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.