A day in the life

Even when I’m writing for myself, I try to avoid ‘journal-y’ writing. First I did this, which was fun, then I saw so-and-so, who’s cool, etc. I don’t like writing that way and I find it makes for boring reading. Even if you substitute ‘killed a panther’ and ‘the Loch Ness monster’ for ‘did this’ and ‘so-and-so’ respectively, that still makes for a pretty banal sentence. That would be a pretty incredible day, but how did you kill the panther? Were you scared? How did you feel afterwards? I digress significantly, but hopefully the point is made. Since the readership of this blog makes it no different than writing for myself, I’ve tried to do the same here.

Sometimes friends ask me, ‘so, what do you do all day? It can’t be much, since you can’t even find one interesting thing to write about once a month.’ The second sentence is more implied than outright said, but I feel it. The truth is that I have a rough routine, but every day is a little different, which makes the question embarassingly difficult to answer. I wanted to try though, so on Saturday, June 9th, I tried to keep track of what exactly I do to pass the time. I definitely made sure to choose a day when I had things to do, so that I would appear more productive and so that I wouldn’t have to foist sentences like ‘between two and four, I pretty much stared out into space,’ on you, dear reader(s?).

I have re-caught the green thumb, as long as that term refers to the desire to garden, not the skill. The last time I had said appendege, I built the seedboxes you see here and tried to grow a variety of delicious vegetables. Without exception, all of them failed. What you see growing here is a Darwinian selection of local weeds and grasses. I think I’ve let them grow as long as I have to avoid the unflinching stare of failure. I didn’t realize that protecting the seeds from the pounding rain was as important as the protection from chickens and weeds the seedboxes provided. All the seeds drowned. But I will not be deterred by a little complete and holistic failure. I bought more seeds, better seeds, and decided to be scientific. Each one of the former peanut butter jars you see here is filled with a different mixtures of soils and fertilizers, and in each one I placed one tomato seed. Tomatoes are the coup de grace; they’re delicious, and they’re expensive and heavy if I buy them outside. But they’re a high maintenence vegetable. So this morning I woke up with the plan to build a protective plastic roof in my garden, under which I could plant tomatoes and red peppers, the coup de second-to-grace. I’d already planted green beans, which don’t need such coddling, to the left of the roof. So in the morning sun I planted seeds and moved the supports around to make sure that water would run off the roof and not puddle. Believe it or not, that took me all morning.

Saturday is a slow day in Cerro Iglesias. There’s no school, so the teachers are gone, as are the students coming and going from all directions. Saturday is also the day of worship for Adventists, which is the most popular religion around here. They go to church in the morning and have bible study in the afternoon, so the streets are mostly empty and the town mostly quiet. As I walked to the co-op, seen here, it was a mostly clear day, and it felt sort of idyllic. Perhaps this picture doesn’t really capture that peace, but I felt it.

My specific goal for that afternoon was to make a poster for a talk I’m giving on Monday about product diversification. The co-op is sort of the town hub, so there would be other things to occupy my mind and time, comings and goings, even on a Saturday. A man I’d run into the other day from a nearby community told me he wanted to talk about building an aquaduct and that he would meet me at the co-op that afternoon. He never showed, but other people came by and asked about the poster I was making, commented on the weather, complained about the road. By the time I had finished my poster, the weather had gotten ugly. Recently, the weather has been behaving itself for the most part. Mornings are usually sunny, and if the rain comes, it does so for only a few hours. But this afternoon the wind whipped, and the rain extended its visit well into the night. I went back home in the late afternoon to cook dinner but promised to return later that night to watch whatever sporting event happened to be on. When I got home the clouds had descended and swallowed my house whole. Out my front door, I could only see ten feet and the rain was still falling. I cooked some spagetti and tried to talk myself out of going back to the co-op. I would just get wet and cold, and I don’t really care about boxing. But I had told people that I would go back and I kinda like watching them get really into the fight or the match or the game. So I went back and found that everyone else had faced the same decision and decided to avoid the rain. I bought a pack of cookies and walked back home. After some tea to warm up and writing to wind down, it was time for bed.

I suppose you could call that a typical day – some kind of physical work in the morning, afternoon at the coop, cooking at night – but like I mentioned, every day is a little bit different. Sometimes not that much though.

Every sentence ends with a question mark

Note: this entry is not the typical fare of snarky observations and smug commentary. Instead, should you continue reading this tale of development, you’ll find I opted for long-winded and pretenious. Oh, and boring. Reader beware.

At the beginning of May, a group called Engineers Without Borders arrived to build a small aquaduct for a group of four houses too far from the main line to be connected. They were three young engineers, one of whom had formerly been a volunteer near here. They came with money raised – nearly five thousand dollars – a budget, and a schedule. The project was primarily theirs, but Jessica and I had helped set things up, provided some manual labor, and allowed the engineers to stay with us. Now three weeks later, it looks like the aquaduct should be completed soon, even though they had hoped to finish more than a week ago.

So, a cluster of houses will have clean running water for the first time. One could argue, and I might even agree, that water is a universal human right, so it’s hard not to appreciate the results. And I do. I know these families, and I watched them sweat carrying materials, and heard their kind words thanking us for our work. They deserve this, but I can’t shake the nagging feeling of uncertainty. Maybe it’s the cynical bastard in me.

Consider that in a rural aquaduct system, the springbox and the water tank are the most expensive and time-consuming elements. For almost exactly the same price and time, we could have built a system for ten or fifteen households. These were certainly not the only four houses in this area that go to the creek to get their water. Doesn’t it make more sense to bring water to as many people as possible? But it’s more complicated than that. Many groups and little communities asked Michael, the previous volunteer here, for aquaduct help. To prove the community was serious, he required that each develop a budget and raise ten percent of the money, and this cluster of four houses was the only one to do so. Aquaducts aren’t infallible or impervious to time; they require maintenence and should be built in communities capable of doing so. Just throwing resources at a problem rarely solves it.

And that was another thing that weighed on me. The engineers showed up with lots of money and very little time, so when the community didn’t have something done that had been asked of them, such as digging the trenches for the pipes, there were no repercussions. The project pushed forward because the engineers weren’t going to go home without having built anything just to teach this small community a lesson. In the last week, we were rushing to try to finish, and there were more gringos (white people) working than Panamanians. Instead of building with them, it often felt we were building for them. Building an aquaduct is hard physical work, but changing someone’s mindset is whole different kind of work. The adage about teaching a man to fish is as cliché as it is true. Will they be able to take ownership and responsibility in the future even though they were never forced to do so beforehand? If they are interested in some other project down the line, will they feel able to do it themselves or dependent on outside help?

Perhaps the most frustrating thing about development is that no one knows exactly how to do it well. Some things work better than others, but there is no fail-safe plan for the broad concept that is ‘development.’ For every technique we learned in training, it seemed there was an equally successful example employing the exact opposite technique. It’s such an unavoidably human process, and we tend not to fit so well on graph paper.

Three families have water who didn’t before. Well, that’s something.