29Jan

To Give, or Not to Give

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Before I left for the trip to Congo, Jeff was gathering as much information as possible about the do’s and don’ts of international missions work. He has so many missionary contacts it was easy. One story shared with him was a heartbreaking reality check on the unintended impact of every thing you do on a mission trip.

The friend explained his organization has a policy that nothing is to be given to the local people from participants on trips. They understood that when Americans witness the poverty of developing countries the first response is almost always guilt for the abundant life lived in the United States. This guilt causes the traveler to give away nearly everything they brought with them on their trip or even hand out money to the local people.

While the organization will accept items for donations which they can then distribute through the local churches, they do not want personal gifts to become the norm. Not only does this set up a culture where the visiting missionaries are seen as a source of material items, it can actually leave the locals worse off than before the missionary came.

At one of their locations, travelers are encouraged to employ the services of a laundress – an act which provides an additional customer to one of the local women. “Consider the traveler who hires a local woman to do his laundry. He can easily pay the set fee, and because he wants to feel he’s made a difference he overpays her. $20 USD is nothing to him, and he can leave the country feeling like he had done a good thing. But what he doesn’t realize is that $20 USD is an enormous amount for this woman — she can live on that for two weeks or more, which she does.”

“But when the money is spent, she must return to work. But by this time her regular customers have had to find a new laundress. She now has no money, and no regular customers. Her situation is worse than before the traveler hired her.”

Asking why she doesn’t save the money — continue working and use the money to improve her situation — is to ask her why she is not American. She lives her life working for the money she needs to live every day. If she does not need money she does not need to work.

This concept is so foreign to Americans, but explains in painful detail why culture will change the impact of what you do. Your generous gift may not be helpful at all. To be truly effective at meeting the needs of families in developing countries, you need to be able to look beyond your cultural norms to understand the potential consequences of your actions.

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28Jan

Climb Every Mountain

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I just realized I should show you this photo of a path up the mountain. Yes, what you are looking at is a path. If you fallow this path up the hill and around a shallow ravine you will pass two or three houses (one being a store) and come to the local government school. Let me interpret for you the other things you may not realize you see in this photo.

The man with the packages is basically the delivery truck for the local store. He is the home owner returning from the town with the goods he purchased in bulk. He was on road to this point, which provides an easier trek up the mountain, but it took us nearly half an hour to drive to this point from the closest town.

In the bags he is carrying are small packages of chips – junk food. While we were visiting the school one of the boys with us purchased 5 or six of those bags for less than $1US. He is probably also carrying some of the cereal we distributed and a few other items.

Notice the steep grade of the path. This patch of mountain is not unique–in fact, at the other mountain school we had to basically walk a few yards up a cliff to get to the store. This is the landscape of the mountains. Steep grades, difficult climbs and the people who live here use their bodies to move everything. So as you can probably guess, joint issues and pain are common in people as young as 20.

This is the steepness of the terrain in which you will find coffee fields – although we are not high enough on this mountain to see coffee. This is the terrain the farmers must navigate to care for and grow their coffee, pick beans and deliver it to the weigh station. It is difficult work that provides little pay. This is the terrain families use for growing food. I can still see the images of the farmers standing on the near vertical hills, picking their coffee, but I wasn’t brave enough to let go of the truck to snap photos to share.

Just something to think about as you enjoy your next cup of coffee.

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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

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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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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