IMF Says Ivory Coast Loan Provisions Will Improve Transparency
By Brent Latham
Dakar
31 March 2009
International Monetary Fund officials say they are optimistic provisions for a new loan to Ivory Coast will help increase transparency in the West African country, as it continues its recovery from civil war.
The IMF insisted on provisions increasing the transparency of government spending when they agreed to extend $570 million in new loans to the Ivorian government and forgive $3 billion worth of previous debt.
The main objectives of the new pact include offering fiscal consolidation and achieving sustainability, says IMF Ivory Coast mission chief Arend Kouwenaar.
"There is a particular emphasis on budget transparency and increasing poverty reduction and pro-poor and pro-growth spending," he said. "There is a lot of emphasis on monitoring of that spending to ensure that the budgeted amounts get really spent in the way the budget lines foresee, and that the population, the council of ministers, Parliament, and then the population see how that money has been spent."
Kouwenaar says extra budgetary spending has been a concern in Ivory Coast in recent years. He says large-scale works such as a presidential palace, a senate building, and monuments have been undertaken with revenues from Ivory Coast's booming oil sector.
"Last year about 0.7 percent of the budget was spent on large scale works outside the budget, which would maybe have a return in the very far future, and the example is the senate," he said. "The senate is being built, or was going to be built - had started to be built - but there is no senate in the constitution of Ivory Coast."
Kouwenaar says the government will now publish an annual budget, and give quarterly updates verifying that spending matches the budgeted amounts.
Kouwenaar says government spending will shift toward growth-oriented initiatives that benefit the broader population.
"The focus in coming years will be on spending for rehabilitation of infrastructure, social services, and some other crisis exit, rehabilitation needs," he explained.
Ivory Coast suffered through a civil war beginning in 2002. Fighting ended in 2003 and the country has been moving slowly towards unity.
A power-sharing agreement between rebel forces and the government led to progress toward presidential polls, which had been scheduled for last November. But the elections were delayed indefinitely when the voter identification and registration process failed to move forward at the projected pace. Observers hope the polls will take place this year.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Monday, March 30, 2009
Description of Service Chapter Four- A Town Built on a Plateau
4. A Town Built on a Plateau
“I can barely remember my first years, before I came here, to San Juan” Anhiel said, as he grinned in a way that had, over the years, etched an indelible smile on his good natured face, now highlighted by a beard grayed through the slow, steady passing of time in that village.
“Coming here to build this house was a great adventure for me. I had never left Belen before that.” If four decades had gone by since then, his weathered face made the time passed, much of it sitting there on the stoop of the house he had built watching the townspeople go by, seem like much more. As he leaned back, and stared up at the massive rock walls of Cerro Grande, which jut upward, across the valley behind the original Perdido home, his face mirrored the sincerity of those hard, cold granite peaks, softened now by the slowly dimming afternoon light, as it faded from bright yellow to a faint orange.
“It wasn’t easy,” he continued. “Until the opening of the road to La Esperanza, there were no building materials in San Juan.” A sparkle glimmered in his eye as he remembered those days. “No cement. No steel rods. Everything was made of mud. There was no way to build upward.” He thrust his arm skyward, to show the height that he now understood could be expected of buildings elsewhere.
When Anhiel was sent down from Belen, at the age of thirteen, the family had finally outgrown that rambling house overlooking the valley, now unrecognizable from the one-room structure built by Angel all those years before. The arrival from Belen of new family members had been a constant strain on resources, including space in that home. But Soledad and Felicidad, like good matrons anxious to accommodate, were reticent to concede the improbability of fitting an indefinite number of relatives under the one roof.
As the head of the growing household, Angel, who could do little to stem the flow of new inhabitants into his home, was left with no option but to look for ways to improve his economic lot. He now had a child of his own to support as well, his new wife having given birth to a son, Angel Segundo. Through the class of sheer determination born of absolute necessity, Angel managed to secure for himself the job of telegraph operator in San Juan, a coup at least partially attributable to the not unimportant detail that there was, at the time, no telegraph in the town.
While rooting about Gracias one day, Angel had the fortune of being the first to discover the possibility of the existence of such a post. Slowly sipping a beer at the local cantina, he overheard two patrons talking about their work for the state-owned telegraph company. They were telegraph operators in nearby towns, they told him when he investigated further. It didn’t take them long to disclose, over several more beers, that they also earned ample salaries for limited work.
Angel was intrigued. As the liquor continued to flow, he was able to convince his new acquaintances of the existence of San Juan, of which they had been in doubt. They explained to him how an obscure state statute, designed to integrate the municipalities of the area, would provide money to run a telegraph line to any town in the region where someone was willing to purchase a telegraph machine, and learn how to use it. The job came with a handsome monthly salary in perpetuity, the bi-monthly collection of which, it turned out, was the motive for their journey to Gracias on that day.
Not more than a couple hours later, having spent the last of those particular paychecks, and then some, at the cantina, the pair of telegraph technicians stumbled out of the bar and down the street to the local telegraph offices, Angel in tow, determined to see their new friend employed as well, so as to augment the salary pool from which to pay for their bi-monthly drinking expedition to Gracias. Finding the office closed for the siesta, the increasingly unruly group clamored onward to the home of the office administrator, who, on the condition that the three drunks leave the vicinity of his premises without delay, agreed to meet with Angel about setting up a telegraph office in San Juan.
Saving up from his occasional cattle herding, Angel was soon able to purchase, from the same office administrator whose home he had visited that day, his own telegraph machine, at a markup from the normal price which would have been considered outrageous, had it not been for the further understanding, completely unspoken and undocumented though it may have been, of the administrator’s agreement to initiate the necessary paperwork to have Angel hired, and the telegraph line extended to San Juan. If the process of setting up the actual line from Gracias took nearly a decade more, and in the end had very little to do with the hiring of a paid operator for the post in San Juan, the contracting of Angel as a permanent employee of the state was handled in a much more expedient manner, given that once a new employee began to collect his salary, he could in turn pay monthly association dues to the company’s state appointed representative in Gracias, in this case that same administrator in charge of the hire, who had also sold Angel his new telegraph machine, mostly on credit.
Content with his new employ, Angel would wait patiently for the line to be up and running, an undertaking for which the level of motivation on the part of the company authorities left much to be desired, largely because no one stood to gain from the accomplishment but the public who might have used the line. In the meantime, and there was quite a lot of that, Angel was content to sit day by day in the would-be telegraph office that he fashioned by clearing Felicidad and her children out of their bedroom, which, inconveniently for her but ideally for the telegraph business, opened directly onto the street in front of the house, which had slowly become a major thoroughfare, such as there was in San Juan. Angel painstakingly went about the facets of the job possible without a working line, namely collecting his bi-monthly government salary, and the rent the government paid him for the still-useless telegraph office which had necessitated the displacement of his sister. When passersby eventually began to mock his perpetual inactivity, sitting as he did all day long behind a desk, for no apparent reason, Angel made further plans to have a sign made to hang out front, but he quickly abandoned them when he realized the risk of being prematurely associated with the state government, which ran the telegraph operations, and, like all other things foreign, was of general suspicion to the San Juaneños. Still, he opened the office doors each morning, and dutifully sat behind his desk, awaiting further instructions from his supervisors in the capital, who were for quite some time, unbeknownst to him, completely unaware of his existence. With time, Angel became so comfortable in that routine, that he would have rued the day many years later that the telegraph line was finally enabled, had he or anyone else in San Juan been informed in anything resembling a timely manner that the feat had been accomplished.
Whatever the seriousness of his work, word of Angel’s newfound economic status enticed even more members of the Perdido clan to come down from the mountains to San Juan, where they installed themselves, each in turn, in his house. Clarita, the youngest daughter of Angel’s generation, came with her three children during a particularly bad drought during which Belen, like so many small towns in the hills, ran dangerously low on food when the corn harvest failed. Then came Metches, the next oldest sister, who arrived with her six children, who she planned to leave with their aunts in San Juan, to attend the newly opened primary school. That group installed themselves in a newly added room at the far corner of the property, which Angel had built months earlier for his own private use. Metches became quite comfortable there, and though she constantly intended to do so, she never found the time exactly right to return to Belen.
In the end, only two of the elder generation of Perdidos remained in the mountain home in Belen. Constance, Angel’s aunt, if only a few years older than he, stayed behind to take care of his mother, who was growing older and lonelier by the day. The two old women subsisted off their modest collection of livestock and a small but healthy garden, as they slowly slept away the numberless days and nights on the mountainside. Left behind, the woman who had given birth to Angel, and had bestowed one of her own given names on each of his two oldest sisters, Felicidad and Soledad, fluctuated for a time between those two dispositions, and finally settled on the first, wrapping her solitude in the embrace of the happiness derived from a deep and intuitive feeling of completion born of the understanding that her children were, now, better off than she had been.
In that way, the woman and the old mountain home faded slowly from memory. It was not until several years later that Angel awoke from a siesta at the desk behind his telegraph station on one hot summer day, and came to the realization that all the family members of such a mind or a viable age had moved in with him in San Juan, that he decided to return to Belen for his mother and aunt. But time and events intervened, day by day delaying any such excursion, to the point that it would be several years more before he made the trip. When Angel finally undertook the long hike up the mountain towards his birthplace, for the first time in decades, he was unable to locate, among the now unfamiliar twists and turns of the hills, the house in which he grew up. When he had wandered the countryside for three days, and slept two nights under the stars, without success finding familiar ground, he quietly returned to San Juan, and never spoke of Belen again.
While the Perdido homestead in Belen was withering in silence, the representation in San Juan flourished. Felicidad, slighted when Angel cleared her out of her room to make space for his office, and unwilling to continue to live ten to a room with her younger sisters, nieces and nephews, set Anhiel in motion on the building project.
Anhiel was a mason trained with utility rather than longevity in mind, and his works reflected that approach. If he couldn’t remember exactly when the house he built was finished, or for how many years it has stood, he did know that it was completed around the time Don Teyo, the local master carpenter, whose story Anhiel enjoyed telling time and time again, died.
“Old Don Teyo,” one of Anhiel’s variations would begin, “eased into San Juan more than thirty years ago. When he got here, he was already so old, he could no longer remember exactly where he had started from. He wasn’t planning on staying here for long. He was on his way out west to the town of Ocotepeque. He came riding in, from over the mountains, on a mule caravan from La Esperanza. The way he used to tell it, that day he arrived, that caravan went south towards the border, and there was no way for him to continue onward to Gracias, which wasn’t unusual in those days. Sometimes there were no caravans for weeks. You could walk from here to Gracias in a day or two, but Teyo was old and tired, so he took a room on the outskirts of town, near the fork in the road where the trail splits and heads west. He wanted to be near the spot where the caravans come together, before leaving town. He thought that way, he could be informed quickly when the opportunity came up to join a caravan headed west.
“In the meantime, Teyo started looking for temporary work to tide him over. He started a few construction projects here and there. Before long, he got his chance to go on to Gracias, with a group of traders headed west. But Teyo was in the middle of building one of the houses up the road, so he passed. That’s about the time when I first met him. He was eating his meals in Mama Feliz’s kitchen, in that home, that house right in front of us,” Anhiel said, pointing at the old Perdido house. “Before she moved over to this side of the road, Aida used to cook meals there, for passers through, to earn some extra money.”
“Well, old Don Teyo saw me at work on this house, and he wasn’t the type of person to see someone needing a hand and not lend it. He knew a lot about building that I didn’t, then. I was about thirteen or fourteen and had never really built much of anything. Mama Felicidad wanted to make a deal with him. She would trade room and board if he would work on her house. She was still mad at Angel for kicking her out of her room, to make space for the telegraph office. She wanted out of that house as soon as possible. But Teyo wanted to stay where he was. He wanted to always be close enough to that route to Gracias, so he could pack his things and leave town on a moment’s notice when the chance came up. Or so he said. But he agreed to help on this house part time in exchange for the meals, so we went to work together.
“Over the years, that path to Gracias turned into a road. The cars began to come and go soon after. They built the restaurant at the crossroads, and once the road had been widened and plowed, there was pretty regular transit between here and Gracias. Don Teyo watched all that from the patio outside his room by the crossroads, still renting by the week. But he never took any of those cars leaving San Juan.
“The town grew, and so there was always enough construction work to keep him busy. When he wasn’t working elsewhere, we worked on Mama Feliz’s house. We built the front room first, and the walls facing the street to block off the property, and then we closed in around them. Mama Feliz came over as soon as we had the roof of the first room covered, and she brought Aida with her to cook. It was warm and dry that summer. She said she had slept in worse her whole life, and she wasn’t about to let the lack of a few walls keep her out of her house. She was so proud.”
“Once we had the basic parts of the house finished, Teyo took me on as his apprentice, and we started doing some other jobs. As he told it, he had never actually been trained in anything in particular, and I could learn that way too.”
Anhiel remembered when the Teyo had told him how, in that place he couldn’t quite remember anymore, where he had grown up, the old master had been confronted with the necessity to build, or maybe rebuild something, though it was never clear exactly what, possibly as a result of one of the frequent natural disasters that frequently tormented the very poor both in San Juan and in the area where Teyo was from, wherever that was. That informal training resulted in a practical ability to build structures which were just good enough to pass muster upon inspection by the proprietor, and thus for Teyo to avoid most of the responsibility for repairing any defect discovered at a later point, be it ten minutes or ten years. Walking around with the tools of the trade, a rock tied to a string for leveling, and his spade, crafted from a sheet of scrap metal tied to a rather dubious sprig of pine, he had slowly become the local authority in matters of construction.
All the other professionals in San Juan, such as they could be considered, had gained their positions through a similar combination of longevity, tenacity, and sheer connivance. For most of the history of San Juan, professional training hadn’t been an issue. The simplicity of design of village life limited the necessary professions roughly to the fields of construction, agriculture, and food preparation. To that group of jobs, over the last few years, had been added the new fields of school professor and policeman, but those were staffed by outsiders sent by the government.
“Teyo thought the lack of formal training made him less suspicious,” Anhiel continued. “He spoke about building in a way people could understand, and I learned that way.”
“That was around the time they first started sending teachers to San Juan, and they opened the school. But I never went, Mama Feliz didn’t believe in it. At that age I was too old to learn anything new at any rate. Back in those days, people were suspicious of the teachers, because they were sent by the national authorities. This is a Conservative town, and the Liberal government sent them. It was the same with the soldiers, who showed up suddenly to police the town. No one thought a job should pay if it was something that a person could do himself. San Juan has always been safe, and gotten by fine, so what use did we have for teachers or policemen? “
So Teyo was also Anhiel’s teacher, if only in the local sense. And Teyo had also become the town’s expert carpenter, if by chance, just as Angel had become telegraph operator. In this new and growing place, one could be almost anything desired. As the local builders, Teyo and his apprentice Anhiel would do the best job they could with limited supplies and knowhow, and come back and fix what needed fixing later. Unfortunately for San Juan, and other towns like it, the same principal applied in somewhat more pressing professions like medicine and governance. In the face of a lack of choice, presence and willingness was necessarily substituted for ability. Only in the eminent matter of religion was a respectable expert sent by an outside authority, deeply concerned with leaving nothing to chance.
But there was less worry regarding Anhiel’s chosen profession, and there was much building to be done, so Teyo settled into his place. In that way, working by day and taking his meals, morning, noon, and night, in Felicidad’s kitchen, Teyo had lived most of his life in San Juan, day by day.
“With Teyo, I built half of San Juan,” Anhiel boasted. “But we never built a home for him. That is one regret I have. He always planned to move on somewhere else. Even after three decades, to the end, he still planned to go. Mayor after mayor tried to offer him land to build on. But they gave up. Teyo refused to put down roots.
“So in between jobs, we kept working on this place. We built the rest of the rooms you see now, one by one. Aida was making some money selling meals, and Mama Feliz began to raise her pigs out back. And slowly, room by room, we built the house up around the courtyard, as it is today. Aida gave birth to her first child – Oduber - right away too,” Anhiel said, laughing, “to help fill up all the rooms we were building. Then Tito was born, and then Delma, who lives in La Esperanza now- she was Aida’s second, then came Patricia and then Nancy, and there was my cousin Maya with her little baby son…,” Anhiel trailed off into a deep, extended silence. Moments later, as gradually as he had slipped away into his memory, he came back into the present. “As we built, the house filled itself.”
“It was years before everything was finished. And that very week that we finished the back room by the gate, when Mama Feliz finally declared that the house was finished, and we opened the champaign to celebrate, that was the week Don Teyo died. It was sudden - but somehow his death was not unexpected, not to me, or to anyone in the family. We had skipped around, Teyo and me, from project to project over the years, but we were always working on this house, throughout. We knew he would leave us when it was finished. When he saw it complete, when he had spent his energy, he had done what he had come to do, and he was satisfied.
“That day, he told me something I never thought I would hear. After all those years, he said that maybe San Juan was the place for him. He said he felt like he was finally home. That afternoon, he went to his room to rest. When he didn’t show up for dinner, I knew what had happened. He was always at the table just before sunset. But not that day.
“I walked up the road in the dusk, with the light fading like it is now. I found him in bed, alone, peaceful as could be. We tried to figure out how to contact his family, but no one knew. He had never told anyone where he had come from, not even me. He always said he didn’t remember anymore. He didn’t have any money saved, but everyone in town pitched in to pay for his burial. By then he had built almost every house in San Juan. My last job, with him, was to build his tomb, down in the cemetery. I could feel his spirit looking over my work, as he had all those years.”
Anhiel stopped again, this time to behold the setting sun in silence, as it sped towards its daily resting place behind the mountain. It was dusk in San Juan. When the light was gone, Anhiel turned to me and, placing his hand on my shoulder, spoke again. “But I will always remember Teyo by the work we did together. Speaking of which, the kitchen is still just as we built it then. Let’s go have some dinner.”
I would eat countless meals sitting in the alcove of that kitchen, my back pressed tightly against the mud wall. Quietly I would sit, morning, noon, and night, day after day, as this man Anhiel described, but who I never knew, surely did as well, accompanied only by those heirs to the Perdido legacy, at work in the kitchen before me. One rotated meat over the open flame, and another pounded cornmeal into tortillas, their frames, plump from working with food all day, rescued from the darkness by the warm glow from the stove in corner. Sometimes, like Anhiel, I thought I could feel Don Teyo with me there, too. The amateur arrangement of the kitchen, sprung from the minds of those two untrained masons years before, yielded an inexplicable feeling of companionship amidst isolation. Perhaps, I would think in the years to come, the unusual design that placed the dining room in such proximity to the warmth of that kitchen, had been no accident.
“I can barely remember my first years, before I came here, to San Juan” Anhiel said, as he grinned in a way that had, over the years, etched an indelible smile on his good natured face, now highlighted by a beard grayed through the slow, steady passing of time in that village.
“Coming here to build this house was a great adventure for me. I had never left Belen before that.” If four decades had gone by since then, his weathered face made the time passed, much of it sitting there on the stoop of the house he had built watching the townspeople go by, seem like much more. As he leaned back, and stared up at the massive rock walls of Cerro Grande, which jut upward, across the valley behind the original Perdido home, his face mirrored the sincerity of those hard, cold granite peaks, softened now by the slowly dimming afternoon light, as it faded from bright yellow to a faint orange.
“It wasn’t easy,” he continued. “Until the opening of the road to La Esperanza, there were no building materials in San Juan.” A sparkle glimmered in his eye as he remembered those days. “No cement. No steel rods. Everything was made of mud. There was no way to build upward.” He thrust his arm skyward, to show the height that he now understood could be expected of buildings elsewhere.
When Anhiel was sent down from Belen, at the age of thirteen, the family had finally outgrown that rambling house overlooking the valley, now unrecognizable from the one-room structure built by Angel all those years before. The arrival from Belen of new family members had been a constant strain on resources, including space in that home. But Soledad and Felicidad, like good matrons anxious to accommodate, were reticent to concede the improbability of fitting an indefinite number of relatives under the one roof.
As the head of the growing household, Angel, who could do little to stem the flow of new inhabitants into his home, was left with no option but to look for ways to improve his economic lot. He now had a child of his own to support as well, his new wife having given birth to a son, Angel Segundo. Through the class of sheer determination born of absolute necessity, Angel managed to secure for himself the job of telegraph operator in San Juan, a coup at least partially attributable to the not unimportant detail that there was, at the time, no telegraph in the town.
While rooting about Gracias one day, Angel had the fortune of being the first to discover the possibility of the existence of such a post. Slowly sipping a beer at the local cantina, he overheard two patrons talking about their work for the state-owned telegraph company. They were telegraph operators in nearby towns, they told him when he investigated further. It didn’t take them long to disclose, over several more beers, that they also earned ample salaries for limited work.
Angel was intrigued. As the liquor continued to flow, he was able to convince his new acquaintances of the existence of San Juan, of which they had been in doubt. They explained to him how an obscure state statute, designed to integrate the municipalities of the area, would provide money to run a telegraph line to any town in the region where someone was willing to purchase a telegraph machine, and learn how to use it. The job came with a handsome monthly salary in perpetuity, the bi-monthly collection of which, it turned out, was the motive for their journey to Gracias on that day.
Not more than a couple hours later, having spent the last of those particular paychecks, and then some, at the cantina, the pair of telegraph technicians stumbled out of the bar and down the street to the local telegraph offices, Angel in tow, determined to see their new friend employed as well, so as to augment the salary pool from which to pay for their bi-monthly drinking expedition to Gracias. Finding the office closed for the siesta, the increasingly unruly group clamored onward to the home of the office administrator, who, on the condition that the three drunks leave the vicinity of his premises without delay, agreed to meet with Angel about setting up a telegraph office in San Juan.
Saving up from his occasional cattle herding, Angel was soon able to purchase, from the same office administrator whose home he had visited that day, his own telegraph machine, at a markup from the normal price which would have been considered outrageous, had it not been for the further understanding, completely unspoken and undocumented though it may have been, of the administrator’s agreement to initiate the necessary paperwork to have Angel hired, and the telegraph line extended to San Juan. If the process of setting up the actual line from Gracias took nearly a decade more, and in the end had very little to do with the hiring of a paid operator for the post in San Juan, the contracting of Angel as a permanent employee of the state was handled in a much more expedient manner, given that once a new employee began to collect his salary, he could in turn pay monthly association dues to the company’s state appointed representative in Gracias, in this case that same administrator in charge of the hire, who had also sold Angel his new telegraph machine, mostly on credit.
Content with his new employ, Angel would wait patiently for the line to be up and running, an undertaking for which the level of motivation on the part of the company authorities left much to be desired, largely because no one stood to gain from the accomplishment but the public who might have used the line. In the meantime, and there was quite a lot of that, Angel was content to sit day by day in the would-be telegraph office that he fashioned by clearing Felicidad and her children out of their bedroom, which, inconveniently for her but ideally for the telegraph business, opened directly onto the street in front of the house, which had slowly become a major thoroughfare, such as there was in San Juan. Angel painstakingly went about the facets of the job possible without a working line, namely collecting his bi-monthly government salary, and the rent the government paid him for the still-useless telegraph office which had necessitated the displacement of his sister. When passersby eventually began to mock his perpetual inactivity, sitting as he did all day long behind a desk, for no apparent reason, Angel made further plans to have a sign made to hang out front, but he quickly abandoned them when he realized the risk of being prematurely associated with the state government, which ran the telegraph operations, and, like all other things foreign, was of general suspicion to the San Juaneños. Still, he opened the office doors each morning, and dutifully sat behind his desk, awaiting further instructions from his supervisors in the capital, who were for quite some time, unbeknownst to him, completely unaware of his existence. With time, Angel became so comfortable in that routine, that he would have rued the day many years later that the telegraph line was finally enabled, had he or anyone else in San Juan been informed in anything resembling a timely manner that the feat had been accomplished.
Whatever the seriousness of his work, word of Angel’s newfound economic status enticed even more members of the Perdido clan to come down from the mountains to San Juan, where they installed themselves, each in turn, in his house. Clarita, the youngest daughter of Angel’s generation, came with her three children during a particularly bad drought during which Belen, like so many small towns in the hills, ran dangerously low on food when the corn harvest failed. Then came Metches, the next oldest sister, who arrived with her six children, who she planned to leave with their aunts in San Juan, to attend the newly opened primary school. That group installed themselves in a newly added room at the far corner of the property, which Angel had built months earlier for his own private use. Metches became quite comfortable there, and though she constantly intended to do so, she never found the time exactly right to return to Belen.
In the end, only two of the elder generation of Perdidos remained in the mountain home in Belen. Constance, Angel’s aunt, if only a few years older than he, stayed behind to take care of his mother, who was growing older and lonelier by the day. The two old women subsisted off their modest collection of livestock and a small but healthy garden, as they slowly slept away the numberless days and nights on the mountainside. Left behind, the woman who had given birth to Angel, and had bestowed one of her own given names on each of his two oldest sisters, Felicidad and Soledad, fluctuated for a time between those two dispositions, and finally settled on the first, wrapping her solitude in the embrace of the happiness derived from a deep and intuitive feeling of completion born of the understanding that her children were, now, better off than she had been.
In that way, the woman and the old mountain home faded slowly from memory. It was not until several years later that Angel awoke from a siesta at the desk behind his telegraph station on one hot summer day, and came to the realization that all the family members of such a mind or a viable age had moved in with him in San Juan, that he decided to return to Belen for his mother and aunt. But time and events intervened, day by day delaying any such excursion, to the point that it would be several years more before he made the trip. When Angel finally undertook the long hike up the mountain towards his birthplace, for the first time in decades, he was unable to locate, among the now unfamiliar twists and turns of the hills, the house in which he grew up. When he had wandered the countryside for three days, and slept two nights under the stars, without success finding familiar ground, he quietly returned to San Juan, and never spoke of Belen again.
While the Perdido homestead in Belen was withering in silence, the representation in San Juan flourished. Felicidad, slighted when Angel cleared her out of her room to make space for his office, and unwilling to continue to live ten to a room with her younger sisters, nieces and nephews, set Anhiel in motion on the building project.
Anhiel was a mason trained with utility rather than longevity in mind, and his works reflected that approach. If he couldn’t remember exactly when the house he built was finished, or for how many years it has stood, he did know that it was completed around the time Don Teyo, the local master carpenter, whose story Anhiel enjoyed telling time and time again, died.
“Old Don Teyo,” one of Anhiel’s variations would begin, “eased into San Juan more than thirty years ago. When he got here, he was already so old, he could no longer remember exactly where he had started from. He wasn’t planning on staying here for long. He was on his way out west to the town of Ocotepeque. He came riding in, from over the mountains, on a mule caravan from La Esperanza. The way he used to tell it, that day he arrived, that caravan went south towards the border, and there was no way for him to continue onward to Gracias, which wasn’t unusual in those days. Sometimes there were no caravans for weeks. You could walk from here to Gracias in a day or two, but Teyo was old and tired, so he took a room on the outskirts of town, near the fork in the road where the trail splits and heads west. He wanted to be near the spot where the caravans come together, before leaving town. He thought that way, he could be informed quickly when the opportunity came up to join a caravan headed west.
“In the meantime, Teyo started looking for temporary work to tide him over. He started a few construction projects here and there. Before long, he got his chance to go on to Gracias, with a group of traders headed west. But Teyo was in the middle of building one of the houses up the road, so he passed. That’s about the time when I first met him. He was eating his meals in Mama Feliz’s kitchen, in that home, that house right in front of us,” Anhiel said, pointing at the old Perdido house. “Before she moved over to this side of the road, Aida used to cook meals there, for passers through, to earn some extra money.”
“Well, old Don Teyo saw me at work on this house, and he wasn’t the type of person to see someone needing a hand and not lend it. He knew a lot about building that I didn’t, then. I was about thirteen or fourteen and had never really built much of anything. Mama Felicidad wanted to make a deal with him. She would trade room and board if he would work on her house. She was still mad at Angel for kicking her out of her room, to make space for the telegraph office. She wanted out of that house as soon as possible. But Teyo wanted to stay where he was. He wanted to always be close enough to that route to Gracias, so he could pack his things and leave town on a moment’s notice when the chance came up. Or so he said. But he agreed to help on this house part time in exchange for the meals, so we went to work together.
“Over the years, that path to Gracias turned into a road. The cars began to come and go soon after. They built the restaurant at the crossroads, and once the road had been widened and plowed, there was pretty regular transit between here and Gracias. Don Teyo watched all that from the patio outside his room by the crossroads, still renting by the week. But he never took any of those cars leaving San Juan.
“The town grew, and so there was always enough construction work to keep him busy. When he wasn’t working elsewhere, we worked on Mama Feliz’s house. We built the front room first, and the walls facing the street to block off the property, and then we closed in around them. Mama Feliz came over as soon as we had the roof of the first room covered, and she brought Aida with her to cook. It was warm and dry that summer. She said she had slept in worse her whole life, and she wasn’t about to let the lack of a few walls keep her out of her house. She was so proud.”
“Once we had the basic parts of the house finished, Teyo took me on as his apprentice, and we started doing some other jobs. As he told it, he had never actually been trained in anything in particular, and I could learn that way too.”
Anhiel remembered when the Teyo had told him how, in that place he couldn’t quite remember anymore, where he had grown up, the old master had been confronted with the necessity to build, or maybe rebuild something, though it was never clear exactly what, possibly as a result of one of the frequent natural disasters that frequently tormented the very poor both in San Juan and in the area where Teyo was from, wherever that was. That informal training resulted in a practical ability to build structures which were just good enough to pass muster upon inspection by the proprietor, and thus for Teyo to avoid most of the responsibility for repairing any defect discovered at a later point, be it ten minutes or ten years. Walking around with the tools of the trade, a rock tied to a string for leveling, and his spade, crafted from a sheet of scrap metal tied to a rather dubious sprig of pine, he had slowly become the local authority in matters of construction.
All the other professionals in San Juan, such as they could be considered, had gained their positions through a similar combination of longevity, tenacity, and sheer connivance. For most of the history of San Juan, professional training hadn’t been an issue. The simplicity of design of village life limited the necessary professions roughly to the fields of construction, agriculture, and food preparation. To that group of jobs, over the last few years, had been added the new fields of school professor and policeman, but those were staffed by outsiders sent by the government.
“Teyo thought the lack of formal training made him less suspicious,” Anhiel continued. “He spoke about building in a way people could understand, and I learned that way.”
“That was around the time they first started sending teachers to San Juan, and they opened the school. But I never went, Mama Feliz didn’t believe in it. At that age I was too old to learn anything new at any rate. Back in those days, people were suspicious of the teachers, because they were sent by the national authorities. This is a Conservative town, and the Liberal government sent them. It was the same with the soldiers, who showed up suddenly to police the town. No one thought a job should pay if it was something that a person could do himself. San Juan has always been safe, and gotten by fine, so what use did we have for teachers or policemen? “
So Teyo was also Anhiel’s teacher, if only in the local sense. And Teyo had also become the town’s expert carpenter, if by chance, just as Angel had become telegraph operator. In this new and growing place, one could be almost anything desired. As the local builders, Teyo and his apprentice Anhiel would do the best job they could with limited supplies and knowhow, and come back and fix what needed fixing later. Unfortunately for San Juan, and other towns like it, the same principal applied in somewhat more pressing professions like medicine and governance. In the face of a lack of choice, presence and willingness was necessarily substituted for ability. Only in the eminent matter of religion was a respectable expert sent by an outside authority, deeply concerned with leaving nothing to chance.
But there was less worry regarding Anhiel’s chosen profession, and there was much building to be done, so Teyo settled into his place. In that way, working by day and taking his meals, morning, noon, and night, in Felicidad’s kitchen, Teyo had lived most of his life in San Juan, day by day.
“With Teyo, I built half of San Juan,” Anhiel boasted. “But we never built a home for him. That is one regret I have. He always planned to move on somewhere else. Even after three decades, to the end, he still planned to go. Mayor after mayor tried to offer him land to build on. But they gave up. Teyo refused to put down roots.
“So in between jobs, we kept working on this place. We built the rest of the rooms you see now, one by one. Aida was making some money selling meals, and Mama Feliz began to raise her pigs out back. And slowly, room by room, we built the house up around the courtyard, as it is today. Aida gave birth to her first child – Oduber - right away too,” Anhiel said, laughing, “to help fill up all the rooms we were building. Then Tito was born, and then Delma, who lives in La Esperanza now- she was Aida’s second, then came Patricia and then Nancy, and there was my cousin Maya with her little baby son…,” Anhiel trailed off into a deep, extended silence. Moments later, as gradually as he had slipped away into his memory, he came back into the present. “As we built, the house filled itself.”
“It was years before everything was finished. And that very week that we finished the back room by the gate, when Mama Feliz finally declared that the house was finished, and we opened the champaign to celebrate, that was the week Don Teyo died. It was sudden - but somehow his death was not unexpected, not to me, or to anyone in the family. We had skipped around, Teyo and me, from project to project over the years, but we were always working on this house, throughout. We knew he would leave us when it was finished. When he saw it complete, when he had spent his energy, he had done what he had come to do, and he was satisfied.
“That day, he told me something I never thought I would hear. After all those years, he said that maybe San Juan was the place for him. He said he felt like he was finally home. That afternoon, he went to his room to rest. When he didn’t show up for dinner, I knew what had happened. He was always at the table just before sunset. But not that day.
“I walked up the road in the dusk, with the light fading like it is now. I found him in bed, alone, peaceful as could be. We tried to figure out how to contact his family, but no one knew. He had never told anyone where he had come from, not even me. He always said he didn’t remember anymore. He didn’t have any money saved, but everyone in town pitched in to pay for his burial. By then he had built almost every house in San Juan. My last job, with him, was to build his tomb, down in the cemetery. I could feel his spirit looking over my work, as he had all those years.”
Anhiel stopped again, this time to behold the setting sun in silence, as it sped towards its daily resting place behind the mountain. It was dusk in San Juan. When the light was gone, Anhiel turned to me and, placing his hand on my shoulder, spoke again. “But I will always remember Teyo by the work we did together. Speaking of which, the kitchen is still just as we built it then. Let’s go have some dinner.”
I would eat countless meals sitting in the alcove of that kitchen, my back pressed tightly against the mud wall. Quietly I would sit, morning, noon, and night, day after day, as this man Anhiel described, but who I never knew, surely did as well, accompanied only by those heirs to the Perdido legacy, at work in the kitchen before me. One rotated meat over the open flame, and another pounded cornmeal into tortillas, their frames, plump from working with food all day, rescued from the darkness by the warm glow from the stove in corner. Sometimes, like Anhiel, I thought I could feel Don Teyo with me there, too. The amateur arrangement of the kitchen, sprung from the minds of those two untrained masons years before, yielded an inexplicable feeling of companionship amidst isolation. Perhaps, I would think in the years to come, the unusual design that placed the dining room in such proximity to the warmth of that kitchen, had been no accident.
Monday, March 23, 2009
Red Cross, Meteorologists to Improve Africa Disaster Response
Red Cross, Meteorologists to Improve Africa Disaster Response
By Brent Latham
Dakar
23 March 2009
The international Red Cross has signed an agreement with an African meteorology organization, hoping to better predict and respond to disasters caused by climate change.
A cooperation pact signed Monday in Dakar will give the Red Cross inside access to weather prediction and data produced by the African Center for Meteorological Application in Development.
The agreement will allow cooperation between organizations with complementary expertise and know-how, says ACMAD director general Alhassane Diallo.
Meteorologist Diallo says climate change will continue, and likely will happen faster in coming years. He says Africa is sure to be further effected and Africans can expect worsening and more frequent droughts and floods.
The organizations say the partnership is encouraging, because together they can predict problems and help alleviate them. Diallo called the effort a "work of pioneers."
The Red Cross plans to use the data to better predict and respond to disasters caused by the planet's changing climate, says Regional Disaster Response Coordinator Youcef Ait-Challouche.
Challouche says Africa has already seen an increased number of disasters spurred by climate change. He says floods, droughts, and epidemics are all increasing on the continent, and the need to better prepare beforehand is driving the coordination with meteorologists.
The consequences of climate change for Africans will continue to be far reaching, Challouche says. He pointed to the disruption of traditional planting patterns and calendars, and resulting population movements, as recent and significant problems spurred by climate change.
Challouche emphasized data provided by the meteorologists will allow the Red Cross to plan their activities based on probabilities, rather than possibilities. The organization plans to undertake food security programs in areas where the data suggests vulnerability to future climate-related disasters.
The Red Cross and international community are interested in helping Africans cope with climate change out of fairness, Challouche says. While Africa is estimated to have produced about two percent of the carbon dioxide emissions that lead to global warming, experts say the continent will bear the brunt of a disproportional amount of disasters resulting from climate change.
By Brent Latham
Dakar
23 March 2009
The international Red Cross has signed an agreement with an African meteorology organization, hoping to better predict and respond to disasters caused by climate change.
A cooperation pact signed Monday in Dakar will give the Red Cross inside access to weather prediction and data produced by the African Center for Meteorological Application in Development.
The agreement will allow cooperation between organizations with complementary expertise and know-how, says ACMAD director general Alhassane Diallo.
Meteorologist Diallo says climate change will continue, and likely will happen faster in coming years. He says Africa is sure to be further effected and Africans can expect worsening and more frequent droughts and floods.
The organizations say the partnership is encouraging, because together they can predict problems and help alleviate them. Diallo called the effort a "work of pioneers."
The Red Cross plans to use the data to better predict and respond to disasters caused by the planet's changing climate, says Regional Disaster Response Coordinator Youcef Ait-Challouche.
Challouche says Africa has already seen an increased number of disasters spurred by climate change. He says floods, droughts, and epidemics are all increasing on the continent, and the need to better prepare beforehand is driving the coordination with meteorologists.
The consequences of climate change for Africans will continue to be far reaching, Challouche says. He pointed to the disruption of traditional planting patterns and calendars, and resulting population movements, as recent and significant problems spurred by climate change.
Challouche emphasized data provided by the meteorologists will allow the Red Cross to plan their activities based on probabilities, rather than possibilities. The organization plans to undertake food security programs in areas where the data suggests vulnerability to future climate-related disasters.
The Red Cross and international community are interested in helping Africans cope with climate change out of fairness, Challouche says. While Africa is estimated to have produced about two percent of the carbon dioxide emissions that lead to global warming, experts say the continent will bear the brunt of a disproportional amount of disasters resulting from climate change.
Description of Service- Chapter 3
Chapter Three of my work in progress. Chapter Two is here. There's no chapter One, yet. All rights reserved.
3. An Old and New World
I arrived on a warm January day. I remember those first days now as if it had all been a dream. Of course, I had never heard of San Juan or Intibucá those few short years ago, when I first arrived in this country. The serendipitous circumstances that led me out there are, in a way, a much less inspiring part of this tale than the rest. It’s a part I usually just skip.
The plane, a jet much too big for the runway it landed on, slammed to a halt amid the green hills surrounding this noisy capital city. Over the years I have become quite used to that landing, but the first time it was a bit nerve racking. Years later, one plane wouldn’t stop in time, and ran off the runway onto the road beyond, setting in motion a chain of events that would lead to the eventual overthrow of the government. That is yet another tale that could only have occurred in a land such as this, whose acquaintance I made on that dream-like day. But that, like much else that could be told but might not be believed, is beyond the realm of this story.
On the day I think I remember, the plane landed without incident. I would have taken a deep breath of the cool air, but I was either too anxious or the city air was too contaminated, perhaps both. Descending from an airplane directly onto the concrete of the runway provided a certain sense of liberation and adventure. For an American, such as me, taking such a step has become quite an unusual experience. Reasonably sized airports have walkways connecting the plane to the terminal. That made the runway to me a foreign, prohibited place, to be avoided except under unusual and perhaps calamitous circumstances. I still remember that first step onto the tarmac, as the first into the unknown.
I maneuvered my way deliberately through the customs and immigration areas, and out into the open in front of the airport. There, holding a sign with my name on it, just outside the exit, was a fat, short man who appeared to be about my age. He wore dark glasses and a deep frown, which did little to disguise the fact that he looked quite annoyed. I approached him.
“Allen?” he asked in a disinterested fashion, using only my last name, as if that were all that interested him. “Come with me,” he said briskly, in response to my nod. I extended my hand, but he had already turned and was walking away. I pushed my way through a group of taxi drivers and porters that seemed determined to do all they could to obstruct my forward movement. I hauled my two bags alongside, packed with my belongings for this new life, deeper into which each forward step now led me.
The man who had held the sign looked back disapprovingly as I pulled the heavy bags through the small parking lot. “You should pay someone to take your bags,” he said, nodding at the group of porters following closely along behind me. I shook my head, but didn’t reveal the reason for my obstinacy. I had brought no extra money. My new employer, the Peace Corps, would take care of all the expenses here, or so they had told me. This whole experience, the choice to leave my well-paying job in banking in the United States, to come here to work as a volunteer helping small businesses grow, meant throwing caution to the wind, I had thought. Why change the rules of the game by bringing along a financial safety net? I hadn’t brought even a dime.
The man turned away again and marched off into the parking lot. Weighted down as I was, I struggled to keep up. He stopped at a large, white Land Rover. He unlocked it, climbed inside and triggered a switch, popping open the back. Arriving at the car well behind him, lugging the bags behind me, I lifted the two suitcases up into the rear of the car, shut the back gate, and walked around to the passenger side. The door was locked. The man sat alone in the driver’s seat looking at his cellular phone. I tapped on the window. He looked up at me, again with a look of irritation, and signaled with his thumb towards the back of the car. “Get in the back” I think he said. Though I couldn’t hear him through the closed glass, I understood clearly enough when the back gate popped open again.
I walked around the back, climbed over my suitcases, shutting the hood behind me, and took a seat sideways in a reclining position on the fold down bench, next to the luggage. The man swung his shoulders around towards me, and extended his arm across the empty back seat. “Give me your passport,” he said.
My hesitation to follow the abrupt command seemed to irritate him further. “I need your passport right now, it is the rule,” he said, beginning to raise his voice. “You must follow what I say - the rules - without questioning,” he snapped, again frowning at me. For a moment, I looked at him as he stared back at me with the intentness of a drill sergeant. I conceded, looked down, and, fumbling around in my bag, extracted my passport. I held it in my hand and studied it for a moment. I knew that, as my sole identification, it represented my ticket back, and I wasn’t anxious to part with it. Without it, the reality of being here, perhaps for a long time, was more concrete. My freedom would be limited.
The fat man continued to stare at me with growing impatience. I handed it over. Document in hand, he turned without saying anything. Haphazardly tossing the passport into the glove compartment, he backed the Land Rover out of the parking space, rammed the car into gear with a jerk, and drove, much too quickly, out of the airport parking lot.
It was obvious this man wasn’t interested in conversation, so I stared out the window at this new scenery. Everything, from the surrounding mountains and hills to the litter strewn paths beside the road, seemed so green. And yet, on those hillsides, there was not a tree in sight.
The people I observed from that privileged perch, secure in the sealed and locked rear of that new Land Rover, looked more alive, going about their daily activities on the roadside, than I felt, trapped behind that sterile glass. The freshly washed window panes of the pricey machine created a transparent but formidable barrier, separating me from their exotic lives, as if they were part of a television documentary, and I watching from my living room.
The sun was bright, but I wouldn’t have known if it was hot outside because of the air conditioning blasting on me from the front of the car. The fat man, nonetheless, was sweating. Perhaps from his current state of irritation, I thought, or perhaps from a generally irritable character. I chuckled to myself at the cleverness my insight.
“Something funny back there?” The man asked with frown, glancing in the rearview mirror. “I’m surprised you’ve already found something to laugh at in our country.”
I had no idea how to respond to such a comment, or indeed the coming battle that hastily drawn conclusion would foreshadow. I did know this man’s continued terseness made me uneasy.
“What is your name?” I asked, trying out a basic sentence in Spanish, partly to demonstrate that I didn’t have any contempt for this country I had just become acquainted with. But he ignored my question. It was a simple phrase in any language. I knew I had the words right, but the man just kept driving. I asked him again in English. Surely giving his name was too simple a request to refuse.
“Oscar, I’m Oscar,” he said after a delay of a minute or so, glancing quickly at me through the rear view mirror, as if watching to make sure I wasn’t about to make a break for it. “I am your boss here,” he added immediately, as if he had been looking for the chance to tell me that for some time.
“OK,” I said slowly, finding the addition of those details a bit forced and extraneous. “Nice to meet you, Oscar. I’m Kawil.”
“I know who you are,” he snapped back. “You are the one who has arrived late and made this unnecessary trip to the airport my work, on a Sunday no less,” he continued. So now at least I knew the immediate cause of his obstreperousness.
“Yes, sorry for that,” I replied cautiously, thwarting his obvious attempt to kill the conversation, and my nascent quest for information, there. “But I couldn’t do anything about the airline schedule. So where are we going, Oscar?”
Speaking in English was already beginning to bother me. The cryptic comment Oscar had made about laughing at his country had hit home, not because it was on the mark, but because I already knew I needed to be as culturally sensitive as possible. From the onset, I wanted to fit in. Obligating a person to communicate in my language in their country, even if it was this curious, rude fat man, seemed like an imposition, and at any rate would certainly make me stand out for all the wrong reasons. And it was clear Oscar already felt imposed upon by the situation.
I did speak some Spanish. But my fluency was limited to the niceties learned in classes, and on the streets back home playing soccer with the immigrant Mexicans. It was sufficient to communicate, but not to adequately convey exactly what I meant. Otherwise I might have asked this man, with a degree of subtlety that I only now manage after years here, what exactly was going on.
On that trip, unable to find out from Oscar where we were headed, I first realized the implications of that lack of language ability. So we rode the rest of the way in silence, and I in the dark as to where we were going, or how long the trip might take. It was clear that we had left the city and were headed up a steep, winding road into the hills. As the journey wore on, I shuffled around uncomfortably in the back of the Land Rover, which clearly wasn’t designed for a full sized person. As I was wondering why I couldn’t have sat in one of the many available seats made for an actual human being, we finally pulled into a small, picturesque town next to a lagoon formed among the hills.
The paved road became a bumpy, cobblestone track, which eased down a steep hill, then curved along the hillside. Oscar parked there, in front of a small iron gate, just across from a whitewashed Catholic church facing a wide, green valley that opened in front. Oscar, saying nothing, got out of the car and walked over to the gate, leaving the back door locked. A group of children stopped their play in front of church, to run over to the car. They began to point at me and laugh. I must have looked helpless and out of place trapped in the back of that unusually large car, with the luggage. I sighed and turned my gaze out over the valley below. The view from that turn in the road, which swept across a panoramic vista, was my first of the scenery with which Santa Lucia, perched on the mountainside above the capital, is blessed.
It was several minutes before Oscar emerged with an old woman, her dress covered by an apron, a dishtowel slung over her shoulder. They were followed closely by a teenage girl. Oscar opened the back door, and spoke to the woman.
“This is the gringo that will stay with you,” he said in Spanish. He turned to the girl. “These are his things,” he said to her, nodding at my suitcases. The young girl came forward bashfully and began an attempt to extricate the smaller of the two suitcases. I leaned forward, and helped push it down, where it fell with a thud to the ground. I wanted to get down from the car, to stretch my legs and to help, but Oscar’s wide frame, his back turned to me, was a notable impediment.
Then the old woman stepped up to the back of the Land Rover, casually pushing Oscar to one side even as he continued to speak to her. She smiled at me. “I’m Marta,” she said in Spanish. “Welcome to your home, at least for the next three months, during your training.” She put her arm out and feebly helped me down from the car, and ushered me towards the gate, as her daughter struggled with my luggage.
Those first few weeks went by quickly. Ideally, I would have been slowly learning the skills that I needed to adapt to life as a rural advisor living on my own in the countryside. I would have only three short months in Santa Lucia to prepare, and then I would be sent off on my own to work.
It turned out that Oscar was not my boss, as he had described himself in the Land Rover on that first day. In fact, we shared a common supervisor, a rickety old man who worked from an office down the hill, as the locals in Santa Lucia would say, in the capital. I saw that man, who really was my boss, only once, on a day early on in the training period, when I had been brought to the office for a medical checkup. Asking around, I was referred to a quiet, crumbling old wing of the expansive building, where I found the head of the small business development program asleep behind his desk. Waking up unhurriedly at my unexpected arrival, he pulled my resume out of a dusty file, which he had tucked away in a rusting old filing cabinet. He glanced inquisitively at it for what must have been the first time, and then expressed mild surprise at my work experience. For some reason, his enthusiasm was heartening to me. But that would be my only encounter with him. That he was Oscar’s boss as well explained what gave Oscar the impression of being in charge back at the training center.
As the training instructor in the field of small business consulting, Oscar’s job was to teach our group of six new volunteers in the field. “You’ll be competing against each other here,” Oscar announced at the first meeting of the group. “The best performers, in my estimation, will get the best assignments. Others may have less desirable postings. All this will depend on my reports and decisions.” He paused, clearly for effect, and then began his monologue anew. “And others,” he said, as he turned and made eye contact with me, “will be going home, if I determine they do not fit the proper volunteer profile.”
“You gringos,” his opening speech continued, “are no longer in the comfort of your homes.”
I struggled through those first days of training. As Oscar’s speech indicated, the approach of the training staff that Peace Corps had contracted was paternalistic and demeaning, and revolved around the constantly perpetuated stereotype of the foreigner lost in this complex new world. I didn’t feel like having a babysitter. I had expected to lose myself in the new experience completely, not to be reminded constantly how out of place I was. Most of all, I expected to be treated with respect, as a professional who had come to do a serious job.
But that respect wasn’t forthcoming. If most of my fellow trainees were unsympathetic to my plight, others seemed to fit the stereotype created for them: a group of soft, overeducated, underachieving strangers out of touch with the reality of poverty. Many, happy to accept the defined haplessness thrust upon them, even began to refer to themselves with the forced moniker of gringo. Perhaps it was no coincidence that, among the crowd of future volunteers, the one who I shared most in common with was also the only one who could not justifiably be called, or call himself, a gringo. Miguel was Puerto Rican, and if he didn’t share my opinion on everything, he at least knew how to listen and think independently.
“Oscar’s just like everyone else in this country,” Miguel said, after a glance over his shoulder to make sure no one could overhear, and in turn misconstrue, what he was about to say. We had gone to the local restaurant for a drink, after another day at the training center ended. That day, as on many, we sat apart from the other groups of trainees, an action which aroused suspicion and irritation. But we had important matters to discuss. “He’s just releasing the sociological tension that comes from years of lack of access to consumer goods.” Over the coming years, Miguel’s elaborate theories about cultural misunderstandings would prove entertaining. Here was one of the first.
“Well,” I said, slightly amused by his roundabout tack, “anyone can serve as verbal punching bag for people here. That requires far too much patience for me.” We slowly sipped on our beers, and I continued. “I mean – I need to be an active part of the conversation, if there is going to be one - not the passive recipient of cross-cultural angst that could be directed against anyone. It’s a question of self worth. I just want to get to the point where I don’t stand out, and I can do my work, and just be another person. But that means not letting myself be defined in this stereotypical mode of a gringo.”
“I don’t know. You, and the rest of the gringos,” Miguel said with a smile, knowing how I hated the word, “stand out here.” I stared at Miguel. He looked up, before continuing. “You know we don’t use that word in Puerto Rico. We say ‘yankee’.”
“It’s not the word itself that bothers me,” I explained. “I’m sick of being categorized, and the use of that word is the central tenet in the categorization process. It’s completely racist, if you think about it.”
“I don’t think so,” Miguel replied, unconvinced. “It’s just a simple linguistic tool for saying foreigner.”
“But they don’t call you a gringo.” I had already gone through these arguments in my mind one hundred times, and was glad to finally have an outlet for my thoughts. “They don’t call Asian people gringo.”
“That’s true,” he said with a smile. “There are like four races here – countryman, gringo, black guy, or Chinese. In my case I’m Latino.”
“Right. What I’m saying is the overuse of those words furthers a simplistic understanding of race and culture that over generalizes and separates everyone into large, polarized groups. You can only be one thing, and that thing is your race, as determined by the color of your skin. Everything else about you assumed from there. “
“What I think is stupid is separating everybody into either foreigner or local,” Miguel said. “I’m Latino. I share a lot with these people. But still I’m categorized as a foreigner because I’m not from this country. The world ends up polarized into groups of six million, the number of people this country, on one side, and six billion, that is, everyone else in the world, on the other. As if everyone not from here shared common characteristics. It’s such a small way to view the world.”
Miguel trailed off, so I continued where I had left off. “So this whole gringo word problem is really part of that larger problem of poverty and cultural misunderstanding. Just look at the kids around here. They have all been conditioned to yell gringo at anyone with light-skin. They say the word then put out their hand. Even kids sometimes just old enough to speak. They all know that word. Why do they do that? Because they’ve learned it. It’s a conditioned behavior that’s paid dividends once or twice, earned them a coin or a lempira or two. So by accepting that word, and that treatment, you’re just part of the problem of entrenching that dependence and poverty. I’m not going to be part of the problem I came here to try to help solve.”
“Hold on,” Miguel interrupted, “that’s way too complicated to try to explain to anyone around here.”
“But that’s just it,” I said, eager to continue. “These people at the training center, they are the bridge between us and the people we will be working with. They should be connecting us, not building artificial barriers to separate us. Take that gringo adaptation speech which they’re constantly giving to the community.”
“You mean the one where they explain how we’ve left behind all our comforts, our luxury, to come work here with the poor people?” Miguel laughed. “My trainer actually said we had left our TVs and sofas at home to come work here. It does make us look bad.”
“Right, they act like we should be accommodated for those so-called sacrifices, as if we are some kind of lost foreigners that need help. Well if it is that way, what are we doing here in the first place? I, for one, came to help, not to be helped. And to help I need to be accepted as a serious person, not a helpless, hapless, lost gringo. So that type of introduction doesn’t do anything for me.”
“That’s what I’m saying,” Miguel added. “Imagine being Latino and still not fitting in. I mean, I’m Latino, just like them, but still I don’t fit into the stereotype. I mean, I grew up in poverty, not like this, but close enough to understand what’s going on here.”
“At least you speak the language well,” I said. “Try saying all this without being able to express your opinions properly. It feels infantile to the point of exacerbation. It makes me physically tired.”
“You might think the language helps,” Miguel replied slowly, “but I stand out just as much as you do. I don’t know how they know I’m not from here, but they know. I mean, yes, my accent is different, maybe I dress differently, but I don’t think it’s that. I just don’t know what it is, but people here know who is a foreigner – they just detect it.”
“The physical judgment is hard to understand, but you’re right, there’s no way to disguise it,” I said contemplating the problem. “The more you fit in, the more serious you will be taken when you go to work. But it’s hard to fit in, when people are more interested in you as a novelty, or someone that can give them money, than a serious worker. I don’t get it either. I’m not blond with blue eyes like those guys over there,” I nodded at the table behind us where a group of volunteers were talking loudly in English as they gulped down beer. “Sure, I have light skin and clear eyes, but there are more than a few people here with the same features. The guy who works on the bus looks just like me.”
The waitress, who was proving to be a favorite of Miguel came by to see if we needed anything. As she turned to walk away, more slowly and dramatically than necessary, the topic of conversation quickly changed to lighter issues. Miguel and I had quickly noticed that we shared common interests, among others observing the deep dark eyes and voluptuous figures of the women here. While the other volunteers, most of them in their mid-twenties, seemed to have enveloped themselves in a self-contained orgy, it was less than a revelation to me, and none at all to Miguel, that all our social relations need not be with the other volunteers. We finished our beers, and, the sun having set, decided it was time to head back to our respective houses for dinner. “Anyway,” I said, as we got up, “this has made me think. I’m going to take it up tomorrow with the people at the training center.”
“You’ve been here for two weeks. You don’t understand anything about the culture.” It was more a rant than a simple statement that came from director of the training center the next day, when I went to have the conversation that I had told Miguel I would.
“It seems to me like a simple issue,” I replied in disbelief. “It’s not a cultural issue at all. I don’t like being called gringo, and I want it to stop. You claim this is a professional environment and yet you let the instructors call us racist names.”
“It is insensitive of you,” he continued as I gnashed my teeth and squinted in irritation, “to object to a word we have always used to describe foreigners. You gringos understand so little about other cultures. You are the one who is a racist. There’s no way you’ll fit in here if you don’t accept things the way they are.”
“But isn’t that why we are brought here?” I asked, trying to ignore his assertion, and sensing a hole in his logic that needed immediate attention. “To help change things?”
But the fat man behind the desk only smirked in proud irritation. “You are brought here,” he said, “to serve the community and the country. Not to question the authority of people like the trainers, or me – people who know much more than you ever will. If you’re not interested in learning in the way we propose, perhaps it is best for you to go home.” His cell phone rang, and he answered it, turning his large office chair around, his back to me. I got up and walked away.
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Everyday at the training center was a similar frustration. Everyone was constantly being judged and evaluated on what could only be considered the most random and inane of criteria. To exacerbate to the problem, the judges were unfair. Oscar would make notes of perceived offenses in what he called the “permanent record.” Each time I questioned his domineering leadership style, or the relevance of the material he assigned, such as the time he sent us home with hours of accounting journal entries to practice, I would receive a written warning.
One afternoon he called me into his makeshift office after lunch. It wasn’t the first time. “Your fellow volunteer, Sally, who has been doing a tremendous job of cultural adaptation, tells me you have been drinking alcohol at lunch today,” he began.
“That is possible,” I replied, not understanding what he was getting at this time.
“That is clearly in violation of our cultural rules,” Oscar continued. “Public intoxication is not fitting of a volunteer.”
“What are talking about? First of all, I’m not intoxicated. Second, my host family offered me a beer at lunch. They had some extended family visiting. Sally only found out because I just told everyone about the lunch – how good it was.” That had been less than five minutes earlier. Apparently Sally had made a bee line for Oscar with the news.
“At any rate,” Oscar said, taking out the little book where he documented offenses, “in our culture, it is not proper.”
“How can you say that,” I replied, quickly losing my patience, “when it was your countrymen who offered the beer to me? They drank with me!”
Oscar stared at me. “Are you questioning my authority as the boss here?” he sneered. “This is not your country, gringo. Your list of offenses is growing long, and soon I will have no choice but to send your case to the director.” Seeing that I was being provoked, I stood up and walked quickly out of the office. I tossed the light screen door open in front of me, and walked through. The door was much lighter than I had expected, and it slammed emphatically behind me.
“Don’t slam that door!” Oscar called after me. “Get back in here!” But I was already on my way out of the training center.
At Dona Marta’s home on the hillside, things were different. Marta and her daughters had a way of making me laugh about my linguistic inadequacies. They seemed to know, poor and humble as they were, that no one is perfect. They had lost, or never shared, the pretext of pretending to be, from which their professional countrymen at the training center suffered.
“What’s wrong, little American?” Marta asked that day when I came through the gate, earlier than usual, and found her working in her garden. Marta never called me gringo; she had quit using that word immediately, and permanently, the first time I told her I didn’t like it. I had tried to explain why I took offense, in what was still very broken Spanish, but there had been no need. If I didn’t like that word, she said, then it wouldn’t be used in her house.
In return, I became more flexible about other things, like eating corn flakes in the morning with warm milk, after separating out the small roaches I always found in the cereal. I also learned to try to say what I wanted to say, and not to be ashamed of failing, and in that way I slowly improved my Spanish.
Over the three months I lived in that crumbling old house on the mountainside in Santa Lucia, as Doña Marta would cook up refried beans and corn tortillas for me over her wood burning stove, I would stare out the open kitchen door at the blue sky, and down over those green hills to the distant capital visible in the valley far below. And I would slowly piece together her story from fragments of a language new to me. The language she used conveyed none of the trivialities one could learn in Spanish classes, but rather the pieces of lives and events that, woven together, comprised the proud history of several generations of a humble family. That is how I perfected my Spanish, and it explains why my diction and understanding grew to be as oblique as the history of that place where I learned, and those who taught me.
Dona Marta lived as so many others in the countryside, alone with her children. With her two remaining single daughters, who still lived at home, she inhabited the mud-walled tile-roofed house that stretched out intrepidly along the hillside in a straight line of rooms, built in the manner so common in that country, one by one over the last century, as family size necessitated and finances provided. The home had first belonged to Marta’s great grandparents that many generations ago, and she had never known any other. The capital being so close, and growing gradually closer, if not in distance then in time, as transportation and roads improved over the years, Marta’s siblings had emigrated one by one, leaving her, the oldest daughter, in charge of the homestead, which they visited on holidays.
If the house had grown years ago to accommodate a larger family, it now seemed an unwieldy and dilapidated relic of a more hopeful era. The kitchen, on the far end of the hill from the gate, near the outdoor bathroom, gave way to a bedroom where Marta slept, behind a curtain hung from the ceiling, with her two daughters, adolescent Anni and the older, but still single, Jenny. The next chamber was a living room, adorned proudly with the finest mementos of all the family’s generations, including the greatest prize, a black and white photograph, framed in old mahogany with golden trim. The picture, Marta said proudly, having taken down from its perch to consider it more closely, had been taken years ago in far away Madrid, of a distant uncle, standing next to the King of Spain. She could never fully explain the circumstances that led to that meeting.
The last room, the end room next to the small iron gate that opened to the courtyard in front of the church, had become surplus years ago. It was used for storage, and sat vacant until the fortunate arrival of the Peace Corps, intent on renting what accommodations there were to be had in the small and hotel-less town for living quarters for soon to arrive trainees. As such, it had been reserved all those years, as Marta explained, for me, and was painstakingly cleaned and arranged before my arrival. It was furnished simply enough with a bed, nightstand, and shelf. Perhaps the most interesting feature was the door that opened directly to the walkway in front of the house. “All of the older houses had that feature,” Marta told me when I expressed interest in the house’s design, with every room opening to the next and to the outside. “The home is a family dwelling, for all to share, inside and out.” Since no one transited through the end room as they did the middle rooms, that space provided me a degree of privacy that proved to be a luxury. Other trainees, who had arrived earlier, had been inserted into newer homes, where they often shared a room with a number of children, or a single uncle. That was generally considered preferable to the dilapidated old room I lived in, which had been left unfilled until the last, with its stained, crumbling mud walls and arching tile roof above. Everyone who saw it expressed their sympathy. But I was happy in that room, in the house of Dona Marta.
Across the path that ran along the front of the home Marta kept a garden, which she prized highly. With Jenny off at work in the capital below, and Anni in school or lost with her teenaged friends, she spent her lonely afternoons tending its manicured plants and flowers from across the region. I found her there the day I returned home from that heated exchange with Oscar.
“You look quite upset,” Marta repeated. “What has happened?”
“It’s the people at the center,” I told her bluntly, having not yet learned to pose my words in an adequately circumspect manner. “I’m not sure what is wrong with my instructor, but he is quite irrational.”
“That fat man who came here with you the day you arrived? He’s an imbecile,” Marta said, surprising me with her own bluntness. Perhaps she had been drinking with family more after I had left. “I wish my countrymen could stand to have a good job and a good salary and not become like him.”
“You know him well then?” I asked.
“Not so well,” Marta said. “But I know his type. He and the director came around when they were searching for places for the volunteers to stay. They talk down to the people here as if we were stupid, just because we are poor, and they have good jobs. They said my house wouldn’t do, because it is old. Then they came back and said they had a last minute addition to the group, and you would be staying with us.”
“I’m not sure it’s about poverty, they talk down to us as well,” I said.
“They don’t have a very high opinion of foreigners either. He told me that the money they pay me, which is more than enough, would not compensate for the burden of hosting a gringo,” she said, wiping her brow and gazing into the hills beyond the church. “Sorry for the word, but that’s what he said. I remember his words. I tell you this because we have come to understand one another,” she continued, “unlike your teachers, who assume understanding because we are countrymen, but understand nothing.”
“Don’t worry Marta,” I said, leaning on the gate and staring at the bright blue sky. “I understand what you are saying. I’ve learned more from you than from those people at the center. I mean at least the cultural training they give-”
She interrupted with a deep laugh, such as I had never heard from her. “Cultural training? How could one learn from such a proud man, how to deal with people, I mean real people, from the countryside? These people from the upper class in the city, how can they ever hope to teach that, when they can’t do it themselves? No my son, stick to your ways, and you will be better off.
“We may have needed the money,” she continued, “but now I have met you and I can say, I would have taken you in for free, it is not at all as they said. We may not be countrymen, but there is much more in common between the two of us than with his type. Now come in and have something to eat. It will calm your spirit.”
When boredom got the best of us, as it would in that small town over the course of three months, Miguel and I eventually began venturing down to the capital. Leaving Santa Lucia was forbidden by Peace Corps rules. It was a lose prohibition that no one paid much attention to, and we missed the excitement that couldn’t be provided by that parochial mountain town, especially on weekends.
It was an easy trip down the hill to the capital. The local bus made the journey, which was more like a freefall down the steep hill, hourly on weekdays. That ride brought liberation from the frustrations of the training environment, and a rush of exhilaration that came with gaining back some degree of anonymity in the larger, less observant capital. Stepping off the Santa Lucia bus onto to the congested, hazy streets of the capital was like stepping back into the real world, even if that bustling version of it differed significantly from the any world I had known before.
We got into the habit of leaving Friday evening under the cover of darkness. We would spend the night out, returning early the next morning. Marta, when she noticed, never seemed to care. We were also lucky to come across Jorge on one such nocturnal adventure. The night we met him, he was alone at a bar, sucking on a cigarette, beer in hand, much too solitary and relaxed to stand out. It was still early that night, and the three of us were the only ones at the bar. As Miguel and I spoke, in Spanish, as I always insisted we do, so as to stand out less, when we were in the city, the thin figured man eyed us circumspectly from across the room. He finished his cigarette, tossed the butt onto the floor haphazardly, picked up his beer, and came over.
“Peace Corps?” he asked as he sat down next to Miguel, with a level of assuredness more robust than his thin frame.
I frowned. I had already become suspicious of approaches like these. Miguel, always more optimistic about the benefits of speaking to strangers, responded. “That’s right.”
“I’ve known a lot of people in Peace Corps,” the thin man said without delay, as he began to recite a list of names we had never heard.
“Congratulations,” I said sarcastically, already a bit irritated. “We don’t know any of those people. We work on our own.”
But the man was clearly undeterred. “Surely you’ll know some people I know as well,” he insisted. “Anyway, you should be careful in this bar. There are many thieves, and girls who will try to take advantage of you for your money.”
“They might get a surprise when they learn we have no money,” Miguel laughed.
I laughed too, but it wasn’t clear the man was listening to the other side of the conversation. “Don’t worry,” he proceeded. “I’ve known many people in Peace Corps. I’ll keep an eye on you. I’m Jorge,” he said, offering a half-full pack of cigarettes instead of his hand.
Not so interested in either of his offers, having already escaped one level of supervision just to be there, and being non-smokers ourselves, Miguel and I continued our evolving discussion of the socioeconomic manifestations of the unusual Central American circumstances that led to the phenomenon of having a preponderance of beautiful women living amongst a population of short, ugly men. Seeing that we were determined to get to the bottom of the issue, Jorge sat back and listened, and before long, he had caught on.
“I see,” he interjected, “you guys are different from the usual volunteers. You come out for the same reasons we do,” he said nodding at a group of girls who had just come in the door.
Jorge’s persistence paid off quickly, and by the end of the night, despite my continued reticence, he and Miguel were acting like old friends. When we decided to go, Jorge offered us a ride across town for a late night snack of baleadas. The sun was rising as we got back in his car, full and tired.
“Where to now?” Jorge asked.
“Back to the bus to Santa Lucia,” I said. “We need to get back. You know where it leaves from?”
“You’re not staying in a hotel?” Jorge asked. “You can’t go back to the mountains on a Saturday morning, there is too much to do on a weekend in the capital.”
“As much as we love the nightlife in the capital,” Miguel said, getting right to the heart of matters, “we can’t afford to stay long on the small living allowance we get from Peace Corps.”
“Don’t worry, my friends,” Jorge said. “You’ll stay at my house. I have extra beds, and we can buy food at the supermarket and cook it. It will be inexpensive.” As we would learn, there was no sense in arguing with Jorge once he had a plan. He was already driving home, down a road neither Miguel nor I was familiar with, so the matter had been settled.
That would be the first of many weekends at the home of Jorge Luis Raudales, a quiet young man, a little older than Miguel and me, but certainly no more mature. He was a chain smoker and serial worrier, but enjoyed the capital late nights and a good time as much as we did. He also preferred the company of those not exactly like him, an uncommon characteristic in a land of stereotypes. And he did have a car, and a house, which were very useful traits.
Jorge lived alone in a marginal neighborhood, named after former American President John F. Kennedy, on the outskirts of the city. He didn’t like to speak much about his family. It was clear from what he did say, and the occasional calls from the US, that his mother and three sisters were quite different from him. When they called, it was invariably to order Jorge to do something, or to ask about the completion of a previous order. Jorge tried his best to miss such calls, and always preferred for someone else to answer the phone.
That inclination was a manifestation of his general preference to be left alone, and he was quite happy by himself in his deteriorating house. But it was clear from that first weekend that he enjoyed our company anyway. We had to argue to get him to let us take the bus back up to Santa Lucia on Sunday morning. It seemed he would have had us stay on indefinitely.
“What do you think of Jorge, really?” I asked Miguel, as we rode the bus back up the mountainside. “It’s a bit strange how he took to us so quickly, don’t you think?”
“He just seems like a nice guy, looking for friends,” Miguel said, trying to sleep after the previous two late nights.
“I mean, it doesn’t feel quite right to me,” I continued. “It feels like he wants to be our friends because we are foreigners. He talks about all the people he knows in Peace Corps – even though I’ve never heard of any of them. I’m not sure I want friends like that.”
“Let me ask you something Kawil,” Miguel said, temporarily rousing himself from a half-slumber, in the vein of a person who realizes that waking up for the moment will allow them a longer, undisturbed slumber at later time. “All those nice looking girls you were talking to last night, the ones who gave you their phone numbers, you think those girls saw something deep within you that instantly attracted them to you?”
I smiled. “That’s just physical attraction my friend. You know that.”
“Well I don’t hear you complaining about them,” Miguel said quickly. “I can’t see how Jorge is any different. Everything in this world, here - every relationship in this country - is a matter of convenience. You just have to recognize what is convenient for you.”
We wouldn’t get the chance to go back down to Jorge’s many more times. It wasn’t long before I realized that even if everyone else was breaking the rules, with justice being metered out so arbitrarily at the training center, I was putting myself in danger by doing so. I gave up those weekend trips. But Jorge was never far away. He would often come up to Santa Lucia to visit, sometimes showing up unannounced at the restaurant. We learned that he would stay for a beer even when we weren’t there, and he would drop our names when approaching other trainees. Unfortunately for Jorge, he was slow to realize that mentioning us to the other trainees probably reduced his chances of making new friends. His primary motivation, or the convenience that drove him, as Miguel put it, was meeting foreign women, an undertaking which too frequently manifested itself in shameless episodes that would be considered stalking elsewhere. Despite that inconvenience, our friendship would last long past those days in Santa Lucia.
So things improved slowly.
But it was already too late. After three months, when the time rolled around for each volunteer to be assigned his work site for the next two years, the Peace Corps officials, who normally would have had the input of a project manager, had had no other contact with us but that garnered through Oscar. They read his notes.
“We would have liked to put you in a larger city, working with a bank, but we’re concerned about your temper and cultural sensitivity,” the director told me, as he explained the work that awaited me in the remote town of San Juan, Intibucá, with Oscar looking on in satisfaction. “Your training review suggests you may not be able to handle yourself in an urban environment.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, shocked at the news, quite annoyed, and deeply concerned. The Peace Corps had said they wouldn’t put anyone in a place with no electricity, or more without a telephone for emergencies. San Juan, they told me, had a population of about five hundred, was seven hours from the capital by bus, and had no electricity or phone.
“You have a long series of transgressions,” the Peace Corps representative said. “You laugh at the misfortune of others, such as the first day you were picked up from the airport.”
“What?” I gasped in confusion.
“I have told them about the first day I picked you up from the airport,” Oscar said, with a feigned air of concern, “I was very concerned that we passed some poor people on the street and you began to laugh at them.” I remembered that car ride distinctly. I had laughed, but at Oscar’s attitude, and at my sorry state in the back of that car, but not at all at the poverty.
“I would never do that.”
“You slammed the door on me after I tried to meet with you about drinking during training, about cultural sensitivity, and you walked out on the director while he was speaking to you about sensitivity as well,” he continued.
“You have displayed a great deal of inability to adapt to the culture here,” the director continued.
“Have you asked the family I live with about this? They will tell you…” but the director again interrupted.
“We are not going to discuss this further. The training staff has made their evaluation. We are excited about your partnership with the cooperative in San Juan. We have placed Sally in La Esperanza, with their main office. She will be helping us to coordinate your work, given the remote location of your assignment.” She looked at Oscar, then at me. “That’s your assignment. You can accept it," she paused as she smiled, before completing her thought. "Or you can go home."
3. An Old and New World
I arrived on a warm January day. I remember those first days now as if it had all been a dream. Of course, I had never heard of San Juan or Intibucá those few short years ago, when I first arrived in this country. The serendipitous circumstances that led me out there are, in a way, a much less inspiring part of this tale than the rest. It’s a part I usually just skip.
The plane, a jet much too big for the runway it landed on, slammed to a halt amid the green hills surrounding this noisy capital city. Over the years I have become quite used to that landing, but the first time it was a bit nerve racking. Years later, one plane wouldn’t stop in time, and ran off the runway onto the road beyond, setting in motion a chain of events that would lead to the eventual overthrow of the government. That is yet another tale that could only have occurred in a land such as this, whose acquaintance I made on that dream-like day. But that, like much else that could be told but might not be believed, is beyond the realm of this story.
On the day I think I remember, the plane landed without incident. I would have taken a deep breath of the cool air, but I was either too anxious or the city air was too contaminated, perhaps both. Descending from an airplane directly onto the concrete of the runway provided a certain sense of liberation and adventure. For an American, such as me, taking such a step has become quite an unusual experience. Reasonably sized airports have walkways connecting the plane to the terminal. That made the runway to me a foreign, prohibited place, to be avoided except under unusual and perhaps calamitous circumstances. I still remember that first step onto the tarmac, as the first into the unknown.
I maneuvered my way deliberately through the customs and immigration areas, and out into the open in front of the airport. There, holding a sign with my name on it, just outside the exit, was a fat, short man who appeared to be about my age. He wore dark glasses and a deep frown, which did little to disguise the fact that he looked quite annoyed. I approached him.
“Allen?” he asked in a disinterested fashion, using only my last name, as if that were all that interested him. “Come with me,” he said briskly, in response to my nod. I extended my hand, but he had already turned and was walking away. I pushed my way through a group of taxi drivers and porters that seemed determined to do all they could to obstruct my forward movement. I hauled my two bags alongside, packed with my belongings for this new life, deeper into which each forward step now led me.
The man who had held the sign looked back disapprovingly as I pulled the heavy bags through the small parking lot. “You should pay someone to take your bags,” he said, nodding at the group of porters following closely along behind me. I shook my head, but didn’t reveal the reason for my obstinacy. I had brought no extra money. My new employer, the Peace Corps, would take care of all the expenses here, or so they had told me. This whole experience, the choice to leave my well-paying job in banking in the United States, to come here to work as a volunteer helping small businesses grow, meant throwing caution to the wind, I had thought. Why change the rules of the game by bringing along a financial safety net? I hadn’t brought even a dime.
The man turned away again and marched off into the parking lot. Weighted down as I was, I struggled to keep up. He stopped at a large, white Land Rover. He unlocked it, climbed inside and triggered a switch, popping open the back. Arriving at the car well behind him, lugging the bags behind me, I lifted the two suitcases up into the rear of the car, shut the back gate, and walked around to the passenger side. The door was locked. The man sat alone in the driver’s seat looking at his cellular phone. I tapped on the window. He looked up at me, again with a look of irritation, and signaled with his thumb towards the back of the car. “Get in the back” I think he said. Though I couldn’t hear him through the closed glass, I understood clearly enough when the back gate popped open again.
I walked around the back, climbed over my suitcases, shutting the hood behind me, and took a seat sideways in a reclining position on the fold down bench, next to the luggage. The man swung his shoulders around towards me, and extended his arm across the empty back seat. “Give me your passport,” he said.
My hesitation to follow the abrupt command seemed to irritate him further. “I need your passport right now, it is the rule,” he said, beginning to raise his voice. “You must follow what I say - the rules - without questioning,” he snapped, again frowning at me. For a moment, I looked at him as he stared back at me with the intentness of a drill sergeant. I conceded, looked down, and, fumbling around in my bag, extracted my passport. I held it in my hand and studied it for a moment. I knew that, as my sole identification, it represented my ticket back, and I wasn’t anxious to part with it. Without it, the reality of being here, perhaps for a long time, was more concrete. My freedom would be limited.
The fat man continued to stare at me with growing impatience. I handed it over. Document in hand, he turned without saying anything. Haphazardly tossing the passport into the glove compartment, he backed the Land Rover out of the parking space, rammed the car into gear with a jerk, and drove, much too quickly, out of the airport parking lot.
It was obvious this man wasn’t interested in conversation, so I stared out the window at this new scenery. Everything, from the surrounding mountains and hills to the litter strewn paths beside the road, seemed so green. And yet, on those hillsides, there was not a tree in sight.
The people I observed from that privileged perch, secure in the sealed and locked rear of that new Land Rover, looked more alive, going about their daily activities on the roadside, than I felt, trapped behind that sterile glass. The freshly washed window panes of the pricey machine created a transparent but formidable barrier, separating me from their exotic lives, as if they were part of a television documentary, and I watching from my living room.
The sun was bright, but I wouldn’t have known if it was hot outside because of the air conditioning blasting on me from the front of the car. The fat man, nonetheless, was sweating. Perhaps from his current state of irritation, I thought, or perhaps from a generally irritable character. I chuckled to myself at the cleverness my insight.
“Something funny back there?” The man asked with frown, glancing in the rearview mirror. “I’m surprised you’ve already found something to laugh at in our country.”
I had no idea how to respond to such a comment, or indeed the coming battle that hastily drawn conclusion would foreshadow. I did know this man’s continued terseness made me uneasy.
“What is your name?” I asked, trying out a basic sentence in Spanish, partly to demonstrate that I didn’t have any contempt for this country I had just become acquainted with. But he ignored my question. It was a simple phrase in any language. I knew I had the words right, but the man just kept driving. I asked him again in English. Surely giving his name was too simple a request to refuse.
“Oscar, I’m Oscar,” he said after a delay of a minute or so, glancing quickly at me through the rear view mirror, as if watching to make sure I wasn’t about to make a break for it. “I am your boss here,” he added immediately, as if he had been looking for the chance to tell me that for some time.
“OK,” I said slowly, finding the addition of those details a bit forced and extraneous. “Nice to meet you, Oscar. I’m Kawil.”
“I know who you are,” he snapped back. “You are the one who has arrived late and made this unnecessary trip to the airport my work, on a Sunday no less,” he continued. So now at least I knew the immediate cause of his obstreperousness.
“Yes, sorry for that,” I replied cautiously, thwarting his obvious attempt to kill the conversation, and my nascent quest for information, there. “But I couldn’t do anything about the airline schedule. So where are we going, Oscar?”
Speaking in English was already beginning to bother me. The cryptic comment Oscar had made about laughing at his country had hit home, not because it was on the mark, but because I already knew I needed to be as culturally sensitive as possible. From the onset, I wanted to fit in. Obligating a person to communicate in my language in their country, even if it was this curious, rude fat man, seemed like an imposition, and at any rate would certainly make me stand out for all the wrong reasons. And it was clear Oscar already felt imposed upon by the situation.
I did speak some Spanish. But my fluency was limited to the niceties learned in classes, and on the streets back home playing soccer with the immigrant Mexicans. It was sufficient to communicate, but not to adequately convey exactly what I meant. Otherwise I might have asked this man, with a degree of subtlety that I only now manage after years here, what exactly was going on.
On that trip, unable to find out from Oscar where we were headed, I first realized the implications of that lack of language ability. So we rode the rest of the way in silence, and I in the dark as to where we were going, or how long the trip might take. It was clear that we had left the city and were headed up a steep, winding road into the hills. As the journey wore on, I shuffled around uncomfortably in the back of the Land Rover, which clearly wasn’t designed for a full sized person. As I was wondering why I couldn’t have sat in one of the many available seats made for an actual human being, we finally pulled into a small, picturesque town next to a lagoon formed among the hills.
The paved road became a bumpy, cobblestone track, which eased down a steep hill, then curved along the hillside. Oscar parked there, in front of a small iron gate, just across from a whitewashed Catholic church facing a wide, green valley that opened in front. Oscar, saying nothing, got out of the car and walked over to the gate, leaving the back door locked. A group of children stopped their play in front of church, to run over to the car. They began to point at me and laugh. I must have looked helpless and out of place trapped in the back of that unusually large car, with the luggage. I sighed and turned my gaze out over the valley below. The view from that turn in the road, which swept across a panoramic vista, was my first of the scenery with which Santa Lucia, perched on the mountainside above the capital, is blessed.
It was several minutes before Oscar emerged with an old woman, her dress covered by an apron, a dishtowel slung over her shoulder. They were followed closely by a teenage girl. Oscar opened the back door, and spoke to the woman.
“This is the gringo that will stay with you,” he said in Spanish. He turned to the girl. “These are his things,” he said to her, nodding at my suitcases. The young girl came forward bashfully and began an attempt to extricate the smaller of the two suitcases. I leaned forward, and helped push it down, where it fell with a thud to the ground. I wanted to get down from the car, to stretch my legs and to help, but Oscar’s wide frame, his back turned to me, was a notable impediment.
Then the old woman stepped up to the back of the Land Rover, casually pushing Oscar to one side even as he continued to speak to her. She smiled at me. “I’m Marta,” she said in Spanish. “Welcome to your home, at least for the next three months, during your training.” She put her arm out and feebly helped me down from the car, and ushered me towards the gate, as her daughter struggled with my luggage.
Those first few weeks went by quickly. Ideally, I would have been slowly learning the skills that I needed to adapt to life as a rural advisor living on my own in the countryside. I would have only three short months in Santa Lucia to prepare, and then I would be sent off on my own to work.
It turned out that Oscar was not my boss, as he had described himself in the Land Rover on that first day. In fact, we shared a common supervisor, a rickety old man who worked from an office down the hill, as the locals in Santa Lucia would say, in the capital. I saw that man, who really was my boss, only once, on a day early on in the training period, when I had been brought to the office for a medical checkup. Asking around, I was referred to a quiet, crumbling old wing of the expansive building, where I found the head of the small business development program asleep behind his desk. Waking up unhurriedly at my unexpected arrival, he pulled my resume out of a dusty file, which he had tucked away in a rusting old filing cabinet. He glanced inquisitively at it for what must have been the first time, and then expressed mild surprise at my work experience. For some reason, his enthusiasm was heartening to me. But that would be my only encounter with him. That he was Oscar’s boss as well explained what gave Oscar the impression of being in charge back at the training center.
As the training instructor in the field of small business consulting, Oscar’s job was to teach our group of six new volunteers in the field. “You’ll be competing against each other here,” Oscar announced at the first meeting of the group. “The best performers, in my estimation, will get the best assignments. Others may have less desirable postings. All this will depend on my reports and decisions.” He paused, clearly for effect, and then began his monologue anew. “And others,” he said, as he turned and made eye contact with me, “will be going home, if I determine they do not fit the proper volunteer profile.”
“You gringos,” his opening speech continued, “are no longer in the comfort of your homes.”
I struggled through those first days of training. As Oscar’s speech indicated, the approach of the training staff that Peace Corps had contracted was paternalistic and demeaning, and revolved around the constantly perpetuated stereotype of the foreigner lost in this complex new world. I didn’t feel like having a babysitter. I had expected to lose myself in the new experience completely, not to be reminded constantly how out of place I was. Most of all, I expected to be treated with respect, as a professional who had come to do a serious job.
But that respect wasn’t forthcoming. If most of my fellow trainees were unsympathetic to my plight, others seemed to fit the stereotype created for them: a group of soft, overeducated, underachieving strangers out of touch with the reality of poverty. Many, happy to accept the defined haplessness thrust upon them, even began to refer to themselves with the forced moniker of gringo. Perhaps it was no coincidence that, among the crowd of future volunteers, the one who I shared most in common with was also the only one who could not justifiably be called, or call himself, a gringo. Miguel was Puerto Rican, and if he didn’t share my opinion on everything, he at least knew how to listen and think independently.
“Oscar’s just like everyone else in this country,” Miguel said, after a glance over his shoulder to make sure no one could overhear, and in turn misconstrue, what he was about to say. We had gone to the local restaurant for a drink, after another day at the training center ended. That day, as on many, we sat apart from the other groups of trainees, an action which aroused suspicion and irritation. But we had important matters to discuss. “He’s just releasing the sociological tension that comes from years of lack of access to consumer goods.” Over the coming years, Miguel’s elaborate theories about cultural misunderstandings would prove entertaining. Here was one of the first.
“Well,” I said, slightly amused by his roundabout tack, “anyone can serve as verbal punching bag for people here. That requires far too much patience for me.” We slowly sipped on our beers, and I continued. “I mean – I need to be an active part of the conversation, if there is going to be one - not the passive recipient of cross-cultural angst that could be directed against anyone. It’s a question of self worth. I just want to get to the point where I don’t stand out, and I can do my work, and just be another person. But that means not letting myself be defined in this stereotypical mode of a gringo.”
“I don’t know. You, and the rest of the gringos,” Miguel said with a smile, knowing how I hated the word, “stand out here.” I stared at Miguel. He looked up, before continuing. “You know we don’t use that word in Puerto Rico. We say ‘yankee’.”
“It’s not the word itself that bothers me,” I explained. “I’m sick of being categorized, and the use of that word is the central tenet in the categorization process. It’s completely racist, if you think about it.”
“I don’t think so,” Miguel replied, unconvinced. “It’s just a simple linguistic tool for saying foreigner.”
“But they don’t call you a gringo.” I had already gone through these arguments in my mind one hundred times, and was glad to finally have an outlet for my thoughts. “They don’t call Asian people gringo.”
“That’s true,” he said with a smile. “There are like four races here – countryman, gringo, black guy, or Chinese. In my case I’m Latino.”
“Right. What I’m saying is the overuse of those words furthers a simplistic understanding of race and culture that over generalizes and separates everyone into large, polarized groups. You can only be one thing, and that thing is your race, as determined by the color of your skin. Everything else about you assumed from there. “
“What I think is stupid is separating everybody into either foreigner or local,” Miguel said. “I’m Latino. I share a lot with these people. But still I’m categorized as a foreigner because I’m not from this country. The world ends up polarized into groups of six million, the number of people this country, on one side, and six billion, that is, everyone else in the world, on the other. As if everyone not from here shared common characteristics. It’s such a small way to view the world.”
Miguel trailed off, so I continued where I had left off. “So this whole gringo word problem is really part of that larger problem of poverty and cultural misunderstanding. Just look at the kids around here. They have all been conditioned to yell gringo at anyone with light-skin. They say the word then put out their hand. Even kids sometimes just old enough to speak. They all know that word. Why do they do that? Because they’ve learned it. It’s a conditioned behavior that’s paid dividends once or twice, earned them a coin or a lempira or two. So by accepting that word, and that treatment, you’re just part of the problem of entrenching that dependence and poverty. I’m not going to be part of the problem I came here to try to help solve.”
“Hold on,” Miguel interrupted, “that’s way too complicated to try to explain to anyone around here.”
“But that’s just it,” I said, eager to continue. “These people at the training center, they are the bridge between us and the people we will be working with. They should be connecting us, not building artificial barriers to separate us. Take that gringo adaptation speech which they’re constantly giving to the community.”
“You mean the one where they explain how we’ve left behind all our comforts, our luxury, to come work here with the poor people?” Miguel laughed. “My trainer actually said we had left our TVs and sofas at home to come work here. It does make us look bad.”
“Right, they act like we should be accommodated for those so-called sacrifices, as if we are some kind of lost foreigners that need help. Well if it is that way, what are we doing here in the first place? I, for one, came to help, not to be helped. And to help I need to be accepted as a serious person, not a helpless, hapless, lost gringo. So that type of introduction doesn’t do anything for me.”
“That’s what I’m saying,” Miguel added. “Imagine being Latino and still not fitting in. I mean, I’m Latino, just like them, but still I don’t fit into the stereotype. I mean, I grew up in poverty, not like this, but close enough to understand what’s going on here.”
“At least you speak the language well,” I said. “Try saying all this without being able to express your opinions properly. It feels infantile to the point of exacerbation. It makes me physically tired.”
“You might think the language helps,” Miguel replied slowly, “but I stand out just as much as you do. I don’t know how they know I’m not from here, but they know. I mean, yes, my accent is different, maybe I dress differently, but I don’t think it’s that. I just don’t know what it is, but people here know who is a foreigner – they just detect it.”
“The physical judgment is hard to understand, but you’re right, there’s no way to disguise it,” I said contemplating the problem. “The more you fit in, the more serious you will be taken when you go to work. But it’s hard to fit in, when people are more interested in you as a novelty, or someone that can give them money, than a serious worker. I don’t get it either. I’m not blond with blue eyes like those guys over there,” I nodded at the table behind us where a group of volunteers were talking loudly in English as they gulped down beer. “Sure, I have light skin and clear eyes, but there are more than a few people here with the same features. The guy who works on the bus looks just like me.”
The waitress, who was proving to be a favorite of Miguel came by to see if we needed anything. As she turned to walk away, more slowly and dramatically than necessary, the topic of conversation quickly changed to lighter issues. Miguel and I had quickly noticed that we shared common interests, among others observing the deep dark eyes and voluptuous figures of the women here. While the other volunteers, most of them in their mid-twenties, seemed to have enveloped themselves in a self-contained orgy, it was less than a revelation to me, and none at all to Miguel, that all our social relations need not be with the other volunteers. We finished our beers, and, the sun having set, decided it was time to head back to our respective houses for dinner. “Anyway,” I said, as we got up, “this has made me think. I’m going to take it up tomorrow with the people at the training center.”
“You’ve been here for two weeks. You don’t understand anything about the culture.” It was more a rant than a simple statement that came from director of the training center the next day, when I went to have the conversation that I had told Miguel I would.
“It seems to me like a simple issue,” I replied in disbelief. “It’s not a cultural issue at all. I don’t like being called gringo, and I want it to stop. You claim this is a professional environment and yet you let the instructors call us racist names.”
“It is insensitive of you,” he continued as I gnashed my teeth and squinted in irritation, “to object to a word we have always used to describe foreigners. You gringos understand so little about other cultures. You are the one who is a racist. There’s no way you’ll fit in here if you don’t accept things the way they are.”
“But isn’t that why we are brought here?” I asked, trying to ignore his assertion, and sensing a hole in his logic that needed immediate attention. “To help change things?”
But the fat man behind the desk only smirked in proud irritation. “You are brought here,” he said, “to serve the community and the country. Not to question the authority of people like the trainers, or me – people who know much more than you ever will. If you’re not interested in learning in the way we propose, perhaps it is best for you to go home.” His cell phone rang, and he answered it, turning his large office chair around, his back to me. I got up and walked away.
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Everyday at the training center was a similar frustration. Everyone was constantly being judged and evaluated on what could only be considered the most random and inane of criteria. To exacerbate to the problem, the judges were unfair. Oscar would make notes of perceived offenses in what he called the “permanent record.” Each time I questioned his domineering leadership style, or the relevance of the material he assigned, such as the time he sent us home with hours of accounting journal entries to practice, I would receive a written warning.
One afternoon he called me into his makeshift office after lunch. It wasn’t the first time. “Your fellow volunteer, Sally, who has been doing a tremendous job of cultural adaptation, tells me you have been drinking alcohol at lunch today,” he began.
“That is possible,” I replied, not understanding what he was getting at this time.
“That is clearly in violation of our cultural rules,” Oscar continued. “Public intoxication is not fitting of a volunteer.”
“What are talking about? First of all, I’m not intoxicated. Second, my host family offered me a beer at lunch. They had some extended family visiting. Sally only found out because I just told everyone about the lunch – how good it was.” That had been less than five minutes earlier. Apparently Sally had made a bee line for Oscar with the news.
“At any rate,” Oscar said, taking out the little book where he documented offenses, “in our culture, it is not proper.”
“How can you say that,” I replied, quickly losing my patience, “when it was your countrymen who offered the beer to me? They drank with me!”
Oscar stared at me. “Are you questioning my authority as the boss here?” he sneered. “This is not your country, gringo. Your list of offenses is growing long, and soon I will have no choice but to send your case to the director.” Seeing that I was being provoked, I stood up and walked quickly out of the office. I tossed the light screen door open in front of me, and walked through. The door was much lighter than I had expected, and it slammed emphatically behind me.
“Don’t slam that door!” Oscar called after me. “Get back in here!” But I was already on my way out of the training center.
At Dona Marta’s home on the hillside, things were different. Marta and her daughters had a way of making me laugh about my linguistic inadequacies. They seemed to know, poor and humble as they were, that no one is perfect. They had lost, or never shared, the pretext of pretending to be, from which their professional countrymen at the training center suffered.
“What’s wrong, little American?” Marta asked that day when I came through the gate, earlier than usual, and found her working in her garden. Marta never called me gringo; she had quit using that word immediately, and permanently, the first time I told her I didn’t like it. I had tried to explain why I took offense, in what was still very broken Spanish, but there had been no need. If I didn’t like that word, she said, then it wouldn’t be used in her house.
In return, I became more flexible about other things, like eating corn flakes in the morning with warm milk, after separating out the small roaches I always found in the cereal. I also learned to try to say what I wanted to say, and not to be ashamed of failing, and in that way I slowly improved my Spanish.
Over the three months I lived in that crumbling old house on the mountainside in Santa Lucia, as Doña Marta would cook up refried beans and corn tortillas for me over her wood burning stove, I would stare out the open kitchen door at the blue sky, and down over those green hills to the distant capital visible in the valley far below. And I would slowly piece together her story from fragments of a language new to me. The language she used conveyed none of the trivialities one could learn in Spanish classes, but rather the pieces of lives and events that, woven together, comprised the proud history of several generations of a humble family. That is how I perfected my Spanish, and it explains why my diction and understanding grew to be as oblique as the history of that place where I learned, and those who taught me.
Dona Marta lived as so many others in the countryside, alone with her children. With her two remaining single daughters, who still lived at home, she inhabited the mud-walled tile-roofed house that stretched out intrepidly along the hillside in a straight line of rooms, built in the manner so common in that country, one by one over the last century, as family size necessitated and finances provided. The home had first belonged to Marta’s great grandparents that many generations ago, and she had never known any other. The capital being so close, and growing gradually closer, if not in distance then in time, as transportation and roads improved over the years, Marta’s siblings had emigrated one by one, leaving her, the oldest daughter, in charge of the homestead, which they visited on holidays.
If the house had grown years ago to accommodate a larger family, it now seemed an unwieldy and dilapidated relic of a more hopeful era. The kitchen, on the far end of the hill from the gate, near the outdoor bathroom, gave way to a bedroom where Marta slept, behind a curtain hung from the ceiling, with her two daughters, adolescent Anni and the older, but still single, Jenny. The next chamber was a living room, adorned proudly with the finest mementos of all the family’s generations, including the greatest prize, a black and white photograph, framed in old mahogany with golden trim. The picture, Marta said proudly, having taken down from its perch to consider it more closely, had been taken years ago in far away Madrid, of a distant uncle, standing next to the King of Spain. She could never fully explain the circumstances that led to that meeting.
The last room, the end room next to the small iron gate that opened to the courtyard in front of the church, had become surplus years ago. It was used for storage, and sat vacant until the fortunate arrival of the Peace Corps, intent on renting what accommodations there were to be had in the small and hotel-less town for living quarters for soon to arrive trainees. As such, it had been reserved all those years, as Marta explained, for me, and was painstakingly cleaned and arranged before my arrival. It was furnished simply enough with a bed, nightstand, and shelf. Perhaps the most interesting feature was the door that opened directly to the walkway in front of the house. “All of the older houses had that feature,” Marta told me when I expressed interest in the house’s design, with every room opening to the next and to the outside. “The home is a family dwelling, for all to share, inside and out.” Since no one transited through the end room as they did the middle rooms, that space provided me a degree of privacy that proved to be a luxury. Other trainees, who had arrived earlier, had been inserted into newer homes, where they often shared a room with a number of children, or a single uncle. That was generally considered preferable to the dilapidated old room I lived in, which had been left unfilled until the last, with its stained, crumbling mud walls and arching tile roof above. Everyone who saw it expressed their sympathy. But I was happy in that room, in the house of Dona Marta.
Across the path that ran along the front of the home Marta kept a garden, which she prized highly. With Jenny off at work in the capital below, and Anni in school or lost with her teenaged friends, she spent her lonely afternoons tending its manicured plants and flowers from across the region. I found her there the day I returned home from that heated exchange with Oscar.
“You look quite upset,” Marta repeated. “What has happened?”
“It’s the people at the center,” I told her bluntly, having not yet learned to pose my words in an adequately circumspect manner. “I’m not sure what is wrong with my instructor, but he is quite irrational.”
“That fat man who came here with you the day you arrived? He’s an imbecile,” Marta said, surprising me with her own bluntness. Perhaps she had been drinking with family more after I had left. “I wish my countrymen could stand to have a good job and a good salary and not become like him.”
“You know him well then?” I asked.
“Not so well,” Marta said. “But I know his type. He and the director came around when they were searching for places for the volunteers to stay. They talk down to the people here as if we were stupid, just because we are poor, and they have good jobs. They said my house wouldn’t do, because it is old. Then they came back and said they had a last minute addition to the group, and you would be staying with us.”
“I’m not sure it’s about poverty, they talk down to us as well,” I said.
“They don’t have a very high opinion of foreigners either. He told me that the money they pay me, which is more than enough, would not compensate for the burden of hosting a gringo,” she said, wiping her brow and gazing into the hills beyond the church. “Sorry for the word, but that’s what he said. I remember his words. I tell you this because we have come to understand one another,” she continued, “unlike your teachers, who assume understanding because we are countrymen, but understand nothing.”
“Don’t worry Marta,” I said, leaning on the gate and staring at the bright blue sky. “I understand what you are saying. I’ve learned more from you than from those people at the center. I mean at least the cultural training they give-”
She interrupted with a deep laugh, such as I had never heard from her. “Cultural training? How could one learn from such a proud man, how to deal with people, I mean real people, from the countryside? These people from the upper class in the city, how can they ever hope to teach that, when they can’t do it themselves? No my son, stick to your ways, and you will be better off.
“We may have needed the money,” she continued, “but now I have met you and I can say, I would have taken you in for free, it is not at all as they said. We may not be countrymen, but there is much more in common between the two of us than with his type. Now come in and have something to eat. It will calm your spirit.”
When boredom got the best of us, as it would in that small town over the course of three months, Miguel and I eventually began venturing down to the capital. Leaving Santa Lucia was forbidden by Peace Corps rules. It was a lose prohibition that no one paid much attention to, and we missed the excitement that couldn’t be provided by that parochial mountain town, especially on weekends.
It was an easy trip down the hill to the capital. The local bus made the journey, which was more like a freefall down the steep hill, hourly on weekdays. That ride brought liberation from the frustrations of the training environment, and a rush of exhilaration that came with gaining back some degree of anonymity in the larger, less observant capital. Stepping off the Santa Lucia bus onto to the congested, hazy streets of the capital was like stepping back into the real world, even if that bustling version of it differed significantly from the any world I had known before.
We got into the habit of leaving Friday evening under the cover of darkness. We would spend the night out, returning early the next morning. Marta, when she noticed, never seemed to care. We were also lucky to come across Jorge on one such nocturnal adventure. The night we met him, he was alone at a bar, sucking on a cigarette, beer in hand, much too solitary and relaxed to stand out. It was still early that night, and the three of us were the only ones at the bar. As Miguel and I spoke, in Spanish, as I always insisted we do, so as to stand out less, when we were in the city, the thin figured man eyed us circumspectly from across the room. He finished his cigarette, tossed the butt onto the floor haphazardly, picked up his beer, and came over.
“Peace Corps?” he asked as he sat down next to Miguel, with a level of assuredness more robust than his thin frame.
I frowned. I had already become suspicious of approaches like these. Miguel, always more optimistic about the benefits of speaking to strangers, responded. “That’s right.”
“I’ve known a lot of people in Peace Corps,” the thin man said without delay, as he began to recite a list of names we had never heard.
“Congratulations,” I said sarcastically, already a bit irritated. “We don’t know any of those people. We work on our own.”
But the man was clearly undeterred. “Surely you’ll know some people I know as well,” he insisted. “Anyway, you should be careful in this bar. There are many thieves, and girls who will try to take advantage of you for your money.”
“They might get a surprise when they learn we have no money,” Miguel laughed.
I laughed too, but it wasn’t clear the man was listening to the other side of the conversation. “Don’t worry,” he proceeded. “I’ve known many people in Peace Corps. I’ll keep an eye on you. I’m Jorge,” he said, offering a half-full pack of cigarettes instead of his hand.
Not so interested in either of his offers, having already escaped one level of supervision just to be there, and being non-smokers ourselves, Miguel and I continued our evolving discussion of the socioeconomic manifestations of the unusual Central American circumstances that led to the phenomenon of having a preponderance of beautiful women living amongst a population of short, ugly men. Seeing that we were determined to get to the bottom of the issue, Jorge sat back and listened, and before long, he had caught on.
“I see,” he interjected, “you guys are different from the usual volunteers. You come out for the same reasons we do,” he said nodding at a group of girls who had just come in the door.
Jorge’s persistence paid off quickly, and by the end of the night, despite my continued reticence, he and Miguel were acting like old friends. When we decided to go, Jorge offered us a ride across town for a late night snack of baleadas. The sun was rising as we got back in his car, full and tired.
“Where to now?” Jorge asked.
“Back to the bus to Santa Lucia,” I said. “We need to get back. You know where it leaves from?”
“You’re not staying in a hotel?” Jorge asked. “You can’t go back to the mountains on a Saturday morning, there is too much to do on a weekend in the capital.”
“As much as we love the nightlife in the capital,” Miguel said, getting right to the heart of matters, “we can’t afford to stay long on the small living allowance we get from Peace Corps.”
“Don’t worry, my friends,” Jorge said. “You’ll stay at my house. I have extra beds, and we can buy food at the supermarket and cook it. It will be inexpensive.” As we would learn, there was no sense in arguing with Jorge once he had a plan. He was already driving home, down a road neither Miguel nor I was familiar with, so the matter had been settled.
That would be the first of many weekends at the home of Jorge Luis Raudales, a quiet young man, a little older than Miguel and me, but certainly no more mature. He was a chain smoker and serial worrier, but enjoyed the capital late nights and a good time as much as we did. He also preferred the company of those not exactly like him, an uncommon characteristic in a land of stereotypes. And he did have a car, and a house, which were very useful traits.
Jorge lived alone in a marginal neighborhood, named after former American President John F. Kennedy, on the outskirts of the city. He didn’t like to speak much about his family. It was clear from what he did say, and the occasional calls from the US, that his mother and three sisters were quite different from him. When they called, it was invariably to order Jorge to do something, or to ask about the completion of a previous order. Jorge tried his best to miss such calls, and always preferred for someone else to answer the phone.
That inclination was a manifestation of his general preference to be left alone, and he was quite happy by himself in his deteriorating house. But it was clear from that first weekend that he enjoyed our company anyway. We had to argue to get him to let us take the bus back up to Santa Lucia on Sunday morning. It seemed he would have had us stay on indefinitely.
“What do you think of Jorge, really?” I asked Miguel, as we rode the bus back up the mountainside. “It’s a bit strange how he took to us so quickly, don’t you think?”
“He just seems like a nice guy, looking for friends,” Miguel said, trying to sleep after the previous two late nights.
“I mean, it doesn’t feel quite right to me,” I continued. “It feels like he wants to be our friends because we are foreigners. He talks about all the people he knows in Peace Corps – even though I’ve never heard of any of them. I’m not sure I want friends like that.”
“Let me ask you something Kawil,” Miguel said, temporarily rousing himself from a half-slumber, in the vein of a person who realizes that waking up for the moment will allow them a longer, undisturbed slumber at later time. “All those nice looking girls you were talking to last night, the ones who gave you their phone numbers, you think those girls saw something deep within you that instantly attracted them to you?”
I smiled. “That’s just physical attraction my friend. You know that.”
“Well I don’t hear you complaining about them,” Miguel said quickly. “I can’t see how Jorge is any different. Everything in this world, here - every relationship in this country - is a matter of convenience. You just have to recognize what is convenient for you.”
We wouldn’t get the chance to go back down to Jorge’s many more times. It wasn’t long before I realized that even if everyone else was breaking the rules, with justice being metered out so arbitrarily at the training center, I was putting myself in danger by doing so. I gave up those weekend trips. But Jorge was never far away. He would often come up to Santa Lucia to visit, sometimes showing up unannounced at the restaurant. We learned that he would stay for a beer even when we weren’t there, and he would drop our names when approaching other trainees. Unfortunately for Jorge, he was slow to realize that mentioning us to the other trainees probably reduced his chances of making new friends. His primary motivation, or the convenience that drove him, as Miguel put it, was meeting foreign women, an undertaking which too frequently manifested itself in shameless episodes that would be considered stalking elsewhere. Despite that inconvenience, our friendship would last long past those days in Santa Lucia.
So things improved slowly.
But it was already too late. After three months, when the time rolled around for each volunteer to be assigned his work site for the next two years, the Peace Corps officials, who normally would have had the input of a project manager, had had no other contact with us but that garnered through Oscar. They read his notes.
“We would have liked to put you in a larger city, working with a bank, but we’re concerned about your temper and cultural sensitivity,” the director told me, as he explained the work that awaited me in the remote town of San Juan, Intibucá, with Oscar looking on in satisfaction. “Your training review suggests you may not be able to handle yourself in an urban environment.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, shocked at the news, quite annoyed, and deeply concerned. The Peace Corps had said they wouldn’t put anyone in a place with no electricity, or more without a telephone for emergencies. San Juan, they told me, had a population of about five hundred, was seven hours from the capital by bus, and had no electricity or phone.
“You have a long series of transgressions,” the Peace Corps representative said. “You laugh at the misfortune of others, such as the first day you were picked up from the airport.”
“What?” I gasped in confusion.
“I have told them about the first day I picked you up from the airport,” Oscar said, with a feigned air of concern, “I was very concerned that we passed some poor people on the street and you began to laugh at them.” I remembered that car ride distinctly. I had laughed, but at Oscar’s attitude, and at my sorry state in the back of that car, but not at all at the poverty.
“I would never do that.”
“You slammed the door on me after I tried to meet with you about drinking during training, about cultural sensitivity, and you walked out on the director while he was speaking to you about sensitivity as well,” he continued.
“You have displayed a great deal of inability to adapt to the culture here,” the director continued.
“Have you asked the family I live with about this? They will tell you…” but the director again interrupted.
“We are not going to discuss this further. The training staff has made their evaluation. We are excited about your partnership with the cooperative in San Juan. We have placed Sally in La Esperanza, with their main office. She will be helping us to coordinate your work, given the remote location of your assignment.” She looked at Oscar, then at me. “That’s your assignment. You can accept it," she paused as she smiled, before completing her thought. "Or you can go home."
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
WHERE HAVE THE PROS GONE? II
WHERE HAVE THE PROS GONE? II
Brent Latham - Sunday, March 15, 2009
In my last piece, I asked why the American Under-20 team that has just qualified for the FIFA World Cup in Egypt is still comprised mostly of amateurs, seemingly putting them at a disadvantage to largely professional rivals.
This time I will try to shine some more light on the topic, and propose a simple way to increase the U-20 professional player pool, and improve player development between the vital ages of eighteen and twenty-one.
Much has been written piecemeal about player development in the US. But getting to the bottom of this complex problem, which involves disparate facets, including a willing federation with a highly successful youth program, youth clubs scattered around the country, and a stubbornly independent professional league, all operating in the context of a global game, requires a disciplined approach.
So let's go about it in a methodical way, by first asking how the US is different from countries that are producing global stars, from Germany to Brazil to Ivory Coast.
The United States is, of course, unique in many ways among the two dozen or so foremost world soccer powers. Perhaps the two most important differences are the prevalence of universities as centers for amateur sport, and the corresponding lack of league substructure to encourage professional talent development.
Interestingly, the American system, presided over by USSF, is already doing a world-class and rapidly improving job in developing talent at the Under-17 level, for what that is worth. Having failed in the narrow Bradenton strategy of selecting a handful of young players to groom, the Federation quickly learned to cast a wider net. This year, it brags that over three hundred graduates of the recently formed national development academy are headed to the next level.
That's quite an advance for USSF. The problem is, in the US that next level is college, not a professional league. For young players in the prime of their soccer development, that misstep may represent a diploma and a door to a better life, but it will represent a serious delay, or even an end to, their professional soccer aspirations.
It is easy to rationalize that decision by thinking that collegiate soccer is a good development substitute for the pros, but hardly anyone associated with the game in the US would argue that point for long.
But what about the young talents in American soccer who do opt to pursue a professional career rather than college?
A handful of American youth are trying their luck in European systems. Many of these are Bradenton graduates who have benefited from the international stage of the U-17 level on which to market their abilities.
Also interesting is that more and more Americans youths of Mexican heritage are now trying their hand in Mexico, with sometimes disastrous results for the USSF - such as the case of Edgar Castillo.
The common thread is that at about eighteen, the approximate age at which the best players around the world are moving to bigger teams and beginning to develop into true professionals, the chances are much better and the incentives much greater for an American to take that college scholarship.
MLS recognizes this tradeoff. As part of Generation Adidas, players are offered money to go back to school if their careers don't pan out. But only a handful of players, some of whom are not even American, are offered the Generation Adidas option each year, and those who are form far too small a group to adequately stock an U-20 pool.
It's simply not enough.
Now, if we are going to bring MLS into this discussion, we must do so in the context of what MLS is - a league run by very rich and intelligent businessmen with designs on creating the dream of such types: a money printing monopoly.
It would be easy to declare that MLS should solve the problem by recruiting more American youth players and pay them more, or to make up new rules forcing the teams to do so, but until we have a soccer czar in America who rules by decree - the case of Sunil Gulati not withstanding - a realistic solution will work within the guidelines of MLS to propose an outcome that is universally beneficial. So let's try that.
MLS is a large part of the developmental problem mostly because the owners insist on tediously following the business model of established American sports leagues. They do so because that model works very well, and the story would end there, except that there are a number of good financial reasons why MLS should seriously consider ways to get more young American soccer talents to turn pro at an earlier age.
Leagues like the NFL and NBA, selling still predominately American sports can afford to let the college systems take on the expense of scouting and developing talent for them, without a resulting decline in the quality of play.
But an interesting lesson can be learned from baseball. College baseball, for one reason or another, has never been quite the revenue generator that football and basketball are, and so money in turn doesn't get invested in developing college baseball players. It's no coincidence that Major League Baseball opts to do much of the development itself, in the minor leagues. In baseball, top prospects sometimes pan out, and others don't. MLB casts a very wide net so as not to miss out.
While MLS copies the NFL and NBA on the development front, MLS inhabits a world in which the other American professional sports leagues would love to reside, where its sport is the dominant one, driving millions of fans around the world to spend. Some American businessmen even richer than those involved in MLS, those investing in the Premier League, already get it.
The MLS guys clearly understand the marketing side, hence the David Beckham saga. But they still seem intent on overlooking the player development and market side that has made clubs across Latin America richer and improved their level of soccer considerably.
It's no coincidence that Mexican clubs now frequent the US looking for youth products, and Scandinavian clubs raid colleges and MLS for free agents. The talent is here, it is free for the taking, and MLS is a hindrance rather than a conduit to the flow of the international player market. Agents know it. They regularly advise promising college players to stay in college until the jump directly to Europe rather than get caught up with MLS and their low-ball contract offers. Even the players know it. Younger Americans are moving to Europe, and now Mexico, en masse, rather than mess with MLS.
The only group that seems to be out of the loop here is the MLS. And they are perhaps the entity with the most to gain from American player development, both in financial rewards and improved quality of play. Further, MLS does not need to revamp its cautious financial approach to take advantage.
In fact, the solution to the player development quandary is really so simple and universally beneficial that it's hard to believe it hasn't been implemented. In its haste to copy other American sports leagues, MLS has made sure to put the clamps on player salaries, and that's fine. But it has also implemented one other rule ubiquitous in American sports, with again the interesting, if partial, exception of baseball, but rare in international soccer: a limit to the amount of players on the roster. Doing away with that limit would not only lead to a surge in quality American youth players and the game in the US, it would almost certainly benefit MLS financially.
Right now MLS teams can have twenty players on the senior roster and four more developmental slots. That's a decrease from a couple years ago, after the elimination of the developmental league.
The player cap is the biggest factor preventing MLS teams from taking a risk on young players, opting instead for middle of the road foreign players or mediocre veterans, who may cost five to ten times more than an anxious 20-year old, but take up only one roster spot. If you are an MLS team with only twenty spots and cap space, you can't take a risk on a young guy when a proven quantity is out there. Eliminating the player limit would immediately reverse that equation for teams willing to develop players.
This may sound expensive, but it needn't be, and shouldn't be if the goal is to encourage development of young players. Keep the salary cap, and let more enterprising teams with better management and coaching focus on stocking up on more, cheaper players. For the $720,000 price tag of one aging veteran like Luciano Emiliano, an MLS team could sign an entire squad to a $40,000 a year deal, and invest the leftover money in coaches, scouting, and facilities, then see which players pan out.
There will be arguments that this will reduce the quality of play, but I would respond with the LA Galaxy as exhibit number one that spending money in MLS does not improve play substantially. Why not give clubs the option of trying it a different way and seeing what happens? With larger rosters play in international tournaments is sure to improve as well.
Other restrictions, such as the draft, free agent restrictions, and allocation, need to go too. It is obvious that MLS also needs to allow its clubs to ramp up their nascent development academies, and let them sign, retain, and sell players from them. But the key is the roster limit. It's a simple process of incentivizing the desired behavior. The team that uses cap space on an expensive player misses out on a slew of developmental players.
Of course the cycle of player development, once begun, should also provide some income through transfer fees for new and improved training that facilitates development of new players. But notice -and this is important - that money from selling players is icing on the cake. Becoming a feeder league is not the primary financial driver motivating player development in this scenario.
The MLS could choose to keep the stars it develops if it wants to pay them, and financially it would be a wash. The goal is to incentivize MLS teams to take a chance and spend money on development, not penalize them for it. The teams will then in turn incentivize young players to turn pro, and the cycle begins.
Another beauty of the system for US Soccer is that college soccer isn't going anywhere, even if it loses the majority of its potential stars. College would remain an option for those players who choose not to sacrifice their education to pursue their soccer career, and it would be a developmental safety net for players who are late bloomers or don't make the cut at the developmental academies.
Furthermore, such a system would provide umbrella motivation for American players to pursue a professional career. There would be no need for the MLS, or USSF, to pick out a handful of stars to motivate individually, hoping they turn out to be the best choices over the long run. That means more players with a chance to develop to the fullest of their abilities.
Most importantly, a wealth of young, professional American talent would finally have the setting to emerge, from which the U-20 team could simply cherry pick. That would make the FIFA Youth Championships, instead of a late spring break trip for a group of college players, a legitimate showcase for American players, as well as a shop window to strengthen MLS' bottom line.
The opinions expressed are those of the author only. While others at Yanks Abroad may hold similar opinions, they do not represent the views of Yanks Abroad or any of our partners.
Brent Latham - Sunday, March 15, 2009
In my last piece, I asked why the American Under-20 team that has just qualified for the FIFA World Cup in Egypt is still comprised mostly of amateurs, seemingly putting them at a disadvantage to largely professional rivals.
This time I will try to shine some more light on the topic, and propose a simple way to increase the U-20 professional player pool, and improve player development between the vital ages of eighteen and twenty-one.
Much has been written piecemeal about player development in the US. But getting to the bottom of this complex problem, which involves disparate facets, including a willing federation with a highly successful youth program, youth clubs scattered around the country, and a stubbornly independent professional league, all operating in the context of a global game, requires a disciplined approach.
So let's go about it in a methodical way, by first asking how the US is different from countries that are producing global stars, from Germany to Brazil to Ivory Coast.
The United States is, of course, unique in many ways among the two dozen or so foremost world soccer powers. Perhaps the two most important differences are the prevalence of universities as centers for amateur sport, and the corresponding lack of league substructure to encourage professional talent development.
Interestingly, the American system, presided over by USSF, is already doing a world-class and rapidly improving job in developing talent at the Under-17 level, for what that is worth. Having failed in the narrow Bradenton strategy of selecting a handful of young players to groom, the Federation quickly learned to cast a wider net. This year, it brags that over three hundred graduates of the recently formed national development academy are headed to the next level.
That's quite an advance for USSF. The problem is, in the US that next level is college, not a professional league. For young players in the prime of their soccer development, that misstep may represent a diploma and a door to a better life, but it will represent a serious delay, or even an end to, their professional soccer aspirations.
It is easy to rationalize that decision by thinking that collegiate soccer is a good development substitute for the pros, but hardly anyone associated with the game in the US would argue that point for long.
But what about the young talents in American soccer who do opt to pursue a professional career rather than college?
A handful of American youth are trying their luck in European systems. Many of these are Bradenton graduates who have benefited from the international stage of the U-17 level on which to market their abilities.
Also interesting is that more and more Americans youths of Mexican heritage are now trying their hand in Mexico, with sometimes disastrous results for the USSF - such as the case of Edgar Castillo.
The common thread is that at about eighteen, the approximate age at which the best players around the world are moving to bigger teams and beginning to develop into true professionals, the chances are much better and the incentives much greater for an American to take that college scholarship.
MLS recognizes this tradeoff. As part of Generation Adidas, players are offered money to go back to school if their careers don't pan out. But only a handful of players, some of whom are not even American, are offered the Generation Adidas option each year, and those who are form far too small a group to adequately stock an U-20 pool.
It's simply not enough.
Now, if we are going to bring MLS into this discussion, we must do so in the context of what MLS is - a league run by very rich and intelligent businessmen with designs on creating the dream of such types: a money printing monopoly.
It would be easy to declare that MLS should solve the problem by recruiting more American youth players and pay them more, or to make up new rules forcing the teams to do so, but until we have a soccer czar in America who rules by decree - the case of Sunil Gulati not withstanding - a realistic solution will work within the guidelines of MLS to propose an outcome that is universally beneficial. So let's try that.
MLS is a large part of the developmental problem mostly because the owners insist on tediously following the business model of established American sports leagues. They do so because that model works very well, and the story would end there, except that there are a number of good financial reasons why MLS should seriously consider ways to get more young American soccer talents to turn pro at an earlier age.
Leagues like the NFL and NBA, selling still predominately American sports can afford to let the college systems take on the expense of scouting and developing talent for them, without a resulting decline in the quality of play.
But an interesting lesson can be learned from baseball. College baseball, for one reason or another, has never been quite the revenue generator that football and basketball are, and so money in turn doesn't get invested in developing college baseball players. It's no coincidence that Major League Baseball opts to do much of the development itself, in the minor leagues. In baseball, top prospects sometimes pan out, and others don't. MLB casts a very wide net so as not to miss out.
While MLS copies the NFL and NBA on the development front, MLS inhabits a world in which the other American professional sports leagues would love to reside, where its sport is the dominant one, driving millions of fans around the world to spend. Some American businessmen even richer than those involved in MLS, those investing in the Premier League, already get it.
The MLS guys clearly understand the marketing side, hence the David Beckham saga. But they still seem intent on overlooking the player development and market side that has made clubs across Latin America richer and improved their level of soccer considerably.
It's no coincidence that Mexican clubs now frequent the US looking for youth products, and Scandinavian clubs raid colleges and MLS for free agents. The talent is here, it is free for the taking, and MLS is a hindrance rather than a conduit to the flow of the international player market. Agents know it. They regularly advise promising college players to stay in college until the jump directly to Europe rather than get caught up with MLS and their low-ball contract offers. Even the players know it. Younger Americans are moving to Europe, and now Mexico, en masse, rather than mess with MLS.
The only group that seems to be out of the loop here is the MLS. And they are perhaps the entity with the most to gain from American player development, both in financial rewards and improved quality of play. Further, MLS does not need to revamp its cautious financial approach to take advantage.
In fact, the solution to the player development quandary is really so simple and universally beneficial that it's hard to believe it hasn't been implemented. In its haste to copy other American sports leagues, MLS has made sure to put the clamps on player salaries, and that's fine. But it has also implemented one other rule ubiquitous in American sports, with again the interesting, if partial, exception of baseball, but rare in international soccer: a limit to the amount of players on the roster. Doing away with that limit would not only lead to a surge in quality American youth players and the game in the US, it would almost certainly benefit MLS financially.
Right now MLS teams can have twenty players on the senior roster and four more developmental slots. That's a decrease from a couple years ago, after the elimination of the developmental league.
The player cap is the biggest factor preventing MLS teams from taking a risk on young players, opting instead for middle of the road foreign players or mediocre veterans, who may cost five to ten times more than an anxious 20-year old, but take up only one roster spot. If you are an MLS team with only twenty spots and cap space, you can't take a risk on a young guy when a proven quantity is out there. Eliminating the player limit would immediately reverse that equation for teams willing to develop players.
This may sound expensive, but it needn't be, and shouldn't be if the goal is to encourage development of young players. Keep the salary cap, and let more enterprising teams with better management and coaching focus on stocking up on more, cheaper players. For the $720,000 price tag of one aging veteran like Luciano Emiliano, an MLS team could sign an entire squad to a $40,000 a year deal, and invest the leftover money in coaches, scouting, and facilities, then see which players pan out.
There will be arguments that this will reduce the quality of play, but I would respond with the LA Galaxy as exhibit number one that spending money in MLS does not improve play substantially. Why not give clubs the option of trying it a different way and seeing what happens? With larger rosters play in international tournaments is sure to improve as well.
Other restrictions, such as the draft, free agent restrictions, and allocation, need to go too. It is obvious that MLS also needs to allow its clubs to ramp up their nascent development academies, and let them sign, retain, and sell players from them. But the key is the roster limit. It's a simple process of incentivizing the desired behavior. The team that uses cap space on an expensive player misses out on a slew of developmental players.
Of course the cycle of player development, once begun, should also provide some income through transfer fees for new and improved training that facilitates development of new players. But notice -and this is important - that money from selling players is icing on the cake. Becoming a feeder league is not the primary financial driver motivating player development in this scenario.
The MLS could choose to keep the stars it develops if it wants to pay them, and financially it would be a wash. The goal is to incentivize MLS teams to take a chance and spend money on development, not penalize them for it. The teams will then in turn incentivize young players to turn pro, and the cycle begins.
Another beauty of the system for US Soccer is that college soccer isn't going anywhere, even if it loses the majority of its potential stars. College would remain an option for those players who choose not to sacrifice their education to pursue their soccer career, and it would be a developmental safety net for players who are late bloomers or don't make the cut at the developmental academies.
Furthermore, such a system would provide umbrella motivation for American players to pursue a professional career. There would be no need for the MLS, or USSF, to pick out a handful of stars to motivate individually, hoping they turn out to be the best choices over the long run. That means more players with a chance to develop to the fullest of their abilities.
Most importantly, a wealth of young, professional American talent would finally have the setting to emerge, from which the U-20 team could simply cherry pick. That would make the FIFA Youth Championships, instead of a late spring break trip for a group of college players, a legitimate showcase for American players, as well as a shop window to strengthen MLS' bottom line.
The opinions expressed are those of the author only. While others at Yanks Abroad may hold similar opinions, they do not represent the views of Yanks Abroad or any of our partners.
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Mauritanian Military to Proceed With Polls Despite Opposition
Mauritanian Military to Proceed With Polls Despite Opposition
By Brent Latham
Dakar
15 March 2009
The leader of Mauritania's military government has confirmed his intention to proceed with presidential elections in June. The plan has raised concern among the political parties that formed the government before the coup.
General Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz said Saturday the military would proceed with the plan for presidential elections on June 6, saying the polls would be free and fair, and open to all.
Speaking at a rally in his native city of Akjoujt , General Aziz said Mauritanians have the duty to register and to vote for the candidate they feel will best lead the country forward.
General Aziz said Mauritanian politicians calling for further sanctions against the country have already caused chaos and disorder, and now wish to worsen the crisis by starving the citizens of the West African nation.
In response to the military ruler's plan, a spokesman for deposed president Sidi Mohamed Ould Sheikh Abdallahi called for the restoration of democracy.
Mauritanian politicians have urged the African Union to maintain travel sanctions and an asset freeze levied against the military government.
AU chair Moammar Gadhafi, who was in Mauritania for talks aimed at resolving the crisis, said would recommend the AU sanctions be lifted. Talks fell apart Thursday, with Mr. Gadhafi accused by politicians of siding with the coup leaders.
Mr. Abdallahi, who is still constitutionally president, is urging the international community to enact further sanctions. He is joined by Mauritania 's main political parties.
Mohamed Mahmoude Ould Lematte, spokesman for the main opposition party, says a consensus among the parties needs to be reached before elections can take place.
The politicians that oppose the plan say elections organized by the junta cannot be free and fair. They also object to the intention to open the elections to all.
A Mauritanian law prevents members of the military from running for office. Unless changed, that law would leave General Aziz, who is widely believed to be planning a bid for the presidency, out of the running.
By Brent Latham
Dakar
15 March 2009
The leader of Mauritania's military government has confirmed his intention to proceed with presidential elections in June. The plan has raised concern among the political parties that formed the government before the coup.
General Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz said Saturday the military would proceed with the plan for presidential elections on June 6, saying the polls would be free and fair, and open to all.
Speaking at a rally in his native city of Akjoujt , General Aziz said Mauritanians have the duty to register and to vote for the candidate they feel will best lead the country forward.
General Aziz said Mauritanian politicians calling for further sanctions against the country have already caused chaos and disorder, and now wish to worsen the crisis by starving the citizens of the West African nation.
In response to the military ruler's plan, a spokesman for deposed president Sidi Mohamed Ould Sheikh Abdallahi called for the restoration of democracy.
Mauritanian politicians have urged the African Union to maintain travel sanctions and an asset freeze levied against the military government.
AU chair Moammar Gadhafi, who was in Mauritania for talks aimed at resolving the crisis, said would recommend the AU sanctions be lifted. Talks fell apart Thursday, with Mr. Gadhafi accused by politicians of siding with the coup leaders.
Mr. Abdallahi, who is still constitutionally president, is urging the international community to enact further sanctions. He is joined by Mauritania 's main political parties.
Mohamed Mahmoude Ould Lematte, spokesman for the main opposition party, says a consensus among the parties needs to be reached before elections can take place.
The politicians that oppose the plan say elections organized by the junta cannot be free and fair. They also object to the intention to open the elections to all.
A Mauritanian law prevents members of the military from running for office. Unless changed, that law would leave General Aziz, who is widely believed to be planning a bid for the presidency, out of the running.
Friday, March 13, 2009
Gadhafi says AU Should Lift Mauritania Sanctions
Gadhafi says AU Should Lift Mauritania Sanctions
By Brent Latham
Dakar
13 March 2009
Libyan leader and African Union chair Moammar Gadhafi has said he will tell African leaders to lift sanctions on Mauritania's military government. The pronouncement came as Gadhafi prepared to leave the country after failing in an attempt to mediate the crisis.
Preparing to board his plane after spending four days in Mauritania, Libyan head of state Moammar Gadhafi declared his intention to recommend that the African Union lift the sanctions imposed on Mauritania's military government.
Mr. Gadhafi, who holds the rotating head of the AU, also said he supports the Mauritanian junta's plan for June elections.
Mr. Gadhafi says the African Union should lift the asset freeze and travel ban on the military government, led by General Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, who seized power last August in a bloodless coup.
Mr. Gadhafi was sent by the AU to mediate the political crisis in the West African state, with the mandate to find a solution acceptable to Mauritanian stakeholders and the international community.
His efforts appeared to fail on Thursday, when leaders of the National Front for Democracy Defense, or FNDD, a coalition of thirteen political parties that have opposed the coup since it took place, walked out on talks. The leaders of the organization accused Mr. Gadhafi of mocking their democratic principles and siding with the military junta.
Abdel Koudousse Ould Abdeidna, leader of the FNDD, said Mr. Gadhafi was pushing the agenda of the military junta.
"Most of the conversation was leading us to accept the coup d'etat as, what we say in French, as a fait accompli, and that we really should embrace that reality," he said.
The FNDD has said they disapprove of the junta's timetable for elections. The military government has scheduled elections for June 6, a date Mr. Gadhafi also said he stands behind, saying the AU will send election observers to assure that polls are free and fair.
But politicians across the spectrum in Mauritania have expressed doubts that elections held under the rules of the military regime can be fair. They are also intent on upholding a law which prohibits military personnel from holding public office, in response to widespread belief that General Aziz is planning a run for the office.
By Brent Latham
Dakar
13 March 2009
Libyan leader and African Union chair Moammar Gadhafi has said he will tell African leaders to lift sanctions on Mauritania's military government. The pronouncement came as Gadhafi prepared to leave the country after failing in an attempt to mediate the crisis.
Preparing to board his plane after spending four days in Mauritania, Libyan head of state Moammar Gadhafi declared his intention to recommend that the African Union lift the sanctions imposed on Mauritania's military government.
Mr. Gadhafi, who holds the rotating head of the AU, also said he supports the Mauritanian junta's plan for June elections.
Mr. Gadhafi says the African Union should lift the asset freeze and travel ban on the military government, led by General Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, who seized power last August in a bloodless coup.
Mr. Gadhafi was sent by the AU to mediate the political crisis in the West African state, with the mandate to find a solution acceptable to Mauritanian stakeholders and the international community.
His efforts appeared to fail on Thursday, when leaders of the National Front for Democracy Defense, or FNDD, a coalition of thirteen political parties that have opposed the coup since it took place, walked out on talks. The leaders of the organization accused Mr. Gadhafi of mocking their democratic principles and siding with the military junta.
Abdel Koudousse Ould Abdeidna, leader of the FNDD, said Mr. Gadhafi was pushing the agenda of the military junta.
"Most of the conversation was leading us to accept the coup d'etat as, what we say in French, as a fait accompli, and that we really should embrace that reality," he said.
The FNDD has said they disapprove of the junta's timetable for elections. The military government has scheduled elections for June 6, a date Mr. Gadhafi also said he stands behind, saying the AU will send election observers to assure that polls are free and fair.
But politicians across the spectrum in Mauritania have expressed doubts that elections held under the rules of the military regime can be fair. They are also intent on upholding a law which prohibits military personnel from holding public office, in response to widespread belief that General Aziz is planning a run for the office.
Ghana on Transparency in Oil Sector
Observers Congratulate Ghana on Transparency in Oil Sector
By Brent Latham
Dakar
13 March 2009
An international governance watchdog group says Ghana is to be commended for keeping contracts in the oil industry transparent to the public. Observers hope the move will help spread the wealth from an anticipated oil boom.
Revenue Watch Institute, a non-profit institute that promotes responsible resource management, says Ghana is keeping its promise to make public current and future contracts in the oil industry.
Industry analysts in Africa say the promise will go a long way in helping the public understand what can be expected of the oil companies and their own government.
"We thought that that was a very important step, and if we live by that promise, it will not only ensure that the citizens will not only have detailed information about what is contained in these contracts, but it will also enable the citizens to be able to hold the government accountable for its promise," said Emmanuel Kuyole, Africa regional coordinator for New York-based Revenue Watch.
Kuyole says the disclosure will also allow institutions like Parliament to play a supervisory role, ensuring revenues are properly utilized.
Ghana is poising itself for an oil boom after British and American companies discovered offshore deposits in 2007. The companies say the Jubilee field, named for its discovery during the celebration of Ghana's 50th year of independence, may contain as many as one billion barrels of crude oil.
Kuyole says Ghana hopes to avoid the experiences of neighboring countries including Nigeria, Cameroon, and Equatorial Guinea, which he says have suffered from rampant corruption since their own oil finds.
"None of these countries have the contracts available to the public. The indication that contracts are going to be made to the public is in itself a bold step," he said.
Kuyole hopes civil society group and local communities in Ghana will now be motivated to push an agenda of environmental and social responsibility from both government and oil companies.
"If the communities are not involved, or even if they are and do not have detailed information regarding what commitments have been made, especially in issues regarding compensation but also around respect for environment, around livelihood and so on, we know that part of the challenge, apart from management of the revenues, are issues regarding development and issues regarding environmental and social impact," said Kuyole.
Ghana, which is a leading producer of cocoa, hopes a profitable oil sector will add to its relatively strong export sector. Ghana's mining industry has also historically been among the most important in Africa.
In January, Ghana celebrated democratic elections in which the opposition candidate, John Atta-Mills, won the presidency by a narrow margin.
By Brent Latham
Dakar
13 March 2009
An international governance watchdog group says Ghana is to be commended for keeping contracts in the oil industry transparent to the public. Observers hope the move will help spread the wealth from an anticipated oil boom.
Revenue Watch Institute, a non-profit institute that promotes responsible resource management, says Ghana is keeping its promise to make public current and future contracts in the oil industry.
Industry analysts in Africa say the promise will go a long way in helping the public understand what can be expected of the oil companies and their own government.
"We thought that that was a very important step, and if we live by that promise, it will not only ensure that the citizens will not only have detailed information about what is contained in these contracts, but it will also enable the citizens to be able to hold the government accountable for its promise," said Emmanuel Kuyole, Africa regional coordinator for New York-based Revenue Watch.
Kuyole says the disclosure will also allow institutions like Parliament to play a supervisory role, ensuring revenues are properly utilized.
Ghana is poising itself for an oil boom after British and American companies discovered offshore deposits in 2007. The companies say the Jubilee field, named for its discovery during the celebration of Ghana's 50th year of independence, may contain as many as one billion barrels of crude oil.
Kuyole says Ghana hopes to avoid the experiences of neighboring countries including Nigeria, Cameroon, and Equatorial Guinea, which he says have suffered from rampant corruption since their own oil finds.
"None of these countries have the contracts available to the public. The indication that contracts are going to be made to the public is in itself a bold step," he said.
Kuyole hopes civil society group and local communities in Ghana will now be motivated to push an agenda of environmental and social responsibility from both government and oil companies.
"If the communities are not involved, or even if they are and do not have detailed information regarding what commitments have been made, especially in issues regarding compensation but also around respect for environment, around livelihood and so on, we know that part of the challenge, apart from management of the revenues, are issues regarding development and issues regarding environmental and social impact," said Kuyole.
Ghana, which is a leading producer of cocoa, hopes a profitable oil sector will add to its relatively strong export sector. Ghana's mining industry has also historically been among the most important in Africa.
In January, Ghana celebrated democratic elections in which the opposition candidate, John Atta-Mills, won the presidency by a narrow margin.
Thursday, March 12, 2009
NGO: Multi-National Banks Aiding Corrupt African Regimes
NGO: Multi-National Banks Aiding Corrupt African Regimes
By Brent Latham
Dakar
12 March 2009
London-based watchdog organization Global Witness is accusing several of the world's largest banks of playing a role in supporting some of West Africa's most corrupt regimes.
A report entitled "Undue Diligence" tracked the flow of money out of a number of the world's most criticized regimes. According to Global Witness, the trail leads to, and through, a handful of the world's largest international banks, including Citigroup, Barclays, and HSBC.
The report documents the involvement of multi-national banks with dictators in countries including Liberia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Equatorial Guinea. Anthea Lawson is a campaigner for Global Witness.
"By doing business with corrupt regimes and their family members, these banks are facilitating corruption and therefore poverty in some of the poorest countries in the world." Lawson said.
The links between banks and corrupt regimes are sometimes direct, Lawson says, citing the case of Barclays. Global Witness says the English bank maintained accounts for Teodorin Obiang, son of the long-time ruler of Equatorial Guinea.
The report says Barclays has done little to investigate the provenance of the funds in the Obiang accounts, thereby helping the family launder millions of dollars of oil revenue from the West African country.
"This particular customer, Teodorin Obiang, earns $4,000 a month as a minister in his father's government, yet we revealed a couple of years ago that he owned a $35 million mansion in California and a fleet of fast cars that he has bought in France." Lawson said. "The question is what due diligence has this bank been able to do in order to reassure itself that the funds in this account are not the proceeds of corruption."
The report says even in cases where the trail of money can be followed, regulation is lax, and incomprehensive across international borders.
Lawson says the global nature of the banking industry means that banks are often also involved with corrupt regimes in indirect ways. She says U.S.-based Citibank helped former Liberian president Charles Taylor, now on trial at The Hague for war crimes, to launder ill-gotten timber revenues through a partnership with a Liberian bank.
"So effectively what this means is that Citibank, through its relationship with a Liberian bank, was allowing a warlord such as Taylor access to the financial system, which Taylor was using through timber revenues to fuel the conflict," Lawson said.
Lawson says Global Witness wrote to the banks cited in the report, asking them to explain their relationships with corrupt regimes.
"Those that wrote back are not able to tell us anything specific about the customers, because it is all under confidentiality, and this is the problem." Lawson said. "All of this is occurring underneath the usual cloud of banking secrecy that has also allowed banks to destabilize and cause such damage to some of the world's largest economies."
According to Lawson, Global Witness hopes the report will lead to changes in the way international banking is regulated. The organization released the report intending to focus attention on the matter on the eve of this week's meeting of the G-20 finance ministers in London.
In response to the report, Barclays offered a statement saying it complies with applicable laws and regulations in the jurisdictions in which it operates, and has a global money-laundering policy in place.
By Brent Latham
Dakar
12 March 2009
London-based watchdog organization Global Witness is accusing several of the world's largest banks of playing a role in supporting some of West Africa's most corrupt regimes.
A report entitled "Undue Diligence" tracked the flow of money out of a number of the world's most criticized regimes. According to Global Witness, the trail leads to, and through, a handful of the world's largest international banks, including Citigroup, Barclays, and HSBC.
The report documents the involvement of multi-national banks with dictators in countries including Liberia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Equatorial Guinea. Anthea Lawson is a campaigner for Global Witness.
"By doing business with corrupt regimes and their family members, these banks are facilitating corruption and therefore poverty in some of the poorest countries in the world." Lawson said.
The links between banks and corrupt regimes are sometimes direct, Lawson says, citing the case of Barclays. Global Witness says the English bank maintained accounts for Teodorin Obiang, son of the long-time ruler of Equatorial Guinea.
The report says Barclays has done little to investigate the provenance of the funds in the Obiang accounts, thereby helping the family launder millions of dollars of oil revenue from the West African country.
"This particular customer, Teodorin Obiang, earns $4,000 a month as a minister in his father's government, yet we revealed a couple of years ago that he owned a $35 million mansion in California and a fleet of fast cars that he has bought in France." Lawson said. "The question is what due diligence has this bank been able to do in order to reassure itself that the funds in this account are not the proceeds of corruption."
The report says even in cases where the trail of money can be followed, regulation is lax, and incomprehensive across international borders.
Lawson says the global nature of the banking industry means that banks are often also involved with corrupt regimes in indirect ways. She says U.S.-based Citibank helped former Liberian president Charles Taylor, now on trial at The Hague for war crimes, to launder ill-gotten timber revenues through a partnership with a Liberian bank.
"So effectively what this means is that Citibank, through its relationship with a Liberian bank, was allowing a warlord such as Taylor access to the financial system, which Taylor was using through timber revenues to fuel the conflict," Lawson said.
Lawson says Global Witness wrote to the banks cited in the report, asking them to explain their relationships with corrupt regimes.
"Those that wrote back are not able to tell us anything specific about the customers, because it is all under confidentiality, and this is the problem." Lawson said. "All of this is occurring underneath the usual cloud of banking secrecy that has also allowed banks to destabilize and cause such damage to some of the world's largest economies."
According to Lawson, Global Witness hopes the report will lead to changes in the way international banking is regulated. The organization released the report intending to focus attention on the matter on the eve of this week's meeting of the G-20 finance ministers in London.
In response to the report, Barclays offered a statement saying it complies with applicable laws and regulations in the jurisdictions in which it operates, and has a global money-laundering policy in place.
Mauritania Talks Breakdown as Gadhafi Accused of Siding with Coup Leader
By Brent Latham
Dakar
12 March 2009
Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi left Mauritania on Thursday after failing to bring the political crisis there any closer to a resolution. Mauritanian political leaders have accused Mr. Gadhafi of siding with the general who orchestrated last year's coup.
The head of a coalition of Mauritanian political parties opposing the military leaders who seized power last year has said that talks toward the resolution of the country's political crisis have ended unsuccessfully.
Abdel Koudousse Ould Abdeidna, leader of the National Front for Democracy Defense, said mediation had failed, and accused Libyan leader, Colonel Muammar Gadhafi of favoring coup leader General Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz.
Abdel Koudousse Ould Abdeidna
Abdel Koudousse Ould Abdeidna
"They failed during mediation because obviously they cannot separate themselves from the general. And I am surprised to see a general listening to orders of a colonel. This is a surprise," he said.
The Front for Democracy Defense, or FNDD, is one of three principal parties involved in negotiating an end to the crisis, along with the military government and a third political party that formed the main opposition group before the coup.
The FNDD has opposed the coup since it took place in August, and is demanding a return to democracy and constitutional order. Members of the coalition walked out of the negotiations soon after they began on Wednesday, citing what they called Mr. Gadhafi's lack of respect for the democratic principles they espouse.
"He said for him democracy and coup d'etatwere equal," said Abdel Koudousse Ould Abdeidna. "We believe that in order to avoid coup d'etat, we need to have fair elections, but not only fair election - we had fair elections - and then we need democracy. This is why we have been fighting. So for us, it is extremely important that people understand that it is the population who is asking for democracy and not the West that's imposing democracy upon the population," he said.
Abdeidna said it was disappointing to hear what he called the anti-democratic principles of the mediator sent by the African Union, but that he was not surprised given that Mr. Gadhafi is, in Abdeidna's words, "a man of coups himself."
"We don't understand how come a mediator who was supposed to defend the cause of democracy will help us to embrace something we've been fighting for nine months, thinking that we were willing or keen to accept a token of gratitude from the general," he said.
The African Union sent Moammar Gadhafi, who currently holds the rotating head of the pan-African body, to mediate the crisis, hoping he could find a solution acceptable to Mauritanian stakeholders and the international community.
But Abdeidna says a resolution in Mauritania is less likely than ever.
"We believe that the African Union and the international community should help Mauritania get rid of the general, in a very peaceful way, by pursuing what the international community has decided to do. Other than that I don't see any solution in the near future," he said.
The African Union has imposed sanctions and travel restrictions on the government of General Aziz, and the European Union is threatening to do the same if democracy is not restored.
Dakar
12 March 2009
Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi left Mauritania on Thursday after failing to bring the political crisis there any closer to a resolution. Mauritanian political leaders have accused Mr. Gadhafi of siding with the general who orchestrated last year's coup.
The head of a coalition of Mauritanian political parties opposing the military leaders who seized power last year has said that talks toward the resolution of the country's political crisis have ended unsuccessfully.
Abdel Koudousse Ould Abdeidna, leader of the National Front for Democracy Defense, said mediation had failed, and accused Libyan leader, Colonel Muammar Gadhafi of favoring coup leader General Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz.
Abdel Koudousse Ould Abdeidna
Abdel Koudousse Ould Abdeidna
"They failed during mediation because obviously they cannot separate themselves from the general. And I am surprised to see a general listening to orders of a colonel. This is a surprise," he said.
The Front for Democracy Defense, or FNDD, is one of three principal parties involved in negotiating an end to the crisis, along with the military government and a third political party that formed the main opposition group before the coup.
The FNDD has opposed the coup since it took place in August, and is demanding a return to democracy and constitutional order. Members of the coalition walked out of the negotiations soon after they began on Wednesday, citing what they called Mr. Gadhafi's lack of respect for the democratic principles they espouse.
"He said for him democracy and coup d'etatwere equal," said Abdel Koudousse Ould Abdeidna. "We believe that in order to avoid coup d'etat, we need to have fair elections, but not only fair election - we had fair elections - and then we need democracy. This is why we have been fighting. So for us, it is extremely important that people understand that it is the population who is asking for democracy and not the West that's imposing democracy upon the population," he said.
Abdeidna said it was disappointing to hear what he called the anti-democratic principles of the mediator sent by the African Union, but that he was not surprised given that Mr. Gadhafi is, in Abdeidna's words, "a man of coups himself."
"We don't understand how come a mediator who was supposed to defend the cause of democracy will help us to embrace something we've been fighting for nine months, thinking that we were willing or keen to accept a token of gratitude from the general," he said.
The African Union sent Moammar Gadhafi, who currently holds the rotating head of the pan-African body, to mediate the crisis, hoping he could find a solution acceptable to Mauritanian stakeholders and the international community.
But Abdeidna says a resolution in Mauritania is less likely than ever.
"We believe that the African Union and the international community should help Mauritania get rid of the general, in a very peaceful way, by pursuing what the international community has decided to do. Other than that I don't see any solution in the near future," he said.
The African Union has imposed sanctions and travel restrictions on the government of General Aziz, and the European Union is threatening to do the same if democracy is not restored.
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