Culture, Nature, and Tradition

Hidden in the biggest island within Cayos Cochinos lies East End; a Garífuna community of about 17 families that live the traditional lifestyles of Garífuna fishing villages. Their houses are small and poor, their kids wear no shoes, but they live in paradise. As a volunteer working with the peoples of Cayos Cochinos, I’ve been presented with the task of helping them find alternative sources of income to complement their, now languishing, fishing economy. Since the first day I met them, they talked about the idea of making their community a tourist destination and using the proceedings to improve the quality of life of the community members. The problem is I’ve seen many projects in Honduras where an organization donates community tourist accommodations, builds it and leaves. I have never seen any of those projects succeed and the remains of the infrastructure built are left abandoned, a constant reminder to people of yet another project that didn’t work. On the other side, being a Peace Corps volunteer means being a facilitator of what the community wants to do, not a force that goes against the current. The challenge has been, how can we make it work when we’ve seen it fail so frequently?

The first thing we’ve done is analyze why it has failed everywhere else. Max and I have visited places where similar projects were implemented and talked to the people that participated. From them, we’ve learned several things: projects have failed because the community was not involved in the implementation (management of the project and building the infrastructure itself), the materials used were low quality and everything deteriorated before the community had any income to maintain it, there were no defined roles left to the groups (who’s the manager?), nobody taught them how to run a business, how to market it, how to access clients, most of the groups were so big that any income was diluted into amounts so insignificant that it wasn’t worth the effort, and finally most of the places lacked a real tourist appeal. Yes, there was culture, but there was no organized effort to portrait it to a potential visitor.

With this information in hand, I’ve set out to design a project that addresses all these issues while still giving the community what it wants. Of course there’s also the issue of money, how are we going to pay for everything we want? The last two months have been an intense effort to design and document a good project that we can submit to potential funders. In the project team we have a community team leader, an architect, several community members, Cayos Cochinos Foundation staff and me. We’ve analyzed the market in Cayos (8,000 tourist last year alone) and the current offerings (only high-end hotel or low-end back-packer options). We’ve analyzed the customer (a lot of Honduran nationals and foreigners that visit for a day, have lunch and leave. Most say they would like to stay longer) and the strength of the community (their culture, beautiful secluded Caribbean paradise next to pristine coral reef, and delicious typical cuisine) and designed a project around all that.

Finally, we submitted a proposal in the last week of March to build a small tourist center in East End. The idea is to fill the niche of mid-range customers that visit Cayos, giving them the option to spend the day or extend their visit for a few days. It includes a restaurant that will be a wooden deck over the water where people can enjoy their meals with a view of the sea, two cabins, training on business management, finance, marketing, maintenance of the facilities, customer service, and the implementation of the concept of tourism without a trace. Within the scope, is the implementation of a working management structure where people earn a salary for their work, instead of it being a cooperative where everybody splits earnings equally, independent of what they’ve contributed. Several community members will be taken to a few tourist destinations (good and bad) so they can experience what being a tourist really is. A master contractor will be hired, but most of the construction work will be done by the community so they are prepared to maintain it in the future. We won’t know until June if the project is approved, and assuming it is, will not see any money until September. We are also looking at other funding options (plan B).
Max and I are super excited about this project, so far it has been a great learning experience and there is so much learning ahead. There are no guarantees that this project will be any better than the others we’ve seen, but we are trying our dammed best.