Winds of Peace Foundation

Steve Sheppard | October 25, 2011

I had the opportunity to see a film the other night entitled, “Which Way Home.”   The movie is a 2009 feature documentary film that follows unaccompanied child migrants, on their journey through Mexico, as they try to reach the United States. It follows children like Olga and Freddy, nine-year old Hondurans, who are desperately trying to reach their parents in the US.; children like Jose, a ten-year old El Salvadoran, who has been abandoned by smugglers and

ends up alone in a Mexican detention center; and Kevin, a canny, streetwise fourteen-year old Honduran, whose mother hopes that he will reach the U.S. and send money back to her. They are stories of hope and courage, disappointment and sorrow. They are the children you never hear about; the invisible ones, and it is a sobering experience to see it.

Amidst all the debates about immigration reform, the behaviors of Immigration Control Enforcement (ICE) and statistics which only serve to distance us from the plight of real people, the film personalizes the issue.  Within its 90 minutes, the film allows us enough time to develop a connection with some of these very young children, to care about what happens to them.  At one point during the film, the filmmakers arrange to meet their train-hopping subjects in the next Mexican city up the line, but the boys never show up there and we can feel a palpable fear for what might have happened to them.   They have put real faces and personalities to the nameless numbers we normally hear about in such discussions, and suddenly the topic becomes much more difficult to deal with.  Being a parent and reacting to the story in the way  which I did, I can only begin to imagine the feelings experienced by the parents of these children.  Excruciating.

It’s interesting for me to note that immigration control attempts to deal with these travelers at the conclusion of their their journeys, when they’re at or over the borders.  It’s a necessary tool in dealing with illegal  immigration, but it seems to me that we place a great deal more attention there than at the front-end of the problem, the context in which these young lives find themselves and the despair which leads them to accept the life-and-death challenge of illegal entry.  The truth is that most of the young travelers would far rather remain in their home countries than to take the risk of illegally and dangerously going elsewhere.

They choose to take the risks, to leave their families and the familiarity of home, out of abject despair.  They feel and see hunger all around them, they recognize the growing despondency in the faces of their family members, they know how the rest of the world lives in comparison and finally they have absolutely nothing to lose.  Uncertain death on a freight train becomes less scary than certain destitution at home.  That’s a frightening prospect, but one which can and does drive children from their parents, parents from their homes, Nicaraguans from their country, and North Americans to an angry response.

The answers might lie far less in building walls than in helping to build opportunities.  Perhaps success is to be found less in meting out visas and more in making greater assistance available for in-country developments.  There must be a likelihood that instead of ignoring the conditions which entice a nine-year old child to strike out alone, we might fare better by creating, say, a loan opportunity that has the potential for stability and sustainability at home.  It’s a matter of cause-and-effect: if I have become overweight, it does me no good to curse my pounds.  Instead, I need to address the eating and sedentary habits that likely have created the unwanted result.  Likewise, the reduction of illegal immigration is likely to be found in the causes rather than the end results.

Seeing a movie like “Which Way Home” begs the question of what to do about it.  The answer may lie in redirecting our help to organizations which aim at the causes and not the end results.  Some organizations are great at placing money but not following through to ensure results.  Those efforts are often futile.  Others are more committed to accountability and measuring progress; those are the ones that have the best chance of impacting the  number of kids jumping trains.

Winds of Peace has never cited immigration as one of its target issues.  Nonetheless, we’re aimed at the causes that often lead to it: lack of opportunity, no work, minimal capital for development, limited experience in institutional strengthening, zero hope for the future.  By helping to provide the resources for Nicaraguans to create a future through their own economic enterprises, we hope to be helping them to re-think the need to leave home and thus to never wonder which way back home….  

 

 

 

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Steve Sheppard | October 16, 2011

I’ve been reading an interesting little book of late, entitled, A Little History of My Forest Life, by Eliza Morrison.  It’s an account of her life in the latter half of the 19^th century in northern Wisconsin, and Madeline Island in particular.  A woman with both European and Native American ancestry, Eliza had been schooled sufficiently to read and write as a child.  As an adult, Eliza had been requested by a good friend to write down her recollections of her life in those early days, and the book is in large part a collection of her letters and stories.

As difficult as life was in the rugged north, Eliza’s autobiography is surprisingly positive.  Her stories of arduous summer work, seemingly always in preparation for the winters to come, are exhausting just to read.  Her descriptions of mid-winter days on Madeline Island, and her regular hikes across the three-mile channel on Lake Superior between La Pointe and Bayfield, are enough to give me shivers on even the warmest day.

But her attitude rarely changes; she is an optimistic and grateful character who would rather give thanks for the steadfast loyalty and partnership of her husband, John, than to curse the vagaries of available work in the region and his need to follow work wherever it led him.  John often found it necessary to migrate across borders and communities in order to feed Eliza and his family of six.    Often alone with her children for months at a time, sometimes in winter nearing the end of provisions with no means of replenishment, Eliza nonetheless offers a perspective of one who has been greatly blessed in life.

Her letters offer an intimate look at both the activities and the psyche of this immensely strong woman.   The tenacity of Eliza’s spirit resonates throughout her letters.  But in between the accounts of paddling a canoe across the wind-driven swells of the Superior Ocean (for such it must have seemed to a solitary paddler on a gusty day) or leading a team of dogs through waist-deep snows to deliver provisions to John, there is also a plaintive voice that speaks up in unexpected places.  It is there that I began to understand Eliza Morrison and her life.

In her note to friend Catherine Gray on December 15, 1894, Eliza provides a glimpse of what else lay deep in her heart.  In the midst of a report about her sister in Michigan, Eliza reveals something else.  “My sister is a widow now and an invalid.  How I would like to go and see her.  She lives in Lanse, Michigan.  Her husband use (sic) to be a Methodist minister.  Sometimes I think it is hard to be poor and my mind will just turn and think may be it is the Lords will and than I content myself.  I have (children) Bennie and Eunice with me.  They both go to school….”

Among all of the optimism and positive thinking that marked Eliza Morrison’s character, this singular notion cries out like some primal scream for recognition and justice.  Eliza was not an ignorant woman; she understood all too clearly the reality that she was poor and that there was something fundamentally wrong in that.  So wrong, in fact, that she could not fathom how her circumstances could be so low, thus having to rationalize the inequity by ascribing it to some unknown, undecipherable divine edict.  In the midst of a world that holds so much, how could she accept her poverty other than by ascribing it to a heavenly will?  And in fixing the responsibility there, she could somehow better accept the unfairness, the incredulity of it all.

Upon reflection, I think that I experience this same kind of rationale in Nicaragua all the time.  Impoverished Nicaraguans, recognizing the great wealth and resources of the world, cannot logically fathom reasons for their circumstances.  They know enough of the world to see how others live.  They read enough to recognize how politics often maintain a strong foothold on the back of their necks.  And yet they cannot comprehend easily the disparity between beans and caviar in a world which has plenty of both.  So they are forced to look for the explanations elsewhere, in the divine, in some inscrutable plan by God who, for some reason, wishes them to be poor.  That’s what extreme poverty can do: to drive a man or woman to so convolute his/her spiritual beliefs that the pains of hunger and want become reasonable and even justified states of affairs by no less than the Creator himself.

This may be the ultimate ignominy of poverty, that somehow it is right with the world, that it is part of a divine plan, that there is not only a remedy to be sought but that somehow to seek such remedy would be contrary to the will of the universe.  There might be no greater insult, no greater humiliation, than to see oneself as a divinely-appointed “bottom of the barrel.”  But that kind of thinking is all too easily fomented by the incessant anxieties and stressors of being very poor.

Some may cite a nobility in being poor.  If there is strength to be achieved through adversity, then the poor certainly must possess great reservoirs of calm and resolve to see them through their consistent crises.  But such nobility only resides in those who have chosen a poverty way of life, a number which is very small.  For the rest of the impoverished, the condition does not offer consolation or meaning, only hopelessness.

I have come to regard the poor in a very different way in recent years.  When I meet them- which in Nicaragua is very often-  I do not immediately see hunger or deprivation.  What I feel first is empathy for people who may actually believe that their condition is both warranted and valid, a belief that ultimately must break their hearts as well as my own.

Sometimes I think it must be hard to be poor.  And I know with growing certainty that it is hard for the rest of us to be rich….

 

 

 

 

 

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Steve Sheppard | October 13, 2011

In working with a few of our cooperative partners in the workshop sessions last month (see some of our recent blog entries here), participants were working toward the objective of forming alliances with one another.  By bringing together the various players in the coffee commercialization chain from the San Juan del Rio Coco area, workshop facilitators Rene Mendoza and Edgar Fernandez orchestrated a dawning realization among participants that their mutual collaborations could strengthen each organization, both individually and collectively.  Such strength-through-solidarity may seem obvious to some, but for rural Nicaraguans it’s not a model that automatically takes hold.  Hence, the workshops to develop such thinking.

The discussion around formation of alliances got me to wondering about similar connections in my own experiences.  I recall alliances between our company and others, among the various chapters of a national association which I served, organizations within our home community and even political alliances around important national issues.  I even recall an uneasy alliance with a fellow manager with whom I did not share a “friendly” relationship, but who sought my support on a questionable initiative.

The importance of consolidating strengths is hard to overstate, yet maybe even harder to teach.  In a world where “me first” seems to have become the norm, the value of a strong alliance can be missed by people who are laser-focused on what they might have to give up instead of what they might stand to gain through forging an alliance.  Rene and Edgar did a good job in setting the table for that understanding through examples, parables, and entertaining an idea that emerged in the discussion.  That notion suggested that before alliances can be effectively formed outside an organization, they must be firmly established inside the organization.  The workshop attendees seemed to grasp this importance pretty quickly and the conversation moved on to other elements.  As usual for me, I found myself falling behind the discussion:  I wanted to continue wrestling with this question of how effective alliances are born.

If effective outside alliances are predicated on the presence of strong inside alliances, then perhaps those inside alliances stem from some earlier base, as well.  And that base just might be the alliance that exists within ourselves, an alignment among our personal values, our courage to remain true to those values, and the actions we take as a result of that alignment.  That’s the alliance which lies at the core of every relationship we build, and which ultimately determines whether we can ever be successful in constructing alliances with others anywhere.  It’s an alliance that is more difficult to discern and to honor than any of the other alliances which may grow out of it.

The notion of personal values likely resonates with everyone, yet our abilities to articulate those values, to fully describe what they are like and how they came to be, is often beyond our reach.  Most of us simply haven’t taken the time from our busy lives to stop long enough to fully identify that which drives us from the deepest levels of our being.

The courage to act on those values is often muted by the fact that we really haven’t fully identified them; it’s hard to stand up for something when you’re not fully aware of what it is.  Most of us are brave to act when we know clearly that which we would defend.  Self?  Of course.  Family?  No doubt.  Values?  Well, what are they….?

Finally, actions are a reflection of what’s on our minds at any given moment.  And if we aren’t continuously conscious of our values, of our willingness to stand up for them, then our actions are likely to be as scattered and disconnected as random thoughts.  It’s how fundamentally good people sometimes perpetrate horrible acts, and then end up wondering why.

Alliances among disparate entities can be almost soothingly integrative; they rekindle a deep-seated hope that somehow, at some level, we can come together for everyone’s advantage, that the world can indeed “work.”  But for that to emerge, for the courage to fight for that hope, we have to start by aligning ourselves with what is fundamental, true and essential to our own cosmic truths.  It’s excruciating work when it’s done seriously.  But when those ideas are united within us individually, only then do we stand a chance at successfully collaborating with others….

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