Oh the Holidays!

Sometimes I cannot even imagine being in the states. I think about myself driving around with a big cup of tea and a bran muffin listening to American music and it looks like someone else. Lately my thoughts about being home have gotten more frequent because many of my volunteer friends are going back for the holidays. They will be pulled out of this world to the Christmas madness, hot showers, carpets, and real bread that constitute the American dream. I am confident in my choice to stay here for the holidays especially because some of the family is coming to visit in February, woohoo! Thanksgiving was a breeze. There was a big Peace Corps party where we had a run, sports, dancing and food binging to the point of sickness, just like home!

I will spend Christmas in my site which may or many not give me a hint of what I am used to. From what I hear, the town fills with cars of family members who have moved away. There are very few people here with private vehicles and none that are not trucks so the presence of cars marks any big special time in town. Other than a large dinner on the night of the 24th involving goat meat, I think Christmas is just a chance to get together and drink and dance bachata and merengue. There is no custom of cutting down trees or gift giving, two traditions that I am sincerely not sorry to miss. Christmas cards, however, I am unwilling to forgo. I started chatting with people about this and realized immediately that card giving in general is a foreign concept. I decided to facilitate a Christmas card making session with poster board, old magazines, crayons and glitter.

I invited a bunch of high school kids and encouraged them to bring anything they had around the house. When they showed up empty handed, they told me that they didn’t understand what we were doing. Who were the cards for, what were they supposed to look like and why hadn’t I showed up with models for them to copy. We started with scrap paper and pencils and many sat waiting still looking over a friends shoulder. My little fifteen year old friend informed me that I needed to teach them how to draw first and we spent the entire allotted time talking about creativity, the thought that counts, and my usual babble about reusing material. No one completed a card nor wanted to work on it at home so I rescheduled for today. I am equipped with more recycled paper, and a few example cards (probably a mistake but well varied and difficult to copy) and more maybe more explanation about the thought that counts.

While I was a little worried about starting too early before Christmas or using materials that you have to buy for kids who could not buy them themselves, I think introduction of art outweighs these preoccupations. We will see how the session today fares but I am excited about being a creativity pusher. The lack of expression is also apparent with the little kids. I have eighteen pictures of houses from kids who come over to color, color a little house with two windows and a flag that apparently they learn in school, and then won’t take their pictures home. Like many things in this country, I don’t understand the fear of doing a little original art or of taking things home but I am not afraid to be that weird white girl pushing kids to color outside the lines. Plus, I could use a little glitter in my life!

But is it really helping?

If people are hungry, you want to give them food. Everyone should have the right to water so we should make an aqueduct, supply filters, make it happen. I could go on and on with sturdy houses, cement floors, seeds and latrines. But if you go to a community and throw up gifts, noble as they are, are you really helping the progression of the community? Are you contributing to development?

This is the situation in my region. I am on the border with Haiti in technically the poorest municipality of the poorest province of the Dominican Republic, a great place for organizations and government agencies (like Save the Children or USAID) to carry out projects. There are 17 large institutions with projects in my region, made obvious by stickers and signs around every gleaming latrine or bright pink wood house. I would be so presumptuous to argue that many of these projects that better the economic and health conditions of the people are detrimental to development. There is obviously something to be said for improving the quality of life of a community and I would never believe that people shouldn’t have the cement floors or clean water. These are changes that immensely decrease the parasitic infections of children and greatly improve the overall health of the inhabitants. Everyone should have a right to health.

My position is that the way the projects are carried out should be dramatically changed. The projects that I have witnessed come like a tornado of presents. They initiate the project with a meeting which lays out what they will be bringing. I have noticed that they bring juice and treats to these meetings, which results in amazing attendance and a first impression that this organization has such excess that they are willing to throw money to buy white bread and cheese. They organize who will be recipients and the details of the tasks to come. As the majority of the projects require labor such as construction of the homes, latrines or aqueduct, the project offers employment to the people of the community. This constitutes a month of high paid labor to a group of community members, a true gift. Maybe they even provide lunch food for the workers which often consists of rice, beans, oil and salami to be prepared by the wives.

The projects are beautiful. Huge trucks carry cement and wood on rough roads. Engineers come from the capital to monitor the project. Nice white people inevitably visit to take pictures and have cultural immersion experiences. Then, it’s over and the people have what they have gotten often with little instruction of maintenance. The lives of those people are improved in one aspect or another and they adjust to their new, more developed lifestyle and wait for the next project to come.

So why am I critical? It is because community organization is not only excluded from these projects, it is discouraged. Ideally, a women’s group or community association would discuss the problems that they face and the most effective and feasible solutions.
However, with the current manner of development institutions, it is unnecessary for a village to make an association, analyze their situations and necessities and solicit a project. In fact, everyone knows that if the community was to plan to build latrines and petition for the resources themselves, the members would have to organize the project and work without pay or free food. It is much more practical for them to go without latrines for however long it takes for someone to come and gift them. The campos around here not only don’t meet amongst themselves, they are resistant to meeting because it is just too much work for not enough compensation. The idea that they should think about progression or work to change their own situation is destroyed.

It is impossible to place the blame or maybe even to imagine a different, more effective approach to development. However, I think it is important to look at what is happening and discuss possible improvements. It could be as easy as more education involved in each project. Not only do you receive water filters but a course about water contamination and the health effects. Maybe they could assign someone in the community as the leader of the project to be of guidance for maintenance and replacement. An organization that installs cement floors could involve a committee in the whole process to show how future projects could be planned and implemented.

Thinking about the best management of development efforts is enough to make my head hurt but it is clear that blindly dropping bags of food or solar panels on people suffering true poverty cannot be the secret. If there is no structural or educational progression, decades will pass with filters and solar panels that no longer work, broken aqueducts, full latrines and people without the custom of changing their own situation. The gifts of these amazing agencies are like your pajamas at Christmas, just gifts to be replaced on another occasion. I hate the word sustainable but it’s like peace, worth a try!