Redefining roles

Today I visited two rural communities in the mountains above Olanchito, called Las Piedras de Afilar and Los Planes. The former is full of a hard metamorphic slate that the people use for sharpening their knives and the latter is relatively flat (for being in a mountainous area), so I can give credit to no one for creativity in naming. I do give credit to the people of both communities for being dedicated and hard-working, though. I went up with Luis, the head of a small Honduran NGO called Alfalit that I recently started working with. Luis’ purpose was to inspect the fields of farmers who had used improved seeds and fertilizers provided by Alfalit late last year. My purpose was to provoke discussion of the status of the construction of the potable water system that I finished designing for them last September, with direction from my counterpart at SANAA (the federal Honduran agency in charge of water system construction and maintenance and the organization with which I was primarily placed). Although I was told by my SANAA counterpart that I was going to be able to work in the construction and not just the design of the system, I have been given no resources to do so, nor have I been included in the administrative process that precedes construction. Instead, a personal friend of my counterpart has been temporarily transferred from the La Ceiba office to oversee the construction and the training of the communities. Which would be fine because he is a SANAA employee and he is Honduran, except that he has no particular expertise and talks a lot fancier than he walks. And I am basically being confined to the office, which doesn’t help me understand any better the functioning of the systems I am learning to design. This, among many reasons, is why I have only been to the SANAA office four times since December.

In any case, I have found a new and more productive role in becoming a liaison between SANAA and Alfalit. These two organizations have theoretically been working together for awhile, in the sense that SANAA personnel have agreed to design water systems for certain communities and provide them with other technical support as well, and Alfalit has agreed to strengthen local water associations and look for additional funding sources for project materials that SANAA cannot provide. But the reality is that no one at SANAA has been responsible about sticking to their end of the agreement. As a result, water systems for some communities have been in the works for years without any progress. Since I started shuttling back and forth between the two offices 3 weeks ago, communication between the organizations, which had all but shut down, has warily re-opened. The main reason is that the heads of both SANAA and Alfalit have some degree of trust in me, even though they don’t have much trust in each other. Surprisingly, progress is already being made on the water systems of four remote rural communities, including Piedras de Afilar and Planes which I visited today.

I admit that my role feels a little strange, but at the same time it is precisely my position as an outsider and volunteer that allows me to sidestep some of the nonsense that has held up these projects. Assuming things continue to go well, I have my sights set on passing this responsibility to a particular capable SANAA employee who cannot currently be involved for various political reasons but who would make a great liaison once some of said politica blows past.

On a more simple level: today I saw fresh beans for the first time in my life. Until this morning, I hadn’t realized that the freshest beans I had ever seen were the already dried ones that you find in huge round woven baskets in Honduran farmer’s markets and in the bulk foods aisle of American supermarkets. Hondurans eat red beans, which in their dried state are the dark, dull color of iron-stained earth. Fresh, however, they are a shining alive red. Like blood.