A Question of Faith

"To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible."

So said Thomas Aquinas, a 13^th-century Catholic theologian.  The longer I spend in this very religious country, the more I realize I’m in the latter group, something that’s sinking in even while my respect deepens for the work that people of faith do in struggling countries like Honduras.

I think of myself as an agnostic on all fronts – religion, politics, economic theories, health trends, social practices, you name it. I’ve got beliefs, of course, but a surprising number have changed over my lifetime after I gained more insight into a particular issue and realized I’d been wrong. So I try to keep an open mind about everything now just in case a compelling new argument surfaces that requires me to rethink what I thought I knew.

Religion has been one of the more complicated subjects for me. I was baptised in the United Church as a baby but essentially grew up secular, saying the Lord’s Prayer every day with all the other kids in my class but never really taking much in. At age 14 I had a brief flirtation with a charismatic Four Square movement targeted at young teens, and diligently read my gold Gideon’s Bible cover to cover.  But I stalked out of my first Four Square service in a rage after taking offence when the minister invited us “non-Christians” to come forward to accept God.

I got married in the United Church, as did everybody in Courtenay, B.C. back in the 1970s. But faith never called to me.  Outside of weddings, funerals and my travels in Europe, it’s been a rare thing for me to spend any time in a church.

Still, I never quite closed the door. Some of the purest, best people I’ve ever met have had faith, and witnessing them putting their faith into action filled me with admiration. My years at PEERS Victoria, which at that time was intensely influenced by the philosophies of Alcoholics/Narcotics Anonymous, taught me that faith is sometimes all a person has to hang onto, and is a powerful force for good in terms of motivating others to go above and beyond their job description to help someone.

But always, I was an observer. I liked what I saw, but I didn’t feel personally touched by any of it. I internalized the values at the heart of most faiths, but I just couldn’t buy into the concept of a divine presence watching over us, let alone that crazy story about a virgin birth.

That said, I do think that the world would be a much better place if more of us asked “What would Jesus do?” and acted accordingly. And in the last few years, I’ve had some of my best work/volunteer experiences working alongside people of faith, to the point that I now prefer to work with faith-based organizations. The social sciences have gone a long way toward creating smarter interventions for people in need, but you can’t beat love.

Here in Honduras, religion is just part of life (except in government, where Honduras actually scores lower on the scale of religious influence than Canada). Every Honduran I’ve met attends church, and sprinkles even the most casual conversation with several  “Gracias a Dios” comments. Impoverished Hondurans struggling with unbelievable life challenges still thank God for keeping them alive to fight another day.

Faith also brings a striking number of young Americans to Hondurans, where they give up the comforts of home in the name of doing God’s work. I have to say, I haven’t run into a heck of a lot of committed atheists taking on similar commitments to make the world a better place.

So I’ve been trying to open myself up again, just in case I’ve been wrong about me and faith.  My workplace does an hour-long devotional every Monday morning, and I dutifully reflect on the thoughts about God that my colleagues present. I’ve even hosted a devotional – on faith in action, of course! – and spent much time thumbing through my Spanish-English bible to find the right verses for sharing.

But the more I participate, the more certain I become that I just don’t have the faith gene. Is it because I’m a relentlessly practical person who wastes not a moment dreaming about how things “should” be? Is it because my years in journalism just confirmed to me that there is no plan, simply a rather random series of blunders, brilliance, and plain dumb luck? Maybe all of the above.

Here in Honduras, I see people spending hours attending church every week while their country falls apart for lack of civic engagement and social care. And yet I've also met so many who truly live their faith. In getting to know the poorest people I've ever known, I've also come to understand that when everything about a life is sad, hard and desperate, all you've really got is faith that something better awaits after death. 

A lack of faith is often viewed as akin to losing hope. I disagree. I might not believe in divinity, but I’ve seen what hard work can accomplish. I’ll put my faith in the human spirit.

Where disaster is just a matter of time

Workshop in Guaramal II

The 14 students of Escuela Anardo Napoleon Mata listen attentively as the woman at the front of the one-room school quizzes them about how they'll respond in an emergency.
Will they jostle each other on the way out the door if an earthquake is shaking the mud walls of the school down? "No!" Will they exaggerate how badly injured somebody is should they need to go looking for help? "No!" Do they know who heads up the Comité Emergencia Escolar in their tiny village? "La maestra!"
We're in Guaramal II, one of 20 isolated villages around Copan Ruinas where my organization works. Emergency preparedness is a significant part of the work done by the Comision de Accion Social Menonita, and on this day CASM is here giving workshops to the 15 families who live in Guaramal II on managing risk during a natural disaster.
That there will be a natural disaster sooner or later is a given. This is the rainy season in Honduras, and rain can be torrential in the hills. Villagers are at constant risk of roads, houses, livestock and crops being washed away when the rains come pounding down on the steep slopes where they live, a problem they've inadvertently worsened by cutting down the forests on those slopes to make way for their subsistence corn crops.

Earthquake evacuation practice

And while North Americans can generally assume that somebody will come to save them in the event of a natural disaster, the villagers of Honduras know otherwise. The residents of Guaramal II and several other villages regularly lose contact with the rest of the world whenever the Rio Negro is running high and the makeshift road that cuts across the river bed is impassable. The village is only 25 kilometres away from touristy Copan Ruinas, but it's a long, hard hour to cover that distance, and it might as well be a thousand miles away given that few of the villagers have vehicles anyway.
There's electricity here, but the power failures are frequent in Honduras at the best of times and a certainty in periods of heavy rain. If you're lucky, you might get a weak cell phone signal in Guaramal. But don't count on it.
Through projects funded by Diakonia and Christian Aid - two of the European faith-based organizations that fund a significant amount of the development work in Honduras - CASM has been working to get communities better prepared for when disaster strikes. Hurricane Mitch killed almost 15,000 Hondurans in 1998, and nobody in the country will forget that anytime soon.
In the schools, the preparation takes the form of Comites Emergencias Escolares, headed by the teacher at each village school and focused on getting students to safety as quickly as possible. In the communities, CASM has developed Comites de Emergencia Local (CODEL). Hondurans like acronyms, and so the CODEL committee members focus on the details of EDAN - evaluating damages, analysing needs.
At the workshop this week, CASM employee Carmen Elisa Recarte encouraged people to think about how they'd priorize their response in the event of a disaster.
Would it be more urgent to replace the roof of the school or the roof of the community health centre, for instance? People in the room were slow to respond, but perhaps it was something of a theoretical question in a village that has neither of those things. The "school" is in fact just an out-building that a resident is allowing to be used for classes, and the nearest health centre is a 40-minute drive away.
The group gets the hang of things after a while, though. They agree they'd priorize rescue services for elderly residents and anyone who is incapacitated. They're not sure what they'd do about contaminated water; that's an ongoing problem in the village at the best of times. But they do know the name of the community leader charged with heading up evacuation and rescue, and they've got a plan for getting villagers to safety. That's more than they had before.
Like every village workshop I've been to in Honduras, this one is interrupted regularly by restless toddlers, crying babies and many chickens and dogs wandering through. But the audience seems to have better attention skills than I do, and by the end of the afternoon they are very clear on why they need a disaster-management plan: To save lives.
In a country where so many lives hang on the thinnest of threads, that's challenge enough.

It's Hokey Pokey Time

Fellow blogger, activist and musician Ross K - better known to his many blog fans as The Gazetteer - asked me to post a video of me and the kids from Angelitos Felices doing the Hokey Pokey.
Ross has been a great supporter of Paul and I on our adventures in Honduras, and just the fact that he puts my blog on his blog list brings a lot more readers to my site. I've been promising him a video of me playing the accordion here in Honduras that I've yet to make good on, so I felt a responsibility to get Hokey Pokeying without too much delay.
So here it is, Ross, from me to you: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDZJwNOKMB8. And thanks again for being such a good blog buddy. 

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.