28Jan

Food for a Day

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What you see is food. Black beans (the traditional bean in Guatemala) and corn meal that can be made into a type of cereal. Twice on this trip we purchased and distributed food to rural mountain families. This caused great internal conflict for me.

According to the World Bank, 18% of Guatemala’s children under age 5 live with hunger. (For comparison, 1% of the children in the US live with hunger, and 34% in DR Congo.) 13% of the population live in extreme poverty – live on less than $1.25 a day.(There is no data for extreme poverty in the US, and 59% of individuals in DR Congo live in extreme poverty). And as is true in just about every country, rural communities are more poor than urban communities – which means mountain families have higher rates of malnutrition and extreme poverty than the country as a whole. It was easy to see in the children.

So everything inside me wanted to feed these families. With the money we had we were about to provide about 5 pounds of beans and two bags of cereal to about 75-80 families in one community. In the other we were able to provide 10 pounds of beans, 5 pounds of rice and 5 bags of cereal to 50 families. But this amount of food will not even get the average family through a week. And this is where the internal conflict begins.

Providing free food is merely a temporary fix to the long-term problem of poverty. And while these families will be able to eat for the next few days – or more likely to continue their inadequate eating by stretching the food out longer – eventually they will run out of the free food. Yes, it gives short term relief. But I know the only way to really end poverty is with longer term solutions – education and improving the economy of the area.

As we passed out the food I kept running through possible solutions in my mind – could we have used the money to help the community develop a food co-op where they purchase larger quantities of beans and rice at cheaper prices? Could we have used the money to help educate the people about better farming techniques? Any real solution will take time – something we did not have on this trip. Any real solution will take a good relationship with the communities – which is what the organization is trying to build by providing free food. And so the reality was all we could do was to help alleviate some of their hunger for a few days.

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28Jan

The Economy of Coffee

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I have only recently become a coffee drinker. It was part an aversion to bitter flavors and part the superior feeling I got from being the only person I knew who didn’t need a cup a day. I learned how to drink the stuff this past spring, and am actually at a point that I can enjoy a cup – though still not addicted. All of which made me slightly more interested in the mountain economy than mere concern for the Guatemalan people.

What you see in the photo above is coffee beans drying in the sun. This is probably about half-way through the economic life-cycle of a coffee bean. They start out by growing on bushes high in the mountains. I’d seen tea plantations in Rwanda, and expected the same beautiful fields in Guatemala. The colors were beautiful-the deep greens of plants growing in wet areas always make me feel earthy- but forget the orderly fields. The mountains are steep, and the coffee is planted in as close to rows and you can get on a steep mountain side.

The bushes are cared for by the local people who are called the Chortie. I was a bit confused about the delineation of the sub-population but from what I gathered they are Mayan descendants. They are a bit of a closed community, and unless you are in an area near a town they will hide from outsiders. They will speak Spanish, but as you get further from towns they have their own language.

The life of the Chortie is simple and difficult. The male head of house (and when possible female head of house and children) will pick coffee beans all day. The beans will be carried (on your back) down the mountain to the closest weigh station where the volume of beans is determined. Payment is made per weight, and the farmer returns up the mountain to get home. I didn’t understand who owned the plants, whether individual families owned the property and sold their beans or if coffee companies owned the land and paid families as workers.

Homes are made of a combination of palm branches and clay bricks. Families who are close to towns may use cement bricks for part of their home but there are some limits to this. Cement blocks cost money, but clay bricks can be made freely by anyone. Cement blocks need to be transported to the home site, so will need to be carried one at a time or a truck will need to be hired (more money). So most families will use the clay bricks and branches. This means their homes are constantly at risk for pests and insect nests. Below is a picture of the type of palm branches used to build homes and structures.

Cooking is done outside. The diet is very plain and nutritionally inadequate. Corn and black beans are the staples. Bananas grow in the mountains so can be added to the diet. We saw some melon fields on the lower slopes of the mountains, but these were obviously a business with the product being sold in the nearest towns rather than being intended for families up the mountains. The furthest we went into the mountains (about a 45 minute drive from the nearest small town), still had a small supply of junk food available – small bags of chips and some soda for sale at a store (the home of a family living next to the government school). Here is a kitchen from a different family who operates a store from their home – again right next to the local government school.

After the coffee is weighed, it is taken to the drying center as seen in the photo above. Coffee is dried, roasted and then packaged for sale. I was able to purchase a pound of roasted and ground coffee from a local plantation for $35Q – with $1USD being equal to $8.2Q this means my coffee cost less than $5. And as a recent coffee connoisseur I will admit to finding the Guatemalan coffee to be lacking the harsh acidic taste I sometimes find in coffee. At my local grocery store or Target I can purchase a pound of good coffee (sorry, I don’t buy Folgers) for about $8 per pound. I have been paying more lately because Josette and I had been trying to purchase fair trade items rather than “regular” items.

The Fair Trade concept sounds good. Basically the corporation selling the product contracts with a farmer or group of farmers to purchase the item at a living wage. This way the farmer is not paid pennies a day for their work. But there are flaws to the system – mostly the price. Few people are willing to pay a higher price for a Fair Trade product. I can get Fair Trade coffee from two companies during my regular shopping trips. They sell their beans in 12 oz contains instead of the standard 16oz  and the prices are higher than the other brands. But the prices for all their products are higher than the other brands. Check out the fair trade products in your coffee and chocolate aisles by looking for this symbol (if you live near a Target, you can purchase Fair Trade coffee):

I have many questions about the impact of Fair Trade on communities. I have significant doubts that fair trade alone is able to end the poverty cycle. I also wonder why price setting (refusing to lower the price when market prices drop) is considered a good thing because the farmers are poor when similar high price setting by companies in developed countries is considered greedy. One concern I have read about Fair Trade is the way the price setting can influence increased production without increasing demand – which leads to overall lower prices. It reminds me a lot of the problem when sugar companies began paying farmers in parts of Africa (I’m pretty sure it was DR Congo, but its been 15 years since I took that class) to produce sugar. The money received for the product was welcome, but families spent less and less of their agricultural resources on food for the family. The money received for the sugar needed to supply the families food, but the family structure and the culture did not support this lifestyle. The men (who by law owned the money) spent the money on drinking and other fun things, while their wives and children were left to try to provide food with fewer and fewer fields. It was a cultural disaster.

No matter how good it may sound to pay farmers in developing countries to grow what you want, it is important to remember that their society may not operate in the way you expect. Giving them more money to produce your food isn’t really a way to prevent that. That being said, I do still purchase Fair Trade. I’m just more of a fan of purchasing and using local products – which is again more expensive and time consuming than the regular grocery store trip.

So yeah, this is what I was thinking about as I road up and down the mountain standing up in the back of an old pickup truck. It is a wonderful experience to have had, the view was amazing – but it was very cold, damp air and the truck went very fast on a one lane dirt road. My heart broke as I saw families picking beans or carrying bundles down the mountain. Poverty is real, and I am blessed to not experience (even if my family lives below what most Americans consider adequate income levels).

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28Jan

Guatemala Facts

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Welcome to Guatemala! OK, so actually I’ve been home for nearly two weeks. I needed time to recuperate from the hectic schedule I created for myself. But I am ready to share the stories and photos now, so lets begin with some basic facts about the country of Guatemala.

If you are geographically challenged, Guatemala is in Central America. Sharing borders with Mexico and Belize to the north, Honduras and El Salvador to the southeast. The Pacific Ocean is to the west, and a small piece of coastline on the Gulf of Mexico completes the borders.

When you think of Guatemala think of mountains. Lots of them. Also think volcanoes. This creates a beautiful country with very fertile soil, but makes travel slow and difficult. The occasional earthquake or volcanic eruption can cause devastation. In fact, the colonial city of La Antigua has been destroyed two or three times. And though you may guess the country is nothing but rain forest, you’d be as surprised as I was to be staying in a desert. Turns out Guatemala boasts multiple eco-systems. There are lowlands where it gets hot, highlands were it gets cold. Areas of high humidity and wide arid expanses. So if you are touring the country, pack for anything.

The beautiful and fertile landscape makes it easy to understand why the Mayan people built their cities in the region. Although I would have loved to see the ruins, it was not part of this trip. Today the population of Guatemala is estimated to be about 14.5 million with less than 4% of the population over the age of 65. Literacy rate is 70% – which means 30% of the population over the age of 15 is not able to read and write. And most importantly to me, the infant mortality rate is 35.5/1000 live births (this is about 3.5 babies dieing per 100 born). Maternal Mortality is 240 per 100,000 live births, or .2 per 100 births. These are much better statistics than Sub-Saharan Africa, but still higher than they need to be.

Economically the country is just as varied. Guatemala City is bustling and modern, but it is estimated that at least 75% of the country lives below the poverty line. 50% of the workforce is agricultural and 35% is service. That leaves a mere 15% employed in industry. Agriculture accounts for a quarter of the GDP and a third of all exports – you may have enjoyed coffee, bananas or sugar from Guatemala. I was delighted to find several of the articles of clothing I purchased for the trip (from a thrift store intending to leave in Guatemala) were actually made in Guatemala.

Politically, the country is becoming more stable. Officially the civil war ended in 1996 with the signing of a peace accord. But ongoing political violence and corruption scandals make it difficult for foreign investors to feel confident enough to invest.

And that is Guatemala in a nutshell, or at least in a list of facts. But it does give you some background to understand more about the trip.

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12Jan

Birth in a Clinic

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One of our saddest realizations was that the clinic, despite its best intentions, could do very little for the people of the community. There is no way to contact the doctors after they leave the clinic for the night, so birth emergencies may be better off happening at home except there is one nurse in the clinic all night, and he or she does have access to some supplies.

This is the supply shelf in the maternity room. If you don’t see it here, they don’t have it. This is actually very well stocked because a medical group from the US had just come and brought 19 suitcases of supplies with them.

This is the pharmacy in the clinic. Again, it is well stocked because of the group from the US that donated these medications.

Before you start thinking you need to get as many medical supplies as possible to send consider this item donated by a group in the United States. Their intentions were honorable, to save babies that are born premature. However their donation is not usable because there is no power at the clinic. The generator barely keeps the lights on, it cannot handle equipment like this.

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12Jan

Inside the House

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Tammy had enough foresight to take photos inside the places we stayed. I thought I would add these shots because they really display the cultural shock that met us on our journey. Do you remember the views from the house we stayed in while spending the night in Bukavu?

The house is in this photos, the white one behind the brick house:

Inside it is modern, and not modern.

For example, here is the living/dining room, fully equipped with satellite television.

But in the same house, right around the corner, is this kitchen:

There is running water, but no place to store food, no refrigeration (a mini-fringe was brought in by the owner to use while he was in town), and the cooking is done on a small electric hot plate.

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12Aug

Life in Bujumbura

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We are getting ready to leave Bujumbura, but wanted to say a few words about our experience here. This is the first time I have actually tried to live in an area of such poverty, and the reality was eye opening.

The selection at the market was slim, and even slimmer because we were trying to avoid unpasteurized milk and fruit we could not peel. Bread really was one of our only choices here.

But this morning we couldn’t even buy bread. The hotel, a small but very high quality establishment had simply run out. We had the same problem trying to buy minutes for Tammy’s phone, they simply ran out. Everything we see for sale looks as if it has come from other countries as donations. The things that are new are very expensive. We thought we wold look for a computer to leave with Flory, but the computer store only carries one model and it costs the equivalent of $1500 US. As a point of reference, a cup of coffee at this fancy hotel is about 80 cents US.

We were able to finally find soccer jerseys as gifts, but they are from the 2002 season. There simply is not a supply of things in Bujumbura for people to buy. It is a strange reality, to see things that are becoming modern but still so far from what they could be.

We checked the World Bank lists yesterday. Burundi is the 4th or 5th poorest country in the World, DR Congo is the third. I wonder just how bad off Zimbabwe is at the number one spot.

We will be on a plane to Addis Ababa in just a few hours, and home in less than 36 hours. It is almost sad to leave, and we are not sure how easy it will be to readjust to the luxuries we take for granted in the United States. We haven’t gotten too used to poverty though. We are both looking forward to the movies on the plane and plan to take hot showers as soon as we get home.

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11Aug

Instead of a Safari

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Since the Safari was not going to happen, we went with plan B – return to Bujumbura so Tammy could be that much closer to getting on a plane home. We packed our bags and headed to the bus station for the 4 hour dive. Flory promised it was shorter than the drive to Kigali.

Flory was wrong. It took close to eight hours, and we had back seats withe the wheel well blocking our feet. The woman in front refused to let us have the window open, and we could smell the exhaust from the van. I’m pretty sure we wrote about this before, so we won’t go into too much detail.

We arrived in Bujumbura alive and began the recovery from the mild case of carbon monoxide poisoning. We are at a beautiful Hotel that gives us internet in our room and has the most darling restaurant on the top floor balcony with a view of the mountains. American food, air conditioning, internet, Tammy didn’t even complain that there was no hot water. We even have the 24 hour french news channel on the TV.

Inside the Hotel

View from rooftop restaurant.

When Flory and Amina came to get us last night he asked about our hot water that Tammy had wanted so badly. We told him the hotel didn’t have any. He was shocked and went to the desk to complain and apparently he was right that something was wrong with the plumbing to our room. We had gotten so accustomed to not having hot water it didn’t even occur to us that something might not be working right.

So we have been in the room updating the blog, answering email and getting our bags ready to leave. We went out this morning to buy some gifts and made a visit to the Batwa village – it is like a native American reservation only for Pygmies; The government moved the people right outside the city in 2000 to try to accustom them to modern life and to begin education for the children. Apparently it did not go as planned. Instead of living in the brick houses built by the government the people built their own mud huts and have not joined the rest of Bujumbura society.

Here are some shots of us in the Batwa village, note the beautiful Congolese dresses Georgette helped us buy.

Meeting the children

Yes, she is an adult. Grandmother actually.

On the way to and from the Batwa village, we passed a garbage dump outside Bujumbura. It was next to a pond where the Batwa and some people living on the outskirts of Bujumbura fish and bathe. We saw people digging through the garbage, Flory said they were looking for bread crusts or anything they could eat. It seemed so common to Flory, but was another shock to the level of poverty we were seeing. He couldn’t believe this doesn’t happen in the US, or that people make good money disposing of the garbage.

Searching for anything usable.

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