Development from the Ground-Up

What is development? As a Peace Corps Volunteer, am I actually involved in my community’s development? These are some of the questions that have haunted me since I arrived in my community.

For the longest time, I had no access to Internet. The only time I checked my email was when I left site, usually to go to Asunción (located only a short 6 hours away by bus!). Friends are often amazed by the quantity of unread emails in my inbox: “You have 200 unread emails?!” My response is “I had 25 and then I came to Paraguay.” Consequently, it’s not hard to imagine my excitement when Internet finally arrived in my community. As of a month now, two locals have obtained Internet connections, a cyber café and the municipality.

People don’t even know how to use computers, let alone what the Internet is. Everyone has been asking me, “Do you have Joe Shmoe’s (the previous volunteer) código?” Code? What does that mean? Oh, email address. People in town want to communicate via the Internet, but they have no idea how to. At least the cyber café offers affordable computer classes. Now high school students no longer have to leave site to attend computer classes, and even younger kids have the opportunity to go. The municipality (muni) allows me to use Internet for free in return for teaching the Secretaries how to use the computer.

Two weeks ago, I was busy surfing the web when in walked the muni’s accountant. As a large part of my work with the two cooperatives in town consists of developing easy-to-use accounting systems, we got to talking about different accounting systems utilized in Paraguay (or the lack thereof). All of a sudden she exclaimed “Para mi, te caiste del cielo” (“For me, you have fallen from heaven”). “Why?” I asked. She responded that by instructing the muni’s employees in the use of a computer, they could eventually learn to perform data entry. With that simple, but lengthy task out of the way, the accountant could use her weekly visit to focus on the actual balancing of the books. What’s more, the employees could use their newfound understanding of spreadsheets to help them comprehend the municipality’s financial situation.

Speaking of accounting, the Treasurer of one of the cooperatives – whom I have been capacitating in electronic financial applications for the past year – and I completed an income statement. We drew our numbers from the several spreadsheets that he and I have assiduously kept updated during the past twelve months. It took us all day, but we finally had a spreadsheet reflecting the cooperative’s income and expenditures, its cash flow. For the first time, the Treasurer was, at one glance, able to grasp the central question that drives every business: “Where’s the money going?” The answer was not exactly the most encouraging one, as our net income was negative.

I spent weeks pounding my head against a wall trying to figure out how we could continue running on a negative balance (after all, I have never studied accounting before). As I sat in Asunción discussing my work with two friends, I discovered that they were both professional accountants. Being the dork that I am, I whipped out my external drive and presented to them our many different spreadsheets. Taking one look at them, my friend explained “Your cooperative functions like the American economy. It’s running up huge debts to obtain cash to pay its members for their sales of products, sales the coop receives on credit. The coop is selling in a market where it has extremely high overhead costs, leaving it with negative profits. It’s using money it doesn’t have.” Realizing the gravity of the situation, I lamented “We’re jodido (f***ed) aren’t we?”

Now, here is the part that blows my mind. My coop doesn’t differ greatly from other Paraguay coops, especially those located in the countryside. As 90% of Paraguay is rural, I’d venture to say that most of the coops in Paraguay are rural. That means that they probably suffer from the same problems we do: illiterate members and leaders, low credit repayment, non-payment of membership fees, little knowledge of computers and modern technology, and ignorance of good business/management practices. They pay exorbitant fees to accountants who visit them monthly from cities an hour or two away and whose sole task is to calculate taxes for the government, not to complete a financial work-up of the cooperative. There’s no coordinated effort to improve cooperatives’ administrations and organizations, no universal accounting system used throughout Paraguay; just scattered attempts by beneficent second-level coops that provide first-level coops with the occasional educational or technical workshop. We Peace Corps Volunteers come for only two years. By the time we have figured out the problems plaguing our organizations, it’s time for us to leave. No wonder this country is still underdeveloped after 40 years of U.S. aid!

On a positive note, maybe the situation is finally turning around, for the better this time. Peace Corps volunteers have a history of reinventing the wheel. Then again, my bosses have referred other volunteers to me who have accounting questions and have requested a packet of accounting spreadsheets that volunteers can apply in their communities. As for the Paraguayan side of the equation, our cooperatives’ accountant told me a second-level coop has developed a complete and automatic electronic accounting system that they have made available for sale. The only barrier is its cost. In one of the most corrupt countries in the world, accounting takes on new significance. My coop may have a negative income statement, but at least the members have begun to use receipts and document their transactions. That’s a large leap in encouraging financial transparency. Even my friend in Asunción has trouble getting his colleagues to utilize receipts. There’s still a lot of work to be done, but at least we’ve taken the first step. I like to think of it as “One small step for me, one large step for my community.”

Yesterday, President Lugo came to my site for the inauguration of one of the coop’s new banana packing center. I knew we had a meeting, but I had no idea that it would be so widely or famously attended. There were the usual coop directors, as well as a huge crowd of community members, directors of higher-level coops that helped us with the project, press members, and security guards. The President has already stood me up twice, promising on two previous occasions that he would show up but failing to. Hence, I was astounded when he actually did.

The speeches given on this celebratory occasion were imbued with significance for the coop and the community. The coop’s president spoke about the organization’s history and growth since its foundation five years ago. President Lugo promised to honor requests for government funding and support. While I reacted to his remarks with cynicism and the usual distrust I maintain for any political promises, I was delighted that he had made an appearance. Having the media there to record both his promises and our pleas has great significance for our community, allowing it to be recognized as a new municipality all over Paraguay and shedding light on our people’s as-of-yet unfulfilled needs.

My favorite speech was that given our mayor. He spoke of how the community has been fighting for 30 years and how finally it became a municipality a year ago. With our 22,000 people, we are one of the more sizeable munis in the country, yet we are unheard of. The water and our distance from the former muni (located 2.5 hours away), allowed us to remain fairly undeveloped. The mayor spoke of how in the past year our community has grown by leaps and bounds, with a community census concluded, plans for an expansion of our local health post (we still don’t have doctors in town), and a government-funded project to empedrado (cobblestone) 8-12 km of road. Our name means “there is work to be done,” and there always will be, but look at how far we’ve come. That is development and I’m excited to be a part of it.

Questions about Development

“How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one’s culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.” – Barry Lopez, Artic Dreams

“What kind of person does it take to facilitate development?” This is a question I asked myself recently, when I left my site to run an errand and took advantage of the opportunity to treat myself to Chinese food and groceries from the Lebanese market. After only a few weeks in site, I felt to need to leave, to see other Americans, and to eat another cuisine. That got me thinking, “Are there who can truly adjust to life in a developing country; people who can leave their homelands and be happy living a place with fewer amenities, culinary options, and intellectuals?”

Maybe that’s why the majority of development workers are posted in capital cities, to keep ourselves from going campo-crazy. If we need to remain in the capital however – far-removed from the poor in the interior –, then can we ever really be effective in combating rural poverty? My friend pointed out homesickness, loneliness, cultural isolation, and losing our grips on “civilization” are exactly the reasons why we need natives implementing development in poor countries. If that’s the case, then the development efforts led by wealthier nations would by necessity be limited to training trainers.

Training trainers sounds like a great idea. We have all heard more than once the idiom “Give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Teach a man how to fish and he eats for a lifetime.” Despite the fact that development organizations and governments strongly advocate education as a solution to poverty, it has been proved ineffective over and over again. Look at Peace Corp’s development record for example. We are supposed to work ourselves out of a job, yet, 40 years later not only are we still in Paraguay, but we are expanding our program. We are here to explain how to employ the most-advanced technology and most-expensive technology available to do the simplest of tasks because in the U.S. even a child knows how to use it and access it, despite the limited availability of it in Paraguay. We are here to teach the Paraguayans how to plant species of trees plants native to their own country. We are here to share the lessons learned from our sophisticated societies’ climbs from rags to riches. “Teaching the uneducated masses” has rightly been criticized as a derivate of the condescending attitude implicit in the way rich countries conduct development. Investments in education do not necessarily result in increases in income or advances in freedoms.

People respond to incentives. Giving government officials loans to pay for new school buildings and teachers’ salaries is useless unless incentives exist to better educational systems that outweigh the temptation to pocket the money. Decreeing mandatory primary schooling will not result in a better-educated populace without guarantees that more years of education will result in higher-paying jobs.
Microfinance works because the emphasis isn’t on training the clients; it’s on training the bankers. The poorest of the poor don’t have any compelling rationale to study banking, but they are in need of credit. Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank had tremendous success because they focused on creating a workforce that knew how to manage an illiterate clientele and provide them with the money needed to profit from work that used the complicated skills their clients had already acquired (from embroidering traditional dresses to selling homemade foods). In fact, after taking out several loans, clients, of their accord, sought out financial management classes. Yunus didn’t need to ram that information down the throat of unwilling “savages,” saying all the while that he knew what was best for them.

If we want poor people around the world to have greater access to economic opportunities, we can’t be content to give our money to organizations that show TV ads featuring children with flies on their faces and squander their funds on their huge overhead costs just because it makes us feel good about ourselves. We can’t continue to engage in negligent consumption, insisting on buying the cheapest possible goods while closing our eyes to sweatshops, pollution, and poisonous pesticides. We can’t keep on allowing workers to suffer the burdens of [social, economic, and health] costs in order to save a few cents. We can’t remain ignorant. We need a paradigm shift away from educating people in poor countries and towards educating ourselves.

I Don’t Want No Bitches and HOES*

*(Horny Overly Excited Strays)



Well, one bitch in particular, my bitch. I came home to find a pack of stray dogs pursuing my puppy Bon Bon. Apparently the doggy birth control which I had injected in her 3 months ago had expired, against all claims by the vet that it was supposed to last for 6 months. In the day and night I had been gone from my house, my yard had turned into the dog pound. Usually the sight of Bon Bon trotting happily down the street, tail wagging, cheers me up. Now, however, I was worried. The dogs that were following her were no longer friendly neighborhood dogs wanting to play with my dog, but wild beasts (Wild: untamed, undomesticated, feral, rowdy, ferocious)! And like all males thinking with their penises instead of their heads, they turned their lust into a fierce competition to conquer the sole female. Any attempt on my part to approach Bon Bon led to several mad dogs, aggressively charging me with their teeth bared. It would be an understatement to say that I was scared. I was terrified. At the same time, my maternal instinct (or maybe just adrenaline) flared seeing several mad dogs trying to rape my baby girl. I charged back, with a large stick in my hands and screaming all the while like an enraged Scot in a Mel Gibson movie. Grabbing my dog’s rope, I dragged her inside the house. For a week, the poor girl was confined my dog to a tiny corner of my house (she’s a campo dog who lives outside and is normally not allowed in the house). When Bon Bon wanted to go outside to use the bathroom, I had to take her out her rope in one hand, armed with a broom in the other. I used that broom too (fear leads you to do crazy things, including beating animals with brooms), not that it helped much.
The first night I couldn’t sleep. I thought that Bon Bon was responsible for the whining keeping me up all night. Only later did I realize that it was the male dogs, lying outside my house, and whining about their blue balls. Whining was the least of my worries. I had dogs ramming themselves against my house walls at all hours of day and night. One even jumped through my kitchen window! These dogs were insane! The results of one hellish week are as follows:


List of Damages

2 broken doors
1 broken shower
1 caged puppy
1 mentally-precarious dog-owner

Why is my life so crazy??? I’ll never take lightly the expression “like a dog in heat” again!

Book Chuck!

Confessions of an Economic Hitman - John Perkins

The Secret History of the American Empire: The Truth about Economic Hit Men, Jackals, and How to Change the World - John Perkins

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle - Barbara Kingsolver

Handy Machete Tip #37

The best way to cut a coconut isn’t with a pocket knife (says the girl who still has a scar), but with a machete.

They Are like THAT because We Are like THIS

When I’m in a bad mood (often a result of some jerk whistling at me or frustration in general with my Paraguayan colleagues for seemingly being unable to get work done without me), I tend to become bitter. I rant, I rave, I curse the Paraguayan people (all in my head of course). As I grow ever more delirious every step that I take in the blazing Paraguayan sun, I’m seething on the inside as well. I fume about Paraguayans lack of education, their dumb questions, their poor manners, their misconceptions of the U.S., their poverty, everything I can think of at the moment. I look down upon them all the while feeling superior because of my university education, my knowledge of computers, my proficiency in several languages, my productivity, my class.

And then this morning I read a parable by Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh. He tells the story of a 14-year-old prostitute in Manila.

It is true that in the city you can make money more easily than in the countryside, so we can imagine how a young girl may have been tempted to go there to help her family. But after only a few weeks there, she was persuaded by a clever person to work for her and to earn perhaps one hundred times more money. Because she was so young and did not know much about life, she accepted, and became a prostitute. Since that time, she has carried the feeling of being impure, defiled, and this causes her great suffering. When she looks at other young girls, dressed beautifully, belong to good families, a wretched feeling wells up in her, and this feeling of defilement has become her hell.

But if she could look deeply at herself and at the whole situation, she would see that she is like this because other people are like that. ‘This is like this, because that is like that.’ So how can a so-called good girl, belonging to a good family, be proud. Because their way of life is like this, the other girl has to be like that. No one among us has clean hands. No one of us can claim it is not our responsibility. The girl in Manila is that way because of the way we are. Looking into the life of that young prostitute, we see the non-prostitute people. And looking at the non-prostitute people and the way that we live our lives, we see the prostitute. This helps to create that, and that helps to create this.

I realized that if Paraguayans are the prostitutes, we are the pimps. Who are we to condemn the way they live their lives, they way they act, the way they are? They are that way because we are this way. They are that way because we are this way. They live in poverty because the American consumer refuses to pay more than 50¢ for a bunch of bananas. Those bananas contain a delicious fruit, nourishing, full of potassium, delicious. In those same bananas are the sweat and tears of the Paraguayan farmer, the days, the weeks, the months spent in the hot sun planting, hoeing and weeding the land. The American consumer demands big, yellow, spotless fruit. We don’t see the fertilizers that double the size of the fruit, the pesticides that ensure that the fruit has no black spots; the vast expense the family must bear to pay to spray fruit ever-more resistant to chemicals. We don’t see the yellow puddles after the rain, chemical runoff from the fields that seeps into the ground and the wells and the water; the miscarriages caused by the women’s exposure to the toxic chemicals on their husbands’ clothes. Looking at their poverty, we see our non-poverty. And looking at our non-poverty, we see their poverty. Paraguayans are that way because Americans are this way.

What I Do: Part II

What I Do: Part II

Recently I was in a meeting between the Consejo de Administración (Board of Directors) and the Junta de Vigilancia (Supervisory Committee/Auditing Committee), when all hell broke loose. The Presidents of the Consejo and the Junta launched into a shouting match. Ever watched a WWF wrestling match? It was a lot like that. Here’s how it went down:

[translation by Pooja Virani]

PRESIDENT OF CONSEJO (PC): We’ve invited the Junta here today to this meeting of the Consejo to keep you informed of our decisions. We’d like to talk about X …

PRESIDENT OF JUNTA (PJ): We don’t like who you’ve chosen. Why did you choose them?

PC: It’s very important that the Consejo and the Junta work together.

PJ: You say you want us to work together, but how when we participate when the Consejo makes all the decisions?

PEACE CORPS VOLUNTEER [in this episode featured wearing a cape and a large PCV imprinted on her shirt]: Excuse me…

PC: We chose them because we taught they would be an appropriate match for the job.

PJ: How come the Consejo made that decision? Why didn’t we get a say in it?

PC: Because we made it.

PCV: Excuse me…

PJ: You only care about yourselves!

PC: No. We think that they are doing a great job and are very trustworthy.

Member of Consejo: “I’d like to apologize on behalf of the Consejo…”

PC: Maybe if you did your jobs…

PCV: Excuse me…

PJ: You all are stupid and you smell! [ok, I’m embellishing here]

Member of Junta: “Can’t we all just get along?”
PC: Well my daddy can beat up your daddy! [still embellishing]

[After half-an-hour or so of these back-and-forth accusations, I was finally able to get in a word. I pulled out one of my handy-dandy guides to cooperatives and read from it.]

PCV: The principal tasks of the Consejo, among others, are to make administrative decisions and to hire all cooperative employees and assign them responsibilities. The role of the Junta is to control the social and economic activities of the cooperative. In other words, their job is to revise the finances and the Consejo’s decisions and ensure that they comply with the cooperative’s by-laws. Under no circumstances, should the Junta interfere with the administrative decision-making process.

[I was so riled up that I couldn’t even properly pronounce the three-four-syllable Spanish vocabulary and had to have the Secretary read these passages]

PCV: [to the Consejo] Your job is to make administrative decisions. [to the Junta] Your job is to make sure that the decisions of the Consejo comply with the by-laws. If by chance they do not or you believe they will not benefit the cooperative members, you can bring your objections to the Consejo’s attention through your monthly report [which of course they have never actually written or submitted in all their months of service].

[Stunned expressions on the faces of both the Consejo and the Junta members. Of course, that only lasted a moment before the fighting resumed.]

PJ: We can’t participate in your decision-making, but that doesn’t mean we agree with the people you chose.

PC: We don’t care, we’re sticking with them.

PJ: You’re still stupid and you still smell.

[Once again, the PCV saves the day…?]

A large part of my job focuses on cooperative education. How do you run a cooperative if you don’t know what your job is? A Peace Corps Volunteer has the opportunity to train local leaders in managerial skills. I accomplish this goal through several approaches, including attending the cooperative’s directors’ meetings, conversing with the directors one-on-one, and directly teaching the directors. I hold classes with the Education Committees of both cooperatives, in which I teach the members about “cooperativism” and the functioning of cooperatives, among other things. The aim is to teach these members to teach the other members of the cooperatives. The same way that Paraguayans feel the need to share how I don’t eat meat with every new Paraguayan that I meet; wouldn’t it be great if they repeated the 7 principles of cooperativism or how great crop diversification is to every new member who attended a cooperative meeting?