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.
