I just finished reading The End of Poverty, by Jeffrey Sachs. He makes some important points toward the end about the anti-globalization movement.
You should know that Sachs himself is very pro-globalization. As an economist, he believes in free trade and open markets as the solutions to many problems (notably, and as the title of his book implies, to the problem of poverty). Very importantly in light of recent global economic events, though, Sachs appreciates that government has an essential role in regulating markets so that they produce the greatest amount of good for the most people.
As Sachs approaches the anti-globalization movement and begins talking about Seattle anti-WTO protesters in 1999, I’m thinking, “He’s going to start his ginormous intellectual engine and crush them.” Because Sachs is very smart. And of course, it’s his book—the protesters don’t get a rebuttal.
In fact, Sachs expresses admiration for the anti-globalizing movement. He credits anti-globalizers with putting the spotlight on issues of corporate responsibility. Corporations are forced to provide better wages and working conditions in factories abroad, to pay closer attention to the environmental impacts of their factories, and to provide drugs at reduced prices in poor countries because of the negative attention they will otherwise receive from anti-globalizers and the media. Of course, this solution is not perfect—government regulation could do a whole lot more than a bunch of rowdy twenty-somethings in hoodies and stocking caps.
So the anti-globalizers have their heart in the right place. Which is something I can appreciate, because I have at least a few times referenced the “corporations” as the root causes of various and sundry social and environmental problems.
But Sachs also criticizes the anti-globalizers for being short-sighted. Yes, Nike is paying workers too little at its scummy factory in Indonesia (or, at least was doing this before the 1999 protests). But who let Nike do this? Indonesia, for not regulating a living minimum wage. The United States, for allowing its companies to profit off of international regulatory loopholes. The “international system”. Not for allowing companies like Nike exist, but for failing to constrain these companies’ actions.
What about Honduras? I have heard that Home Depot imports a fair amount of its wood from Honduras. Some comes from tropical rainforests where endangered species live. Honduras has passed several laws protecting swathes of land from loggers. However, much logging in Honduras happens in a very informal way—a couple of campesinos know they can sell wood in San Pedro Sula for x price, so they go to where they know there is a whole lot of wood available—the national forest. A place as poor as Honduras has no money to spend protecting the integrity of its national forest, and there is no check at the point of sale on where the wood comes from. Who’s to blame? Honduras has done all it can; Home Depot can’t necessarily do more. Any ideas for a solution?
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Chuchos and Poverty Policy (a blog that i started a month ago and didn't finish)
Chuchos and Poverty Policy
Chuchos
Dozens of dogs roam the streets of Copán. By way of explanation, I have heard that Hondurans do not keep house-pets in the same way we do in the United States. A family may own and feed a cat or dog, but that animal lives exclusively outside the house. The idea appealed to me for awhile: pet ownership without confining an animal to life in a box; a best friend that can walk itself. Even more interesting was that everyone seemed to know the names of the town dogs. I remember thinking, “It makes sense—in a town where everyone knows each other, they also know each other’s dogs.” But as I paid more attention, I noticed a few stranger things. All of the dogs seemed to have the same name. “Chucho!” people would yell at passing dogs. Then, instead of coming, the dogs always seemed to turn tail and run from their callers. Had Honduran dogs re-discovered the call of the wild, and sought further independence from their human captors?
It wasn’t until I got fed up living with piles of garbage that I was finally able to answer this question. My landlady speaks wonderful Spanish. Her speed, fluency, and control of the regional accent are all enviable to someone who is trying to learn to communicate with locals. Put another way, she is impossible to understand. So when I have a question for her, like “What do I do with my garbage?”, I can generally expect an hour-long conversation full of gesturing and the words ripite por favor. What I think I learned, though, is that garbage day is Wednesday. Oh, and the garbage bags should be tied to the front gate, high up if possible, out of the reach of the chuchos. Because the chuchos are not fed by anyone in particular—they are stray dogs in a place where spaying and neutering has not yet arrived.
Poverty
To foil the chuchos, who might otherwise spread garbage all over Copán’s streets, houses and businesses without gates have constructed small garbage lofts. For example, my school, which produces five large bags of garbage every day—mostly food packages and scraps from the cafeteria—built a six-foot garbage loft structure on four poles with about 30 square feet of space on top. The bags pile up until garbage day, safe from chucho interference.
The other day, I found myself waiting for a friend in front of the school, not far from the garbage loft. I was there about ten minutes before a family of six showed up—five children under the age of ten, and their pregnant mother. The mother immediately sat down on a stone under a tree, holding the youngest child’s hand. I assumed they were waiting to catch a bus. Then I saw that the oldest of the family, a girl of nine, had climbed the tree and was picking fruit. The fruit is called jocote, and has no English translation of which I am aware. Jocotes are the size of large grapes, and my students like to buy them in bags of twenty before eating them with plenty of salt. They have not yet appealed to my taste buds.
In her mouth, the tree-climber held a machete. She climbed up high, and farther out on a limb than I would have dared to go. Then she began hacking away. As she chopped, I noticed her two younger brothers, probably five and seven years old, were climbing the garbage loft. They threw two bags down, jumped after them, and hauled them off into the bushes. The girl in the tree shouted at her youngest sister to step back a moment before her machete buried its blade in the ground next to her. Soon after, both sisters commenced stripping the branches of all of their small green fruit. The boys came out of the bushes with their trophy, two pizza boxes—I assume with some leftovers inside. The mother stood up, her children lined up behind her, and off they went from where they had come.
The whole event took less than ten minutes.
Chuchos
Dozens of dogs roam the streets of Copán. By way of explanation, I have heard that Hondurans do not keep house-pets in the same way we do in the United States. A family may own and feed a cat or dog, but that animal lives exclusively outside the house. The idea appealed to me for awhile: pet ownership without confining an animal to life in a box; a best friend that can walk itself. Even more interesting was that everyone seemed to know the names of the town dogs. I remember thinking, “It makes sense—in a town where everyone knows each other, they also know each other’s dogs.” But as I paid more attention, I noticed a few stranger things. All of the dogs seemed to have the same name. “Chucho!” people would yell at passing dogs. Then, instead of coming, the dogs always seemed to turn tail and run from their callers. Had Honduran dogs re-discovered the call of the wild, and sought further independence from their human captors?
It wasn’t until I got fed up living with piles of garbage that I was finally able to answer this question. My landlady speaks wonderful Spanish. Her speed, fluency, and control of the regional accent are all enviable to someone who is trying to learn to communicate with locals. Put another way, she is impossible to understand. So when I have a question for her, like “What do I do with my garbage?”, I can generally expect an hour-long conversation full of gesturing and the words ripite por favor. What I think I learned, though, is that garbage day is Wednesday. Oh, and the garbage bags should be tied to the front gate, high up if possible, out of the reach of the chuchos. Because the chuchos are not fed by anyone in particular—they are stray dogs in a place where spaying and neutering has not yet arrived.
Poverty
To foil the chuchos, who might otherwise spread garbage all over Copán’s streets, houses and businesses without gates have constructed small garbage lofts. For example, my school, which produces five large bags of garbage every day—mostly food packages and scraps from the cafeteria—built a six-foot garbage loft structure on four poles with about 30 square feet of space on top. The bags pile up until garbage day, safe from chucho interference.
The other day, I found myself waiting for a friend in front of the school, not far from the garbage loft. I was there about ten minutes before a family of six showed up—five children under the age of ten, and their pregnant mother. The mother immediately sat down on a stone under a tree, holding the youngest child’s hand. I assumed they were waiting to catch a bus. Then I saw that the oldest of the family, a girl of nine, had climbed the tree and was picking fruit. The fruit is called jocote, and has no English translation of which I am aware. Jocotes are the size of large grapes, and my students like to buy them in bags of twenty before eating them with plenty of salt. They have not yet appealed to my taste buds.
In her mouth, the tree-climber held a machete. She climbed up high, and farther out on a limb than I would have dared to go. Then she began hacking away. As she chopped, I noticed her two younger brothers, probably five and seven years old, were climbing the garbage loft. They threw two bags down, jumped after them, and hauled them off into the bushes. The girl in the tree shouted at her youngest sister to step back a moment before her machete buried its blade in the ground next to her. Soon after, both sisters commenced stripping the branches of all of their small green fruit. The boys came out of the bushes with their trophy, two pizza boxes—I assume with some leftovers inside. The mother stood up, her children lined up behind her, and off they went from where they had come.
The whole event took less than ten minutes.
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Two Economies
In Honduras today, I saw a man riding his horse down the street, talking on his cell phone, and I found myself wondering: is that legal? In Washington, we have laws about talking on the phone while in transit. Either you have a hands-free device, or you leave the talking to your co-pilot. The horseman clearly had no hands-free device. Copilot? Thankfully, his scrawny beast was only burdened with one human. But do you think anything in Washington’s legal code allows for...autopilot? The technology hasn’t arrived on US streets, but I would say the horse knew exactly where it was going, and was fully capable of averting obstacles without instructions from its master. Horse autopilot therefore poses very little risk of accident. There’s an idea to consider if you like to chat while commuting.
The juxtaposition of old and new economies is all over Copán: men drive gas-powered trucks out to the forest to cut firewood with hand tools. The wood fuels stoves in households where families do have electricity, but find it more useful to power their televisions. Local carpenters and tortilla-makers, who used to have a lock on the local market, are just now facing competition from industrial, manufactured versions of their products.
In this world of two economies, those who are first to join the new one reap the most benefits. Felipe, the owner and sole technician of the largest internet supplier in town, has 250 customers paying the equivalent of $40 per month for his service. By Honduran standards, he is bringing in a small fortune of $120,000 annually. I do not know what his overhead looks like, but his profit potential is certainly much greater than that of someone who hauls a dozen bundles of wood into town each day to be sold for 10 Lempiras (about $0.55) apiece.
Felipe did not receive a formal technical education. He was lucky to be able to spend a few months in the US (I’m not sure if he came legally or not, as visas are extremely difficult to acquire when coming from Honduras), and he was doubly lucky to have a relative in Miami who works with computer networks. With this brief experience, Felipe was able to launch his start-up a few years ago.
Not everyone in Honduras is as lucky as Felipe. The two paths to join the new economy of technology and international trade, connections to rich countries and education, both favor individuals from families that are already wealthy. Immigration to the US is a difficult, expensive process. Staying in school beyond sixth grade is tough when your family needs you to work, and schooling is only free until ninth grade. Upper-level education is focused around Honduras’s two big cities, San Pedro Sula and Tegucigalpa, which are dangerous, expensive places to live.
While Honduras is benefiting from its integration into the new economy, the advantages are favoring some people more than others. To share the wealth more efficiently and evenly, Honduras needs to expand its educational system and provide incentives for young people to stay in school and learn the trades that will make them better contributors to society.
The juxtaposition of old and new economies is all over Copán: men drive gas-powered trucks out to the forest to cut firewood with hand tools. The wood fuels stoves in households where families do have electricity, but find it more useful to power their televisions. Local carpenters and tortilla-makers, who used to have a lock on the local market, are just now facing competition from industrial, manufactured versions of their products.
In this world of two economies, those who are first to join the new one reap the most benefits. Felipe, the owner and sole technician of the largest internet supplier in town, has 250 customers paying the equivalent of $40 per month for his service. By Honduran standards, he is bringing in a small fortune of $120,000 annually. I do not know what his overhead looks like, but his profit potential is certainly much greater than that of someone who hauls a dozen bundles of wood into town each day to be sold for 10 Lempiras (about $0.55) apiece.
Felipe did not receive a formal technical education. He was lucky to be able to spend a few months in the US (I’m not sure if he came legally or not, as visas are extremely difficult to acquire when coming from Honduras), and he was doubly lucky to have a relative in Miami who works with computer networks. With this brief experience, Felipe was able to launch his start-up a few years ago.
Not everyone in Honduras is as lucky as Felipe. The two paths to join the new economy of technology and international trade, connections to rich countries and education, both favor individuals from families that are already wealthy. Immigration to the US is a difficult, expensive process. Staying in school beyond sixth grade is tough when your family needs you to work, and schooling is only free until ninth grade. Upper-level education is focused around Honduras’s two big cities, San Pedro Sula and Tegucigalpa, which are dangerous, expensive places to live.
While Honduras is benefiting from its integration into the new economy, the advantages are favoring some people more than others. To share the wealth more efficiently and evenly, Honduras needs to expand its educational system and provide incentives for young people to stay in school and learn the trades that will make them better contributors to society.
Where is the poverty?
Downtown Copán is beautiful. The town centers on a spacious plaza full of shady trees, with a stone fountain in the middle. Across the cobbled streets from the plaza are modern-looking hotels, restaurants, a bank with an ATM, and cafés with wi-fi. If you were to parachute into the plaza and start your exploration of Honduras from there, you might immediately think you had found a better version of the United States: all of the services you ever wanted, in a gorgeous setting, at a third of the price (Hotel Marina de Copán, the best 4-star in town, starts at $85 per night; a nice dinner for two costs around $10). And then you might ask yourself: where is the poverty?
I found myself wondering this upon my arrival in Copán. Of course, there are a few immediately noticeable lifestyle changes—you can’t drink the tap water, and you have to put your TP in the little can next to the toilet instead of flushing it—but these don’t necessarily make you feel like you are living in poverty. (Imagine Vancouver with smaller pipes and no water treatment.) All in all, these adaptations aren’t much compared to the poverty-shock I had imagined before leaving.
So there are some very nice things in Honduras. But some wealth does not equal general wealth. As a city that receives over 100,000 tourists per year (mostly to see the Mayan ruins just outside of town), downtown Copán comes with a bright shiny veneer that masks some of the problems its people are facing. If, instead of parachuting into the center of town, you had taken a more conventional approach—flown into San Pedro Sula and ridden the bus three hours into the hills—you would have seen a very different part of Honduran life.
Leaving San Pedro Sula (or, just San Pedro) is a little like leaving a war zone. Similar to other Central American cities, San Pedro has a ridiculously high crime rate—one of the clearest signs of poverty. One particular story comes to mind: I have a friend who lived in San Pedro for three years, during which he was robbed multiple times in different manners. The worst of these was a home break-in. Although his house was protected by a fence, plus bars on all of the windows, one tenacious criminal figured out how to get in. The crook pulled his truck up to the fence, allowing him to jump over and run a chain from his truck to the window bars. He then hit the accelerator and ripped the front off of my friend’s house.
The happiness you might feel escaping from Honduras’s second-largest city is tempered if you look through the window on your way out to see shantytowns stretching for miles. After you have realized that even a stone house with a fence and barred windows isn’t entirely safe, imagine living in a house cobbled together from thin sheets of roofing metal. On the bright side for most of the people who live in these houses, they can afford very little worth taking.
Between San Pedro and Copán is another kind of poverty. Rural Honduras is full of small agrarian villages, where people live much the same as they have for the past few centuries. Poor education and a dearth of job opportunities mean that people have little incentive to abandon their small farms in search of something more. Thus, while Copán has wi-fi, many Honduran families can’t afford necessary medical care; children continue to walk shoeless; and few stay in school past sixth grade, when they are brought back home to work and support the family.
If you ride the expensive luxury bus out of town, though, you can still miss everything: it picks you up at the airport and whisks you off to your destination in a compartment with curtains on the windows and a movie to distract you. Tourists from rich countries can travel and be pleasantly surprised by the affluence here. But poverty in Honduras is not defined by the upper end of the spectrum. Rather, the presence of a small class of people enjoying lifestyles similar to wealthy Americans makes it all the more shocking how poor the majority of Honduras is.
I found myself wondering this upon my arrival in Copán. Of course, there are a few immediately noticeable lifestyle changes—you can’t drink the tap water, and you have to put your TP in the little can next to the toilet instead of flushing it—but these don’t necessarily make you feel like you are living in poverty. (Imagine Vancouver with smaller pipes and no water treatment.) All in all, these adaptations aren’t much compared to the poverty-shock I had imagined before leaving.
So there are some very nice things in Honduras. But some wealth does not equal general wealth. As a city that receives over 100,000 tourists per year (mostly to see the Mayan ruins just outside of town), downtown Copán comes with a bright shiny veneer that masks some of the problems its people are facing. If, instead of parachuting into the center of town, you had taken a more conventional approach—flown into San Pedro Sula and ridden the bus three hours into the hills—you would have seen a very different part of Honduran life.
Leaving San Pedro Sula (or, just San Pedro) is a little like leaving a war zone. Similar to other Central American cities, San Pedro has a ridiculously high crime rate—one of the clearest signs of poverty. One particular story comes to mind: I have a friend who lived in San Pedro for three years, during which he was robbed multiple times in different manners. The worst of these was a home break-in. Although his house was protected by a fence, plus bars on all of the windows, one tenacious criminal figured out how to get in. The crook pulled his truck up to the fence, allowing him to jump over and run a chain from his truck to the window bars. He then hit the accelerator and ripped the front off of my friend’s house.
The happiness you might feel escaping from Honduras’s second-largest city is tempered if you look through the window on your way out to see shantytowns stretching for miles. After you have realized that even a stone house with a fence and barred windows isn’t entirely safe, imagine living in a house cobbled together from thin sheets of roofing metal. On the bright side for most of the people who live in these houses, they can afford very little worth taking.
Between San Pedro and Copán is another kind of poverty. Rural Honduras is full of small agrarian villages, where people live much the same as they have for the past few centuries. Poor education and a dearth of job opportunities mean that people have little incentive to abandon their small farms in search of something more. Thus, while Copán has wi-fi, many Honduran families can’t afford necessary medical care; children continue to walk shoeless; and few stay in school past sixth grade, when they are brought back home to work and support the family.
If you ride the expensive luxury bus out of town, though, you can still miss everything: it picks you up at the airport and whisks you off to your destination in a compartment with curtains on the windows and a movie to distract you. Tourists from rich countries can travel and be pleasantly surprised by the affluence here. But poverty in Honduras is not defined by the upper end of the spectrum. Rather, the presence of a small class of people enjoying lifestyles similar to wealthy Americans makes it all the more shocking how poor the majority of Honduras is.
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Leaving
Today is important because I am leaving for Copan (in 8 hrs. 37 min.!). Here is my dilemma: nap, or savor my time in the Great PNW?* Napping seems impossible, even ludicrous: in addition to having packing to do and last-minute purchases to make, there is the excitement (and the coffee) keeping me wired.
But then there's the nap. Napping is essential to being alert. If you've ever traveled to a foreign place, you know how important it is to be alert on the first days. These are the days when you form your impression of a place. If you are alert, you notice where this impression comes from. It's like jumping into a swimming pool: for the first minute, you are shocked by how cold (or how surprisingly warm, even though you expected goosebumps) the pool is. Then you start having fun. After dunking your sister, swimming around like a shark, and dropping a few cannon-balls, you barely notice the water any more. It's too late: you can no longer tell your mother whether the pool is cold or not.
I will be a good son and let you know what the first shocking (or surprisingly soothing) dip in this new pool is like. I promise to overcome the obstacles and nap. Expect a report from me soon!
*For those poor souls who aren't familiar, Pacific Northwest.
Monday, August 18, 2008
A New Definition of Poverty
This is a brief background article I wrote for The Columbian newspaper in my hometown of Vancouver, Washington:
Like most folks from
When I graduated from
I go to these places for a number of reasons. I’m curious—I want to understand how it’s possible that the average American earns $43,000 a year, while Lee County residents earn only a quarter of that, and Hondurans earn a miniscule $3300. I also have a strong desire to help. As a teacher, I play a significant role in opening young people’s eyes to opportunities, and in giving them the skills necessary to achieve these. Finally (and this is why I’m writing you this letter), I think it’s important for people to understand different perspectives. They allow us to see ourselves in a new light, and to appreciate the humanity of those who are far away.
POVERTY REDEFINEDI would like to begin by proposing that middle-class Vancouverites like me are actually the world’s upper crust. I know, driving down I-5 in our cars, we don’t feel especially rich. At home, we may have wireless internet, flat-screen televisions, and i-pods, but to us, this is just normal. We feel like we are barely keeping up with the Joneses.
It turns out the Joneses are some of the richest people in the world. Eighty percent of the world survives on less than $5,533 per year. Can you imagine trying to make payments on your mortgage, your car, your health insurance, your... ... ..., with this amount of money? Turns out you’d have to give up a lot of these things.
In the
A Honduran would be astonished to see that those whom we consider “poor” in the
All of this leaves me feeling...well, rich. And it leaves me with a lot of questions. For example, does all of this mean that poor people in the
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