The Beginning
When you arrive at East End you’ll find a quiet village of 17 families. Their houses are made of mud or wood with palm or zinc roofs. The kids and the dogs play about, and you will find it difficult to know whose son or daughter or dog is whose. They all just play together and are looked after by everybody, like a commune. The breeze sweeps your face; the ocean rugged, impassive and majestic threatens to embrace everything around. You take a deep breath and, in a second, admire the beauty around you. You feel grateful for being a creature of this planet, and for having the privilege of enjoying its beauty.
This is our town. These are our people. This is the place where Max and I have done most of our work. It is ironic that this is also the place that I’ve written the least about. You’d be surprised to learn why. You’d be surprised to learn that this is where we’ve fought our biggest battles, and found our biggest threats.
It all began well before we arrived in Honduras. The community of East End, in their endless battle to end their poverty, decided to conduct a meeting. They realized how beautiful their home is, and how interested people might be in getting to know it. This presented an opportunity for jobs, by doing tourism. They contacted who they knew might help, HCRF (Cayos Cochinos Foundation) and Anthony Ives (Peace Corps volunteer at the time) and expressed their interest in building a tourist center on their premises as an income generating business. The Foundation approved the idea and obtained a permit from the Secretary of Natural Resources and Environment (SERNA) for the execution of the project.
Max and I arrived in Aug 2005, and met with the community as part of the process of community introduction that Peace Corps had taught us during training. We were new, idealistic, and excited to help and quickly fell in love with the place and its people (as we can assure you will fall in love if you ever visit the place). The community reiterated their desire to work on a tourism project in general and to build cabins, specifically. They asked for our help.
We then spent the months of October 2005 to April 2006 working with the community on creating a vision and establishing the proper organizational structure, including how the project would be run and how they would manage the business once it was built. We found a very generous architect in La Ceiba that was willing to help us without charging a penny and designed the infrastructure of the center. The design includes a cabin with two rooms, a restaurant and kitchen, a reception area and a small souvenir store where the kids could sell their handicraft to tourists. The community loved it! Things were finally happening.
The next step was to find money to build this thing, no easy task. We figured we needed about $30,000 to build our vision, including solar panels to power the center and furnishings. The community would provide the land and the labor, since they didn’t have any money to invest as capital. Max and I don’t like how development organizations go around teaching communities to form cooperatives and other pseudo-socialists organizations to reduce poverty. Over and over we see these organizations fail. The development world should know better, since we all come from countries where capitalism, not socialism, has worked. Sadly they don’t. Max and I decided to try something different. Instead of a cooperative, this would be a corporation. Each individual in the community could invest capital (in this case labor hours since they didn’t have money) and in that way become a stock holder, or part owner. The more hours they work, the higher the percentage of their ownership. The employees, all hired from within the community, would get paid basic salaries for their work, and the earnings could be re-invested or divided amongst the owners according to their investment at the end of the year. This would guarantee people had a stake in things, a percentage of the business, as opposed to everything belonging to everybody and nothing to anybody. This also guaranteed people would show up to work during the construction, if someone did not work, they would not take part in the future profits.
Finding $30,000 was still a problem. Between January and April ’06 I must have written six or seven proposal to different organizations. No easy task considering I had never done grant writing before, nobody had taught me how to do it, and every organization seemed to want different information. Some were in Spanish and some in English, which made it all the more confusing. I spent a lot of time on the internet, learning how to write them. Another problem was that we couldn’t find an organization willing to donate the full amount; they all wanted to give smaller amounts of 2, 5, or 10 thousand. We divided the project in two phases (phase I the construction of the cabins and phase II the restaurant and other areas) and sent proposals for phase I to organizations such as SAM (Mesoamerican Reef System), National Marine Sanctuaries Foundation, USAID, CITES, TNC, AVINA, and the Peace Corps. All the organizations loved the project, and they all said they wanted to support, but we’re still waiting to hear definite responses from some of them (it’s been over a year since I submitted the proposals). I’d like to add here that it is this inefficiency and uselessness that has lead me to decide I do not want to work with development organizations after finishing the Peace Corps. How do you work in an environment like that, when you understand the need out there and you see their inability to react in a timely manner?
In the end it was the Peace Corps with their Small Project Assistance (SPA) program that responded first. In April 2006, we got feedback from our Project Manager that included a request for clarification on the issue of ownership of the land. The Peace Corps would not fund infrastructure projects in places where people have invaded the land since they might be displaced and the investment could be lost. The community presented us with a copy of their title, issued by the National Agrarian Institute (INA) on September 2002. Everything was in order.
In May 2006 (exactly a year ago) we submitted the final proposal to the Peace Corps with letters of support from the director of HCRF and the president of the community’s local governing committee. The SPA grant was approved in September 2006 for $9,300. Not enough to do the entire project, but definitely enough to get us started. The community was elated, and Max and I couldn’t be happier. All the hard work of the prior months was finally paying off and soon we would start seeing the fruit of our labor.
Little did we know that in the next few days a series of events would kick in that would taint our (and the community’s) much disserved happiness. It all began with a phone call I received during the week of September 4, 2006.
To be continued in “Meeting El Padrino”.
This is our town. These are our people. This is the place where Max and I have done most of our work. It is ironic that this is also the place that I’ve written the least about. You’d be surprised to learn why. You’d be surprised to learn that this is where we’ve fought our biggest battles, and found our biggest threats.
It all began well before we arrived in Honduras. The community of East End, in their endless battle to end their poverty, decided to conduct a meeting. They realized how beautiful their home is, and how interested people might be in getting to know it. This presented an opportunity for jobs, by doing tourism. They contacted who they knew might help, HCRF (Cayos Cochinos Foundation) and Anthony Ives (Peace Corps volunteer at the time) and expressed their interest in building a tourist center on their premises as an income generating business. The Foundation approved the idea and obtained a permit from the Secretary of Natural Resources and Environment (SERNA) for the execution of the project.
Max and I arrived in Aug 2005, and met with the community as part of the process of community introduction that Peace Corps had taught us during training. We were new, idealistic, and excited to help and quickly fell in love with the place and its people (as we can assure you will fall in love if you ever visit the place). The community reiterated their desire to work on a tourism project in general and to build cabins, specifically. They asked for our help.
We then spent the months of October 2005 to April 2006 working with the community on creating a vision and establishing the proper organizational structure, including how the project would be run and how they would manage the business once it was built. We found a very generous architect in La Ceiba that was willing to help us without charging a penny and designed the infrastructure of the center. The design includes a cabin with two rooms, a restaurant and kitchen, a reception area and a small souvenir store where the kids could sell their handicraft to tourists. The community loved it! Things were finally happening.
The next step was to find money to build this thing, no easy task. We figured we needed about $30,000 to build our vision, including solar panels to power the center and furnishings. The community would provide the land and the labor, since they didn’t have any money to invest as capital. Max and I don’t like how development organizations go around teaching communities to form cooperatives and other pseudo-socialists organizations to reduce poverty. Over and over we see these organizations fail. The development world should know better, since we all come from countries where capitalism, not socialism, has worked. Sadly they don’t. Max and I decided to try something different. Instead of a cooperative, this would be a corporation. Each individual in the community could invest capital (in this case labor hours since they didn’t have money) and in that way become a stock holder, or part owner. The more hours they work, the higher the percentage of their ownership. The employees, all hired from within the community, would get paid basic salaries for their work, and the earnings could be re-invested or divided amongst the owners according to their investment at the end of the year. This would guarantee people had a stake in things, a percentage of the business, as opposed to everything belonging to everybody and nothing to anybody. This also guaranteed people would show up to work during the construction, if someone did not work, they would not take part in the future profits.
Finding $30,000 was still a problem. Between January and April ’06 I must have written six or seven proposal to different organizations. No easy task considering I had never done grant writing before, nobody had taught me how to do it, and every organization seemed to want different information. Some were in Spanish and some in English, which made it all the more confusing. I spent a lot of time on the internet, learning how to write them. Another problem was that we couldn’t find an organization willing to donate the full amount; they all wanted to give smaller amounts of 2, 5, or 10 thousand. We divided the project in two phases (phase I the construction of the cabins and phase II the restaurant and other areas) and sent proposals for phase I to organizations such as SAM (Mesoamerican Reef System), National Marine Sanctuaries Foundation, USAID, CITES, TNC, AVINA, and the Peace Corps. All the organizations loved the project, and they all said they wanted to support, but we’re still waiting to hear definite responses from some of them (it’s been over a year since I submitted the proposals). I’d like to add here that it is this inefficiency and uselessness that has lead me to decide I do not want to work with development organizations after finishing the Peace Corps. How do you work in an environment like that, when you understand the need out there and you see their inability to react in a timely manner?
In the end it was the Peace Corps with their Small Project Assistance (SPA) program that responded first. In April 2006, we got feedback from our Project Manager that included a request for clarification on the issue of ownership of the land. The Peace Corps would not fund infrastructure projects in places where people have invaded the land since they might be displaced and the investment could be lost. The community presented us with a copy of their title, issued by the National Agrarian Institute (INA) on September 2002. Everything was in order.
In May 2006 (exactly a year ago) we submitted the final proposal to the Peace Corps with letters of support from the director of HCRF and the president of the community’s local governing committee. The SPA grant was approved in September 2006 for $9,300. Not enough to do the entire project, but definitely enough to get us started. The community was elated, and Max and I couldn’t be happier. All the hard work of the prior months was finally paying off and soon we would start seeing the fruit of our labor.
Little did we know that in the next few days a series of events would kick in that would taint our (and the community’s) much disserved happiness. It all began with a phone call I received during the week of September 4, 2006.
To be continued in “Meeting El Padrino”.
posted by Lynnette @ 4:29 PM
2 comments
2 Comments:
The Padrino in refrence to "Meeting El Padrino," isn't going to be me is it?
xo
-rob
Any resemblance to actual persons, living or not living, is purely a coincidence.
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