The Middle Class Hoax

Growing up in a middle-sized Texas town, as the son of an architect and a stay at home mom, I always considered myself middle class. We didn't eat out much, didn’t own a Mercedes or a Lexus, went camping for our vacations, and cut our own grass. Why would I have ever considered myself rich? In my mind, the rich were those with guitar shaped swimming pools, a chauffer to take them to and from their tennis lessons, and Maui Jim sunglasses. I was certainly not that, and I wasn’t begging on the streets, so I must have been middle class. That's what society told me, and it seemed reasonable to me. And had I never left the United States, I probably would never have changed my mind. But after living the last several years in rural Central America, my concept of the middle class has changed. My idea of what is normal has shifted.

Here in Nicarauga, I wake up every morning at 4:30, brush my teeth, and light up the firewood in order to cook my breakfast of rice and beans. After dressing and downing a cup of coffee, I wedge my machete between the bars on the frame of my bicycle, and pedal to a nearby farm where I work. Later in the afternoons, after the workday is over, I sit around and talk with my neighbors, go out to look for firewood, or wash my clothes on a concrete washboard and hope that the sun is out so that they will dry. I work six days a week, as does pretty much everyone here, and relax on Sundays. If my next door neighbor had a good week selling firewood in the market, we might splurge and go in together for a three liter coke to share between the five or six of us that live nearby. If it's payday and I'm feeling generous, I might blow 100 Cordobas (a little less than $4) on several tamales to share. But only if I'm feeling generous, because that's more than I make for a days worth of work. On Sundays, if I'm feeling restless, I might go to town with a friend to make my normal purchases of rice, beans, oil, tomatoes, onions, coffee, and sugar. It's nice to get out of the pueblo every once in a while. But if funds are tight, and he can't afford the 8 cordobas (30 cent) bus fare into town, I go by myself.  

Bicylces are a thing here in the countryside. In the village I live in, there are only a couple cars, and they are 80s or 90s model beat-to-hell pickups that are normally, more or less, mostly running. A few more people have motorcyles. They are the people with a little steadier or higher paying jobs. Normally school teachers, construction guys, or security guards. That leaves the rest of us to get around on bicycles and public transportation. And since no one sits around talking about the gnarly public bus they rode into town today, that leaves the focus on the bicycles. Instead of sitting around and talking about the new aluminum rims they put on their Honda, or the bumpin'  sound system they put in their Jeep Wrangler, a lot of my friends sit around and talk about the new additions to their bike. "Hey man, I just got this sweet aluminum handle bar post. It cost me 120 cordobas (4 dollars) but it looks great." "Dude, have you seen the new rims Luis just put on his bike? He must have been working a lot lately and have some extra cash." Personally, I'm pretty proud of my own bike. I took everything off, sanded down the frame, and painted it white (to match my skintone, obviously). I have blue aluminum handle bars and a blue aluminum seat post, and some awesome Shimano decals stuck on the frame. I obviously don't have any Shimano parts, cause those cost five times as much, but the decals looks great. Because of the white paint, we named it La Parmalat, after a Nicaraguan brand of milk. It's not the nicest bike in town, but it definitely gets me to work and back everyday. But man, I would love to put some aluminum rims on that baby.

Describing the ins and outs of daily life in that way almost makes it seem funny. Because I grew up in the "middle class," cooking my breakfast over a wood burning fire now seems like I'm back on a Boy Scouts campout. However, my bicycle and my rice and beans are not just part of a cute social experiment. They're not just part of a funny story about a gringo in rural Central America. This is how the majority of the world lives. Turns outs there's nothing in-the-middle about middle class America. On a global scale, the middle class American is one of the privileged few. Part of the high society. One of the wealthy.

A quick google of “world poverty” leads to a lot of graphs, figures, and articles. And none of them consider $50,000 a year as somewhere in the middle. A majority of the people around me here in Nicaragua make between $1,000 to $2,000 a year. Some less, some more. 3 billion people worldwide live on $2.50 a day or less. 80% of the world population lives on $10 a day or less, and in the vast majority of the world, the income differential between the rich and poor is widening. One fourth of the world lives without electricity. On gameday, Cowboys stadium consumes more electricity than the entire country of Liberia has the capacity to produce. In the U.S., 81% of the population owns a car. In Nicaragua only 6%, and in Nepal, ½%. 7% of the world has a college degree, and 22% of the world owns or shares a computer.

Now let’s talk about consumption. 1.8 billion people worldwide consume 20L of water per day. In the United Kingdom, the daily average water consumption is 150L, and in the United States the average consumption is 600L. In 2005, the wealthiest 20% of the world accounted for 77% of the total private consumption of goods. All of Africa uses 3% of the world’s energy, and the U.S. consumes 19%. Americans spend more on Halloween than the entire world spends on malaria in a given year. In 2006, the world spent around $1.1 trillion on military expenditures, of which the U.S. accounted for $598 billion. That same year in the U.S., $58 billion was spent on education, and $52 billion on healthcare. Certainly says something about our priorities… The average American consumes as much energy as 6 Mexicans, 31 Indians, and 370 Ethiopians. In 2009, the average American consumed 260 lbs of meat. The average Nicaraguan consumed 55 lbs, and the average Bangladeshi consumed 9 lbs. In the entire year.  If we divided up the GDP of the entire world equally among all of its citizens, each person would receive $10,000 a year to live off of. Could you live off of $10,000 a year? Could your family of four live off of $40,000? If I made $10,000 a year here in Tepeyac, Nicaragua, I’d be the richest guy in town.

In order to change our world, we must first change our mindset. We must consider what life is like for people outside of our immediate family, our circle of friends, or our country. We are all humans, supposedly created equally, by the same God. Regardless of race, ethnicity, or the social class we are born into. We must see ourselves as a member of the global population, and not just as an American.

Maybe the average “middle class” American cannot easily dictate the spending habits of the U.S. government, but he can certainly change his own spending habits. If each American continues to consume 260 pounds of meat a year, 600L of water a day, and a vastly unproportional amount of the world’s energy, how can the Nicaraguan, the Indian, or the Ethiopian have access his fair share. We must start to live sustainably and reasonably. We must stop considering our incredibly over consumptive lifestyles as normal. It doesn’t take a Harvard economics graduate to know that if a small percentage of the world’s population consumes a vast majority of its resources, only a little bit is left over for the majority to live off of. If those with the lions share of the global power and privilege, aka the “middle class” of the first world, continue to take and consume everything it can get its hands on, the poverty and the wars caused by it will never be reduced. Unless we shift our understanding of what is normal, and readjust our actions accordingly, how can global poverty ever be reduced?

Several years ago, a movie entitled 12 Years a Slave was released, depicting the life of a free black man in the United States who was tricked and sold into slavery, living the next twelve years of his life as a slave. During his years as a slave, the man had several slaveowners, some worse than others. However one of the slaveowners he had was portrayed in the movie as "the good" slaveowner. He didn't beat or kill his slaves like others did, and he talked to them gently.  He even took them to church on Sundays, since he was a respectable, God-fearing man.

With several hundred years of hindsight, the contradiction is glaring. How can a slaveowner be good? It doesn't make much sense. Today, the logic of considering a slaveowner a holy and righteous person seems preposterous. Ignorant even. But at that time, during the first half of the 1800s, it seemed normal. Only with the benefit of hindsight are we able to see the ridiculousness of it. And let's not forget that it wasn't very long ago that public places were segregated by law, women were not considered intelligent enough to vote, and doctors prescribed cigarettes to help calm a patient’s nerves.

After watching this movie, the image of the good slaveowner kept me thinking. What will our generation be judged for one or two hundred years down the road? What is it that today we consider normal, will then be considered an appauling infrigment on human rights. It very well may be the ridiculous economic inequality of our world. The fact that we consider it normal that a small percentage of the world has 2500 square foot houses, two cars in the garage, and a pool, while a large percentage of the world lives in houses made of rusty sheet metal, thick black plastic, rotting planks of lumber, or mud. That we consider it normal that a small percentage of the world has great access to health care facilities employing well educated doctors, dentists, and surgeons, while the vast majority of the world waits for hours and hours in line at an extremely understaffed hospital with undertrained employees with very little medicine and few if any surgeons. That we consider it normal that the minimum wage in the United States needs to be $15 an hour to provide a decent living for each person, but the farmworker in Nicaragua can be paid $150 a month (the legal minimum wage), and be expected to provide a decent living for his family. That we consider it normal that a Nicaraguan doctor can expect to make $400 or $500 a month, but a U.S. doctor isn’t considered successful until he’s pushing seven figures.

We may not be able to change the world, but we have to change ourselves. We have to view ourselves in light of the global population, and not just in light of the U.S. population. We must care for our brother in Africa as much as we care for our brother in the U.S. We must consume less. We must see that our overconsumption comes at a price, and that is price is global poverty. We must learn to share our global resources. Because we are not the middle class. Our lifestyle is not normal. It was a hoax.  

"The rich man cannot enter the kingdom of joy not because he wants to be bad, but because he chooses to be blind." - Jesuit priest Anthony Demello

*Sources: www.globalissues.org, www.one.org, www.worldcentric.org, 100people.org, public.wsu.edu.

My Life as an Immigrant

Whenever I meet someone new here in Nicaragua, they normally ask me if I'm a volunteer or a missionary. I say no to both. I certainly have never offered to volunteer for free as a farmhand on a local farm, and the term missionary brings to mind images of brown robed friars treating Indians as slave labor or overzealous Christians forcing their views on uninterested locals. However, nor would I consider myself a tourist, as I live here permanently, and don't lug around a big REI backpack everywhere I go. Some might consider me an ex-pat, which probably is at least a little more accurate, however, I think I'm more likely to be considered a young idealist with too much of an imagination. Regardless of whatever label seems to fit best, some days I just feel like an immigrant. An outsider. A white man in a Latino world. I receive some strange looks from people I don't know when they see me walking in the typical black rubber boots of a campesino, with a machete in one hand and a bunch of plantains slung over my opposite shoulder. Or when riding my bike through the nearby pueblos, there's no shortage of stares, or the occasional shout of, "Hey gringo!" I mean, fair enough. I'm an odd sight in rural Central America. Certainly not one they see too often, if ever. I speak Spanish, but I definitely don't sound like a Nicaraguan. And if my accent doesn't give it away, my third grade level grammar probably does. Sometimes, walking by a group of teenagers standing on the side of the road, I'll hear one of them shout out, "Gringooooooo," as if calling me that makes their other friends think they're a badass. I'm a white American, raised in the middle class, college educated, and globally speaking, someone with privilege and power. Feeling like an immigrant is not something I've dealt with much in my life.

The problem of slapping the label of gringo or immigrant on someone, is that along with the label goes a string of unfounded ideas about that person. When someone sees me only as a gringo, they see me only as loud, rich, and pretentious. When the label of immigrant is put on a Latino in the U.S., they are seen as lazy, drunk, and uneducated, while simultaneously stealing the jobs of hardworking, honest Americans. In this case, even the stereotype itself is contradicting.

Every person has the desire to be known. The desire to genuinely connect with other human beings. Not just superficially, but at the depths one's self. That's the problem with labels. There is no connection. When I get those stares on the street, I want to say to those people, "Hey! I'm more than just a gringo! I'm not what you imagine me to be. I'm a real person with ideas and dreams too. Before you judge me, get to know me." When the Latino walking down the street in the U.S., or working their daily job, receives that all-too-recognizable stare, I'm sure they feel the same way. The gringo and the immigrant aren’t given the chance to express who they really are, because the person who labels them believes they already know all there is to know. Loud, rich, and pretentious. Lazy, uneducated, and drunk. And the person dolling out the labels also loses the opportunity to genuinely know and connect with the other person. It's a loss on all sides. It's the root of racism and discrimination. It's that subtle train of thought that at first seems insignificant, but when allowed to grow, leads to hate crimes, state-sanctioned racism, and war.

Sometimes I wonder what I would do if I were born and raised in an environment like Tepeyac, Nicaragua. If my mom spent her days slaving over a wood burning stove. If my dad (if I was lucky enough to have one) spent his days swinging a machete for $120 bucks a month. If both of my parents were barely literate, if that. If I was lucky enough to make it through middle school or high school, and then had three options of jobs for the rest of my life: farmhand, construction worker, or security guard. All with a salary just good enough to put rice and beans on the table and hope that no one in the family gets sick. Because after spending all your money putting food on the table, there’s not much leftover to spend on a medical emergency. I think I would probably immigrate to the United States too.

I know a guy who's an undocumented immigrant in the U.S. He works landscaping, and gets a meager wage, by U.S. standards. He normally feels like an outsider as well. Often criticized by white Americans or documented Latino Americans, he's viewed as a lesser. He's a brown man in a white, English speaking world. He's not given the chance to be known. But what does it matter? He's probably just a lazy, uneducated drunk anyways, right? As it turns out, this time the label's not accurate. Imagine that… With the money he makes, he helps support his elderly mother and helps put his sister through college in Central America. He's putting the food on his mother's table, and giving his sister an education she wouldn't otherwise have had access to.  He's a hard-working, self-sacrificing individual. He just happened be born south of the Rio Grande, so by law he's not allowed access to the decent paying jobs of the United States. God may have chosen where he was born, but his fellow man has doomed him to a life of economic disadvantage.

Several times during the last few years I've lived in Central America, Latinos have asked me why I'm allowed to be in there country, traveling wherever the hell I want, while they're not allowed to be in my country. It's a good question. The only answer is because I was born in the United States and they weren't. Because I have power and privilege and they don't. In the current system, decent work has become a privilege dependent upon place of birth. If you were born between the right two borders, you deserve to be the beneficiary of an incredibly unequal world economy. If you were born between the wrong two borders, sorry bud, you’re out of luck. You’ll be poor your whole life. Just accept it.

For the first time that I can remember I've felt a connection to the immigrant. Struggling with the language, in a foreign culture, labeled and judged, viewed as an outsider, all the while wanting to be known. Don't get me wrong, the majority of the people I've met here in Central America have been extremely warm and accepting of me. I’m sure I’ve been much more cared for and accepted far more than the average U.S. immigrant. As a whole, Central Americans have been extremely accepting and understanding of me. But still, there are definitely times I feel like an outsider. And, in certain ways, I think we all can relate. Everyone knows the feeling of being an outsider, an outcast, and just of wanting to be known. The first day at a new school. First day in a new job. Moving to a new town. Alone and out of place. We can all relate to the immigrant if we look at our lives and think about our past with humility. We've all had the desire to be known for who we are, and not for what other people think we are. We may not have had to live with the daily fear of being deported back to an extremely dangerous home-country, or even a country in war. We may not have had to struggle to learn a foreign language, and felt like a lesser every time we open our mouths to try to communicate. But in certain ways, we’ve all been an outsider. We’ve all longed to be understood and accepted. Hate and the elitism form when we put up new walls, disconnect ourselves from other human beings. Forget that we are all brothers, trying to live a meaningful and happy life. Mother Theresa once said, “If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.” Truer words have seldom been spoken. If there’s no compassion for the immigrant, it is because we haven’t opened our eyes enough to see that we too have felt a part of what the immigrant feels. We’ve all felt unloved. But instead of seeing that, we’ve put up a wall between them and us. We’ve disconnected ourselves from our brother.

So when you see someone struggling with directions, seemingly lost, remember that time you too were lost in a new city. When you talk with someone who struggles to speak English, imagine what it must be like to be in a foreign country where even communicating is a huge struggle. When you see the foreign homeless man who can't find a job, remember that Jesus too lived homeless, and often relied on the generosity of others to eat every day. When this year’s presidential race is filled with hate speech and racism, remember a time when you felt hated, unwanted, and unloved. When you go to the polls to vote for the future president, question why only those born north of the Rio Grande are allowed to work in the United States. Why you are allowed to travel and work wherever you please, but the Central American is forced to stay within his small borders and try to eke out a living with some of the lowest wages on the planet. We've all felt unloved. We've all felt like an outsider. Now let's learn from that experience, and treat those around us with unbiased love. Regardless of race, color, or birthplace. Let’s take down the walls we build around ourselves; let’s work together, let’s work as brothers.  

If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other...

Las Jaguitas

This has been one of the hardest blog entries for me to write by far. There have been plenty of thoughts running through my head these days, but getting it all down on paper has been a real challenge. You see, I cut my right hand while sharpening my machete the other day, and so for now I’m forced to grip the pen with my first few fingers and without the help of my thumb…

It was just after 6am, the hour that I show up to work each day, and I’m crouched down running my file over the machete preparing to do some serious damage to the overgrown brush I was sent to chop down with my other coworkers. After 95% of the machete is razor sharp, and I’m putting an edge on the very tip, the machete slips, and the nice sharp edge slides down the side of my hand. “I told you to be careful,” Armando remarks, without a hint of compassion, despite the blood running off my hand and onto my pants. “Hold still,” says Juan as he takes a small rag and wraps it around my thumb to slow the bleeding. Luckily it wasn’t bad enough to need stiches, so now it’s just slowly healing.

So I was actually able to find a job. It’s at a nearby farm that has 25 acres of plantain, coffee, and orange trees planted. We start work at 6am, and finish about noon everyday. It also has plenty of big, beautiful cedar and mohagany trees, among others. It’s really a beautiful place to work. In fact, the other day while working in the coffee, a howler monkey shit on me. Sure it smelled bad, but one has to be thankful to work in an environment as wild as this one is. Most days at work, my five coworkers and I are “volando machete,” or “flying our machetes,” which turns out to be unfortunately accurate sometimes, as I´ve seen the machetes slip out of someone´s sweaty hand as we´re working. We pass the days cutting down tall grass, maintaining and harvesting the plantains, and cutting grass for the horses to eat in the evenings. And as a reward for our hard work, we get paid a daily wage of 95 cordobas, or about $3.50. When I was working overtime on the cargo ships, I could make that in eight minutes…

Several friends of mine that I´ve come to know over the years of visiting this pueblo on TCU Spring Break trips helped me build my house. Misael, my closest friend here in the community, and his family had some empty space on their propery, and they graciously allowed me to set up shop there. The walls and roof of the house are made of sheet metal, and the floor is dirt, which classifies more or less as a lower middle class house here. Nicer houses are made of cinder block with a concrete floor, and poorer houses are made sheets of vinyl and bamboo. My kitchen is tacked on to the side of the house, where I light up the firewood each time I want to cook. The latrine and bathing areas are behind it. The most grueling aspect of the construction was digging the latrine. The hole is one meter by one meter wide, and all of the locals insisted that I dig it five meters deep. I think it will take me the rest of my life to fill it halfway up, but considering they´re the experts on latrines and not me, I went along with what they said. I don’t think I´ve ever sweat so much in my entire life, as I did digging that damn hole.

During the month or so that I was building my house, I stayed at a nearby retreat center that is run by several nuns. While I was there, there was an eight day retreat based on the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius, and since one of the nuns invited me to attend, I decided to go. The Jesuit priest who directed the retreat was exceptional, and an expert at helping you to see the darkness inside of yourself and your own participation in the evils and injustices of the world. I, as well as many of the other participants in the retreats are fans of liberation theology, and tend to blame a lot of the injustices of the world on corrupt governments and large corporations. However, this priest helped all of us to see how we too are guilty, and need to struggle each day to recognize the injustices we create in the world, and the ways we oppress others.

Around that same time, the massacre in Las Jaguitas occurred. It didn´t make international news, but here in Nicaragua, it was a big deal. Basically, the police had set up a drug bust, and dressed themselves in civilian clothes and ski masks. They positioned themselves in a certain dangerous part of town, and prepared to stop a car that they believed to be full of drug traffickers. As the car approached, and the driver saw the masked men, he tried to speed off. The police opened fire, shooting to kill, and were quite successful. However, the car wasn´t being driven by drug traffickers, it was being driven by an innocent man and his family. They had tried to speed off, believing the masked men to be assailants, and only the father survived the police´s onslaught. The wife and children died. Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega offered his condolences, but was quick to justify it as collateral damage of the ever important was on drugs. The policemen involved were convicted of negligent man slaughter instead of homicide, and received a very light jail sentence. No highly ranked official was ever tried.

Needless to say, much of the country was up in arms over the lack of respect for life and coverup by the police and government (which are basically the same entity here). One night while talking with a friend of mine, we began to argue about the situation. What aspect was the most troubling? What was the most threatening to the people of Nicaragua? Was it the fact that the innocent children were slaughtered, or the fact that the police apparently had orders to shoot to kill without the need to identify the targets, much less send the suspects to trial before being convicted? We argued from all different angles, each one of us convinced of our correctness. Soon I realized that I was evening listening to what my friend was saying, but instead only trying to craft my argument so that I could be declared the victor and show my intellectual superiority. I wasn´t interested in finding the truth of the situation, only in defending my pride. And then it dawned on me: my thought process in that situation was probably the exact same as President Ortega´s when he learned of the Las Jaguita´s massacre. I´m sure that as soon as he heard, he began crafting his argument to best defend his and his government´s position. Looking how to hide the weaknesses in his argument. How to protect his pride and power. I´m sure he wasn´t interested in listening to the opposition´s opinion, or seeking out the truth of the situation. The very same thought processes that I was following in my argument were the same ones that President Ortega utilized to make a mockery out of the justice system of Nicaragua and disrespect the innocent, slaughtered family. Had I been in his shoes, drunk with power and my own pride, I might have done the very same thing.

It made me think back on my retreat a few months ago, and how the priest challenged us to look inside of us each day to seek out the evils we hide inside. If we want to fight the injustices of the world, we must first fight the injustices within. We are all part of the problem, and we must all be part of the solution. It´s easy to throw stones at Daniel Ortega from a distance, and blame all of the country´s problems on him, but it´s a lot more difficult to stop and look inside and seek out the ways that I too am part of the problem. The corrupt governments and huge corporations are guilty, and we, as the society that supports and protects them, are guilty too. As Ghandi once said, we must be the change we wish to see in the world. 

Ortega Vende Patria!

Somewhere between fifteen and twenty thousand people took to the streets of Juigalpa, Nicaragua this past Saturday, June 13^th, to protest the construction of the interoceanic canal. Over a year ago, Chinese billionaire, Wang Jing, with his company HKND (Hong Kong Nicaragua Development) Group, convinced the Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega and the rest of his government to grant them access to the land of Nicaragua in order to build a canal deeper and wider (as well as much longer) than the one in Panama. However, many of the citizens of Nicaragua, especially those who will be forcibly removed from their land, are not too happy about the decision. This past Saturday, thousands of Nicaraguans, from all over the country, filled the streets with chants of:

¿Que quieren los campesinos?...

¡Que se vayan los chinos!

What do the people want?...

That the Chinese get out!

Of course it has a better ring to it in Spanish.

Environmental concerns, socioeconomic concerns, and a lack of transparency by the Nicaraguan government as well as HKND Group have many, inside and out of Nicaragua, wondering if this megaproject is such a good idea. Even the U.S. Embassy, not known historically for their support of the Nicaraguan poor, issued a statement citing their concern over the lack of transparency.

The only thing lacking from the scene this past Saturday was the Nicaraguan press. During the 80s, Ortega’s government used military force to silence the media that was critical of their actions. Now they have discovered that it is much more socially acceptable to just pay them off; the majority of news outlets in Nicaragua are considered to be on Ortega’s payroll. How else do you justify the extremely limited coverage of the largest protest to date concerning the highly controversial project. Controlling the international press has been a little tougher, however, and Ortega’s had to resort to harassment and detainment by military and police, as well as revocation of permission to be in the country.

This past Saturday, I woke up at 3:15 am, and began traveling towards Juigalpa, with two of my Nicaraguan friends. We made it there by 11, just in time to see the multitude of people cresting the hill and peacefully marching down towards town square. They were led by a banner which read:

Daniel Vende Patria

Daniel is Selling the Homeland

Many in Nicaragua, having a history of their natural resources being extracted and used for profit by foreigners, view the contract signed by their government and the Chinese development company as the selling off of lands for others profit.

It was inspiring to see thousands of people who had travelled from all corners of Nicaragua in boat and bus, peacefully standing up for their rights. It remains to be seen, however, if their chants will be heard, or if the never ending lust for the almighty dollar will prevail.

I got back home that night at 9pm, exhausted, but animated by the energy of the people, and their will to protect one another and the environment.

So… I am back in Central America. But this time in Nicaragua, not Honduras. I just recently got here, after spending the last six months in Wichita Falls catching up with family and friends, and enjoying hamburgers, french fries, and Shiner Bock. Don’t get me wrong, I definitely enjoyed my time in the States, but I felt like I needed to come back to Central America.

The last three years in Honduras have been an education for me in many ways. I began to know and learn more about areas of life that before I had little or no experience of. At the orphanage, I got a small taste of what human suffering comes from not having a family. How that affects a child, and what can become of it. But I also learned about the slow upward march of overcoming struggles, of finding joy in the darkness, and clinging to one another when times are hard. I also learned about how the majority of the world lives: in a material poverty. It was a type of poverty that I had seen before, but hadn’t known very intimately. “The poor” were no longer people I heard about in Sunday sermons or saw on TV commercials asking for money, but they were my friends next door, the guys I played soccer with, the people I drank coffee with. Honduras opened my eyes in many ways, and for that I’m very grateful.

However, leaving the Farm didn’t feel like a chapter of my life that I read and then could turn the page on. It felt more like the beginning of a book, and that I was only a few chapters into it. So I have decided to return to Central America, and continue on this journey, not knowing where it will lead, or what God has in store for me, but confident that I am taking a step in the right direction. I am living in a small village called Tepeyac, several miles outside of Granada, Nicaragua, where I have visited many times before during Spring Break trips with TCU, as well as during the previous years while I lived close by in Honduras. Thankfully, because of my past experiences here, I have several friends, and one is allowing me to put up a small, one room, sheet metal hut on their land where I will live. In the meantime, while I am gathering materials and digging the latrine, I am staying at a retreat center located on the edge of the village run by several wonderful nuns.

My plan is to live here like the average Nicaraguan does. In a small, one room shack, looking for work in the fields or in construction, and living off of whatever I can make. The goal is not to bring any particular “service” to the community. Obviously I will work with them in whatever way I can, but I won’t be working with any particular nonprofit organization or on any particular project. I will just be living and working, much like they do, and trying to get a better understanding of material poverty from the inside.

I heard a quote once, from a woman named Lilla Watson, an indigenous Australian and activist, and it rang true with me and what I feel like my role here is. She said:

“If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”

I didn’t decide to move back to Central America because I feel like I am needed here. I decided to move back because I feel like I need to be here. For my own inner peace and fulfillment, and because I feel that slowly, step by step, we can work together for a more peaceful world for all of us.

That being said, I do miss the hamburgers and fries…

Help The Children Of The Farm!

For any of you who've read this blog before, you know about the Farm of the Child, where I've spent the last three years volunteering. Though I am now currently back in the United States, I remain close with the children of the Farm, and therefore I've organized a fundraiser to provide them with more tools to maximize their talents and brighten their futures.

Although northern Honduras is rich in natural beauty: the clear blue ocean, rolling mountains, and beautiful rivers, job opportunities are scarce. Outside of earning meager wages in agriculture or hard labor, there isn’t much. Permanent, full time jobs are hard to come by. Most have part time work in the fields or in small businesses, eking out a living in whatever way they can. However, there are a few emerging areas that look promising, two of them being tourism and technology. So the volunteers and staff of Farm of the Child are hoping to equip the children that live there, as well as those in the surrounding villages, with the tools they need to go out and find success in these areas. The key tools they need are English and computer skills.

There is currently a small computer lab attached to the school of the Farm, where teachers and volunteers have computer classes and English classes (using computer programs to enhance the learning and strengthen computer skills at the same time). However, the computers are exceedingly old and often function poorly, if at all. Not to mention the electricity is extremely unreliable, and students miss tons of class time because of frequent power outages.

In order to bring a functioning, reliable computer lab to the children of rural Honduras, we are trying to raise $4800 in order to buy backup generators and three new computers. Help us create opportunities for these children who have been given very little. Help give them the tools they need to fulfill their dreams and one day earn a respectable living. As the poor are able to pull themselves up out of poverty, through their own hard work and skill, a more just society can be formed.

English language computer program

How to Donate:

Donations of any size, big or small, would be greatly appreciated! 

Clicking on the link below will take you to Farm of the Child’s donation page:

Click Here to Donate

All donations are tax deductible. A letter will be sent to your mailing address that you can use when filing your taxes.

We are hoping to have as many funds as possible raised by April 20th, in order to have the generators and computers placed on a shipping crate that is headed to Honduras very soon. As you can imagine, opportunities to ship supplies overseas without a huge cost are quite rare.

Having spent the last three years volunteering at the Farm of the Child Honduras, I was lucky enough to share my life with these beautiful children. Therefore, ensuring that the children have all the tools possible to enable to them to pursue their dreams is a huge passion of mine. If you have any more questions regarding this fundraiser, or anything else pertaining to the Farm of the Child, feel free to contact me. Thanks!

Sincerely,

Harrison Hanvey

harrisonhanvey@gmail.com 

www.farmofthechild.org

Wrappin' it up

Now that my time volunteering for the Farm of the Child has come to close, I want to write one last blog post, just for old times sake. As the past three years have gone by, my posts have become more and more infrequent, so I thought leaving a good eight months between the last one and this one would be a fitting way to close it out.

One of my favorite students.

My final day at the Farm was December 3^rd, and the weeks leading up to it were fairly emotional. After almost three years, one can become quite accustomed to a certain place and group of people. I’ve spent many beautiful days walking underneath tall trees and seeing the sun breaking over the mountains, with parrots squawking overhead and a cool ocean breeze blowing across my face. I’ve been fortunate to travel a lot during college and the years after, but I’ve never been to a more beautiful place than the humble rural countryside of the northern coast of Honduras. I’ve also met some of the most beautiful and welcoming people there. Many of the Honduran men and women I worked with and got to know inspired me and taught me many things about life I never would have expected to learn. Just under forty children allowed me to enter their lives and walk with them for a short while, and though myself and our organization are far from perfect and couldn’t always provide them with the love and care they deserved, many of them formed a deep and beautiful relationship with me, and also taught many lessons I hope to never forget. They offered me the most beautiful smiles I’ve ever seen, the most resilient and wild laughs, the most ridiculous senses of humor, and an incredible place to call home. They also gifted me some incredibly frustrating moments in which I wanted to give them a hard smack upside the head, but it turns out that’s frowned upon in children’s home, so from that I guess I reluctantly learned patience and restraint. So on my last night at the Farm, after having visited all of the children and adults, saying our last goodbyes, I fell asleep with full heart. Full of gratitude for the love I’ve encountered and the lessons I’ve learned, but also full of a heaviness knowing this chapter of my life was over. Unfortunately this full-hearted sleep only lasted an hour or two, because I woke up at 4am to get a ride to the bus stop, beginning a two week journey through other Central American countries that would be my, and the other four volunteers leaving with me, last hoorah before heading home.

Those of us who left this December had been planning this trip for months, and once the initial shock of leaving the Farm began to wear off, it turned out to be a great way to end our time in Central America. Our first stop was Nicaragua, where we met up with two former volunteer psychologists whom we had previously worked with in the Farm. We left Nicaragua’s capital city of Managua, and traveled to a smaller town named Jinotega, situated in the mountainous coffee growing region of the country. In this town we encountered a very interesting Nicaraguan tradition called La Griteria, or The Shouting, in English. The name sounded strange, and soon enough we found out its meaning. The Catholic feast day of the Immaculate Conception of Mary falls on December 8^th, and is a highly celebrated holiday in Nicaragua, but the night of the 7^th is when the infamous Griteria occurs. Our Nicaraguan friend with whom we were traveling explained it to us, but we didn’t fully understand the explanation until we were able to experience it for ourselves. After evening mass in the main Cathedral, everyone dispersed and began roaming the streets looking for a house or business that had erected a shrine to Mary. When you saw a crowd of people all pushing and shouting (hence the name) to get inside a certain location, you knew you’d encountered a good one. You arrived to the house and began pushing and shoving until you were able to squeeze your way in the front door. Then you stood there for ten or fifteen minutes with the other fifty people who’d pushed their way in, and half heartedly sang songs about Mary. There were normally one or two middle-aged women belting them out, and the rest of the crowd mooching off of their enthusiasm. After patiently waiting and pretending you were interested in singing, you were rewarded with a small amount of candy, an orange, or a small stalk of sugar cane. Upon receiving the prize for your heartfelt songs of adoration, you left the house to look for another, repeating the process. At the end of the night, after hours of pushing and shoving and singing with the other faithful Catholics of the town, you happily returned home with a sack full of candy and oranges and maybe a few small bags of chips. To me, it didn’t feel much like a religious experience, but I did escape without any bruises or broken bones, and fully understood why they called it La Griteria. 

Jinotega, Nicaragua

From Nicaragua we bused to San Salvador. None of us had ever been there before, and didn’t have particularly high expectations for the huge bustling city, but we turned out to be pleasantly surprised. After leaving the hostel our first day in town, we began navigating the ever complicated, but very exciting, urban bus system. We paid twenty cents to ride the bus route 52 for a while, then hopped off at the corner and paid another twenty cents to ride the 42B. I can’t remember the details precisely, but I believe we then changed to the 103A, got off and walked a few blocks, crossed the street,  got on the 33C microbus, very different from the 33C full sized bus, rode it to the intersection with route 13, then took that north to our destination. One way or another, with lots of help from the locals, and a many twenty cent bus fares, we navigated out way to the University of Central America. Here we visited the site of the murder of six Jesuit priests and two women, which took place during the Salvadorian Civil War. We read accounts of each of their lives, their work with the poor and their calls for justice, during a time when speaking out against those in power, the government and the military, was a risky business. Ultimately, on November 16, 1989, they opened their doors to a US-trained, Salvadorian counter-insurgency force, which entered their home and murdered them in. They died for speaking out against injustice, standing up for the poor, and thus, in the eyes of the military, identifying themselves with subversive movements. Later on we visited the home of Oscar Romero, archbishop of El Salvador during the same time period, who was known for speaking out against the ongoing violence and the oppression of the poor. He too was assassinated, in 1980, while celebrating the mass. During his funeral in the cathedral of San Salvador, the military set of bombs and fired shots into the crowd of the tens of thousands who attended. It was very rattling to know that these types of crimes against humanity were going on during our lifetimes, and especially that the US Government was in many ways involved. Those who were in power, fought to maintain it at all costs, regardless of how many innocent lives it required. Visiting these sites were very sacred moments for all of us. Sobering to know of the atrocities, yet for me it was also inspiring, learning of the six Jesuit priests, two women, and Archbishop Romero, whom tirelessly fought for the rights of the poor and the sanctity of life. We too had been living with and working with the poor of Central America, and learning about the stories of these martyrs inspired me to continue to fight for the poor, and for justice, in whatever way that may manifest itself in the future.

The chapel in the Farm of the Child, Guatemala

Leaving El Salvador, we headed to our final stop: Guatemala. For all of us the journey had begun there, spending several weeks in 2012 studying Spanish before heading on to Honduras. And for many of us the journey was going to end there as well. We went because we wanted to see the sight of an orphanage founded in northern Guatemala, by the same couple that founded our orphanage in Honduras. The original Guatemalan orphanage was begun in the 1980s, and after building it and running it for many years, the couple moved to Honduras to begin another, which would become the Farm of the Child as we know it today. Unfortunately the original Farm of the Child in Guatemala didn’t last long after the founders left, the children were relocated to other homes, and now the site is only ruins. While planning this trip, we talked to the founder, and she told us that no one had visited the site in over ten years, and that there was probably very little remaining. Many more phone calls later we got in touch with a man who said he would take us to the original site and show us around. So from Guatemala City, we got on a night bus, and more or less 15 hours later, arrived in El Naranjo, Guatemala, a city well known for… absolutely nothing. It is close to the Mexican border, so it is a good stop off point for all immigrants heading north, but other than that all the town has is a big river and a lot of cattle. In fact it didn’t even have electricity until it was just recently installed this past November. Our soon to be friend, Victor, a former teacher at the orphanage’s school, met us when we arrived, and took us to the hotel where we would stay. Immediately he began telling us one story after another of the old Farm, one of his favorites being about Pablo, the resident howler monkey who lived in the trees and was constantly harassing the kids. If one of the children attending the school wasn’t playing close attention, he would steal their backpack and carry it up the tree to inspect it for anything he was interested in. He kept what he wanted, and threw the rest back down. He would even steal the babies’ bottles of milk, carry them up the tree, then upon drinking the milk, hurl the empty bottle to the ground. For years it seemed like the children had a love-hate relationship with Pablo, until one day, the German man who directing the orphanage at that time, sent all the kids into town to buy some ice cream. While they were gone, he got out his trusty rifle and ended the Pablo’s mischief once and for all. When the kids began to ask where Pablo went, he replied that he must be off in the forest somewhere playing with his friends. Finally Victor finished with his favorite story of all. The story of how he married one of the English volunteers, who is still his wife today and with whom he has a fifteen year old son. Obviously Victor could never forget the Farm. The next day he put us on a boat, and took us on the short trip down the river to the site of the Guatemalan Farm of the Child. The only buildings really left standing were the chapel and a few chicken coops, but the concrete foundations were all still there, and we were able to vividly imagine the stories Victor explained. Kids making loops on rollerblades in the one room schoolhouse, the female caretaker who they always tried to keep from going to town because she frequently ended up pregnant afterwards, and Vicente, the founder, taking off in his Cessna on the dirt runway, bringing someone to the nearest hospital hours away. Getting to know the original Farm of the Child, and hearing Victor’s endless stories, was a dream for us, and a very fitting way to end our journey.

My three years at the Farm of the Child in Honduras was one of the most beautiful experiences of my life. It involved some of the lowest lows, and some of the highest highs, and because of that it urged me to learn and grow in ways I never would have imagined. I encountered a dark side of humanity I’d never known much of before, in the suffering of the children and the struggles they deal with daily through no fault of their own. But I also encountered a force and a resilience I’d seldom seen before, in the way they respond to their demons, and the way the volunteers and employees of the Farm fight their battles with them. And finally I found a real beauty in the landscape and lifestyle of rural Central America, and in the unlikely relationships formed between abandoned children, Honduran adults, and American idealistic volunteers. Those three years were far from easy, but for that I’m very grateful, because it allowed me to learn what I have, and grow into the person I’ve become. I’m grateful for the opportunity to be there, to God, and to each and every one of the people I’ve had the pleasure to meet over the past three years. And I pray that the things I’ve learned and the ways I’ve grown continue on with me as I move forward with life.

Group of Farm boys along with neighbor boys after a 3-1           The fear-inspiring, mustache-wearing Farm male volunteers

And for all of you who’ve lost countless hours of your life reading these far-too-lengthy blog posts, thanks I guess. I enjoyed writing them, so I hope ya'll enjoyed reading them.

  

Mud, Guatusas, and Socialism

For the four or five people who actually read this blog (two of them being my parents), you’ve probably already heard most of this. I tend to forget just about everything, and can only remember a handful of stories at a time, repeating them over and over to whoever will listen. So if this all sounds familiar, just give it a quick scan and go back to facebook.

Back in December, another one of the missionaries, Kevin, and I, went home on vacation with one of the Honduran staff here at the Farm, Dynia. She lives in Patuca, a town on the southern side of the country, not far from the border with Nicaragua. We hopped on a bus from Trujillo at 5am, and for the next seventeen hours fought  dirt roads in the heart of the rainy season. About three or four in the afternoon, the bus finally fell victim to the forces of nature, and all fifty or so of us had to get off while they called a front end loader to pull it out of the mud. For the next hour or so, this strong piece of Caterpillar engineering, with tires balder than Samuel L. Jackson’s head, attempted to pull us out. Meanwhile we’re standing in the rain, wondering whether or not we’ll make it there before midnight. At one point, another car came up, got stuck in the mud as well, and being the gentleman I am, decided I would help push it out. God, having the sense of humor that He does, repaid my good deed with mud being slung all over my jeans and nice shirt from the spinning tires. But then again, maybe I should’ve seen that one coming… By the time the Cat is able to pull the bus out and we made it to town, the moon was starting to rise. We finished the adventure with a half a mile trek through mud up to our calves and suitcases over our heads, and Kevin falling over every five minutes, before eventually reaching Dynia’s house. The town had no electricity and the house had a dirt floor, but I have never felt so welcomed in someone’s home. I think they killed half the chickens they owned in order to serve us meat at every meal. Some might say, however, that Dynia’s uncle, Mando, was the most hospitable of all. Mando is a farmer, and our time in Patuca coincided with the beginning of the corn harvest. Kevin and I woke up one morning, had a breakfast of chicken, beans, and five or so corn tortillas, then walked over to Mando’s house to see what his family was up to. His wife was grilling some corn, and we eagerly accepted the invitation to eat an ear. It was delicious, and so they offered us another. Now it’s a little rude in latino culture to turn down a gift when offered, so we obviously said, “Yeah, we’d love some more!” Then they offered us a third. “Great!” we said through slightly gritted teeth. By now my stomach is starting to rebel. Then a fourth. “Uhm… eh… well… okay,” remembering that other than a priest back in the 90s, we’re the first white people to ever come to this village, so we better make America proud. Then a fifth! At this point I’m not sure if this is called hospitality or a sick joke, but finally we said we’d take it with us so we could eat it back at Dynia’s house, secretly planning to ditch them somewhere in one of the patches of knee high mud. I, personally, didn’t want to see corn of any sort for the next year, and Kevin literally became sick. I think he was still puking up corn a few days later…

       Their humble abode.                         Dynia cookin up some good chow.               Backdrop of their house.

 Another exciting thing that happened around the same time was that I became the proud owner of a baby guatusa. A what? A guatusa! In English they’re called agoutis, but since you’ve probably never heard of that name either, we’ll just stick to the Honduran term. It’s a rodent, kind of like a mix between a guinea pig and a rabbit, and weights around ten or twelve pounds as an adult. The story is that one day, I was talking to my friend Marcos, one of the Honduran maintenance workers, and we were discussing how people down there often have wild animals for pets. So I told him that if he ever found a baby animal while he was out hunting in the mountains, to bring it down for me. And a few weeks later, I’m the proud owner of a baby guatusa. She was definitely very latina and very sexy, so we named her Shakira, and made a cage for her. She eats just about any fruit you can find, a few vegetables, and loves nuts. She’s actually the only known animal that can open a Brazil nut! (yeah I don’t know what that is either) But since I’ve been on vacation back in the states,

Shakira with her game face on.

the other volunteers have found out she loves Cornflakes more than anything. I bought a cat leash here in the states, so soon I’ll be able to take her around the Farm, to class, and to morning prayer. I’m pretty sure St. Francis would’ve loved to have a guatusa with him in the chapel during prayer, so I don’t wanna hear any complaints from the nuns. No doubt Shakira will be a faithful friend to the volunteers for many years to come. In fact, they say guatusas can live for twenty years in captivity. But then again, I just might smuggle her back to the states with me.

The last part of this blog has a different tone. At the risk of sounding like a self-righteous young American who’s spent time abroad, I’d like to throw out some thoughts I’ve had lately about material poverty. I’m giving fair warning through, my dad’s been calling me a socialist for a few weeks now, so if you don’t wanna hear my idealistic rants, you should go now. Spending time in rural Central America has made material poverty a very real concept for me. Instead of the poor being starving Africans on tv or people I heard about at mass, the poor are the kids I have in my English class, or the friends I’ve made in the surrounding communities. I know that there are kids in my classes who go without meals, or that eat meat once every blue moon. One of my good friend’s family members recently got very sick, and the family had to sell two motorcycles and a property they owned to pay for the treatment. Another friend is planting as much as he can on a little bit of land beside his house, and fishing when possible to try to put food on the table for his large family, now that he doesn’t have a steady job. I met a lady in one of the mountain villages who walks five hours roundtrip to town a couple times a week to wash clothes for a woman there. I asked her why she doesn’t take the bus and she replied, “I only get paid 100 lempiras (5 dollars) each time, and the bus tickets would cost 40 (2 dollars).” Sick people often come in our clinic without the money to pay for the treatment they need in a hospital. And here I am with money in my bank account, wondering if helping these people out would be “sustainable,” or if I might need that money for retirement some day. I don’t give because one day I just might need that money, and I’ll be glad I saved it. But the thing is, they need it today. All my life I’ve heard the stories about Jesus telling the man who had fulfilled all of the commandments to give everything to the poor, or the woman in the temple who gave the only two cents she had, and I’ve thought to myself, sure I’ll give, but first let me get a house, a car, good health insurance, a healthy 401k, some investments, and enough money to go out with my friends on the weekend. Then I’ll give a few bucks to feed the hungry. But since I’ve had sustainability on the mind anyways, one thing is for sure: my type of lifestyle is certainly not sustainable. The whole world cannot live like middle class America, the earth simply does not have enough resources. Therefore, because I am financially and materially secure, someone else will live in poverty. Not everyone can be rich, one has to be a result of the other. I did a quiz online, and based on my salary when I worked on cargo ships, I was of the richest 0.5% of the world. Sure I call myself middle class America, but I’m certainly not the middle class of the world. The stereotypical “good Christian” avoids the big three: alcohol, drugs, and sex. But when I look at the gospels, Jesus seems to do a lot more talking about the rich and the poor than he does about these. Maybe for the past twenty years I’ve just conveniently skipped over the parts that threaten my comfortable lifestyle.

So what is the answer to global poverty? I’m not sure. Should I forget the retirement fund and give all my money to others? I dunno. But I do think it is a question that we ponder far too little. And if I had happened to be born in rural Uganda, Bangladesh, or Honduras, it would definitely be something I’d think about far more often.

Ok, dad, that’s the end of my socialist rant for today.