Are We Measuring The Right Things in Development?

Are We Measuring The Right Things in Development?

By Wendy Griffin May 3,2015

I seriously began studying  rural Honduras in 1989 when I got a three month grant from the Inter-American Foundation, part of the US government. My funded grant  proposal was tostudy the question of Gender in the Integrated Development of the Escuela Superior del Profesorado Francisco Morazan (now UPNFM), with the Pech Indians of Dulce Nombre de Culmi, Olancho, Honduras.

The Inter-American Foundation was interested in rural grassroots development,with women and/or Indians in LatinAmerica, and intermediate organizations. So they looked at my grant proposal and check,check,check it was what they wanted studied and my letter of recommendation was from someone they reportedly liked, Dr. Thomas LaBelle, Dean of the School of Education at the University of Pittsburgh at that moment, so they funded my proposal.

In April1989 I had finished my Master’s in International Development Education which did spent some time talking about what is the “development” we were working towards, how different stakeholders in projects have different reasons for being involved,  and the techniques of how “development” is reached varied on what you thought needed to be changed to reach it. How do you evaluate if your project moved towards “development Goals”  would also vary on what you thought the underlying problem was and what criteria you decided to measure at the end. If you misidentify the underlying problem, which I think is happening in Honduras currently, and you misidentify how to measure success, which I think is also a problem with statistics the World Bank generates, then the proposed project no matter how well or honestly carried out will neither resolve the underlying problem, nor will your statistics tell you if you have reached “development” success.

I personally took the grant because I thought I would work in some aid agency like USAID, and it was my experience that the people there knew precious little about the realities of rural life. So even though, or maybe even because I was already over 30 years old, and had two years experience in urban Honduras, I decided to go and live in a Pech village for 3 months and intensively study the same thing Manuel Chavez studied in another part of Honduras Como Subsisten los Campesinos?, the result of his Master’s in Economics and Rural Development Planning, How do the Countryside people live? He studied Lencas and Ladinos in the area of Gracias, Lempira, where the current president is from and I studied rainforest Indians in the Pech villages of La Campana (the Bell)/Aguazarka in Dulce Nombre de Culmi, Olancho.

It was somewhat hard living. The former carpentry shop where I stayed eventually showed I shared the room with a wood rat, cockroaches so big and strong that if you put a machete through them they still wiggled, and scorpions. The water in which the Pech bathed had green worms that fell from the trees, and I am very delicate about my hair, which has mostly all fallen out now from stress, and so I would rent a hotel room in Culmi at $5,50 a night just to wash my hair.  I cooked my own food, but the Pech women had to tend the fire under the comal as I don’t have much experience cooking with a fogon, a Honduran wood burning stove.  A Pech  12 year old boy shared my room so that I was not in danger at night. When they found a dead lance de fer snake behind my house, and then it turned out not to have died and slithered away into the night, I adopted ice cream containers for chamber pots.

My study focusses on what was the work of men and women and even old people and children, to compare if the training we were giving matched what they did in the community, a popular topic in my Master’s program and in anthropology at the time.     I divided the work into unpaid work, semirenumerated work where part was done unpaid for the family and part done to sell things for cash, and paid work. Pech women worked mostly in unpaid and semirenumerated work, but both Pech men and women will work as day laborers for the coffee harvest of their Ladino neighbors.  Being paid in advance for work is in fact an important source of rural credit, as is selling coffee (café en flor) or corn (maiz en agua) in advance of the harvest for a discounted price.

The complete results of this study, an 89 page report, were given to the Inter-American Foundation which never did publish the article based on the report, a requirement of the grant, and the other copy was given to the Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History (IHAH). I thought if they had copies of all archaeological work in Honduras they should also have copies of the anthropological work in their country. The staff at IHAH eventually threw out the report as it was disturbing them or was in the way (estorbaba). The staff there has since changed and the librarian is interested in having copies of anthropological and historical work done in Honduras in the IHAH library, as well as the archaeological studies.

Conference Papers on this Research—CIES and IDEA

My experience in 1989 with the Pech I also wrote up as conference papers including for the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) in Pittsburgh on the educational question of matching gendered training to gendered roles in the Pech society, and if this was not done,why not? and a conference paper for the Tegucigalpa meeting of the International Development Ethics Association (IDEA) in 1992. That paper focused on the question of why if the World Bank statistics for Culmi all  showed improvement between 1950 and 1990, yet the Pech all reported being worse off over that time period which also  saw the Ladino population of Culmi grow from under 250 people to over 18,000 people.  This raises the question-- Do we in fact know how to measure rural development?

How do you live on under $2 a day?

One of the issues that is hidden by the statistics is food insecurity and housing insecurity, both elements of my own story that I tell on this blog as the Personal Story of a Female Vet, so I look for them. A rural person, and when I first came to Honduras in 1985 about 60% of the population was rural, gets the following things for  free.

His house and his land are generally free and have been in their community for generations.

His water he gets for free

Meat from hunting and from raising chickens and pigs is free, or almost free.

Fish from fishing is free or almost free

Light from the ocote pine is free

Some of the medicine is from plant medicine which is free

Some crafts the rural people make themselves, but this is changing among the Pech.

Among the Pech the money they make selling pigs, (walking bank accounts for times of  crisis) and eggs, selling rainforest and pine savanah products like chichimora seeds for diarrhea and pine seeds for reforesting elsewhere in Honduras, or day labor, or their crops, or firewood, they are much better able to meet their necessities than someone who earns L3,000 ($150) a month in the city, but who has to buy food, water, shelter, and medicine.

What had happened to the Pech that they felt their standard of living had declined?   More Ladinos moved in the area which resulted in overhunting, pollution of the water from cattle feces, less rainfall as the rainforest habitat was cut down. So the Pech became malnourished, especially anemia, and had more problems with diarrhea. This last was made worse as they learned to not have confidence in their traditional medicines. This is in spite of what they used epizote is in fact effective against 5 out of 6 classes of intestinal worms and for the remaining kind they could use pumpkin or squash seeds. You can see the worms come out when you use it I am told. Indians in generally are having trouble understanding their water has become contaminated, and it is not because of something that they did but usually either Ladino agriculture, mining, or cattle ranching.

The Pech religion and life had been centered on sharing with vulnerable children,older people, women, similar to Sahlin’s Stone Age Economics. The combination of intensification of Christianization among the Pech, more Ladinos watching them, and the lack of animals and fish, has led to the loss of these celebrations where food was shared.  The result was that 95% of the Pech were malnourished, especially with anemia. A lot of the food they sold was to pay school supplies, uniforms, shoes, I am afraid. Parents make a decision do I educate my children or feed them, and obviously feeding them should be more important.

The Pech said, “We are living here in the Glory” compared toliving in Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula even before the current insecurity, about which the US Naval Postgraduate School has written a book sold through Barnes and Noble. As devaluation was done, all kinds of stresses were put on mathematically challenged people, and theft of food began in the rural areas and prices rose, but not as much as inflation because there were price controls on basic foods like what the Pech produce—corn, beans, rice, etc.

The Lencas at Rio Blanco for which the former head of COPINH just won the prestigious Goldman prize for environmental activism are fighting for access to land, to farm to feed their families, to water, and to have some security where they have lived.  

I have discussed this idea with Jeff  Pynes, a linguist who works with Tolupan Indians of Montaña de la Flor in rural Francisco Morazon, who have had their own land problems over the last few years. He also noted that you could live in Montaña de la Flor nicely on what are considered low amounts like $2 aday per person,  but you could not live in Tegucigalpa for that amount, where his wife’s family is from.

More people working in the cash economy may look like greater amount of growth, but often it is showing greater food and housing and water insecurity at least in Honduras. Feeling insecure, from danger, from being alone in the big city when their families are from the rural areas, from lack of safe housing and steady income for food, the young men and some  women are at risk for joining gangs.

When in Honduras in 2014, I met or communicated with a few Catholic Church, Evangelical churches like Vida Abundante, and Mormon leaders about what might be able to be done for those in danger in falling into gangs and those who are already in prison. Having been locked up in mental hospitals for part of 2014, I had those locked up (los privados de libertad) on my mind as I was locked out of the house all night one night  in Tegucigalpa and wrote up some of these documents.

In Honduras not even going to jail ensure that you get three meals a day as there is a shortage of money in Honduras to pay for food, soap, and other basic necessities for the prison or errant youth populations.  Some of these focused on education and Marlon Escoto the Minister of education at the time was also thinking along the lines of education programs for those who have to be in jail. If they are not involved  in some  positive thing in jail,then they have a lot of time and resentment to think of and learn bad things. Referring to young boys, they said they went into jail for having stolen apair of pants and come out knowing how to rob banks.  

Most grocery stores in Tegucigalpa got rid of their big picture windows because of fear of riots over food and have metal covers or cement over their windows.  Being hungry or not having somewhere secure to live would explain a lot about insecurity in Honduras. Sending more troops is a case of misidentifying the underlying problem, which still has not gone away, but seems to becoming worse.