Tag Archives: Accompaniment

Certificate Program, Education, Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Lean, Organizational Development, Rural development

The Five “Wise”

November 5, 2016 Steve Sheppard Leave a comment

During the Second Certificate Program in rural Nicaragua, held during the first week of September, participants were escorted more deeply into the worlds of open book management and Lean process improvements. Having experienced a taste of both methodologies in the First Certificate Program, conducted last year, producers expressed a desire to know more about the concepts and how to apply them. These programs are all about organizational strengthening, and these two initiatives are as important to organizational health as any strength-building efforts.

For teaching Lean, the Foundation enlisted the expertise of Brian Kopas, of Fabcon Precast in Savage, Minnesota. (Brian was an important presence at Foldcraft Co., where he honed that company’s storied strengths in continuous improvement.) Brian’s expertise and inviting demeanor won over the Nicaraguan participants thoroughly as he introduced the elements of Lean. And among those elements, Brian asked “why?” A lot.

Asking “why” is one of the core tools employed in any Lean implementation, and maybe especially so in an environment where tradition and culture play such a big role in defining activities and protocols. So Brian was quite specific in encouraging his audience to ask “why” at least five times before settling on the root cause of any problem in need of a fix. To do otherwise was to simply assume the reason for a difficulty, which can lead to missing the solution due to not knowing the real problem! “Drilling down” to the real cause of a difficulty requires discipline and patience, but leads to a much better identification of the root cause of our pain.

It’s not a usual practice for anyone, and certainly not for rural Nicaraguan producers, who have followed the habits and traditional wisdom of past generations. Think about it for a moment, as in this hypothetical sequence: your production of coffee in this cycle is down. “Why?” (Your initial observation might be that a fungus has infested part of your crop.) You might go no further in your analysis and respond by destroying your plants and starting all over again, in hopes that in the next cycle you will be luckier. Instead, Lean would have you ask “Why” has the fungus attacked. The answer this time is that the fungus affects coffee plants that have not been fully protected by proper nutrients and care. “Why?” Because there have been insufficient resources to purchase all of the necessary inputs for a successful crop. “Why?” Because the limited resources available were used for discretionary spending by each producer, rather than partially contributed to a general coop fund for a collaborative “emergency” response to threats. “Why?” Because the notion of an effectively-functioning cooperative has been lost over the years, and the organization has come to be seen as simply an access point to outside funders. After five “why’s” we might see the fungus disaster in a new light, a problem of institutional purpose and not one of plant biology.

The Certificate Program attendees became pretty good at asking the five why’s, though it’s not as easy as it may sound. As is true with most tools, it only becomes effective with practice. But over the course of our week together, participants were playfully (and effectively) asking “why” about nearly everything, a process that gradually made it clear to them the importance of the question. The hope is that the exercise becomes a habit, and then an actual tool for eliminating many of the pains of their work lives.

A treatise on the use of the “five why’s” in the Certificate Program might seem like an odd entry for a blog topic here. But in observing the impact of the tool upon the newly-introduced, it dawned on me that the process, in fact, isn’t just for the agricultural producer or factory worker or office administrator. The process of asking “why” takes us closer to the truth of whatever issue might be complicating our lives. Our human tendencies to jump to conclusions, without seeing the full extent of the issues before us, often lead us to wasteful and even dangerous end results. Seeing the true, underlying causes of our difficulties is the first step in finding solutions, to becoming truly wise.

Many rural cooperatives in Nicaragua are disintegrating. “Why?” Because they have limited access to financial and learning resources. “Why?” Because they are perceived to be poor risks for credit and education investment. “Why?” Because development agencies have little knowledge of and relationship with them. “Why?” Because the effort and cost in traveling to rural sites to listen to the peasants’ own analysis of circumstances is too great. “Why?”

Good question….

Education, Entrepreneurship, Lean, Open Book Management, Organizational Development, Reflections, Rural development

Acts of Commitment

September 22, 2016 Steve Sheppard Leave a comment

The hiatus here over the past couple of weeks has been the result of spending time in Nicaragua, participating in the second Certificate Program for development of rural producers and their counterparts in commercialization and credit. With so much information and context to consider, reflection and writing are crowded out in favor of absorption. Seven days of presentations, applications, ideas, questions, analysis, laughter, sharing and learning (from one another) was consuming.

I’ve had ample time to sort out my various reflections about the week spent among the rural participants, and I’m sure that some of those images will show up here in the weeks to come. But as I recall the week in its entirety, there is one observation that rises to the top of mind above the others. It is the matter of commitment.

Imagine for a moment what it would require of you to leave your home and your work for six full days (eight if you count travel to and from the conference site) to attend an educational workshop. To further complicate the matter, the work that you will leave behind will not be performed by anyone else. It is time-sensitive work, agriculture, which will consider no excuse if it is not done on time. It is your only livelihood.

The conference site itself is a long way from your home, a location to which you will likely travel for hours by crowded bus. Once at the site, you will be housed in dormitory-style, rustic quarters, but the outdoor toilets are really not more than twenty-five yards away. Access to sinks and showers is shared, so the earliest risers have the best chance at access.

These are the accommodations that will be yours for an entire week as you learn materials that are quite foreign to your experience; the facilitators will be requiring you to get out of your “comfort zone” every day. Most of the instructors do not speak your language, so you will be receiving their information through translation. Furthermore, the instructors are not even from your own country, so the cultural, social and educational norms they bring are not your own. They have brought books with them, which, though translated into your language, you may or may not be able to read, given your previous educational experiences. You know few of the other participants, perhaps just the one other person from your own business.

This, then, is the context of the Certificate Program held from September 5-10 at the foot of Peñas Blancas, home of the GARBO Cooperative. Yet despite the need to come to terms with inconveniences which might keep most of us away, forty-five producers, technicians and funders attended this second gathering of organizational innovation. Their mere presence was an astonishing testament to a desire to learn and implement new ideas in a world that, at times, is changing as quickly in rural Nicaragua as anywhere else in the world. No one was present because they had to be; they participated in the 9-hour days of presentations and exercises because they had committed themselves to learning something new, to improving upon what they have practiced for generations, to becoming someone different.

Perhaps a part of that commitment stemmed from the presence of several unusual “teachers.” My own face and voice has become familiar to at least some in the audience, but I was accompanied by two new faces, friends/colleagues from the U.S. who brought a unique and valuable bundle of organizational development experiences with them. Brian Kopas is a former teammate from Foldcraft Co., the leader in our efforts for implementing Lean Manufacturing there, a continuous-improvement-by-method. one of the main hallmarks of that company’s success in recent decades. Alex Moss is President of Praxis Consulting Group, one of the truly personal and high-values consulting firms in the U.S., and an outstanding teacher of open-book management cultures and practices.

Imagine for a moment what it would require of you to donate an entire week of your life to helping complete strangers grapple with the difficulties of organizational strengthening. You will need to seek time off from your “real work” to make the journey. To further complicate matters, you will receive no monetary compensation for your time and there will be no prospects of financial gain in the future from this endeavor. You will be required to travel for a day-and-half to reach the conference site. You will be addressing an audience which does not speak your language. Your accommodations will be modest but comfortable, as long as you don’t drink the water.

There is but one motivation to compel people like Brian and Alex, as well as the participants in the Program, and that is the notion of commitment. The attendees were as committed to learning as any group I have encountered in the U.S. in over 45 years. The commitment on the part of Brian and Alex, to bring their expertise to a part of the world where it is sorely needed, is a statement of faith in stewardship and sharing, an unselfish giving that flies in the face of today’s headlines of self-centeredness.

There was a lot more going on in the Certificate Program that week; I look forward to sharing it with you. But for me, the overriding truth of the week emerged from the strength of its commitments….

Making An Impact, Organizational Development, Perspectives, Poverty, Reflections, Rural development

Being There

April 30, 2016 Steve Sheppard Leave a comment

Among the many newsletters, magazines and Internet articles which I receive about Nicaragua, every so often someone’s reflections about being in the country capture my attention. I found one such article in the most recent newsletter from ProNica, the U.S.-based organization which works to build cross-cultural relationships between Nicaraguans and North Americans using Quaker values. It’s an organization which has done good work in Nicaragua focusing on community cohesiveness and just, economic development.

ProNica’s new Program Director is Bambi Griffin. In the most recent newsletter, she has written an introductory piece which I think captures an important element of providing assistance of any kind in Nicaragua, or any other country. She writes of her first visit to Nicaragua shortly after Hurricane Mitch devastated the country in 1998. I have excerpted her article below:

When I arrived, it was the dry season, hot and dusty. I was going to help community members by digging postholes. Wooden posts would be cemented into the holes so the black plastic tarps could be wrapped around them to create basic shelters, the residents’ new homes. I made it a point to wear my oldest, grungiest clothes that I planned to discard when leaving Nicaragua. When we arrived, women were hanging freshly washed clothes on anything they could find: barbed wire or a tree stump, to dry them under the sun. Children were running around. Little girls were dressed in bright frilly pageant dresses that looked out of place with the dusty brown earth and rows of black tarp tents. People were trying to put order into their day-to-day lives while living without running water, electricity, or even walls.

The community members came out to meet the volunteers, and when they did, I realized something very embarrassing, something that was the start of an important transformation for me.

The residents of Nueva Vida had done the opposite of what I had done. They had taken the time to put on the very best they had. They didn’t come out to meet us looking disheveled. They were neatly dressed, their hair was combed, the lady whose house we were going to dig postholes for that morning had applied lipstick. In contrast, I was wearing stained jeans with a hole ripped in the knee. I had on an old tee shirt that I used to sleep in, that was also stained, and I had a bandana on my head.

Although the community members had lost almost everything they owned, in some cases even their families, they looked presentable that morning when they came to meet the volunteers. I was ashamed. I was going to meet people I had never met before to work with them on a project. Why did I think it was OK to wear clothes that I planned to throw away? Why did I present myself to them in a way that I would never present myself to any other group of people that I would be working with? Did I feel that they deserved any less than anyone else? Why had I not done for the residents of Nueva Vida what they had done for me? Put their best foot forward. They, who had so little, offered what they had, and I, who had so much, didn’t consider that these people deserved the same basic respect I would have shown to anyone else. That day I started questioning myself, my motives, and my actions.

I realized that I unknowingly went into a community under the impression that I was going to “help.” I entered their space with a lack of sensitivity and awareness of who they were, what they had experienced, and I focused on my own needs and wants. I had not even thought about them, but rather me. I thought I was going to do a job, to “help.” I realized that they did not need me to dig postholes for them. They were just being kind to let me do it. What they needed was to be treated with dignity, respect, and compassion. That is what they needed. I mistakenly thought I was just there to dog postholes….

I don’t often talk about my first experience in Nicaragua because I didn’t live through what the residents lived through. I did not live with a dirt floor, four posts surrounded by black plastic tarp for my walls, struggling daily for the survival of my family. I talk about it now because it was the start of my understanding of my privilege, something that I will never be able to un-do. When I think I am helping, I might actually be causing harm. That first experience was when I seriously questioned my motivations, the purpose behind my actions, and my understanding of what I was doing and why….

Like so many other occasions in life, we are sometimes subject to the unintended consequences of what we do. The desire to “help” in a country like Nicaragua may be well-intentioned. But without an understanding of the current context, the traditions, the social milieu and even the international histories between nations- being there in the fullest sense- aid workers and organizations run the risk of perpetuating inequalities, power disparities or even creating setbacks for Nica progress. Bambi Griffin writes perceptively about that reality, one from which many other aid workers could learn an important truth.

As hard to believe as it may be, giving of yourself isn’t always an easy thing, even if it’s nearly always a good thing….

Fear, Interdependence, Life in the U.S., Making An Impact, Reflections, Servanthood

For Whom Do You Speak?

April 18, 2016 Steve Sheppard Leave a comment

Whether consciously or not, we all speak for someone. Of course, we speak for ourselves. But even what we speak in our own self-interest most often represents others; we live in a pluralistic place which guarantees that what we say likely echoes someone else’s views. Over the past months I have listened- sometimes intentionally, other times involuntarily- to a host of political voices seeking to speak on my behalf. Despite the fact that I would be quite uncomfortable having any of them speak for me, each seems to lay claim to the privilege of speaking for a majority of the electorate, including me. And as I have wrestled with the reality of someone purporting to represent my thoughts and feelings, it got me to thinking about the rest of us. Who do we speak for?

I thought about the people I know best. One of my close friends, passionate about the outdoors his entire life, has come to teach environmentalism to college students at a time when most of his peers have retired. Another has devoted his energies to the cultivation of the arts, and on a broad scale, in a manner that embraces not only accomplished artists but also the most fledgling efforts of the virtually unknown. A third has ended a career of pastoring his congregations with a voice for social justice, even when doing so might have generated unrest and personal discomfort. Each has chosen a cause, a purpose for his voice, a deliberate act of representation.

A lot of people attempt to speak for others but miss the mark. Government officials are notorious for speaking what the constituents want to hear, or what the officials want them to hear. Religious leaders for centuries have tried to tell their followers how they should behave, only to be challenged by shifting societal norms. CEOs everywhere adopt the role of corporate spokespersons, but the perspectives of employees are often far different from the company line: ask a CEO about his/her company’s culture and then interview an employee or two.

Others of us are much less overt- quieter types for whom introversion is a safer form of existence and who are far less likely to mount a figurative soapbox of any kind. Who or what do we represent in our relative silence? For assuredly, not to speak is still a statement of one kind or another.

One of the lessons I learned long ago during my earliest years in business was that “silence is acceptance.” If I was not willing to challenge an idea, then the fair presumption was that the concept was acceptable to me and that I would support it. While the wisdom served as a potentially liberating management tool, more broadly the notion described the societal reality in which we live. Just as in the truth of “not to decide is to decide,” there is truth in “not to speak is to speak.” And there is potential danger in words that are never spoken.

For instance, an article in The Minneapolis StarTribune describes the growing number of “speakers” fomenting anti-Muslim sentiment in rural towns of the Upper Midwest. The self-appointed proselytizers, whose expertise ranges from used car sales to conspiracy theory, possess an understanding about how to use their words to stoke the fears of the unknown in the minds of their audiences. Of course, there are many unbiased residents in small-town America. But the silence of their voices provides amplification to those who portray all Muslims as like-minded, radical jihadists. The “preachers” speak only for themselves, I hope.

Then there is the case of words spoken out of the side of the mouth. The same political candidates referenced above, with choruses from their legislative colleagues, have all decried the disappearance of the middle-class in the U.S. in the most recent case of a near-extinction. But while each has accentuated the importance of the species and pledged to save it, their words belie their true loyalties. While the middle-class faces utter disappearance, the top 1% of the population continues to amass unprecedented wealth. The reality begs the question about who truly speaks for the vanishing strength of America, its middle class.

For whom do we speak? Whether we dedicate our words and actions to the natural world, the creativity of the arts, the circumstances of marginalized people, a political ideology or something else, our words leave a legacy. That legacy will be a fingerprint of our lifetimes, a precise identification of who we were in our time, a picture of what was important to us, an identification of our stewardship, the depth of our love, and whether we left the world in any better shape than we found it….

Announcements, Organizational Development, Peasant Agriculture, Rural development, Territorial Development, WPF partners

Tilling the Soil

March 24, 2016 Steve Sheppard Leave a comment

I wrote in a post here last week about the need for both “planters” and “harvesters” in the development community to reasonably blunt the oppression of poverty in Nicaragua. My choice of words and analogy prompted a couple of responses which requested some clarification of those terms and funding postures. (That’s not at all unusual, as my brain and my words don’t always operate in perfect synchronization.)

In considering how to provide that clarification, I recalled an e-mail that was written by my colleague and Nicaraguan Director for Winds of Peace, Mark Lester. He had written a response to an inquiry from another funder asking about our process and assessment of project proposals. I revisited the e-mail and, as I had suspected, Mark’s words painted a clear portrait of a development process geared to clients themselves, and how WPF has come to work with its potential partners in a fashion that plants seeds for and is very focused on the future. That e-mail is excerpted here:

I think the goal of having your grassroots group partners dictate to you what their specific needs and priorities are is a very good institutional goal, and one that we very much share, but our experience is that it gets very complicated when you try to put it into practice.

Suppose you [identify] a grassroots coop, and they send you a request. That request will reflect the needs and priorities of the coop to the extent that the leadership really represents the rest of the members, and that is precisely the problem that I explained on our Skype call. These leaders [always] tend to be the same people (patron-fieldhand relationship). In this case the only way to know whether something being proposed reflects the membership is if you spend time in the coop; interviewing board members, but also interviewing a diverse selection of members in different regions of the coop, visiting them in their homes. This is the only way to find out what the members really think when there is great power disparity among the members of the coop. Because those with less power in the community will not say things publicly that would reflect negatively on those with more power in a local community. Their situation is too fragile, and their ability to be able to go to those powerful people to help them in times of need is too important to risk by being honest in a meeting.

But when you have collected that information from private conversations with members, and then in a plenary session with the members of the coop present the findings, the collective is forced to deal with the true reality, because everyone recognizes it is true. But there was never a way for that truth to surface publicly and thus have everyone deal with it. Without this truth on the table, however, there is no possibility for the coop to move forward for there to be change, and thus there is no change in the territory, because the [individual]organizations within the territory are not changing.

This is the work that our colleagues have done and are doing with all the cooperatives that we are working with, and this is what the followup workshops have dealt with. We too put a high value on the people deciding what their priorities are, but as we delved into it more, we realized to do so effectively often meant getting beyond the leaders, because they really were not representing their membership.

As a result of the ongoing dialogue, and exchange among the coops, a number of coops have told us that they want to be able to export directly, i.e. not have to sell to either an export company or a 2nd tier cooperative. Especially two coops had determined in their own internal planning – that for the first time was truly participatory, because the interests of sectors that previously were not reflected in the plan (because of the situation I described above) now were – they decided they wanted to learn how to export. In the last workshop we had, we were able to have a number of small coffee roasters present, precisely because the coops told us they wanted to export. In the course of the workshop the roaster said they wanted to buy coffee [specifically] off these two groups, and in the discussion with the roasters about what they needed, these two coops realized that exporting was more complicated than they thought, so the issue is a very hot topic for them.

To be clear WPF does not want any money, we are however interested in that your money (and other international aid) really does help the grassroots people, and not a local elite that looks like a grassroots group from the outside. Because every dime that ends up going to the local elite ends up financing the very people blocking what the grassroots really want and are able to express when they are offered a channel that does not put them at risk.

Our experience and research shows that unless there is a methodology that gets around the unequal power distribution at the local level, the resources are always going to be controlled by the local elites (who to outsiders may look poor, but internally they clearly are an elite). But there are very few organizations that deal with this central issue. That being said, there is another organization in Nicaragua that does this well, but using a slightly different methodology. I can send you more about them as well if you are interested.

The context Mark described above is happening every day in Nicaragua and in many if not most other impoverished nations where the poor work with assistance groups for their advancement, if not their very survival. In many cases, they have become dependent upon the intervention of funders, and in the process have abandoned both their right and their hope to ever operate in a self-sustaining fashion. The projects they propose may, in fact, be capable of generating repayment of loans received or accomplishing grant objectives. But the essential question to be asked is whether the results are transformative or simply stop-gap until the next infusion of support. That’s the recipe for dependency.

Within the WPF methodology, we prefer to think of ourselves as planters, “in the soil” with the campesinos, tilling the ground until the first shoots of growth emerge, transforming seeds into ways of life, and working toward an eventual harvest….

Entrepreneurship, Interdependence, Organizational Development, Poverty, Rural development, Territorial Development

Planters and Harvesters

March 18, 2016 Steve Sheppard Leave a comment

I think most people would be surprised to learn the difficulty involved in being a funder. Most often, when folks learn that I work for a private foundation which provides grants and loans in Nicaragua to really poor people, they respond with something like, “Oh, what wonderful and rewarding work that must be.” And while it’s true that there is great intrinsic satisfaction in working with our Nicaraguan partners, there are other layers in our labors that one might never anticipate. It turns out that, like in most enterprises, it’s not all that easy to envision, plant, nurture and harvest the precise outcome desired.

That reality was impressed upon me again recently in a conversation I had with an acquaintance about measuring end results. That’s something which most aid organizations are prone to do, because without some sort of results to tout, raising funds from potential donors or justifying actions to a Board of Directors becomes quite difficult. The easiest measurement to take, of course, is the number of dollars placed during a given year, under the assumption that if an organization is placing lots of money it must be creating lots of impact. (Which is not always the case.) During my conversation, a number of additional measures were cited, including number of households served, geographic area covered, number of women included and loan default rates. We all search for some way to affirm that funds and energy expended have been put to good use and yielded a good result. We want to look forward to a “harvest” of the good intentions and capital that we have sown.

Understandably, there are many aid organizations for whom the harvest is the main objective and without a reasonably short and certain “growing season,” they won’t make the investment. Harvesters are numerous and they are essential to vibrant development and organizational accountability. They represent significant funding sources.

But one of the realities of development work learned by WPF over these past several decades is that sometimes germination just takes longer than we’d like, and there is no certainty of anything growing out of a particular investment made. Risk is without guarantee, and especially when swimming upstream against currents of rural location, prevailing culture, limited education, autocratic governance models and natural disasters. So occasionally, the exceptionally poor require the presence of “planters,” those who are willing to sow in marginal soil, where possibly the only measurement is whether anything can bloom- not in micro-loans returned or number of houses built, but in whether there are grounds for further accompaniment and relationship.

Planters bring an entrepreneurial appetite for exploration and risk. They are willing to “get proximate” enough to make a bet on the lives of deeply marginalized people. They not only lend and grant, but also accompany. Measures are not unimportant, to be sure, but they are less sure. And for planters, that’s OK. Because eventually planters hope to be harvesters, too. They just may be willing to wait longer to be so.

Working on development in the rural sectors of any country is not an exact science. WPF has developed its perspectives and methodologies over thirty years of on-the-ground observation and partnerships. There is no existing formula for certain success. If it was formulaic work, more institutions would be doing it, with assurances of success and favorable measurements to share with the donor base. It isn’t that easy.

We are all members of the development universe in some capacity, whether we acknowledge it or not. As members of a common humanity, we do have an obligation to one another. Our actions, whether small or large, create an impact, good or bad. Harvesters are willing to travel where the path is rocky, but straight, so that they have reasonable expectations of repeating their success. Planters bring visions and seeds to scatter, in the recognition that neither the path nor the final fruits are necessarily clear; they are less sure of their own viability in the process. But we need planters and harvesters and every other resource we can muster in order to blunt the disgrace and indignity of deep impoverishment. …

Announcements, Education, Father Fernando Cardenal, Making An Impact, Servanthood

Father Fernando, 1934-2016

February 22, 2016 Steve Sheppard Leave a comment

The inevitability of mortality is no solace when we lose someone whose life has transcended the usual boundaries of what it is to be a human being. We know that whatever one’s legacy is to be, it is certain to come in time, whether we are prepared for it or not. When we learned the news of Father Fernando Cardenal’s illness several weeks ago, there was collective hope and prayer that his time had not yet come and that he might recover to extend the remarkable legacy of his life. But it was not to be. Despite several rallies in recent days, Father Fernando died Saturday, at age 82, an age that belies the enormous impact of his life.

Neither this site nor this writer can pretend to adequately express what Father Fernando has meant to a world which refuses to see and people who ignore the truth of the poor. (There are ample locations to learn of the Nicaraguan priest’s background and life story; visit them, and understand the kind of person the world has lost.) He became the voice and patron of the impoverished, in many ways at the cost of his own vocation and voice. Indeed, he was expelled from the priesthood for his continued educational work with a revolutionary regime which in the 1970’s overthrew the longstanding Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua. Such was his commitment to those who possessed no voice of their own. (And such was his commitment to his faith, that he earned his eventual reinstallation to the priesthood years later.)

His story, recounted in part in the recent autobiography, Faith and Joy, (and assisted by WPF colleague Mark Lester and Kathy McBride), is a life lesson to make even the most egocentric among us re-think our own journeys and legacies. But such was Father Fernando’s gift, to speak for the poor, and for the rest of us, in ways that could touch us profoundly. I met with Father Fernando on four separate occasions. I can share without shame that upon each occasion, the passion of his words and the depth of his dedication to “the small people” prompted tears- of joy, of admiration and of self-reflection. For Father Fernando, his calling was crystal clear: “I cannot accept that people live this way. As a human being and as a Christian, I cannot accept it. It has to change.” I found it an impossible perspective to refute.

Even at his age of 82, it was still too soon to say good-bye to a life of such inspiration. We needed more of him, more words of hope and perseverance for the poor and more words of encouragement and for introspection among the rest of us. We all conduct our life journeys with too little of either, and now one of the important instructors of our consciences is gone. Take a moment to learn who he was. His loss begs for for prayer and remembrance….

(“It is my hope that the young people return to the streets to make history.”) -Father Fernando Cardenal

Creativity, Education, Interdependence, Life in the U.S., Organizational Development, Personal Notes, Reflections, Rural development

Undue Burdens

February 15, 2016 Steve Sheppard Leave a comment

I spent the first week of this month in Nicaragua, my first visit since April of last year and a revisit that was long overdue. Like most things in life, one cannot truly know a reality without personally experiencing it and long absences from Nicaragua quickly dull the memory of what life can be like for many who live in onerous poverty. I do not pretend that I experience the same conditions that plague daily life for the impoverished, but I know it more clearly than I ever could by simply reading or hearing about it.

As usual, I spent the week learning: understanding more about the gaps in education at all levels in country against a cultural reality which has been forced to prioritize work over learning; sitting face-to-face with grassroots producers who experience all of the same vagaries of raising crops as growers around the world, but with the additional hurdles of unscrupulous coyotes who manipulate and cheat the markets; encountering great development works by local organizations which place human dignity and voice at the top of their resource lists; participating in a territorial workshop where small producers are willing to share intimate details of their work, their obstacles, their dreams and their lives. Who could ask more from the content of a week?

My reflections of that week just past are nothing new. They include the recognition that the human struggles in Nicaragua are far more basic than the battles which most of us are compelled to fight in the U.S. Not easier, not more noble, not enviable, just more basic to the work of making a living and just living. But also, that a large part of the struggle there is the result of manmade barriers to sustainable daily life. Of course, there are the realities of natural disasters like earthquakes and hurricanes, but even those have taken on a decidedly man-impacted intensity in recent years. There are inevitable gyrations to the economic markets which Nicaraguans serve- as diverse as insulated wire and coffee- but also North American market perspectives which view the entire Central American neighborhood as a second-rate trade zone. There is the rich cultural history of Nicaragua- full of achievement and natural opportunity- but one which has been largely gutted by outside interventions, by the U.S. and others, over generations and to the present.

Effective development work in Nicaragua thus requires a re-setting of the clock and of the starting line. If some of those manmade obstacles are to be corrected, as they ought, then consideration of our collective economic, political and social attitudes have to precede such changes.

It’s a shift which will not be easy. In talking with one well-intentioned North American last week, I discussed with him some of the roadblocks that compromise Nicaraguan development. I broached, gently, the notion that we in the North bear a fair amount of responsibility for economic difficulty there. His reply belied an all-too-frequent posture toward those in the developing world: “If they would just learn English,” he said, “it would be so much easier to work with them.”

Speaking the same language, indeed. That would be a circumstance which might substantially level the playing field in all kinds of ways, for Nicaraguans and North Americans alike. But the reality of a universal language is not a particularly likely answer to creating sustainable justice, whether economically, politically or socially. For many people in Nicaragua, learning comprehensive language skills in their native tongue is a stretch by itself; indeed, a third-grade education in Nicaragua hardly qualifies a child as a linguist. Learning a second language-let alone, the most difficult language to learn in the world (English)- is neither a practical nor a reasonable solution to development needs. It’s also a little condescending to expect another culture to adapt itself to our language; there is nothing wrong with their own. A leveling of the playing field requires some other forms of more mutual adaptation.

It’s easy to fall into such colonial thinking. We are surrounded by our own, comfortable ways which feel right from their familiarity. A friend of mine recently made the observation that, “In Nicaragua they just don’t work the same way that we do, do they?” (No, I thought. They work much harder.) Yet, as we know intellectually, if not emotionally, comfort does not always translate to sensibility, and certainly not to justice. In fact, oftentimes those comforts of ours translate to someone else’s burdens.

Getting out of our comfort zones is an important element of expanding one’s line of sight to such burdens. I was very glad to be back in Nicaragua last week, to see, to hear, to know….