When nothing goes right

I´m having one of those days that Cuso International warns its volunteers about - one where the frustrations of life in a new country and culture build up to the point that you´re at risk of snapping rudely to just about anyone, "Come on, you people, get your freakin´act together!"
Admittedly, some of the frustration is petty. Everything seems to break here, including the kitchen clock we bought after we arrived  that has now developed the habit of stopping every time the hour hand passes "1." The electrical current is so irregular that I´ve burned through an expensive electric toothbrush, a Kobo reader, and no less than three power cords for my laptop.
One of those cords was dead within an hour of me buying it despite being plugged into the pricey new voltage regulator that the store vowed would solve all my problems. Maybe I had broken the regulator, the clerk suggested helpfully.
Which leads to another point of frustration: poor-quality goods and services. I had to be persistent for an entire week to get that store to replace the power cord, and it was touch and go to the end. Our bedside lamps fell apart within a couple hours of use after the glue used to make the shades sizzled under the heat of the 40-watt bulbs. My spouse bought the wrong kind of extension cord one time and could only get 50 per cent of his money back despite returning it in the original packaging, with the receipt, within minutes of buying it.
In November I bought a new $500 washing machine with a one-year guarantee for the Angelitos children´s home, but we couldn't get it to work. The store took three months to send around a repair man, informed me that the problem was that the digital display drew more power than the neighbourhood had available, then charged me an additional $100 to swap in a non-digital machine because the other one was now "used."
 I took my laptop in to be cleaned a couple days ago and it came back with the keyboard broken. Having lived here a year, I  know there's nothing to be done about that other than to have a good old rant in the kitchen and write a crabby blog post. I bought an external keyboard, but today that´s not working either.
The stuff all comes from the same Chinese factories where Canadians get their goods, and the prices are the same if not higher. There´s no obvious explanation for the inferior quality. But I´m starting to suspect there's a seconds bin in those factories with a big sign saying, "For sale in the developing world only." And like I say, it's not like there are any avenues for complaint in Honduras.
Putting my small gripes aside for a moment, the country´s truly serious problems are handled in similarly cavelier fashion.
I just spent two days walking around coffee plantations in Copan, where farmers are being devastated by an unprecedented attack of coffee fungus that's wiping out as much as 70 per cent of this year's coffee harvest in parts of the country. The news is even bleaker for the coming two years, because those plants will have to be cut back so hard that they won't be producing again until 2016.
Multiply that by the millions of Hondurans who make something of a living from coffee, and you've got a national emergency. From the producers to the truckers to the export companies to the two million hungry people who depend on the four-month harvest season for work, this will be unbelievably bad.
And yet there's the Honduran agriculture minister in the morning paper, assuring everyone that Honduras has the situation under control and the impact will be minimal. That's a lie.
The country - and several other Latin American coffee-growing countries grappling with the same fungus  - is heading into a natural disaster of epic proportions due to the fungus. What the government ought to be doing is jumping into this with a detailed plan of action and enough international support to help everyone in the industry weather this crisis. What it's actually doing is nothing.
Nor is it doing anything effective to curb the staggering amount of criminal activity in the country. People throw around the word "impunity" a lot in Honduras, but impunity is just what happens when you've got a compromised and inadequate police force, an absent court system, vast numbers of unemployed and poorly paid people and a disengaged government.
Those same coffee producers I met with this week told me of their little co-op being robbed of more than $60,000 last year by an unscrupulous Honduran coffee buyer. But there's nothing they can do about that, any more than they can stop the organized criminals who steal into the fields late at night and make off with their coffee crops.
How do you "fix" a country that lives so doggedly in denial of its own role in solving some of its problems? Bad clocks, power surges and lousy customer service are ultimately just irritants that get on a volunteer's nerves, but they symbolize an absence of care and attention that goes right up to the highest levels. 

Passing the hat for basic needs

Hang around Honduras for more than a few days and you're bound to see some group or another staging what I've come to think of as a water-bottle campaign.
The fundraising drives are essentially a stepped-up version of passing the hat, using empty 20-litre water bottles - like the kind on the office water cooler - for collecting the money. The campaigns are similar to the Christmas drives that organizations like the Salvation Army put on back home; it's common here to see the bottles set out in public places or clutched in the hands of smiling young people soliciting at the side of the road.
But what distinguishes a Honduran maraton are the causes that people are raising money for. In a country with no apparent strategy or funding source for essential public services, passing the hat is really all you've got.
For instance, worried families and staff from the main public hospital in San Pedro Sula held a maraton last week to raise money for basic surgical supplies. Happily, the drive raised a million lempiras - about $50,000 - and surgeons at Mario Rivas hospital are briefly back in business.
Families at the big public hospital in Santa Rosa, Copan, organized a similar fundraiser a couple of months ago after word got out that newborns were being kept in cardboard boxes for lack of proper beds. No doubt plans are also underway for a maraton on behalf of the public hospital in La Ceiba, which was recently served with an eviction notice due to unpaid rent and electrical bills.
Schools use maratones all the time. The campaigns fund the absolute basics: Desks; a new classroom; decent bathrooms; books and school supplies. And while the government does take responsibility for teachers' salaries, the reality is that they're so bad about paying that teachers are always going on strike. (As are doctors and nurses.) If there hasn't already been a maraton to fund a teacher's salary, I'm sure there soon will be.
This past weekend, people were out in the streets of Copan Ruinas holding a maraton for a young man who was kidnapped last week. The kidnappers are demanding an amount that's way beyond anything the young man's family could hope to pay, so they've been reduced to wandering around town with empty water bottles hoping strangers might throw in a few lempiras for their missing son.
Perhaps the nuttiest thing is that Hondurans don't find any of this odd. It's just the way it is. In theory, they've got a democratic government and a lot of laws and policies around caring for vulnerable citizens and ending inequality, but the truth is that people are almost completely on their own.
Maybe that's not such a bad way to live if you're rich; after all, Honduras has all the bells and whistles of a developed country for those who have the money to access them. You don't notice the rich worrying too much about whether Mario Rivas hospital has surgical supplies, because they're buying their medical care  at the bright and shiny private hospital down the road.
But it's a pretty raw deal for the almost 70 per cent of the population that lives in poverty. They've got the worst of both worlds: a government that taxes them but at the same time feels little responsibility to provide basic services.
Governments are good or bad for all kinds of reasons. One that is largely absent leaves its own cruel mark on a country, and a long line of empty water bottles waiting to be filled.

Shaking things up

Paul says I've "gone Honduran" with the new blog look. He doesn't mean it as a compliment. We've had many conversations this past year about the crazy colours, unreadable fonts and cutesy designs that are favoured by some of the people we work with here.
But I don't know. I was good and sick of that blue-sky-and-puffy-white-clouds theme. I've seen it on other people's blogs, too, which I find very jarring. The idea of someone having a blog that looks just like yours except with different words - well, that's unsettling.
 It's much tougher to pick a new design theme than you might think, though. And if you let yourself get caught up in thinking about what a certain theme "says" about you, everything slows to a crawl. (Tried out a fairly attractive autumn-leaves theme, but for the life of me couldn't think of one reason why an autumn-leaf backdrop made any sense.)
So yes, the new colours are pretty bold, but I stayed conservative with the font type. It's called Molengo. I love trying out new fonts, but ultimately share Paul's viewpoint that unless a font is effortless to read, you've kind of lost the point. I redid my haiku site, too, but had a little more fun with the fonts.
Anyway, welcome to the new me. For now.

There's a scammer born every minute

I wouldn’t have thought that a scam targeting Honduran non-profits would be particularly lucrative. Few of them have a discretionary centavo to spare outside of their meticulously itemized project funds.

But this scam is a relatively clever appeal to the ego, and I can see how it might trick somebody running an NGO in a developing country like Honduras. It involves an invitation to an international congress on HIV-AIDS ostensibly being organized in Canada at the end of this month by the Ontario Public Health Association.

My boss at the Comision de Accion Social Menonita head office in San Pedro Sula received the invitation, forwarding it to me with a request that I verify its legitimacy.

Screen shot of the fake invitation

The OPHA has yet to respond to an email I sent asking about the scam. But the $620 registration fee to be mailed in U.S. funds to an address in Spain did raise my suspicions from the start. So did the fact that the invitation is in French – one of Canada’s two official languages, true, but not the one you’d expect an Ontario organization to use when sending out international invitations (or ever, really).

I did a Google search today on the name of the man listed on the invitation as the president of OPHA, M. Jean Paul Merlier. Not only is he not the president, but his name brought up a warning on the Web site of the Union of InternationalAssociations cautioning members about the scam. It also brought up a site that featured that particular invitation and a variety of others for the use of anyone in the business of scamming NGOs.

“An increasing number of email scams are using NGOs, international NGOs, development agencies, meetings, international conferences etc. as the hook to defraud or cheat unsuspecting recipients,” notes the UIA in a message about the OPHA scam, which first surfaced two months ago.

The organization then goes on to list 316 examples of similar scams dating back to 2009. Many invoke the names of internationally renowned groups from the World Health Organization to the Red Cross as a means of luring innocent NGOs into submitting registration fees for non-existent international conferences.

Unlike those Nigerian scams with too many capital letters and a promised payout that’s just way too rich to believe, somebody did put a little thought into the six-page invitation that my boss received.

There are some official-looking logos at the top of the page, albeit out-of-focus and strangely stretched-looking, and even a photo of the fictional Mr. Merlier at a podium with a Canadian flag in the background.  The invitation trots out many of the themes popular among the international-NGO set, from caring for the environment to addressing Africa’s poverty.

And while a $620 registration fee is huge money in a country like Honduras, the invitation promises an all-expenses-paid trip to Canada and a $620 per-diem for the five days of the conference. That could be enough to suck in an unsuspecting NGO director or two.

I don’t imagine the Ontario Public Health Association is happy about having its good name sullied in a global scam. But the association can at least get a rueful laugh out of being described in the invitation as “a charitable organization of Canadian law with international aims and objectives among others to assist individuals and organizations around the world through loans for business, education, economic development and environmental protection, especially to support African organizations involved in the social, environmental and economic assistance for humanitarian NGOs...”

As for the poor guy in a suit who’s pictured on the invitation as the fictional Mr. Merlier, I’m sure he’d be deeply unhappy to learn that his photo is being used to scam money from non-profits in developing countries. But at least he’s just got three more weeks to tough it out until the date of the fake HIV-AIDS conference passes and a new scam takes its place. 

What to make of David Suzuki?

I don’t like David Suzuki. That’s been the case for many years now, ever since I showed up at a book-signing in Victoria to interview him and discovered that the man I had thought of as a kind, wise environmentalist was in fact an obnoxious, rude guy who made no attempt to hide his contempt of the fans gazing at him all fawn-eyed and adoring.

I’ve generally kept my opinion of him to myself, however, for fear of seeming un-Canadian. I don’t know what the process is for becoming a beloved Canadian icon, but have long recognized that once someone achieves that status, any Canadian who dares to say otherwise is really in for it.

But a story this week from the Sun Media chain was just too good for me to pass up. The story featured a series of emails from John Abbott College in Quebec about Suzuki receiving more than $40,000 in fees and expenses for a speaking engagement at the college in October. 

Better still, the emails - obtained through a Freedom of Information request - featured a juicy little bit about Suzuki requesting that the college also provide attractively dressed female college students to walk alongside him and ward off the advances of all those adoring fans he can’t stand. (The college now says Suzuki made no such request, although the email exchange seems pretty clear. But here's the viewpoint of Halifax Chronicle Herald journalist Paul McLeod, who thinks SunMedia went too far with its allegations. )

I posted the story on Facebook and mentioned the long-ago book signing as my reason for being a bit gleeful at seeing Suzuki in the muck.  Within minutes, dozens of people had posted comments. Within an hour, there were almost 50 comments and 20 “shares” of my link to the story. By this morning, the comments were up to 62 and there’d been 26 shares.

And the people writing the comments were MAD: Mad at Suzuki for being rude and horrible to them at some point as well; mad at me; mad at Sun Media; mad at the Conservatives (not sure how they got dragged into the debate); mad at anyone saying mean things about a man who’d done such great things for environmental awareness.

“WOW! You hit a hotspot here!” noted one Facebook friend.  Clearly.  There was a lot of passion in people’s comments, whether out of love for Suzuki and the work he has done or because others also had lingering feelings of bitter betrayal after being treated roughly and rudely by him.

Ultimately, the heated exchange brings to mind that old saw about whether you can hate the sin but love the sinner. Can we admire Suzuki’s work while also acknowledging that at times he's an arrogant, unpleasant jerk?

I’d guess that all of us have done things in our lives that we’re not proud of. So I’m always pretty careful to avoid assessing the total sum of a person based on the dumb decisions or big mistakes they’ve made.

I think it’s possible to make good presidential decisions while also being a pathetic womanizer, or to be an amazing athlete even while lying blatantly over a very long time about your use of performance-enhancing drugs. You can’t take the measure of a person’s contribution to this world solely by looking at their worst errors in judgment.

That said, there are obviously some acts that tend to knock you right out of everybody’s good books forever – pedophilia, violence against your spouse or children, planning someone’s murder, ripping off vulnerable people or charities, racism. Personally, I find hypocrisy very difficult to forgive as well, which is why I now count as unredeemable fallen stars like Elliot Spitzer, Lance Armstrong, Tiger Woods, and a long list of two-faced pseudo-Christians in the U.S. who foment hatred and judgment while behaving loathsomely in private.

With David Suzuki, that’s a harder call to make. The stories of his rough treatment of people are numerous enough that we can conclude he’s got a real capacity to be a rude, arrogant bastard. But hey, the world is full of guys like that, and mostly I don’t waste a thought on them.

So why does Suzuki’s bad behaviour evoke such passion – in me and all the people on that Facebook thread?

One problem is that he just SEEMS so amiable and kind when we see him on TV that we come to believe that it’s true - that we “know” the man. Then we meet him in person, witness him treating us or his fans rudely, and feel an astonished sense of betrayal that he isn’t who we thought he was.

For others – people who haven’t met him yet, I suspect - Suzuki’s personal “brand” is so synonymous with being a responsible, caring and aware citizen of the natural world that any attack on the man is seen as an attack on environmentalism.  

In this particular case, there was also the fact that Suzuki’s college-girl demands and enormous speaking fees were played up heavily by a controversial media network that’s more or less the Fox News of Canada. It’s a muck-raking, biased network that responsible, caring and aware citizens of the natural world love to hate.

At the end of the day, the story has confirmed rather than changed my opinion of Suzuki.  That he might want pretty young women to walk alongside him to hold all those annoying fans at bay is not much of a surprise to me, because I witnessed his arrogance in Tanner’s Books many years ago and know that arrogant men see themselves as outside the rules that govern the rest of us.

I do feel for the people who are having their rose-coloured glasses torn away for the first time, though.  I remember how that felt.

As for the enormous speaking fees and the fact that Suzuki did indeed get that phalanx of girl bodyguards he requested, that reflects most poorly on the Quebec public college that agreed to those demands. What were they thinking? What truly good works at the college might that $40,000 fee have funded?

That college administrators didn’t hesitate in providing Suzuki with attractively dressed female students also gives the lie to decades of big talk about not objectifying women. Our academic institutions have often led that conversation, and it’s very disappointing to see that the commitment to respectful treatment of women lasts only until a coveted speaker makes a sexist demand.

However, I can separate the personal from the professional. I still love the environment and those who have dedicated their lives to the struggle. I’m thankful for the work of the David Suzuki Foundation and Suzuki himself. I will not let my personal feelings for Suzuki detract from my appreciation of his work.

But I’ll also give my instincts a quiet little high-five for being right all those years ago, when I first caught a glimpse of a very different man underneath that genial smile.