Splitting the check

One of the nice things about all this SPA construciton is that it’s a great chance for the comunity to pull together and work as a team. However, as is the case in human endeavors, not everyone wants to play ball. Mayans have a strong sense of community, a willingness to look out for the less fortunate or those struck by disaster or misfortune… but when taken to extremes, it becomes an incontrollable sense of “fairness” that almost looks like greed.

Last week I was assembling the galvanized steel water piping for a tank, and realized that I was out of Teflon tape. For those of you that don’t do plumbing, Teflon tape wraps around the threads of the pipe to ensure a tighter, more waterproof connection. It’s not necessary, but it’s a cheap way to increase the quality of the work- especially if no one has a monkey wrench and you have to tighten the pipes with vicegrips. Anyway, I had used some on the previous tank, so I sent a kid to run down to that house and get me some from that tank’s owner, José.

“He doesn’t have any,” the kid said when he came back 10 minutes later. Um, bullshit. He had some two days ago. I walked down the hill to José’s house, to exert some gringo influence.

“Hi José!” I smiled as I walked into his yard, and casually leaned on his brand-new tank. “Man, this tank stuff is a lot of work! Say, how’s your tank drying?” Playing innocent/ dumb is usually the best way to master the Latin American system of “indirect communication,” and beating around the bush is always a good intro.

“Great!” he said. “We’re all very excited about it.”

I smiled. “Well, I’m happy to hear it,” I smiled. “I’m working on Eulalia’s tank up the hill, and realized that I don’t have any Teflon tape! Silly me. You don’t happen to still have that almost-empty roll from two days ago, do you?”

His eyes lit up. “Actually, I do, Jaime! Let me get it for you.”

And that is how it works. Part of it is that I’m The Gringo, and people will do things for The Gringo that they wouldn’t do for their own blood relatives. But more than that, it’s a need to be recognized that they’re making a contibution or sacrifice, and I’m a high-profile witness for that sort of thing.

As I’ve mentioned before, we have had some “misses” on materials estimation. One fortunate error is that I over-estimated a tiny bit on the steel required for the tanks, so instead of 16 bars of steel, we just used 15. I explained to each tank owner that the extra material belonged to the community, not them, and that we might need it elsewhere before the project was all done. If we didn’t claim it by July 1, then they could have it as a gift. A few weeks later when we started the stoves, we were a tiny bit under on the steel order, and I sent runners to reclaim our rebar.

They didn’t have much trouble recollecting the supplies, because I’d thoroughly explained the deal to the various owners. Yesterday, however, we went to Lataq to build a stove base* and we needed another bag of cement. “Thank goodness,” I thought, “that we had one extra after we built that floor two weeks ago.” Lataq, as you might remember, is about an hour walk from here, on top of the mountain, and has no road or electricity. We are doing two projects there, because there are two ladies that come a LONG way every week to hear our health lecture. Our supplies had run a tiny bit over on the first one, a floor, and at the time I told the owner to hold onto that extra bag of cement, because it would be a bear to try to get another one up there if we needed it suddenly for the second project.

Diego hung up his cell phone as we were climbing the mountain. “She says that it’s hers, and you said she could use it when we put a floor the other room of her house.”

Ugh, that was an unfortunate misunderstanding. She’d asked me if we could put a floor in the other room of her house, and I told her we’d be happy to show up and help her, but she’d have to buy the materials. If we didn’t need to use the extra bag of cement elsewhere, she could use that too. Part of what we try to do is encourage people to take their projects that extra step: in the case of the tanks, for example, we aren’t plastering them if they hold water as-is. We’re keeping the project cost down, and they can save up their money and make these sort of aesthetic improvements on their own anyways. And in many cases, they are.

This lady never did anything about her second floor, but the thought of losing something she thought was hers was painful to her. I explained that the cement belonged to the community, for the benefit of all, and that that we were coming to get it. When we arrived, she was conveniently gone and we got the cement from her teenage daughter. Yep, she was pretty mad.

This all seems petty and senseless to me, but it comes from their cultural history and poverty. The Mayan idea of “mine” is strong; once the material hits their property, they all assume it’s theirs and no one else has any right to it. I suppose this is a factor of their economic situation. As Diego and I were walking back from Lataq, we crossed the new bridge the community had put in a few months ago. The old wooden one was lying in the field next to it. “What will they do with that?” I asked him.

“Nothing, until the community has a meeting about it,” he said. “They could re-use it, but they might just decide to chop it up and give every family a handful of kindling for their kitchen fires.” Oh, that. The Mayan obsession with fairness takes things to extreme, sometimes absurd, ends. I vividly remember when we first proposed our project, the leaders heard that we were only going to bring enough money to build sanitary infrastructure in about 40 houses. Their response? That it wouldn’t be fair, and that we should split the money between every single family, maybe buying each a piece of sheetmetal roof** or something. To them, giving everyone the same thing and having no useful improvement in their lives was FAR more important that doing something that would actually make a difference.

But right when I start to dismiss this equality obsession as a purely Guatemalan condition, I remember how aghast I was the first time I ate in a restaurant with Emily’s family. The bill arrived, and everyone broke out the calculators to figure the shares to the nearest penny. Money changed hands, bills and coins, even to the point of someone writing a check to someone else because they didn’t have exact change. Dude, in MY family, half the time everyone just throws some twenties into the center of the table and if it’s a little bit over, it’s a good day for the waitress. The other half of the time, someone says, “I’ll get it,” knowing that someone else will get it the next time. But, the truth of it is that Emily’s family has always had a little less money than mine, and that drives their level of care. And our villagers have a LOT less money than anyone I’ve ever known before.

I said goodbye to Diego as I we parted ways. I started down the gravel road to my village, and he stopped me. “One more thing. Can I put a roll of Teflon tape on the material list for our final delivery? José says we used up his, and he wants it replaced.”

I nodded, too tired to point out that he’d “given” it to me, and just petty enough to notice that we’d be replacing his almost-empty roll with a brand new one.

*A post on how to build efficient woodburning stoves will be coming out very soon, don’t you worry.

**Interestingly, Nick and Katal are now starting to work up a project in their community, and came across EXACTLY the same thing. How can a sheet of tin roofing improve the health of a family? In both cases, we avoided the issue by explaining that if the project doesn’t make a demonstrable improvement in family health, the aid organization wouldn’t fund it.