The gap that just keeps growing

 
     Something about being in the capital of Honduras in the runup to Christmas has really brought the income disparity issue home to me. I was in one of the big malls this week looking for books to take back to the Angelitos Felices kids as a gift, and seeing all those shiny $25 children's books that rich Hondurans are buying for their own kids just made me really sad.
   The gap between the rich and the poor exists everywhere, of course. In Canada, the average income for the top 20 per cent of the population is 5.5 times as much as the bottom 20 per cent. But in Honduras, the top fifth earn almost 30 times as much as the bottom fifth. (In the U.S. in 2012, incomes for the top 1 per cent grew by 20 per cent compared to a 1 per cent growth for everybody else, creating the biggest income gap since the 1920s.)
    Just how much wealth Honduras actually has is never clearer than when you're in Tegucigalpa, where the malls just keep getting bigger and the prices in the high-end designer stores are the same as what you'd find in the same store in New York City.
    The contrast is disconcerting. In the capital, you could be dining at a super-flash Thai restaurant in Tegucigalpa listening to a fine jazz trio (see my little video above) even while the 14 kids at Angelitos back in Copan Ruinas are scratching by on the simplest diet imaginable in a children's home that regularly has neither electricity nor water because the woman who runs it can't afford to pay the bills.
    I really hope the campesinos that my organization works with never have to see just how rich Tegus is, because the one saving grace about being poor in Honduras is knowing that so many others are poor too that it's almost a normal state. I fear it just might break their hearts to see for themselves how unbelievably wealthy some of their countrymen are, including their political leaders.
   Wealth distribution ought to be a subject that consumes all of us. The gap between the rich and poor is tied to every health indicator out there, and is a significant determinant of the future of a country. If Honduras just took two per cent of the earnings of the top fifth and redistributed that money to the poorest fifth - as education scholarships, for instance - it would effectively increase their income by 40 per cent.
    So much positive change at the bottom of the income scale, so little impact on those with the big money. But the rich and powerful in the country just keep on pocketing that wealth and leaving it to international development organizations to bail out Honduras' poor. Makes a person want to pack up the development tent and go home.
     

Shades of grey

   

It’s complicated. I find myself using that phrase a lot these days, pretty much every time a friend from back home asks me my opinion on any of the big issues at play in Honduras.

    Were the elections clean? It’s complicated. Which party would best serve Honduras? Complicated. Is it true narco-traficantes are calling all the shots? Well, that’s…complicated. Is the country being ruined by drug trafficking? Sorry, that one’s complicated, too.

    You get the picture. I thought I saw the world in shades of grey already, but it took Honduras to introduce me to just how many shades there really are. Even things that I once thought I had nailed in terms of how I felt about them – poverty, child labour, murder, violence – I now find myself rethinking.

    A friend sent me an article this week that talked about the vast majority of Hondurans living in “abject poverty." It struck me that while it’s true that millions of people here lack worldly goods, secure incomes and money, it’s simplistic and even insulting to portray their lives as one of abject poverty.

     I don’t know how they manage with so few resources, but they do. There is much to be admired in people who can take a small plot of land and feed themselves and their families, and who keep moving forward despite being constantly beset by new problems. While I’ll certainly never use the phrase “poor but happy” again or romanticize a simple life off the grid, we’re not doing Hondurans any favours by painting everybody here as helpless victims living desperate lives.

    That’s not to suggest we should quit paying attention to poverty reduction, or that developed countries should get a free ride on policies and practices that create and support poverty in the countries where they have commercial interests. But slapping an “abject poverty” label on the country really does a disservice to the resilient, resourceful people who have figured out how to live on scant and irregular incomes of $150 or less a month.

    As for murder, that’s a black-and-white issue until you live in a country where there’s no functional justice system. Murder is never a good way to settle scores, of course, but it does become more understandable when you think about families and towns left on their own to manage the crimes committed against them.

    If somebody killed one of your loved ones, for instance, what would you do if there was almost no chance that the killer would ever be arrested, tried and jailed, even in cases where everyone in town knew who did it? What might a group of subsistence farmers be capable of one night when they finally caught the thief who had been ruining their lives by stealing their cows and commercial crops?

    In Canada, our police and courts take such awful decisions out of our hands and permit us to believe that “justice will prevail," with no need to take the law into our own hands. Sure, we complain about court decisions, but in general our justice system serves us quite well.

   Not in Honduras. The police don’t come when called, and in truth nobody really wants to call them anyway because they’re scary and unpredictable.  The “bad guys” don’t get arrested very often. The courts don’t work. The prisoners essentially run the prisons. (And even that starts to make sense when you understand that if it weren't for prisoners finding ways to generate money on the inside, there’d be nobody to feed and clothe them.)

    As for whether narco-traficantes are the bad guys here, I’d have to say… it’s complicated.

Yes, I suspect the cocaine distribution business (Honduras is essentially the FedEx of the industry) is responsible for much of the staggering murder rate in Honduras, although there are no official numbers. Yes, the business in all likelihood has tremendous influence in the country - as does any lucrative, job-creating industry anywhere in the world – and is well-integrated into every level of government and public service.

    But looking at the issue from a purely economic viewpoint, this country would be sunk without narcos. However you feel about the product they’re moving, they create a lot of jobs.

    They've got money - to eat at restaurants, stay at hotels, shop at the malls, buy medical services and new vehicles, build nice houses. They've got money for all the things that stimulate more economic activity, which is the only thing that ever truly pulls a country out of poverty.  

    They like real estate, and at least in Copan Ruinas are said to be responsible for much of the new construction in town. They apparently love owning dairy cattle and are among the few farmers who can actually afford good care for their cows, assuring a better supply of Honduran-produced milk and beef. They are clearly intelligent people who know how to run a business, because even while the country staggers from one crisis to the next, the cocaine keeps flowing north.

     Not enough narcos understand that they could really improve their image by funding more good works in their communities, but I've heard quite a few stories of generous narcos building a new school, paving a road, coming to the rescue of villagers in financial jams. Yes, they lack a sense of proportion in settling scores and really need to get a grip on the violence in their industry, but characterizing them as hateful villains to be eradicated is gross oversimplification.

    So. That’s my new world view – shades of grey as far as the eye can see. Sometimes I long for the days when I was more certain, and question whether I’ll be certain about anything at all by the time I die if this keeps up.

    But I guess that’s what happens when what you used to “know” collides with what you now know first-hand. It’s complicated. 

The scene the day after: Copan Ruinas

     While we were theoretically confined to the house yesterday due to concerns our organization had about unrest after Sunday's election, we just had to venture out later in the afternoon to see what all the hub-bub was coming from the town square.
     Here's a two-minute video I made of what we saw there, which turned out to be a mix of Nacional supporters celebrating what appears to be a presidential win for the party, and young boys using that as an excuse to light off a whole lot of big firecrackers. Hondurans do love their firecrackers.
    The country looks to be a long way from having all the results in even two days after the election. Having seen some TV footage of how they have to do the count, I understand.
    Each ballot has to be held up for observers to see who the vote was for and that the back of the ballot has been stamped. And every political position in the country is up for grabs on election day here - the president, all the mayoral positions, 128 diputados who make up the national congress. It's a lot of counting by any standards, let alone when every ballot has to be carefully verified by hand in the presence of international observers.
     There's no evidence of unrest so far in the country, but I guess we'll see when the count's fully done. Hondurans haven't struck me so far as a people who launch into public protest easily, although a really tight finish between the Nacional and Libre parties could start things sparking in the cities.
    In the meantime, it's a great time for firecracker sales. 

Honduras election: Hoping for miracles, bracing for more of the same

   

The scene in Tegucigalpa after the 2009 coup

Tomorrow is Election Day in Honduras. They have this odd system where every elected position in the entire country is up for grabs on the same day every four years, and I don’t think I’m just imagining that today feels kind of ramped-up and tense, even in quiet little Copan Ruinas.

    Politics are politics all over the world, and the strutting and throwing around of money in the runup to the election has been familiar. Canadian parties might not drive hooting and hollering supporters around in the backs of honking trucks playing the party song at top volume, but the pageantry is similar.

    But unlike Canada, Honduras has a recent history of playing a little rough in its elections. People have advised us to stay home Monday, the day after the election, just in case things get intense. Cuso International has in fact ordered all of us to stay home, and even the Honduran organization I work for is closing its doors for the day. Cuso has talked about flying us back to Canada out of Guatemala City if the post-election scene really gets wild.

    I’m having a hard time imagining my Copaneco neighbours getting wild, but I guess we’ll see. I found myself buying an extra jar of peanut butter at the grocery store today and stocking up on dog food just in case.

    Honduras is a democracy, but my sense of the place is they haven’t really got the hang of that system just yet. In 2009, the government of Mel Zelaya was overthrown in a military coup, something fairly untypical for a democratic country. The current president was elected democratically the following year, but the wounds from the coup are still pretty raw.

    Zelaya’s wife is running in this election under the banner of a new party, Libre, which has added an interesting undercurrent. Certainly things are zizzy in quiet Copan at this very moment, with many trucks decorated in party colours making their way around town in a hunt for treats to transport to the villages tomorrow to lure voters. (One of my friends in the Moskitia says her Garifuna community loves election years, because the politicians are always coming around with free meat.)

    I wish I could feel excited about the changes a new government might bring. But I don’t see a lot of hope of that. The polls are calling 50-50 between the Nationals and Libre, and I don’t think either outcome would give Honduras the dynamic, committed government that it so desperately needs. There’s a former sports journalist who I’m rooting for, running on an anti-corruption platform, but the election will almost certainly go either to the conservatives or the slightly-less conservatives, as seems to be the way of the democratic world right now.

    At any rate, this is a country that is still very much governed by wealthy families with long histories here. My sense is that they will get what they want. I just wish they wanted competent government, because you sure don’t see nearly enough of that down here.

    One of the country’s crazier political policies is a prohibition preventing presidents from serving more than one four-year term. It’s intended to prevent the buildup of power that can lead to a dictatorship, but how it manifests is as a disruptive and destabilizing force that condemns the poor country to spin its wheels ever more.

    While most governments of the world are self-serving these days, the lack of voter accountability that results from a single four-year term has created a monster in Honduras. Government takes no responsibility for addressing the country’s staggering problems, none of which are going to go away in a four-year term. I see more hope at the municipal level, but politicians at that level have neither the power nor the money to do much.

    But hey, nothing would make me happier than to be wrong about all of this. Maybe the very nice people of Honduras are finally going to get a government that takes its responsibilities seriously. Maybe you really can work miracles in a mere four years. Maybe even hungry people get to thinking sooner or later that one day of free meat is a lousy trade for 1,459 days of neglectful, uninterested governance.

    Go, Honduras. You deserve so much better.

Call me when you're ready to rise up

 

  I was having one of those days today that I recognize as the start of my “What is wrong with you people?” stage that I reach sooner or later in every job.

    I’m not exactly sure what the triggers are, but I know that once it starts, I find it harder to be Nice Jody and get increasingly intense in all my workplace and social interactions. Paul calls it my “looming” stage, based on my habit of projecting my intensity onto whoever I might be talking with. Usually it makes them quite nervous.

    I think the mood starts to kick in when I've been long enough in a job that I can see where mistakes are being made while also recognizing my inability to do anything about that. Twenty years ago when I experienced my first intensity surge, it drove me into management in the belief that I could affect change by getting higher up the ladder. I quickly learned that things are even more intense in the higher ranks and you still don’t have the power to change anything, so now I usually just push hard from whatever position I occupy until I run screaming from the building (metaphorically speaking).

    The most memorable manifestation of it was when I was at PEERS Victoria. About two years in, I was so deeply frustrated with the lack of options for participants and the stupid, stupid things that were said about sex workers that I always seemed to be pinning somebody up against the wall while I sounded off about everything that was wrong with everything.

    I’m entering that same phase now in my Honduras work. I used to be content to slip in a well-planned word every now and then about the importance of good workplace practices in creating productive, effective employees who feel valued (a bug-bear of mine on behalf of my Honduran co-workers). But today I found myself going into a near-rant about it at the Monday morning devotional, triggered by a slightly smirky little U.S. video that one of the administrators showed about battling the “virus” of bad attitudes in the workplace.

    I guess a rant is a positive sign that I’m feeling more comfortable in Spanish, but I did see the vaguely alarmed looks on my co-workers’ faces that I recognize as the sign of Going Too Far. I saw the same look on the faces of hapless friends who had the misfortune to ask me how things were going at PEERS during my last few months.

    In the latter case, the source of my frustration was pretty much the whole wide world. In the case of Honduras, it’s the widespread disregard for basic workers’ rights. I’m not a big union advocate in general, but I feel as fired up as a Scottish trade unionist when I contemplate the work practices in Honduras, chief among them the complete lack of job security and the flat-line wages that doom even full-time workers to a life of scrambling. Going unpaid is also a strikingly common problem in the country, as is being ordered to work 7 days a week.

    So off I went about all of it this morning. I think it was pretty pointless. Nobody chimed in, even though they’re all just 3 weeks away from receiving the standard letter every one of them gets every December telling them that their contract is over. (Some will get a new contract. Some won’t.)

    The worst of this stage for me is that once you feel too intensely about something, you lose your ability to talk about it convincingly with people who just aren’t there yet. And on this particular subject, nobody’s there yet.

    Now what? Oh, the mood will come and go over these last 4 months at my job, and I’ll alternate between ranting and keeping to myself in order not to rant. And then I’ll leave, and later have only this blog to remind me of how crazy-making it is to want something more for people than they want for themselves.