the sole source of development funds.
 How can more rich Hondurans be encouraged to engage in the work of bringing Honduras out of  chronic poverty? It's galling to see foreign countries doing all the heavy lifting with so little help from the people who have done very well in Honduras.
I think it's best if rich people talk to rich people about things like this, so in my dream project I'd gather the wealthy philanthropists from other countries to create a strategy for engaging the big earners in Honduras. Let's start with a committee made up of a few of the people that Barron's lists as the 25 most effective givers. They've clearly got it going on.
Of course, you can't just show up in a foreign country demanding that rich people give more money to charity. The plan will need to be highly strategic and long-term. But wealthy philanthropists are all about strategic and long-term. I'm sure they've all thought long and hard about their own motivations for giving, and could be invaluable in crafting messages and incentives that might pry some lempiras out of the hands of Honduras's millionaires.
Meanwhile, democratic governments in Canada,  the U.S. and Europe can do their part by applying a little friendly government-to-government pressure.
They do it all  the time when the mood suits them, sometimes by threatening to withhold aid money (not that I'm in favour of that, seeing as the only ones who get hurt are the poor sods at the bottom of the economy), sometimes by making noises about emerging markets and the need to have exemplary partners. What would be so wrong with using a little international bullying to get the Honduran government to tax its wealthy citizens as well as its poor ones, and to ease up on the free ride it gives to the country's most powerful corporations?
For one thing, it's only fair. No country should get away with heavy reliance on development dollars from other countries while its richest citizens are free to pocket enormous wealth without so much as a guilty second thought.
For another, a country trying to climb out of the hole solely based on project dollars from foreign donors is doomed to failure. Short of revolution - and we all know how touch-and-go that can be - how can a country ever stabilize its economy and build a better future without engaging the people with all the power and money?
A development project for the rich and powerful. Now there's an idea whose time has come.

On-line donations for Angelitos now possible - and thanks for asking!

Thank you to all the people who have been asking me how they could help with the work Paul and I are doing to try to support the 40 children being cared for at the Angelitos Felices foster home here in Copan Ruinas. I've now set up a page through gofundme.com that sets out our specific fundraising goals and allows people to donate on-line. Sorry I can't offer a tax receipt, though - that's solely an option for registered charities in Canada and the U.S. (and if you'd prefer that route, please check out our Cuso fundraising page).
The gofundme site takes an admin fee of about 8.5 per cent on donations - 5 per cent off the top, 3.5 per cent through PayPal for the service of being able to collect and withdraw on-line donations. If  you don't like the idea of that, you can always send a cheque to my mother's house and save the admin fee - just drop me a line at jodypatersonmobile@gmail.com and I'll send you her address!
I'm new at this and very conscious that accountability is a big issue when I'm taking other people's money. You have my promise that every penny beyond the site admin fees will go to the children of Angelitos Felices. There's now a big button up there on the right-hand side of my blog that connects to the new site - I'll be posting lots of photos and updates to keep people informed and connected. 

I can see (slightly) more clearly now

How can I help? Such a big question. Still puzzling over that one as we head into our seventh month in this challenged country, but today I finally felt like some of the pieces might be starting to come together. 

We came down here with Cuso International, which emphasizes "capacity-building" when placing volunteers. In other words, you're not here to do the day-to-day work of the organization you're placed with, but to put your skills to work helping them do their work more effectively. The goal is to leave the organization you work with in a stronger position than before you came. 

I think that same approach is going to stand me in good stead for my projects on the side in Copan. There are always going to be times when what's needed is simply an extra pair of hands, but if I can tackle some of the bigger stuff with an eye to the long-term benefits that will last after I'm gone, I think that would be the best use of my two years here. 

I've spent many hours puzzling over how I was going to do that for the foster home I was introduced to back in April, Angelitos Felices. I go there pretty much every Sunday and have some fun with the kids, and I recognize that counts for something. But when you're standing in the midst of children living in a place like that - no beds, rag-tag clothes that never fit, barely enough food - you can't help but want to do better than just popping around once a week to sing several rounds of the Hokey Pokey and hand out crayons. 

The bed thing really bothers me, and I had a big plan to find hospital mattresses that would be durable, easy to clean and a better alternative than the poor little guys sleeping on the dirty concrete floor like they do now.  That seemed like something I could do that would make a lasting difference in the lives of these kids.

But I haven't gotten anywhere on my inquiries. So I've now moved on to Plan B, which involves buying regular foam mattresses that are available here in Copan and wrapping them in this super-durable plastic they sell in San Pedro Sula for making biodigestors. I figure if there's a plastic that can withstand intense Honduran sunlight and the constant heat of fermenting cow manure - the sausage-shaped biodigestors are used on small farms here to transform manure into methane gas for cooking - it should be tough enough to handle 30 kids and all the urine, poo, vomit and fidgety hands they can muster for several years. 

On the up side, I can probably do the project for less than $1,000 if I do it this way, compared to $1,000 for each hospital mattress even if I did get so lucky as to get even one mattress company to reply to my inquiries. On the down side, I am imagining how it's going to go when the time comes for me and my partner to wrestle 30 foam mattresses into heavy-duty plastic (which handily comes in tube form) and seal the ends using a candle. Not pretty. 

I think I can also scrounge around for money for a ceramic-tile floor for the big, empty room where the kids spend 90 per cent of their time. Right now it's dirty, painted concrete - hard to clean, scabby-looking, and definitely worsening the general grimness of the place. It's not like a new floor will turn anybody's lives around, but a better living environment for kids that spend so many hours trapped inside seems like a good investment. 

Perhaps there's also an opportunity to do some relationship-building between Angelitos and the international medical community that runs clinics here, because there sure are a lot of  medical needs among the kids at the home. The public health care here is scant and somewhat sketchy, and chronic health conditions go untreated all the time because nobody has the money for medications.

And then there's short-term stuff I can help with: Swims at the pool every couple of weeks; crafts and songs; help with staples like eggs, cheese, laundry soap, disposable diapers. That's not really capacity-building, because the goods stop coming as soon as I'm no longer here. But I have a secret hope that I can rebuild some of the broken connections between the home and the Copan community along the way that will carry on once my Honduran adventure wraps up. When people see you doing good deeds, sometimes it puts them in more of a mood for such things as well. 

Then there's corporate sponsors. After my lack of progress on finding a mattress company that would even send me so much as a thanks-for-your-inquiry email - and all I wanted was a chance to buy their product -  - I'm keeping my expectations in check on this front. But still, you'd think that a company like Nestle's or Kimberley Clark (respective makers of Nido milk products and Huggies diapers, dominant brands here) might have a heart for kids with absolutely nothing. At any rate, it never hurts to ask. 

I'm looking into on-line fundraising options, like gofundme.com, in order to have a slightly more professional donating option for some of my friends who want to help. Right now all I can do is suggest they send a cheque made out to me to my mother's address in Victoria, which seems quite lame. It's nice people trust me to do the right thing, but I'd really like to be able to demonstrate more accountability and get more specific about the projects that are catching my eye. 

Thank you to the readers with experience in some of this work, who've been very generous with their advice.  Little by little, a plan is taking shape.

 

Seasons change but the warm days never end

There is something of an eternal summer feeling to life in Honduras, which suits me just fine. I spent much of my Canadian summers in a state of mild anxiety, trying to pack as much outdoor time as possible into the scant weekends when the days were warm enough for the beach. No more.

But while the warm days are virtually a constant here in Copan, the seasons do change. They bring different birds, different bugs, more or less leaves on the trees, a different feel to the day. 

Copanecos consider this time of year to be "winter," because it rains more. But whatever they want to call it, it's summer.  The flowering trees are in full bloom, the vegetation is lush and green. Young birds are everywhere, having hatched in the last couple of months and grown big enough to be testing out their wings and making those distinct and somewhat abrasive feed-me calls common to young birds the world over. 

The lizards clearly come into their own in the rainy season as well. The little barking geckos that hang around in the rafters of our house appear to be year-round residents, but since May I've seen and heard a lot more of the larger varieties skittering around in the gravel and dead leaves at the edges of the dirt roads I walk. But the dinosaur-like crested fellows that occasionally darted across the road on their hind legs have vanished, so I'll have to presume they prefer the dry months of February, March and April.

There is a particular type of cicada that sings in the trees in the runup to Semana Santa in March or April, and another kind that heralds the start of the rainy season in mid-May. Lately I've been hearing another kind with a higher pitch to its song, perhaps a variety that ushers in this pleasant period during July and August  that the Copanecos call "summer in the middle of winter." 

The days leading up to the rainy season also brought out an extraordinary number of small black and tan beetles, which I enjoyed until their numbers grew so large that I couldn't put a foot down near my desk at work without crushing one. They're gone now, as are the the leafcutter ants that a month ago were diligently carting bits of leaves past our front door every night. 

We arrived here in January, and I briefly thought Copan was going to be a place with cooler temperatures and more drizzle, because that was what that time of year tends to bring. But then the heat hit in mid-February and we went weeks without rain, and April brought a dry, intense heat that had us sweating through long, restless nights and rushing out to buy fans for our house and our overheated computers.

The rainy season arrived in mid-May and the brown hills were suddenly lush and green. I'd almost convinced myself that Copan was a place without many mosquitoes, but soon learned that's only true in the dry months. It has motivated me to keep taking those nasty, bitter malaria pills, and to hope that the locals are right in their assurances that dengue fever is a problem only on the coast.

If you're a birder like me, you also mark the changing seasons by what you see through your binoculars. The Montezuma oropendolas were splendid when we first got here, making their crazy yodelling calls and building magnificent dangling nests at the tops of the tallest trees. They've since moved on to wherever oropendolas go in July, but now the corn fields are full of white-collared seed eaters,  lesser goldfinches and grosbeaks, and the trees along the river are full of kiskadees and flycatchers.

May and June were fine months to see turquoise-browed motmots, exotic fellows with tails like cuckoo clocks. Copanecos know them as guardabarrancos for their habit of nesting in dirt cliffs. I spent several happy weeks seeing them on almost every bird walk. 

The sightings have become rarer in recent days, but in the last month I've seen collared aracaris twice. This place used to be thick with black vultures, but their ranks seem to have thinned lately. As for green herons, I need only walk a short distance to the sewage settling ponds, where they appear to be year-round residents.

Nobody seems to have a name for the season that starts around October, so I guess we'll see what that brings. People here in Copan consider that time of year to be frio, but that just means temperatures in the mid-20s. Hurricane season will be wrapping up right around then on the coast - could be the perfect time for that trip to Roatan we've been talking about. 

Fall will be settling in around Victoria about that time, and I will think fondly of that nice sharpness that the mornings get as a Canadian autumn takes hold.  But then I'll remember how Novembers tend to play out. I suspect a change of insects and another warm day will look pretty good at that point. 

Ignorance persists in absence of options

I knew I wasn't in Kansas anymore when I read a story not too long ago in one of the Honduran papers in which the leading medical expert on mental illness in the country described bipolar disorder as a "split personality," with one personality prone to committing violent acts. 

Yesterday, there was a column in La Prensa defending the government's 2005 decision to prohibit gay people from adopting children. The writer noted it was a well-known fact that if gay people raise children, the children often turn gay themselves.

Uh-huh. Such blatant falsehoods have started me reflecting on how other countries managed to grow past similarly uninformed and harmful points of view. You need the will, of course, but you also need the mechanisms for combating ignorance. Honduras is really lacking on that front. 

In Canada, we like to gripe about our governments and their lack of attention to the things we care about. Admittedly, virtually any social progress requires much pressuring of the government of the day and a dogged determination to keep an eye on them forever lest they backtrack as soon as you're not looking. But at least it's possible in Canada. In Honduras, not so much. 

Take the examples of mental illness or gay rights, for instance. It wasn't so long ago in Canada that many people thought about those issues with the same level of ignorance that's common in Honduras. 

So how did that change? As representatives of those groups can attest, it's a long, slow process that is at constant risk of being subverted by even a single high-profile event that sidetracks a nervous public (the tragic beheading committed by a mentally ill man on a Greyhound bus a couple years ago comes to mind ). Eradicating stereotypes and prejudice even in progressive countries like Canada will always be something of a work in progress.

 But having governments that are at least a little susceptible to voter pressure and persuasion is critical to such efforts, as are public forums where you can safely raise a contrary opinion. Here in Honduras, you won't even find a letters-to-the-editor section in the newspapers, let alone anything resembling a responsive government. How do you get traction for social change in the absence of mechanisms for broadening the public conversation and ultimately turning up the heat on government?

I don't know where things like mental-health awareness and gay rights fall on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, but almost 70 per cent of Hondurans exist at the bottom of that hierarchy. It could be that the struggle for survival simply doesn't leave enough time in the day for worrying about human rights and seriously flawed views on mental illness. And like I say, there's nobody to complain to anyway.

But if life is incredibly difficult for the average Honduran, I can't even imagine what it must be like for those living with mental illness. The death rates must be phenomenal. 

 I'm told there's a big asylum in San Pedro Sula where people are locked up for what is often probably a lifetime. What must conditions be like inside there? That comment about split personality made by the Honduran bipolar expert was in reference to a story about a mentally ill man who had killed his father and was about to be jailed for life in an iron cage so small he couldn't even stand up in it. 

As for being openly gay in Honduras, forget it. People live deep in the closet,  rightly fearing the violence and public vilification they'd endure otherwise. In 2005, Honduras even went so far as to amend its constitution to ban gay marriage and specifically prohibit gay people from adopting or having custody of a child. 

I wish I was naive enough to still believe that international sanctions on things like this would be enough to bring a country around. 

But such fights are never won from the top down. Canada recognizes gay rights because thousands of brave Canadians risked it all over many decades to speak out, and an independent judiciary and eventually a reluctant government pulled alongside. Canada has (mostly) humane and research-based strategies for the treatment of mental illness because millions of families endured and endured and endured, and courageously told their stories so that others would understand.

Maybe the day will come for Honduras, too. Until then, it's the dark ages.