SPA CRAZY

Fletch has been posting avidly about the design and construction of our infrastructure project. His posts come out looking very neat and organized. The projects look polished and done. This doesn’t really portray the reality of what has been a rather frantic and taxing mental and physical effort. These posts don’t ever let on to the fact that this project consumes most of our waking hours. We thought the week of floors was difficult, but that was before our first week of water tanks. Holy cow.

The Small Project Assistance grant from USAID is an interesting facet of Peace Corps service. Not everyone chooses to take on the task. I have said many times before and still believe that I would never have done one of these projects as a single volunteer. That said, I have heaps of respect for our friends who came in with no building training (which I actually had before Peace Corps), who’d never written grants or managed projects, and who all completed successful SPA projects in their communities. Fletch has been working like a madman. First it was all the trials and tribulations of getting largely illiterate communities on board with getting a bank account and filling out a mountain of paperwork for the US government. Then there’s all the red tape through which that paper work has to pass for an undetermined length of time. During this phase the communities often become confused, doubtful, even suspicious that you just made them do a hundred and one silly things and they’re not going to get anything in return. So we must reassure and assuage them until finally we get the call that the money has come in. Then there’s the task of getting materials ordered, materials delievered, and materials recounted to make sure we got all that we ordered. ALL OF THAT comes before building anything. Building, the phase we’re in at present, is where the project shines. First of all you’re asking the locals to work hard. This is something they do anyway, but they do it with gusto when their work means they’re going to have a floor in their house or a water tank in their yard at the end of a day or two of work.

Because of all the things that came before building, we are running this final p hase pretty late in the game. All of our friends who’ve done a project finished a few months ago, except for one who is running her second project. That means that on most days we’re a little worried about when and how things will all get done before it’s time to pack up and say our good-byes. Fletch worked three 12-hour days last week and the other 3 days were between 8 and 10 hours of work not including all the time spent figuring things out after physical work hours. I was feeling a little sick when we returned from our two weeks of craziness on the road, but last week at the busiest point of the project I was unable to move without feeling like I was going to be violently ill. This left him working solo, and worse, when he came home at the end of the day, there was no bathwater hauled in and heated or food on the stove. It was bad. I felt awful for letting him down. Friday I was able to start working again, but by Saturday morning the guy couldn’t think straight. He was impatient and jumpy. I have to say, he’s been putting a superhero effort into this, but I can’t allow him to knock himself out before we’re done.

Part of the insanity comes from the fact that we decided it would be better to let each family identify their greatest health need, choosing between floors, stoves, latrines, and water tranks, rather than making the entire community decide on one thing they all needed. I would say most of the SPA projects are done as a way to build one type of infrastructure. Each family gets the same thing so that only stoves are built or only floors are laid. We thought letting them choose would increase ownership of the project. It has also created a giant headache for us. Our materials lists are crazy long. The actual construction picks up as we get used to one thing, like floors, and then slows down tremendously as we figure out how we need to do the next thing, like water tanks, and now we’re in the middle of water tanks figuring out how to run the stove construction. Since we’ve given people the freedom to choose, some of them have interpreted it as “freedom to demand changes and exceptions at will.” Again, most of the work falls to Jaime. He’s the one who’s organized everything and he has a better grasp of how everything goes together. Though, in addition to being mentally swamped, he has a tendency to tell everyone YES!

I started out saying that this was his project and I’m only here for moral support, but it’s become apparent that if we don’t do a lot of problem solving and communicating between the two of us and if I don’t manage the overall building days while he hones in on teaching specific aspects of the project to the participants, then we aren’t going to get this done in an organized and timely fashion. Both of us are get-it-done kind of people. If we are given a deadline, we will make the deadline no matter how much work it takes, but we keep thinking, “Work smarter not harder.” How do we do this? I counter a lot of Jaime’s YES! responses with a No. This way he doesn’t have to feel like a bad guy and he can tell people he’d like to do that but…and I can tell people it’s just not possible. A lot of their requests are minor, like what direction their water tank sinks are facing, but if we change it on every one we spend extra hours refitting the form work every time the next family decides they want it a different way. This also makes the learning process more confusing for the guys who are learning the job. I came up with a short term solution as Fletch seemed to be floundering on Saturday afternoon. I reorganized our time a bit. Instead of just taking Sunday off I had him draw diagrams of the rebar cage, measurements, and number of pieces we needed in each shape and then explained (read: did not ask or give them an option) to the leaders that we would show up on Monday at 11am (rather than our usual 7:30 start time). They were expected to have everything set up and we would come check their work before the concrete was poured. This gave Jaime two days that he didn’t have to jump right out of bed and out the door.

We had to show up at 11:00 you see (instead of noon or not at all, even though they were perfectly capable of doing that day’s work without us) because we needed to be there to eat. EVERYONE wants to feed us. A typical work day involves a 10am atol break where we drink rice, corn, or oatmeal mush usually with some sweet bread. Somewhere between 11:30 and 1:00 there’s a lunch break. To show their appreciation, the families all purchase meat or kill a chicken from their house to feed us; this is a big expense for them. In the afternoon, when the work is finished, we’re treated to yet another atol and sweet bread snack. Sometimes we get a soda and sweet bread. If the woman has paid attention to our habits and our health talks then we’re presented with bottled water (bought fresh from the tienda) and sweet bread. We’ve talked a lot about how it’s a good idea to drink more water than soda, and we’re also constantly swigging from our nalgene bottles as we give talks or work on the project. Last Monday I actually went to the site with Fletch even though I knew I didn’t feel well; I just didn’t realize how bad it was until I finished my rice atol and felt like I was in grave danger of it all coming back up. I made a million and one excuses in order to walk myself home–even though they offered to let me rest in their bed many times, set up a seat for me in the shade, and begged me to stay. You should have seen the look of disappointment on the cook’s face. She really wanted me to eat lunch. Turns out she’d made a delicious beef and cabbage stew, which on a normal day I’d probably enjoy eating, but on that day might have been the end of me.

Remembering that face, I stayed away from construction for an extra day to make sure I really was okay before I had to go back to eating so much food again. There is one little trick that both of us employ, which is to ask for a bag. Even at regular family gatherings, it’s so important that everyone get an equal share that the hosts will provide plastic bag for taking home pieces of fruit, extra rolls, or bits of meat that someone was too full to finish. Fletch can’t stomach boiled platanos though the locals are a fan of this squishy, sweet treat. In general we’ve just had our fill of sweet bread, though all the women insist we take two each. So we eat a bit in front of them and then ask for a bag. As we walk the winding dirt road home between the two communities at the end of the day we always run in to kids, but now we’ve got treats to hand out to the first kids we come across, and it makes them pretty happy. I can assuage my guilt over giving away sugary soda when, like yesterday, I find a group of 5 or so children who get to share the bottle instead of giving the whole thing to rot one little kid’s teeth. The health worker part of me is so automatic, I give a bottle of pop to a group of smiling kids and say, “Now, don’t forget to your brush your teeth!”

Giving orders to kids is easy, but giving them to all the guys on the project has been met with mixed reactions. Mixing cement for one of the floors, we’d tried to impress upon everyone the benefit of not putting too much water in the mix. This makes your floor spall, or have tons of spider cracks and chipping. At our second floor, the group of young guys and men working reacted to my comments of “remember not too much water” by looking me in the face and continuing to dump buckets of water in. Make your floor crappy, boys! See if I care. Every time they started standing around, I’d grab a hoe and start doing their jobs. They’d rush in to take over. At least I can keep things moving, even if they don’t particularly like me. At another house, the third water tank, the father of the family treated me kindly as some sort of cute curiousity. I found this more funny than offensive. He referred to me as Emmy the whole time and when I gave them the next step to work on or friendly reminders on how and why to do things a certain way he’d say, “You understand a man’s work so well!” like he was genuinely impressed. Every time I picked up a tool he’d kindly show me how to do a task I was already familiar with. In most cases, I think my ability to make the guys move isn’t a straighforward expression of sexism, but an unconscious reaction to their gender expectations. I don’t think guys are even aware of the fact that they take my tools out of my hand–even Chalio does it when we’re working in the garden! It’s as though something registers with them as out of place and they have to fix it, so they take over for me and it’s fixed. At least I can use their reactions to our advantage. Generally I alternate between giving instructions, jumping in doing bits of work, and playing with babies. The ladies like it when I play with babies. Here a woman is throwing her grandson at me. I think it reassures them that even though I don’t have any of my own I’m not a total alien, because I still like them…Sometimes I am amazed at how strange I must be to them.

This has all led to some interesting discussions with Diego, Ximon, and various families we’ve worked with regarding the ideas of Men’s Work and Women’s Work. Ximon is a really calm, pensive guy. We like him a lot. After one little talk about how Jaime and I share tasks he said, “You know, we’ve been talking about these ideas in church, about la dignidad de la mujer (the dignity of women).” Apparently what I was saying concurred with the ideas discussed at church, that a man can wash clothes just like a woman can and a woman can work in the fields just a like a man can. I told him, “When people say, ‘Oh he can’t do that he’s a man’ or ‘Oh, she can’t do that she’s a woman’ it’s not that he or she cannot, but that they don’t want to try or that their parents or grandparents don’t want them to try because they believe in Man’s Work and Woman’s work as two separate and distinct things.” Working with these families and watching them it gives me a much greater appreciation for a culture or societies struggle for gender equity. It necesitates so many deeply rooted ideological changes, and the difficulty of those changes I think are greatly underestimated by those of us who’ve not had to struggle out from under them. Particularly I think it’s so easy for women, say in a college gender studies course, to demonize foreign men. It’s so much harder to undersand the subtleties of gender inequality and how to counteract them. I think though, that what I’ve observed has left me hopeful. People are listening to these message about gender. They’re thinking about them, mulling them over. It’s a process that takes time. Slow as it may be, I think things really are changing for the better.

I keep thinking about the benefits and drawbacks of the project. A group of us were talking at the COS conference a few weeks ago, commiserating about what a headache even attempting one of these things is, and my friend Anne (who managed a water tank project in her town) said, “Yeah, first of all it’s a pain, and second I don’t think it’s that sustainable. Teaching them about why these types of infrastructure are important so that they build them themselves is sustainable, but doing a SPA project isn’t sustainable.” I have to say, I agree with all that. So as volunteers obsessed with sustainability, why do we continue to seek these grants and help build? I think SPA projects can build trust and confidence in a community, and these two things when developed can help everyone achieve a better state of living.

Trust is built over the period of time the community and volunteer establish their relationship and decide they want to do a project. When the project happens and the community sees that you didn’t just deliver the common politician’s empty promises, they trust that things can be done to improve their lives. This entire process has been a learning experience for the two main community leaders, Diego and Ximon, on how to manage community funds and a community bank account. But they’re doing it responsibly and well, which builds trust between the community and their elected leaders. This is something Guatemala is greatly lacking, trust in elected leaders, thus doing a SPA project helps to build that trust on a small, local level. In this case, our home village is a counterpoint–the leaders didn’t manage to get their act together and run a project, thus community trust in their leaders has disintegrated to apathy.

Confidence is built slowly through the process as well. Diego and Ximon build their self confidence as they realize they are capable of running a project with an international aid organization. Through all the work the project entails, Diego, Ximon, and all the participating community members become more confident masons by acquiring new building skills and insights to construction. Finally, building infrastructure that improves the quality of their home increases self confidence within the participating families.

Doing a SPA project is also a question of economic opportunity. Do the communities we’re working in have enough economic opportunity to allow them to save money in order to build infrastructure without outside help? Is there a way to create or better use that economic opportunity? Here we tried to create that with the Temux Mayan Artisans, with their participation in the social program Mi Familia Progresa, and talking about how they can better spend money sent to them from family working in the states. All of the participating artisans were also participants in the health talks and slated to receive a project in their home. The money they earn from the bags could have gone to building. We wanted to make that a very clear connection, but since the SPA project here totally fell through, that attempt also failed.

In Yulais, there are very few men in the states (which in some ways is GREAT), and we haven’t been able to develop the artisan project enough to include their community as well (though this is a future possibility). We focused on teaching them how to better spend their welfare money from Mi Familia Progresa. The fact is, there are plenty of places in Guatemala (and too many other places in the world where there are yet more Peace Corps Volunteers deciding for or against SPA projects) where there is no economic opportunity. The community in southern Huehue where we helped our friend Charlotte with a latrine building project appeared to have no resources and no income. The homes were simple adobe, everyone cooked over open fires. The homes lacked many of the comforts that we see in poor houses all over the country–televisions and stereos. They had nothing to offer beyond what they could provide in labor. To do a SPA project or not do a SPA project is sometimes a question of do we leave them hanging with these vague notions of health and what it takes to make their health better but no clear path to get there, or do we clear the path for them to clarify these notions and make them a reality? If the crux of the argument is economic opportunity, by doing a project are we simply treating symptoms instead of the root of the problem? In this case is that bad or good? I’m not really saying that we should all approach our jobs in one specific way. To me, it’s just an interesting debate I’ve had rolling around in my head since we jumped head over heels into this project. Evaluating the benefits and drawbacks of what we’re doing is the only way to try and improve. It’s worth thinking about.

I think overall the project has been and will continue to be very beneficial for the community of Yulais. There’s the improved trust and confidence I talked about, but there is also the fact that the SPA has been a great extension of official Peace Corps goals of cultural exchange. Every time we take an atol break or sit down to lunch with a family, we have an opportunity to talk to them about things that are important to them. We’ve been giving mini-charlas on all sorts of topics: family planning, gender equality, deforestation, using resources wisely. We exchange jokes, learn new Q’anjob’al words, dance to the marimba in time with compacting cement. There’s a lot of laughter. Many of the families blast the radio all day long. We aren’t super fans of this, but making a joke out of it helps us deal with it. Fletch’s sense of humor has been amazing through all of this. He can keep himself and others laughing long after I feel done for the day. He says he feels terribly impatient, but I think I’m the only other person that ever notices. Everyone else keeps working and smiling at their usual unhurried pace. That’s just the way it is. It will be close on all accounts: money, time, materials, and our stamina, but we’ll get ‘er done.