I'll fight, but will I win?

A long, long time ago, I thought of myself as shy. But I left that behind many years ago when I took a job that required asking bold questions of strangers, and it was onward into bigger and bolder from that point on.

Forthright and informed with a touch of indignation can be a very effective strategy for making things happen in Canada. Using the ability to find information that I’d picked up as a journalist and the copy-the-boss-and-the-boss’s-boss strategy that I’d honed in my work with non-profits, I became  quite adept at resolving problems in my work and in my personal life. I even got a cell phone company to back down on a $150 “early cancellation” fee, and I’m sure you can appreciate how challenging that was.

But I’ve met my match in Honduras.   In Canada, I know how to play the role of a polite but clearly unhappy customer prepared to take it up the chain until she gets satisfaction. But I’m lost here, where they just pat your hand and assure you they’re working on your problem even though they’re not.

You keep coming back at them, of course, because your complaint doesn’t get resolved. But the process just repeats – so sorry, we’re looking into that, try again next week, we’ll call you Thursday. And repeats.

Two recent examples, both having to do with Honduran banks.  In the first instance, I waited two long months for a debit card so I could access the stipend that Cuso International pays, as there’s no branch of that particular bank in Copan Ruinas.

If I didn’t want to take an eight-hour return bus ride to San Pedro Sula whenever I needed money, getting my hands on that debit card was essential. But all my Jody powers were useless in the face of a friendly, do-nothing string of nameless bank employees who said all the right soothing things in the moment and then just left me to do it all over again with whoever I ended up dealing with the next time.

I lost track of how many times I heard that my card was on its way – sometimes to Copan, (until the bank quit pretending that it had been mailed to Copan), sometimes to a mysterious shipping agent who took care of such things, sometimes to the bank branch in San Pedro Sula.  I ended up making two trips to San Pedro Sula before the problem was resolved, and a long series of calls and emails to various young dependientes and their bosses as I desperately tried to grasp how it could be this difficult just to get a lousy debit card.

I got it eventually, and for maybe a month all was well. But on Friday I used my card at the ATM I always go to and ran straight into a new banking nightmare.

I knew to be worried when the machine made more grinding noises than usual, and didn’t dish out my cash at the usual speed.  Then it spit out less money than what I’d requested – 3,000 lempiras instead of 4,000, a $50 difference. And no receipt.

Uh-oh, I thought. The bank hadn’t opened yet, so I trotted home to log into my account on-line to see what I could see. It was worse than I expected – the ATM had dinged me for 4,000 lemps that it never gave me, and then another 3,000. That’s a $200 hit, significant money on a volunteer stipend.

I returned to the bank the minute the doors opened, but I pretty much knew how things were going to go. The nice young man at the desk where they send unhappy customers told me that the machine always corrected itself at 3 p.m. every day, so I should just check my bank balance after 3 p.m. and probably everything would be fine. And if it wasn’t, I could come back.

It wasn’t. I came back. And this time I talked to the woman who looks after the ATM, who promptly went into some back room to check and emerged to tell me that everything seemed to be fine with the ATM. Did I have a receipt, she asked? No. Did I have any way of proving that I hadn’t just pocketed those other 4,000 lempiras? No.  With a pleasant smile, she advised me to check my account balance again in a couple days and maybe things would have straightened out– and if not, I could come on back to talk to her.

My partner says the way they do conflict in Honduras is kind of like Muhammad Ali in his prime, all rope-a-dope. You can throw all the punches you like, but the only one who’s going to be worn down by the end of the fight is you.

Today I’ll send an email to my bank in Tegucigalpa, and copy the other bank here in Copan that owns the ATM. I’ll ask to see some kind of documentation that shows the exact timing of those two transactions, in hopes of demonstrating  that it wouldn’t have been possible for me to withdraw two batches of money in what must have been a mere three or four seconds, let alone in a single transaction. The ATMs here only allow you to withdraw 4,000 lempiras at a time, so I plan to make the argument that I couldn’t have withdrawn 7,000 given that I inserted my card only once.

But I’m doing all that only because I can’t bear to give up a fight that easily. I’m betting I’ll never see that $200 again. It infuriates me, but I just know how this is going to go. I guess it’s better that I take the hit and not a hungry Honduran for whom $200 is serious money, although who knows how many of them have had this same frustrating experience?

Then again, even the master of rope-a-dope didn’t win every match.  I just have to learn to fight like Joe Frazier.

The ingredients of a home

I heard myself saying I was happy to be “home” on Tuesday when we dragged back from eight long days in Tegucigalpa.

Home.  I’ve always known I have quite a fluid definition of that word, having lived in some god-awful places that somehow grew to be “home” very quickly to me nonetheless.  But not every place will do.

It needs, for one thing, a good shower. I’ve been blessed to live for the last 20 years in a series of houses that had good showers – lots of pressure, plenty of hot water, no weird smell (I’m very fussy about smell). It needs to  be a place where I can open the door and walk outside, and not just to stick my head out and catch a breath but with room to pull up a chair and sit in the fresh air. The hotel-room experience in Tegucigalpa was a good reminder that I would almost certainly go mad if I had to live in an apartment with no immediate access to the outdoors, which is where I prefer to spend most of my time.

I don’t need a lot of comforts, but I do need a decent bed and a good pillow. I don’t know if it’s a worrying sign that I’ve started to pack my pillow in my suitcase when we travel, but so it goes. And an Internet connection now means “home” to me, especially when I’m so far away from my family and need the instant connections of Facebook and Skype to keep all my loved ones close.

My partner and I have been together for 15 years now, and he’s “home” to me, too. If he’s with me, I feel like I’m at home.There's an Edward Sharpe and theMagnetic Zeros song about that. I think this Cuso volunteering business could be very, very lonely if you came without a partner to help transform your various travails into a grand adventure. Things go wrong all the time down here, but having someone to laugh it off with changes everything. What great fortune to have stumbled into a relationship in which two people are both up for throwing it all in and moving to Honduras.

We spent six weeks travelling in Vietnam a couple years ago and I realized that “home” also meant being able to make music, because I pined for my accordion while we were away. So bringing it was a priority for me this time, and I’m home every time I strap that flashy red girl on and start playing some tunes. Paul had to leave his guitar behind – hard to pack it into the overhead bin – but today he finally bought a very nice replacement, and I know he’s going to feel a lot more at home now, too.

“Home” is also a place where I can get away from people. I admire the Cuso volunteers who are living in group housing in isolated villages somewhere in Africa, but I would have a very tough time with that. I like people well enough, but my dad’s loner spirit courses through me. I’m not an island, but I’m a very small archipelago.

Home doesn’t necessarily mean having a pet. But I have to admit that I worked very hard to lure a skinny stray dog back to our front stoop tonight. “Venga! Venga!” I kept encouraging him as he looked expectantly up the side streets where he was used to finding food. And it worked. He stayed for a couple of hours, ate a big bowl of dog food and gulped down a lot of water before heading off on whatever rounds the street dogs have here. I’m really hoping he comes back, because there’s just something about animals that tells me I’m home as well.

We have an RV back in Canada, and I am always home when I’m in it. I used to put myself to sleep as a kid imagining that I was in a magic space ship that supplied everything I needed and could travel on land, water or air at the push of a button. The RV comes closest to that fantasy of any “home” I’ve ever had, and one day when this international  travel has run its course I hope to get behind the wheel of the Fleetwood Jamboree and discover home in whatever spot we pull up to for the night.

“I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself,” said Maya Angelou. I think I’m almost there.

Be careful what you wish for

You need lots of razor wire in a country without governance

We were commiserating over breakfast yesterday with the owner of the little hotel in Tegucigalpa where we stay when on Cuso International business. He described Honduras as a capitalist country without the balance of a social structure, which struck me as a near-perfect description of the place.

Honduras is the real-life embodiment of the kind of governance that conservative political forces in Canada, the U.S. and Great Britain think they want for their own countries. It has a free-market economy with very little government interference, a political structure built around the needs of business and the upper-class, and a distinct absence of social supports.

Having lived under governments that could only dream about such things, I'm finding the real deal here in Honduras particularly enlightening. Here you really are free -  free to be as rich as you can possibly be with no worries that anyone will expect you to share even a little of your wealth with the less fortunate, equally free to pass your days in abject poverty with no hope of relief. 

Of course, Western governments shape the dream a little differently when they're trying to sell it to their citizens. British Prime Minister David Cameron came up with that whole "Big Society" business to dress up his government’s massive cuts to social spending.

The theory behind a Big Society – popular with the B.C. and Canadian governments as well – is that when governments withdraw social supports, communities step up to close the gap. Volunteerism increases. Citizens draw closer to their neighbours as each takes more responsibility for helping the other. Everybody lives happily ever after, and pays fewer taxes to boot.

So let’s consider the example of Honduras, then. It’s a Big Society if ever there was one, seeing as government does almost nothing and communities really are on their own. An outsider might presume a deeply ingrained culture of neighbourly support in a country like this.

But what the absence of social supports has actually created is a culture of survival. People are so used to living with the fear that the bottom could drop out of their lives at any moment -  because it so often does – that all their energies go to taking care of their own. From what I've seen, Honduran families watch out for their family members in all kinds of ways, but anything outside of the family is somebody else’s problem.

A story in Sunday’s La Tribuna made this point quite nicely. The rather tragic public school system is on the verge of collapse in Honduras for all kinds of reasons, but this story focused on youngsters at one particular school who have to sit on the floor for their six hours of class because they have no chairs.

It turns out that there are chairs at the school; the parents of the students who come in the morning (schools have two shifts of students a day) fundraised to buy them. But the chairs are locked up after the morning session. A parent spokesman for the morning group said that if the afternoon students wanted chairs, then it was up to their parents to do their own fundraising.

Ah, now there’s community spirit for you. And you can’t even blame the morning parents for having that attitude, because in a culture of scarcity they’re probably right to fear what might happen to those chairs if they start sharing them around.

But it gives the lie to the myth that conservative governments like to feed us, about how we’ll all get more caring and sharing once we’re not so reliant on government.

Another example: Garbage on the streets. Individual Hondurans appear to be tidy people at home, sweeping up their front stoops every day and picking up whatever trash careless passersby have thrown in front of their houses. But as soon as you get to an empty lot or a vacant house, the garbage accumulates at an alarming rate.

People take responsibility for their own tiny piece of the environment. But nobody takes responsibility for the whole. There are no community clean-up crews, nobody doing anything about the de facto dumps that develop along river banks or on quiet back roads.

The rivers and lakes are polluted, because whose job is it to do something about that? The trees fall in the forest – in the last 15 years, Honduras has lost 45 per cent of its trees to illegal logging and fires – but if it’s not your land, it’s not your problem. I suspect Westerners would be no different if there really was no government resources, no authority, no chain of responsibility.

How bad can it get in the land of the “free”? How’s this: A terrible highway collision (common here, because whose going to take responsibility for road improvements if not government?) takes the lives of eight people. Before the ambulances can even retrieve the bodies, passersby have stripped the dead of their wallets, jewelry and other valuables.

Heinous behaviour to cultures that haven’t had to experience life as a survivor. Here in the land of the free, it’s just another day.

Michener nomination for TC writers well-deserved

Very exciting news to discover that Paul and I, riding on the extensive coattails of Times Colonist reporter Lindsay Kines, have been nominated for a Michener Award along with TC columnist Les Leyne. But I wish the nomination also came with the power to roll back all the damage done to B.C. families whose devastating circumstances were the subject of that series of articles.
The Michener Award is given each year to a Canadian newspaper that can demonstrate that its coverage of an important issue in its community or province led to real change. Lindsay's dogged reporting last year on the closure of group homes for people with developmental disabilities did exactly that. By the time the dust settled this past January, the cabinet minister responsible for Community Living B.C. had resigned, the CEO of the agency had been fired, $40 million in new money had been found and the B.C. government had pledged to stop closing group homes.
Happy ending? More or less. But dozens of people lost their group homes before the government backed down, and they're not going to get their placements back. For better or worse, they're in private homes now. Some are no doubt very happy with that, because they didn't need the structure of a group home and will thrive in more of an independent setting. But others had been very happy where they were living, and it's damn cruel that they and their families had to endure the trauma of being wrenched away from familiar places and faces in homes that some of them had lived in for 20 years or more. Here's an archive of my blogs from 2010-2011 on this subject, and you can find Lindsay's stories and more here.
Still, let's celebrate the moment. Lindsay did a heck of a job by staying on this story for more than a year. The Times Colonist was the first B.C. newspaper to give significant publicity to the issue of group-home closures, and the only one that provided prolonged coverage. And the Michener judges noticed. Credit is also due to the plucky activist group MOMS, which worked hard to keep this issue alive and helped identify many families willing to talk to media.
Given the up-and-down history of community living supports in B.C. over the last five decades, I fear this won't be the last time a public campaign will need to be waged on behalf of families and advocates of people with developmental disabilities. But at least the good guys won this time. 

Honduran upper class has a role to play

The more a government does, the less its citizens have to do. Garbage in the street, bruised child in the house next door, stray dog barking all night long - in a well-developed democracy like Canada, there's some government body or another to turn to for any of those problems, and an MLA or city councillor to yell at if nothing happens.
Honduras is the other side of the coin. It's a country where there's nobody but you to take responsibility for anything. If somebody's old wreck of a couch turns up outside your door, if the neighbour's child is clearly neglected and possibly abused, if a pack of starving dogs is howling and fighting every night around 2 a.m. just down the road, you've basically got two choices: Take things into your own hands or shut up and live with it.
I don't know what conditions have to be in place before communities unable to rely on government inrtervention come together to launch citizens' initiatives to deal with shared problems. What are the factors that give rise to service clubs, for instance, or Neighbourhood Watch programs? What prompts churches to lift their vision beyond the needs of their congregation and reach out to the broader community?
Those are questions that Honduras communities would do well to ponder. The 3.5 million Hondurans who live in extreme poverty can be excused for not being able to summon the resources for anything beyond keeping their family alive, but what's stopping the other four million from doing more? Why do they tolerate such massive problems in their communities, such ineffective governance?
If you're poor in Honduras, life can be pretty damn miserable. But it can be pretty damn miserable if you're rich, too. All the money in the world won't save you from the country's car-eating potholes, random violence, garbage-strewn and contaminated rivers, and starving feral dogs that bark all night long.
Even if they were acting solely out of self-interest, I'd have expected to see more community initiatives underway at the hands of middle-class and wealthy Hondurans, if only because they were good and fed up with having to build higher and higher walls around their houses and hire more and more security guards to accompany their families on virtually every outing. Wouldn't they, too, like a clean lake and a green park for their kids to play in? (A writer for Honduras Weekly also wonders why the rich aren't doing more.)
The general explanation given for why so little happens here is that narco-trafficantes control everything. But that explains nothing to me, because surely narco-trafficantes want better roads and more security in their daily lives as much as anybody. Why would working in an illegal industry automatically exclude you from wanting better for your country?
Honduras feels like a country that's waiting for change. Unfortunately, that comes from within. Some of the most important work I see my organization and other NGOs doing is educating young people on the rights and responsibilities of living in a democracy, and how change starts with one person choosing to do things differently.
But somebody's got to get some action going among the rich Hondurans, too. With significant homegrown wealth here, it's not right to leave the mess for coming generations and other countries to solve.