Human Development

September 5^th, 2011

             Happy Labor Day to all in the states, hope you are enjoying your weekend and the last bit of summer. I had a pretty exciting weekend here, on Friday we had another make shift movie night in which we borrow the projector and play a movie onto a wall. We attempted to watch the movie “Bridesmaids,” I say attempted because about thirty minutes in it began to rain… a lot. I’m talking probably the most rain I have seen come down in a 30 minute period in my life, the rain kept knocking the power out so the movie was unable to finish up but the girls decided to turn it into a makeshift dance party instead, after showing off my fabulous dance moves (I have actually learned a couple of Latin dances while here and I feel like I am actually okay at them surprisingly) for a few minutes and then returned back to my house. I needed to rest up for the busy weekend that included two birthday parties and a day of helping to clean up at the local school. The two birthday parties were actually two other volunteers who oddly enough had their birthdays on consecutive days, so we were able to experience the birthday party Honduran style. Honduran birthday parties are not all that different but they do have a full meal, cake, and usually some party games (the party today also had the added bonus of gift bags).

            In between all of this partying we also were able to get a little community service in as well. The local school was having a cleanup day at their school and they extended an invite to us seeing as how we are able bodied individuals who like to help. We were told to show up at 8 o’clock as this was the starting time, we have long been told that things here in Honduras do not start on time and so many of us showed up knowing full well that we would be waiting for 10-20 minutes. Well we waited for about 45 minutes and still no one showed up, I pasted the time by picking the weeds amongst the plants in the garden a skill that I did not know I had but now realize I have picked up after years of watching my Dad do the same thing. So thanks Dad for teaching me such a useful and handy skill! After this long period of waiting some of the other volunteers got tired of waiting and left, soon after they left the lady in charge showed up which just goes to show you that you should always go that extra mile even if it is something as small as five more minutes. Once the lady showed up she immediately put us to work and I was handed a machete and told to chop off some branches of a nearby tree. I am telling you right now, if you ever want to feel like a man go out in your backyard with a machete and start chopping branches, it is a good feeling. I even climbed up into the tree with the machete and chopped some branches (Don’t worry Mom I was very careful, I promise!) at that point I thought the tree was good but the lady kept pointing to other branches saying that they were ugly. When I got done with the tree I will admit that it looked better but I do feel like it may have been a little bit too trimmed, o well.
            After we worked for a little while longer, the lady in charge of the event came over to us and started talking to us, we found out that she had lived in the states for 23 years and she spoke good English. She told us about the challenges that she has as head of the parents organization at the school. A little bit of background on this lady, she lived in Miami where she met her husband and they had a kid. Her husband is the son of two English parents and did not speak any Spanish when they met, she did not speak any English when they met and she learned English from a dictionary (How, I have no idea). Her son, according to her, looks just like Vin Disel, a fact that she kept telling me and told me she had to show me a picture of him which unfortunately she did not.
           So after hearing much about this women’s life she began to talk about how she is the head of the parents association at the school and she does not have any children at the school. She told us how much trouble she has with getting parents to participate, a fact that was illustrated by only two parents showing up to the cleanup day and leaving after an hour of “work.” Her take on the situation is that many of the people of the community feel as though they are poor and that they cannot help out in any way, a far too common excuse that I feel is used the world over. For some reason, people do not really seem to understand that you do not have to have any money to help serve your fellow brother and sister. Her theory on this troubling problem, and I would tend to agree with at this point, is that the Honduran people (and for that matter most of Latin America) have come to the point where they expect to be given things. For so many years now people have been coming to Latin America and providing support and aid to these people only they have been providing the wrong type of support and aid. In providing mostly monetary support to these people for so many years they have actually done the opposite of their intent and actually hurt the people more than they have helped.
          So much of world aid in the past was done with the theory of give them money, that is all they need. The fact of the matter is that more than anything these people need education; I know it is cliché but give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. It is scary how well that applies to development work and even scarier to think about how little it is actually applied to the field of development. Why is it that people find it so hard to give up their time and services in today’s world and would rather give up some money instead? It seems almost paradoxical since we live in such a materialist and commercial driven world but it seems that time is more important than money. Until we begin to realize as a world community that we cannot solve development issues by throwing money at it, just like almost all problems are never fixed by throwing money at it. We need to realize that the real way to do development work is by becoming part of the community, education the community, and most importantly helping the community help themselves. In any given community, there are so many untapped resources, all it takes is someone who can point these people in the right direction, and most importantly show them that they can in fact develop their own community, using their own resources, and their own people. Human development is just that, development of humans, not of buildings or physical structures and until begin to put money into developing humans I am afraid that we will continue to deal with many of the same issues that we are dealing with today.     

P.S. new pictures:

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