Cents of Community in Colombia

About month since our last post to the blog, it is finally time to report that we are alive! After a two week stay in Europe visiting loved ones, friends and family we are back in adventure mode touring around Colombia, South America. During our first week we stayed in the capital, Bogota, with the wonderful family of a fellow Santa Clara student. We hadn’t expected it but our schedule soon became filled with meetings and visits in barrios all over the city of seven million people. While an initial impression of Bogota central may surprise you with its mild “Northwestern U.S.” climate and chic “Portland Oregon-ish” coffee shops and bookstores you need only to look to the hills that surround the city for scars from Colombia’s decade-long civil war: the hills that enclose Bogota from the realities of rural Colombian life are littered with millions of extremely modest, single story, double room, brick homes of desplazados (millions of farmers displaced from violent conflict in the far reaches of the country.) One result of the ongoing violence and consequent migration to safe, urban centers is that Colombia has at least economically become one of the most inequitable countries in all of Latin America. Though the issue of economic equity lies at the root of efforts to provide micro financing services to the “bottom billion” there are also other strategies emerging to encourage entrepreneurship at the family level.
First, I’ll mention concept that was introduced to us by Jacquie, an Ashoka Fellow who runs Laudes Infantis, a Bogota based organization that assists urban desplazados in building the community of their dreams. One barrio we visited, Bella Flora, which overlooks a valley of skyscrapers and stadiums has been developing in their own unique way: a community cafeteria, home-made playground, a community center complete with library and a radio station as well as local preschool. Each building constructed by the community with the help of Laudes is splattered with bright colors and a custom, colorful windows of all shapes and sizes. Bella Flor even features public trash bins constructed of recycled tires and (of course) painted in vibrant colors (public trash receptacles of any sight are a rarity in these parts!). Finally, the centerpiece of the community and indeed the organization on a whole is the concept of Banco de Trueque or a Bartering Bank. Here’s a scenario that was used to explain to me how a bank with no money works: A family goes to eat at the community cafeteria and if, despite being offered a subsidized, yummy, 13 cent lunch they cannot afford it the family simply agrees to a visit to the Banco de Trueque and then are served lunch. Later, during their visit to the bank the family explains that theory have no work and therefore cannot afford to eat for at least two weeks. In return for the food service the family is offered various outlets of community service to pay for the food they will eat over the following weeks. For example the father and mother are assigned shifts to empty the trash bins around the community and the children promise to visit the library to work on their homework and study for at least three hours every week. Upon completion of the assigned tasks, the father, mother and children are given special bartering bank currency (the wooden coins pictured left) that they take to the bank in order for their community “debts” to be cleared from the books.
The fourth type of bank we visited apart from commercial banks, micro financing banks, and bartering banks was a clothing bank run by the Arquidiocesana Foundation in Cali, Colombia about an hour’s flight south west of Bogota. Originally started by a psychologist Sofia Sarasti, Arquidiocesana Foundation’s banco de alimentos is surprisingly one of the first food banks opened in Colombia only eight years ago. Outside of distributing food donations to local families-in-need, the foundation has focused on targeting the causes of hunger, thereby lessening the need for donations in the first place. One of their programs designed especially for woman is called a “clothing bank” and it looks something like this: the foundation collects clothing donations (of completely new products) from local businesses and displays them in the clothing bank store in their headquarters complete with labels and price tags. Then, a group of about 100 women representing neighborhoods all over Cali are invited to take a one year class meeting once every two weeks on basic business skills such as accounting, product presentation as well as self-esteem and personal presentation. Once enrolled in the class, women are allowed to choose a daily quota of 50,000 pesos (~25 USD) in clothing from the clothing bank to take with them back to their local communities where they sell the clothing from their homes. Any resulting sales are split 50/50 between the bank and the entrepreneurs. Finally after one year of classes, when the women are cut-off from the free supply of clothing from the bank, the hope is that they will have the necessary personal and professional skills to buy products and start their own, sustainable businesses.
~sam

Attack of the Fruit Bat

Greetings from Burkina Faso. Sam and I just returned from a visit to the “bush” and we have a short story for yawl.

When we arrived at the guest house that our Professor had built we noticed that the first thing our driver Adama and the new library coordinator did was close the windows to their bed room. Not much thought was given to that until…. I tried to capture our dialogue best I could so follow along.
Austin: “Sam!……..Sam! Wake up…….Sam!” I throw my flip flop across the room to wake him up.
Sam stirs “Hmm What’s Up?”
Austin: “There is a bat in our room”
Sam: “Are you sure it is a bat?”
I was starring the bat eye to eye as it clung to my mosquito net. “Yes…I am very sure that it is a bat”
Sam: “Is it a vampire bat or a fruit bat?”
Austin: “What the hell difference does that make?……………..I hope it is a fruit bat ”
The bat flies around the room and lands on Sam’s mosquito net
Sam: “Maybe this is why the other guys closed their windows before they went to bed”
Austin: “Most likely”
The bat flew around the room again and disappeared under my bed, I was awake all night with a fear that Dracula was going to emerge from under my bed. I felt like a 6 year old with nightmares about monsters under my bed again. Fortunately in the morning I was still alive without having been bitten by a vampire and having to share in Dracula’s lament.

Hope all is well back home, Sam and I are off on safari for the next few days. Hopefully we get some good photos of elephants for you!

Can you spell Ouagadougou?

Nearly two weeks since last touching a personal computer and after a week without electricity for our cell phone, we find ourselves sitting in the large capital city “Ouaga” in the to-be-known country, Burkina Faso. Over two weeks ago we left Accra, Ghana and headed north to visit Friends of African Village Libraries (FAVL) a not-for-profit organization founded by Santa Clara University professors Michael Kevane and Leslie Gray. After more than a week spent in the village of Sumbrungu cataloging books, frying hash browns for friends, playing team-building games, waiting for something to happen, walking around the village and chatting it up with the local elders over a fresh crop of groundnuts (peanuts), we taxied north yet again to cross the border into Burkina Faso. After the initial shock of crossing into Burkina and figuratively hitting a wall in Francophone Africa, we slowly recovered enough to speak basic French phrases such as “toilette?” and to begin to absorb the vast differences between former English and French Africa colonies. With time it became clear that not only our tea and sweet breads from Ghana would be replaced by homemade alcohol and crispy French bread but that, in important matters, the English tradition of passive governance in Ghana is rivaled by Burkina’s inheritance of the French “Functionaire.” (An example of the importance of titles in which a government employee views their job as simply fulfilling a function, no more and no less). However these subtle differences are easily lost in the larger and perhaps more striking realization that Burkina Faso is undeniably, statistically and in our personal experience among the five poorest countries of the world. In upcoming posts and conversations we will try to be more specific about our observations of Burkina, but for now I want to introduce two dilemmas for you to help us discuss:

Dilemma 1: Can I knowingly contribute to “tourist pollution” and still go to tourist heaven?

Walking in the breathtaking landscape in the remote Nepali village of Lamatar we proudly returned warm smiles of welcome with our newly learned greeting “Namaste.” Upon which, and without fail, the local children would gladly respond to our traditional gesture, with not-so-traditional demand in English “Chocolate, Please!”
Fast forward thousands of miles to Paga Northern Ghana and as we stand frozen with cash in hand to pay a taxi driver for a trip to the Burkina border he looks at us longingly, wondering why we would cheat him out of the “bag fee” you know his explains: “pay for luggage.”
I do not know about “luggage fee” and I DO know about “Chocolate, please” (and I would really like some but it Africa chocolate bars cost more than a baby goat, I’m serious) I also realize that at some point, an well-intentioned traveler handed out a box of Hershey’s bars at the base of the Himalayas. That same tourist, on their next vacation on elephant safari in Ghana, decided to tip the taxi driver for handling their luggage. Not because it is custom, but because why not pay extra when it is not too much money for us? What is the difference between paying $4 for a $2 taxi ride especially when it is benefiting someone who really needs it? ($2 is about the daily wage for an agriculture worker in Northern Ghana).
In other words: as a representative of the financially wealthy West do I have the right to set the expectation that future tourists will also tip and come bearing gifts (tourist pollution)? Also from the perspective of local entrepreneurs, are they justified in expecting Westerners to pay a premium for the same, sweaty taxi ride?

Dilemma 2: When do I need to hold my Western, educated, socially liberal , ethnically European, modern American male tongue?

During a stay in a country village in El Salvador Austin complemented his host family on the size of their only prized chicken. “Me gusta!.” Several hours later he sat and starred wide-eyed at the freshly prepared lunch plate of pollo. “Te gusta?” his host mother asked intently. Adding to the stickiness of eating the only meat a family can afford all month, what if Austin, hypothetically, had been strictly vegetarian for moral reasons? Do you say something? Or just grin it and bear it as my Dad would say. Lets take this a step further by bringing in only real examples from our current travels: What if the host whose food you are about to enjoy has been obviously and consistently verbally abusing the underage (by our standards), female cook? What if that same female has not been given an education in local village school because her role as a woman is seen in that specific tradition and culture as solely a caregiver to her family. Can you, do you say anything? What if the host who is serving you chicken she cannot afford is wearing a Catholic rosary and she has prepared the meal with the help of the younger underage women who happens to be her husband‘s second wife. She has carried two of his children and lives in a mud house directly next to the younger wife who has given birth to one of his children. Do you feel comfortable asking her how, as a Christian, she views polygamy and marriage? What if, upon clearing your empty chicken plate to the water bucket to help the women wash, you are teased by the men in the family for doing women’s work. Do you stop washing to avoid disrespect for their tradition, or do you insist on helping and push the issue upon your male friends asking them why it is that only women are asked to clean? What if the women insist it is their tradition to clean?

Real life. Real stuff. What do we do?

~sam