A Trip To Guatemala
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Not Your Regular Trip to Guatemala “at the end of the day, when you get back to your own life, its impossible to correlate these people’s lives with your own life. Don’t even try.” - Bill Abramson I could say that I have been interested by micro-‐finance long before it was trendy, because I have always been passionate about helping the impoverished. I could say that, and it would be a complete lie. The truth is that I fell into the topic by accident. A friend decided to quit his perfectly normal NYC life, move to Buenos Aires, and start a non-‐profit dedicated to helping small businesses and worker cooperatives in Latin America. When someone does that kind of thing, you have to take notice. When they show up for brunch next time, months, years later, you have to ask how its going. That’s how I learned what a worker’s cooperative is, why capitalism in Latin America is more than a little broken, and how my friend’s organization is so amazing. In the uninteresting process of helping my friend, I asked one too many questions of Trickle Up board members. So when they were organizing their first-‐ever field trip for board members to observe their operations in Latin America, they invited me along. I knew I had nothing of value to add to the trip, but if you ask me if I want to drive around on dirt roads in the poorest corner of Guatemala, visiting weavers, bakers, and chicken farmers, to see if micro-‐enterprise can make a difference to the poorest of the poor, I say yes. At least once. Its remarkably easy to travel to developing-‐world-‐style poverty. You slide down on some Boeings, walk through an almost completely empty, brand new airport in Guatemala City, and drive away in important looking SUVs with hastily laminated “Trickle Up” signs on the dash. The rural poor live in some inconvenient places, so we spent the night in Antigua, the old colonial capital, at a simply lovely hotel, Casa de Santo Domingo, built in the ruins of an ancient monastery. Top notch amenities. Wi-‐Fi in every room, parrots on stands near the pool, excellent espresso. Antigua is a lovely tourist destination. I only had 14 hours there, and spent most of it sleeping, eating, and debating with blissful ignorance whether micro-‐enterprise can help bring people out of poverty. The next morning we rush out and drive for a few hours up the newly paved Pan-‐ American highway, winding through lush, low and steep hills. Then a sharp turn up
onto a dirt road. A really windy, bumpy, back-‐shattering dirt road, switch-‐backing up and up, the kind of road where you are sore the next day from the car ride. Past some cinder-‐block buildings with ubiquitous blue “TIGO” signs, the local telecom. After awhile the cinder-‐block construction fades to weathered mud bricks. The rural poor we visited, on average, tend to live 10 miles away from a paved road, at the highest point of whatever geography we were at. Travel time on the dirt road was always more than an hour. Isolation is of course part of the charm that keeps them so poor, and makes micro-‐enterpise, or any form of trade, difficult. After half an hour my ability to have a conversation in Spanish with Jorge, our driver, fades away and is replaced with two thoughts: when will we get there, and, I am really happy to be in an SUV. We stop at a random spot on the road. The rural poor are not noteworthy or distinguishable in any way. You can pull over at any random place and find them. In Guatemala, 4 out of 10 people live in what is called “extreme poverty”. Its probably not a coincidence that 4 out of 10 people in Guatelmala are also classified as “indigenous.” We were traveling to a particular Trickle Up community, one of 800 in Guatemala, one of 1400 in Central America, and one of 34,000 in the world, growing by roughly 11,000 each year. There are more than a billion people who could benefit from Trickle Up support, or any support. Our random stops on the road were anything but random: we were stopping at needles in haystacks. “When it comes to helping the poor, there is always more demand than supply” – David Larkin, Trickle Up board member. The dozen of us, mostly gringos, disembark, and start walking up a mud trail past small, fragmented corn fields. We walk by the bizarre objects and structures that are typical of rural areas whose purpose are indisernable by city folk, all looking broken and unused. Is that a cistern for watering chickens? Or a pen for holding harvested corn? I have no idea. It’s a sunny bright day, but not buggy or humid, as we are in the highlands. After a short flat walk we get to Xesiguan , a set of mud houses with thatch or corrugated tin roofs. Smoke is flowing out of the gap between the wall and the roof. The scene is complex, there is a lot to take in. The houses decorated with laundry, calendars, drying corn cobs, toothbrushes, and other things that I would eventually take for normal exterior adornments. There are also more than a dozen women, standing or sitting, most smiling, some old women scowling, all dressed in clean and colorful indigenous costumes. Of course, they are not costumes, to them it’s clothing. We learn that with these Kaqchikel , at least, the patterns on the clothing tell you about the person: stripes for a married women, birds and flowers with stripes for a young woman looking for a husband, black collars for widows. There are more widows than you would expect.
Why can’t we have this as part of our culture? Is it too personal? Around us orbit another dozen children less than 10, unsure whether to scowl, smile, or run away, so they do all of that, over and over again. Benches have been set up for us, and partially completed weavings are set up all around. The women sit against the house, against the dirt walls and dirt floor, and we get down to business. We first all introduce ourselves, and we all clap after every introduction. It’s a slow way to start, but helps break the ice. Despite their non-‐latin faces, and non-‐latin clothing, their names are all latin-‐biblical, as in Maria, Francesca. Familiar names. Here, in Xesiguan, through a local NGO, Trickle up has provided seed grants to 16 women to help them become weavers. With Trickle up financial support and training, they create products, sell them, and re-‐invest the profits, providing families with the first steps towards lifting themselves out of poverty. If you really want to help poor people not be poor, helping them create a sustainable business strikes me as a lot smarter than handing out bags of rice. Or computers. Or eyeglasses. Trickle Up promotes micro-‐enterprise, but that’s not the same thing as micro-‐ finance. Trickle Up gives grants and training. They don’t collect interest. They don’t collect anything. One could argue that in the places where Trickle Up operates, it destroys the micro-‐finance market. Why get a loan when you can get a grant? The reality is that Trickle Up is so small, and the numbers of poor so great, it simply doesn’t matter. Besides, where Trickle Up operates, the people are so poor, have so little, that without extra support, extra training, extra help, micro-‐finance is not going to do squat. These women, and the other communities we would visit, are not business people who need help getting on their feet: these are people who never thought of themselves as being in business at all. After the clapping and introductions, we start asking the women questions. What do you make? How much? How and where do you sell it? What do you with the money? Typically, the questions have to go from English, to Spanish to their indigenous tonal language, as most of these women don’t speak more than rudimentary Spanish. To my ears their native tongue sounded lovely, with pitch changes and a mesmerizing cadence, it sounds like singing, but multiple translations are a painfully slow way of performing financial due diligence. Benjamin and Penny, two Trickle Up board members, are both in finance and are ask the same questions I want to ask, and they, like me, are practically jumping out of their skins at how hard it is to get at the story. The story that slowly emerges is truly amazing. The women in Xesiguan used their grants independently to buy thread, of different qualities, and knit different products, and transport and sell them all individually, which we find unfathomable. That’s the benefit of Trickle Up: it lets the
communities find a solution that makes sense to them, even if it doesn’t make sense to us. Xesiguan has formed a savings group. Access to emergency capital is especially critical to the very poor, where any setback can bump you back to ruin. Creating local financial support groups is another part of the Trickle Up program. Like everything Trickle Up does, each implementation is left to the local community and local NGO partner to figure out. At Xesiguan , each member pays about a dollar into a fund each month. Where do they keep the money? The nearest bank is several hours away, irrelevant and untrustworthy. Knowing what I know now about institutions in Guatemala, and how they relate to indigenous people, I wouldn’t trust a local bank either. Then where do they keep the money? They don’t exactly have a mattress, and with everyone in the extended family sleeping in the same bed, that’s probably not a great choice. A secret nook in the mud wall? Is it safe? The answer was, they don’t actually have any money, at least not any cash. The entire fund is lent out to the members, who pay 5% interest each month. The cash is quickly converted into goods, like thread, or weaving tools: useful things that are not useful to steal. It’s a bank without a bank. I had so many questions, and there was no way our two-‐step translations were going to keep up. How do they keep track of this? Do they understand percentages? Interest? How do they do fractions? Typically, these people have up to a second grade education. What happens if too many need to borrow? Or too few? What did they need the loans for? What happens if someone can’t pay the loan back? For the most part, these questions remained unanswered. Getting answers to our intensely myopic questions was surprisingly difficult. Questions like “how much to you make in profit?” or “how much to you spend on thread and material” didn’t seem to make any sense. What we did learn, though, was that becoming financial contributors to their households has an enormous empowering effect on these women, an effect I would have discounted without seeing it in person. They spoke about the positive emotional effects producing and selling weavings had on their children, their husbands, and their larger community. For the first time, they said, they felt like hard work was paying off in a better life, for themselves and their families. You see this in their smiles and warm eyes as they hear each other tell their stories. They discussed the hard decisions they had to face. Should they re-‐invest their earnings in thread or a hand-‐powered sewing machine, or buying their kids paper and pencils for school? The pride they had at even having these choices was palpable.
When our big discussion is over, there is a great deal of carefully translated thanks and commendations both ways. The women offer us hot cider, with bread and cheese. Or maybe it was butter. I try to look very thankful, and do my best to create the illusion of consuming it all with gusto, while actually just tasting it. It was extremely generous to offer us lunch, since there are times of the year when they have a hard time feeding themselves, but, a hot water beverage in rural Guatemala? In my delicate gringo stomache? I wander about their homes, noting the details. They live in closely packed mud brick, thatched roofed single room rectangles, placed between the polygonal corn fields and the steeply sloped forest. There are no streets, no plan, just a few huts separated by a meter or two of packed dirt. More homes are scattered up the slope, paths snaking through corn fields. There is an outhouse 50 feet up a trail, do families share that? Its hard to see inside a dark hut, with the midday sun is so bright. A door, a window, a dirt floor, a single bed. Hardly any furniture. Maybe a chair, or a single low table. Corn and bundles of clothing are stacked on top of the wall, or hang from the ceiling. Smoke rises out of an open wood flame on the hearth, spilling out a gap between the roof and the wall. Some houses didn’t line up with the wind, and there the smoke stays in the house, making it even darker and difficult to breath. Do they really want to add lung damage to their list of difficulties? Don’t they know about chimneys? Or does it keep the bugs away? But we are 6000 feet above sea level, the air is pleasantly cool and dry, and there are no bugs. My mind keeps racing on silly tangents like this, because I don’t want to think about the important things. We all know that more than a billion people live just above subsistence. Maybe two billion, maybe three, depending on how you want to slice it. Knowing and walking, talking, breathing it are different, though. I don’t mind the dirt floors, the cooking fires, the lack of indoor plumbing. I could imagine getting used to that, if the weather were nice. I might even get used to the lack of electric lighting, which limits your day to the 12 hours the sun is in the Central American sky. I try to understand what the world is like, if I were illiterate, and had never seen anything other than the nearest town, whose language I can’t understand. This mental isolation is simply unfathomable. Less tangible concerns tie my stomach in knots. To live in fear between harvests that my kids might not get enough food. If someone gets sick or hurt, medical care is essentially unreachable. Will my child die of diarrhea?. What can I do to avoid…. To not have any choices, to be trapped in this same community, same life, with no hope of breaking out, no hope of your children breaking out, because they are trapped with you. Should I just give up and drink myself to death while my family starves? Irrational choices start to make sense when they are the only choices you have.
As we walk down the path, back to the road, our bottled water in our SUVs, and drive to the next Trickle Up community, I have to admit, the world is looking much brighter for the women at Xesiguan . With a little bit of help, they are able to make a better life for themselves. In fincancial terms, ignoring the hard work by everyone involved, it only cost $100 per family, plus $35 for the local NGO partner. For a single $2000 investment, 16 families are on a better path. That’s 13 men who won’t have to leave their families to migrate out-‐of-‐country for work, and thirty or more kids who have better odds at making it past the second grade. If I come back in a few years, the women told me I might find tin roofs instead of thatch, maybe cinderblock walls instead of mud. Not a bad return on $2000. Does it mean we could lift billions out of poverty for $100 per family? The debate in the long, bumpy car ride, and every subsequent one, focused on that single question. Is fostering micro-‐enterprise a sustainable way to lift the poor out of poverty? Is Trickle Up’s program scalable? Is it applicable to every community? Do cultural or geographical differences determine success or failure, or can micro-‐ enterprise work everywhere? Is every poor person an entrepreneur in the rough, simply in need of a little help to bootstrap themselves? If not, is there a process for finding the people for whom fostering micro-‐enterprise is worthwhile? I was expecting a lot of campaigning from the Trickle Up staff on these long car rides (did I mention how long the car rides were? Why can’t the rural poor live closer to an airport or a decent hotel?) , if not the board members. There was none of that. Quite the contrary, the conversations were open and honest. Trickle Up staff, board members have the same questions as I do. They are smart, motivated people, and they are working hard on trying to figure this out. They will tell you they don’t have the answers. Yet. It made for some lively debate, in between the switchbacks. Our next stop was Aldea Quisaya, up an equally bad road, where we walked up a short dirt path past small corn fields to an almost identical community of Kaqchikel women. In Quisaya, Trickle Up has provided seed capital to 14 families, all of whom are also involved in weaving. We sat in on one of their first Village Savings and Loan Association (VSLA) meetings. Despite being almost identical in most respects, same Trickle Up partner, same ethnic group, same micro-‐industry, same number of families, the savings program in Quisaya was very different than the one in Xesiguan. Women in their embroidered bird shirts, some with black hems and borders, gathered around on benches, while the VSLA officers brought out a triple-‐locked box. The box had three separate padlock on three different sides, and each officer had a key to one of the locks. They ceremoniously opened the box, took out their records and handed out savings books to all the members. One by one, with a great deal of ceremony and official counting, everyone contributed 5 Quetzal (about $0.80) into the savings fund. The savings fund has two parts: one gets paid out to each member on a
schedule, kind of like a bonus, and the other part comprises the savings of the bank, which get lent out. Getting the details on how this scheme worked, and why it was so different than the first community was going slowly, so I started playing with the kids. In Xesiguan, there were only little children, too young for school, and older kids, past the third grade or so, working at home. Neither group wanted to interact with strangers. Now it was later in the afternoon, school was out, and the five to nine year olds hovered around, darting under bushes, or diving into dark doorways, squealing with excitement, if you turned to look at them. The kids are distracting. The indigenous groups we met treat kids differently than in the US, or anywhere I have been. Children can come and go without being shooed or shushed, until they do something really grevious. Wherever we met, if there were kids around at all, they ran around, shouted, wrestled, grabbed adult legs, walked right up to someone giving a presentation to an entire room and got in her way, all the while attracting less attention from the adults than a stray cat or chicken. Its something I had read about, historically, behavior common to many American indigenous groups, but it was interesting to experience it. Oddly disconcerting. Awkward, sometimes. What do you do when kids are grabbing at your backpack and no one is chastising them? Despite their freedom, the kids were incredibly shy around us, especially when we started pointing cameras. I would like to believe that they are worried about us stealing their souls, but there are enough cell phone cameras around to make that a silly superstition. The real answer is more distressing: they associate foreign cameras with baby smuggling, which used to be, and maybe still is, a real problem for them. In 2000, in an area we would later travel to, a bus load of Japanese tourists was attacked, killing a tourist. I had not heard of that incident, yet, and after seven years of parenting girls, there is nothing that gets me more excited to point my camera than cute little girls who are smiling and giggling and running away from my camera. First I lured the girls out of the dark, smoky kitchen (no chimney’s here, either) where they were hiding using a rainbow pony. (Even when there are no kids around, rainbow ponies are an important part of my camera gear. They can be used to build makeshift tripods, and can add a splash of color to landscape shots. Sic. ) Handing out rainbow ponies got the boys eager to start grabbing my backpack, so I distracted them with some crayons. Penny, the Trickle up board member, handed them some paper out of her notebook, and pretty soon a half dozen kids were drawing some pretty amazing pictures, and happily sharing the rainbow pony. The older kids were willing to speak Spanish with us. The kids were always 25% older than I guessed, which was also true for the adults. Not having enough protein
ages you. The mothers never seem to have enough teeth: calcium deficiencies from having lots of kids starting very early without a proper diet. The savings and loan meeting ended, and the women hand out woven scrolls commemorating our visit. Then a vaccum cleaner blares from the nearest kitchen and we break for a party. Turns out its not a vacuum cleaner, but a blender. Imagine a mud-‐brick, dirt floor kitchen, filled with smoke from a fire in a brick basin, pots and pans stacked on the floor, with a single stool, and on it, two women working with a blender. They have electricity, they just can’t afford to use it very much. Due to an odd subsidy program, where the government hired a Spanish company to build a rural electrical grid, rural electricity for the rural poor costs three times what it costs in town. This is a special occasion: for us they have made a fruit drink from blackberries the size of my nose. I have a large nose. Each of us gets a bag of three tamales. Hoping the blackberries were not washed before hitting the blender, and betting that nothing can live in a freshly steamed tamale, I eat and drink with gusto, saving a tamale for Jorge, our driver. Under a late afternoon sun, everyone follows us down the path through the cornfields to our cars. We wave goodbye, and drive off. Give Them Luggage It’s a few hour drive to our hotel that night, on the shores of Lake Atlaitan. Panajacchel is a wonderful hippie backpacker town, with cheep international cuisine and lots of trinkets and pipes for sale. Views of the lake and volcanoes are amazing. All the Nicaraguan drug traffickers have villas there. We enjoyed a whole 9 hours, most of which I spent sleeping. Benjamin found time to swim in the lake. Then we were back on the winding, nauseating road to the highlands of northwest Guatemala, in HueHueTenango. Huetenango, not a rich place to begin with, was especially hard hit during Guatemala’s thirty-‐year civil war, a war fought mostly over the intensely unfair resource allocation stemming from the conquistadors. You really have to hand it to the conquistadors. Using sheer nastiness and brutality, they were able to able to set up a long lasting system where a few families control most of the arable land and most of the wealth for the entire country. They had the help of an accidental germ warfare program, and the accident of 20,000 years or so of genetic isolation of the locals, but its still a nifty feat. Any attempts at reform result in deaths, or coups. These families are above any law, even being able to elude the United States. Its just like any other Central American country, just more so.
After a particularly long and unpleasant drive, across rather barren, pine and scree covered hillsides we arrive literally at the end of the road: the community of Aldea Chelam. A set of cinder block buildings have been built around a dirt courtyard by some distant, well intentioned aid organization, the same one that build the road. Its unclear what the buildings are used for, if anything, and several look thoroughly unused. Out of desperate need, I head towards the nastiest latrine in the world, perched on the edge of the soccer field over a mound of garbage, that spills down the hillside into the cloud forest. The courtyard fills with Mam. As they collect for photographs, pleasantries, and discussions about their micro-‐enterprise aspirations, its clear these people are really really poor, making the other people we have met look well off. We start with a big meeting in one of the cinderblock buildings, us on stage, townspeople filling the seats, standing in the back, spilling out the door. I breathe the smells of concentrated wood smoke and dust. Two people from the local partner NGO that Trickle UP works with are familiar to these people, and lead the show with all smiles. They never stop smiling, even though audience is mostly glassy-‐eyed and vacant, or even fearful. One NGO worker, a native Mam herself, is simply captivating, as she translates Spanish into sing-‐song Mam with elaborate hand-‐waving and an amazing smile. After the big meeting, the Trickle Up troupe breaks into two smaller groups to visit some homes. The sky is dark gray, with heavy clouds masking the mountain tops, only a thousand feet farther up. Heavily farmed ravines and hillsides stretch below us. We are at the top of where you can live. We walk along steep trails into corn fields that were probably virgin cloud forest, before the Mam were forced up here during the war, and now are unable to return to wherever they came from. While everyone acknowledges the community is not more than 30 years old, questions as to how they got here, or where they came from are not answered. As always, its unclear as to why we can’t get answers. Do they not know? Are the answers too upsetting? Do they not understand the questions? I have no idea, but I am already used to my seemingly simple questions being unanswerable. Aid agencies have provided Chelam with the road, a building, a school, tin roofs, water collection tanks, and other random solutions to problems aid agencies want to solve. Its not clear that these haphazard solutions are providing real benefits. While every house has an new plastic cistern, courtesy of some Japanese NGO, I only found one house where it was actually connected to a gutter to collect rain water. What happened to all the extra piping? Did it not arrive? Did it get cannibalized to keep the single home working with an accessible, clean water supply? Is it anyone’s
job to keep track of the success of the water program? Not speaking Mam, I didn’t get an opportunity to ask these questions. We spent a few hours questioning, or rather interrogating, two families, both weavers, and both recipients of Trickle Up aid. One used a mechanical loom to create rolls of fabric for napkin holders and table runners. The second used a hand loom to create pants. Benjamen and Penny tried to analyze these businesses in terms of inputs, outputs, costs, marketability of products. To be fair, they asked all the questions I would have asked, but I already knew how it would go. Whether it was language or cultural barriers, trying to tell us what they thought we wanted to know, or outright deceit, I do not know. Suppose space aliens landed in your backyard and said, “we want to learn about your lives. Please, help us understand. Where did the grommets of your shoes come from? Do you work your TV’s remote control with your left or right hand? How much does it cost you to drive your kids to school?” How would you answer? Could you answer? While it struck us as odd and frustrating that these stories were so unaccessible, even though we had the people right there with us, I reserve judgement as to whether there was any outright lying. These people are illiterate, have never read a book or a newspaper. They speak a language I had never heard of before that morning. They have never been far from their mountaintop. I have no idea how their minds work, how they see us or our questions. Never underestimate the power of a simple misunderstanding. Regardless of the reasons, our research into Chelam micro-‐enterprise did not make much sense. Units did not add up. Inventory did not accumulate according to stated rates of production and sales. Products sold did not equal profit gained. After maybe 30 minutes of questioning, we did figure out that while one family could make 4 pants a week, they had not actually made any pants for some time, because they were unable to sell pants. Why not? Too expensive to get to market, to pay someone for the 2 hour truck ride down the mountain? Or no one wants to buy your hand made, patchy pants? Or you do not speak any Spanish, so you don’t know either? I listened with half an ear, and spent my time giving out rainbow ponies, fighting back tears, and shooting video and photographs of sometimes frightened, sometimes rambunctious kids, who probably had not seen a foreigner, a real-‐live Gringo before, much less played with one. It was getting to be dark as we left, and none of us were excited about driving down that road at night. The summary for Chelam was: those people are just F^@cked. At Trickle Up’s request, the local NGO had been tasked with finding the poorest groups, and at that they had succeeded. Yet the idea that Trickle Up or any organization can use micro-‐enterprise to improve the lives of the poorest of the poor had clearly come up against some limits. The residents of Chelam are so isolated,
geographically, culturally, linguistically. There is no local economy. Sub-‐subsistance corn and yucca farming. What goods can they create that they can sell within their community at the top of a mountain? What goods can they create that are worth selling down in the valley? Other than collecting more aide, what hope do they have at all? To paraphrase an old Sam Kinessen joke, Chelam did not need more aid of any kind to help them preserve their community. What they needed was luggage, and maybe subsidized housing, so they could move to where there are jobs and schools and opportunity. On the drive down, clouds stretching between hillsides below us, we debated the value of keeping the Chelam where they are. Workforce mobility is a modern concept. A theme in helping indigenous peoples is that there is cultural value in keeping communities together, on their own land. Perhaps. Chelam only seems to be there by accident. Besides, its too crowded for anyone to succeed. My great-‐ great grandparents had enough the second or third time the Cossaks messed up their woodworking shop in the Old Country and hopped a boat to Ellis Island. That was not an easy thing to do. None of their descendants have ever regretted that decision. We spent the night in a very odd cinder block hotel. Benjamen, who is a vegetarian and who, as far as I could tell, had been fasting for several days now, managed to get in a run to some nearby Mayan ruins, for which I was quite jealous. Oh, this is your cousin’s bakery… - paraphrased from “Troopers” a spoof on Star Wars storm troopers, where the protagonist says to a Jawa, “oh, these are your cousin’s ‘droids…” At Yerbabuena , another community where Trickle Up is just getting started, we sit on a hill and talk. It’s sunny and cool, high up in the hills in another part of Huehuetenango. There is no town center. The community consists of the standard Guatemalan mud-‐brick, thatched huts scattered on the mountainside. The community just gets poorer and poorer, and more and more men spend more and more time working somewhere else, Guatemala, Mexico. The conditions are heartbreaking, the wages unacceptable, but there are no other choices. We hear how there is no livestock in the community, they are too poor for that. Yet 1/3 of them have cell phones, which they claim only use to receive calls from loved ones working far away. As we have this big conversation on the hill, the phones ring fairly often, until someone spreads the word they should be silenced. We walk past eroded fields to visit an open air bakery, past sheep, goats, and a cow.
At Yerba Buena, things are very confusing. Nothing is as what we hear. There are some very nice latrines located in everyone’s yard, each painted with a big white number. Apparently, there is an NGO focused on providing rural communities with latrines. They have done a spectacular job in Yerba Buena . Erosion is very apparent, leaving large fields of volcanic scree on which nothing grows, brilliant red against the verdant green of corn fields and pine trees. Its unclear whether the people realize that cutting down the pine trees and over-‐ farming is destroying the top soil, and once it washes down the ravines, the land is useless. Even if they realize where all the scree is coming from, I doubt they have any choices to make. All the hilltop land is utilized. There is no land to lie fallow. You need firewood to eat corn. Each family has on average 1/8 the land they need to survive. The custom is that land is always divided and passed on to sons. Which means that the next generation will have less land. The time to fix this was a few generations ago, when a father could have said, “Sons, I do not have enough land. You all cannot be farmers. One of you will get the land, and you others, I am sorry, you have to move elsewhere and make your fortunes.” A hard decision to make, of course, but having 1/8 the land you need to succeed as a farmer, but still trying, is that any better? Solutions are so easy when you can drop in on your SUV, look around, and drive away. The bakery is a brick hemisphere beside a house surrounded by corn fields. At the community meeting, we heard there was no bakery, and an enterprising group of three youths were pooling their grants to create a bakery, because their father knew how to bake bread. So we were confused when we walked up to a fully functional open air bakery, tended to by the mayor’s daughter and wife, as well as by someone hired to actually bake the bread. After more questioning, we learn the three youths are going to expand the bakery, hiring people to do the actual baking, and their job will be to sell the bread in town. These guys are kind of slick, wearing gold chains, and something about the way they acted showed they were worldly by local standards. They had probably migrated for work. They had seen things beyond the hilltops. How much they can sell the bread for, and how much it would cost to transport the bread the multi-‐hour trip to town? Answers were vague. They never stopped smiling. And why is the bakery located at the Mayor’s house, when he has nothing to do with the bakery? Deceit, or misunderstanding? Very difficult to say.
It was clear was that Yerba Buena, unlike Chelam, could make effective use of micro-‐ enterprise, even if it meant pooling their grants. The bread they were baking was sold locally, to schools and residents. Could they be successful selling bread in town? Was the whole thing a scam to grab a few hundred bucks? Was the local NGO trying to game Trickle UP? Or does it just look like that to an untrusting Gringo whose suspicions are raised when he can’t get answers to what seem like simple questions? I don’t know. Unsure if it matters. The Land of People Who Wear Purple Shirts For about an hour along the dirt road to Ixquilams, another ethnic Mam community in the mountains, you notice kids doing their homework on the sides of the road, rushing to get it done before dark, and women weaving in doorways, always with dark purple and red yarn. Everyone is wearing the most amazing clothes in purple, blue, and red. Several communities we visited sported some interesting garb, but in Ixquilams, men, women, and children were dressed unanimously spectacular. When we arrive at the community meeting hall, everyone is in the most amazing purple and red shirts. The design in unique and beautiful, with high, rounded collards and folded cuffs. All the men are wearing straw or pine-‐needle hats, and these wonderfully vibrant shirts. We sit on stage and listen to them speak, poetically, with smiles and bright shining faces, as to how they will use subsequent Trickle Up grants to become potato and chicken farmers. There is a wonderful sense of community, equality, democracy, as anyone who wants to, men or women, stands up and talks about their problems. Noone wants to be weaver, and sell wonderfully unique and beautifully made shirts to Gringos. In the land of purple shirt people, the last thing they think is valuable is a purple shirt. Conclusions By now, this trip is several months old. My memories are no less bewildering or confusing. If I were researching the effectiveness of micro-‐enterprise on the rural poor, I could easily have spent weeks or more at each of the sites we visited. Even then I would probably understand very little. Fostering entrepreneurship and micro-‐enterprise, and the Trickle Up program in particular, providing grants, training, and expertise to individual families is carefully
selected communities, can have huge positive impact. In at least some cases a very small grant has had huge benefits to a whole family, and a larger community. It’s also clear that some recipients are lacking in some qualities or support structures, without which its hard to see how Trickle Up’s program, or any program, can succeed. Maybe the qualities have less to do with the recipients themselves than with the relationships between Trickle Up, its local partners, and the communities. Or perhaps it’s simply a matter of patience. In the last three communities, Trickle Up was just getting started. Trickle Up, from their website, “works to provide the poorest of the poor their first steps out of poverty through microenterprise development.” It’s a worthy goal, and its well stated, but its not entirely accurate. I question that the poorest of the poor might not be the most successful recipients of Trickle Up aid. Trickle Up already has a set of criteria to exclude some really, really poor people who are unlikely to succeed in the Trickle Up program. They don’t work in really dangerous places. They don’t work in refugee camps. I think Trickle Up will figure out they can’t work in some other places too, based on some as yet undefined criteria. I think Trickle Up will decide that the $100/person grant structure does not work for all groups that they want to work with, and change that too. Trickle Up realizes this. I think they will figure it out.
onto a dirt road. A really windy, bumpy, back-‐shattering dirt road, switch-‐backing up and up, the kind of road where you are sore the next day from the car ride. Past some cinder-‐block buildings with ubiquitous blue “TIGO” signs, the local telecom. After awhile the cinder-‐block construction fades to weathered mud bricks. The rural poor we visited, on average, tend to live 10 miles away from a paved road, at the highest point of whatever geography we were at. Travel time on the dirt road was always more than an hour. Isolation is of course part of the charm that keeps them so poor, and makes micro-‐enterpise, or any form of trade, difficult. After half an hour my ability to have a conversation in Spanish with Jorge, our driver, fades away and is replaced with two thoughts: when will we get there, and, I am really happy to be in an SUV. We stop at a random spot on the road. The rural poor are not noteworthy or distinguishable in any way. You can pull over at any random place and find them. In Guatemala, 4 out of 10 people live in what is called “extreme poverty”. Its probably not a coincidence that 4 out of 10 people in Guatelmala are also classified as “indigenous.” We were traveling to a particular Trickle Up community, one of 800 in Guatemala, one of 1400 in Central America, and one of 34,000 in the world, growing by roughly 11,000 each year. There are more than a billion people who could benefit from Trickle Up support, or any support. Our random stops on the road were anything but random: we were stopping at needles in haystacks. “When it comes to helping the poor, there is always more demand than supply” – David Larkin, Trickle Up board member. The dozen of us, mostly gringos, disembark, and start walking up a mud trail past small, fragmented corn fields. We walk by the bizarre objects and structures that are typical of rural areas whose purpose are indisernable by city folk, all looking broken and unused. Is that a cistern for watering chickens? Or a pen for holding harvested corn? I have no idea. It’s a sunny bright day, but not buggy or humid, as we are in the highlands. After a short flat walk we get to Xesiguan , a set of mud houses with thatch or corrugated tin roofs. Smoke is flowing out of the gap between the wall and the roof. The scene is complex, there is a lot to take in. The houses decorated with laundry, calendars, drying corn cobs, toothbrushes, and other things that I would eventually take for normal exterior adornments. There are also more than a dozen women, standing or sitting, most smiling, some old women scowling, all dressed in clean and colorful indigenous costumes. Of course, they are not costumes, to them it’s clothing. We learn that with these Kaqchikel , at least, the patterns on the clothing tell you about the person: stripes for a married women, birds and flowers with stripes for a young woman looking for a husband, black collars for widows. There are more widows than you would expect.
Why can’t we have this as part of our culture? Is it too personal? Around us orbit another dozen children less than 10, unsure whether to scowl, smile, or run away, so they do all of that, over and over again. Benches have been set up for us, and partially completed weavings are set up all around. The women sit against the house, against the dirt walls and dirt floor, and we get down to business. We first all introduce ourselves, and we all clap after every introduction. It’s a slow way to start, but helps break the ice. Despite their non-‐latin faces, and non-‐latin clothing, their names are all latin-‐biblical, as in Maria, Francesca. Familiar names. Here, in Xesiguan, through a local NGO, Trickle up has provided seed grants to 16 women to help them become weavers. With Trickle up financial support and training, they create products, sell them, and re-‐invest the profits, providing families with the first steps towards lifting themselves out of poverty. If you really want to help poor people not be poor, helping them create a sustainable business strikes me as a lot smarter than handing out bags of rice. Or computers. Or eyeglasses. Trickle Up promotes micro-‐enterprise, but that’s not the same thing as micro-‐ finance. Trickle Up gives grants and training. They don’t collect interest. They don’t collect anything. One could argue that in the places where Trickle Up operates, it destroys the micro-‐finance market. Why get a loan when you can get a grant? The reality is that Trickle Up is so small, and the numbers of poor so great, it simply doesn’t matter. Besides, where Trickle Up operates, the people are so poor, have so little, that without extra support, extra training, extra help, micro-‐finance is not going to do squat. These women, and the other communities we would visit, are not business people who need help getting on their feet: these are people who never thought of themselves as being in business at all. After the clapping and introductions, we start asking the women questions. What do you make? How much? How and where do you sell it? What do you with the money? Typically, the questions have to go from English, to Spanish to their indigenous tonal language, as most of these women don’t speak more than rudimentary Spanish. To my ears their native tongue sounded lovely, with pitch changes and a mesmerizing cadence, it sounds like singing, but multiple translations are a painfully slow way of performing financial due diligence. Benjamin and Penny, two Trickle Up board members, are both in finance and are ask the same questions I want to ask, and they, like me, are practically jumping out of their skins at how hard it is to get at the story. The story that slowly emerges is truly amazing. The women in Xesiguan used their grants independently to buy thread, of different qualities, and knit different products, and transport and sell them all individually, which we find unfathomable. That’s the benefit of Trickle Up: it lets the
communities find a solution that makes sense to them, even if it doesn’t make sense to us. Xesiguan has formed a savings group. Access to emergency capital is especially critical to the very poor, where any setback can bump you back to ruin. Creating local financial support groups is another part of the Trickle Up program. Like everything Trickle Up does, each implementation is left to the local community and local NGO partner to figure out. At Xesiguan , each member pays about a dollar into a fund each month. Where do they keep the money? The nearest bank is several hours away, irrelevant and untrustworthy. Knowing what I know now about institutions in Guatemala, and how they relate to indigenous people, I wouldn’t trust a local bank either. Then where do they keep the money? They don’t exactly have a mattress, and with everyone in the extended family sleeping in the same bed, that’s probably not a great choice. A secret nook in the mud wall? Is it safe? The answer was, they don’t actually have any money, at least not any cash. The entire fund is lent out to the members, who pay 5% interest each month. The cash is quickly converted into goods, like thread, or weaving tools: useful things that are not useful to steal. It’s a bank without a bank. I had so many questions, and there was no way our two-‐step translations were going to keep up. How do they keep track of this? Do they understand percentages? Interest? How do they do fractions? Typically, these people have up to a second grade education. What happens if too many need to borrow? Or too few? What did they need the loans for? What happens if someone can’t pay the loan back? For the most part, these questions remained unanswered. Getting answers to our intensely myopic questions was surprisingly difficult. Questions like “how much to you make in profit?” or “how much to you spend on thread and material” didn’t seem to make any sense. What we did learn, though, was that becoming financial contributors to their households has an enormous empowering effect on these women, an effect I would have discounted without seeing it in person. They spoke about the positive emotional effects producing and selling weavings had on their children, their husbands, and their larger community. For the first time, they said, they felt like hard work was paying off in a better life, for themselves and their families. You see this in their smiles and warm eyes as they hear each other tell their stories. They discussed the hard decisions they had to face. Should they re-‐invest their earnings in thread or a hand-‐powered sewing machine, or buying their kids paper and pencils for school? The pride they had at even having these choices was palpable.
When our big discussion is over, there is a great deal of carefully translated thanks and commendations both ways. The women offer us hot cider, with bread and cheese. Or maybe it was butter. I try to look very thankful, and do my best to create the illusion of consuming it all with gusto, while actually just tasting it. It was extremely generous to offer us lunch, since there are times of the year when they have a hard time feeding themselves, but, a hot water beverage in rural Guatemala? In my delicate gringo stomache? I wander about their homes, noting the details. They live in closely packed mud brick, thatched roofed single room rectangles, placed between the polygonal corn fields and the steeply sloped forest. There are no streets, no plan, just a few huts separated by a meter or two of packed dirt. More homes are scattered up the slope, paths snaking through corn fields. There is an outhouse 50 feet up a trail, do families share that? Its hard to see inside a dark hut, with the midday sun is so bright. A door, a window, a dirt floor, a single bed. Hardly any furniture. Maybe a chair, or a single low table. Corn and bundles of clothing are stacked on top of the wall, or hang from the ceiling. Smoke rises out of an open wood flame on the hearth, spilling out a gap between the roof and the wall. Some houses didn’t line up with the wind, and there the smoke stays in the house, making it even darker and difficult to breath. Do they really want to add lung damage to their list of difficulties? Don’t they know about chimneys? Or does it keep the bugs away? But we are 6000 feet above sea level, the air is pleasantly cool and dry, and there are no bugs. My mind keeps racing on silly tangents like this, because I don’t want to think about the important things. We all know that more than a billion people live just above subsistence. Maybe two billion, maybe three, depending on how you want to slice it. Knowing and walking, talking, breathing it are different, though. I don’t mind the dirt floors, the cooking fires, the lack of indoor plumbing. I could imagine getting used to that, if the weather were nice. I might even get used to the lack of electric lighting, which limits your day to the 12 hours the sun is in the Central American sky. I try to understand what the world is like, if I were illiterate, and had never seen anything other than the nearest town, whose language I can’t understand. This mental isolation is simply unfathomable. Less tangible concerns tie my stomach in knots. To live in fear between harvests that my kids might not get enough food. If someone gets sick or hurt, medical care is essentially unreachable. Will my child die of diarrhea?. What can I do to avoid…. To not have any choices, to be trapped in this same community, same life, with no hope of breaking out, no hope of your children breaking out, because they are trapped with you. Should I just give up and drink myself to death while my family starves? Irrational choices start to make sense when they are the only choices you have.
As we walk down the path, back to the road, our bottled water in our SUVs, and drive to the next Trickle Up community, I have to admit, the world is looking much brighter for the women at Xesiguan . With a little bit of help, they are able to make a better life for themselves. In fincancial terms, ignoring the hard work by everyone involved, it only cost $100 per family, plus $35 for the local NGO partner. For a single $2000 investment, 16 families are on a better path. That’s 13 men who won’t have to leave their families to migrate out-‐of-‐country for work, and thirty or more kids who have better odds at making it past the second grade. If I come back in a few years, the women told me I might find tin roofs instead of thatch, maybe cinderblock walls instead of mud. Not a bad return on $2000. Does it mean we could lift billions out of poverty for $100 per family? The debate in the long, bumpy car ride, and every subsequent one, focused on that single question. Is fostering micro-‐enterprise a sustainable way to lift the poor out of poverty? Is Trickle Up’s program scalable? Is it applicable to every community? Do cultural or geographical differences determine success or failure, or can micro-‐ enterprise work everywhere? Is every poor person an entrepreneur in the rough, simply in need of a little help to bootstrap themselves? If not, is there a process for finding the people for whom fostering micro-‐enterprise is worthwhile? I was expecting a lot of campaigning from the Trickle Up staff on these long car rides (did I mention how long the car rides were? Why can’t the rural poor live closer to an airport or a decent hotel?) , if not the board members. There was none of that. Quite the contrary, the conversations were open and honest. Trickle Up staff, board members have the same questions as I do. They are smart, motivated people, and they are working hard on trying to figure this out. They will tell you they don’t have the answers. Yet. It made for some lively debate, in between the switchbacks. Our next stop was Aldea Quisaya, up an equally bad road, where we walked up a short dirt path past small corn fields to an almost identical community of Kaqchikel women. In Quisaya, Trickle Up has provided seed capital to 14 families, all of whom are also involved in weaving. We sat in on one of their first Village Savings and Loan Association (VSLA) meetings. Despite being almost identical in most respects, same Trickle Up partner, same ethnic group, same micro-‐industry, same number of families, the savings program in Quisaya was very different than the one in Xesiguan. Women in their embroidered bird shirts, some with black hems and borders, gathered around on benches, while the VSLA officers brought out a triple-‐locked box. The box had three separate padlock on three different sides, and each officer had a key to one of the locks. They ceremoniously opened the box, took out their records and handed out savings books to all the members. One by one, with a great deal of ceremony and official counting, everyone contributed 5 Quetzal (about $0.80) into the savings fund. The savings fund has two parts: one gets paid out to each member on a
schedule, kind of like a bonus, and the other part comprises the savings of the bank, which get lent out. Getting the details on how this scheme worked, and why it was so different than the first community was going slowly, so I started playing with the kids. In Xesiguan, there were only little children, too young for school, and older kids, past the third grade or so, working at home. Neither group wanted to interact with strangers. Now it was later in the afternoon, school was out, and the five to nine year olds hovered around, darting under bushes, or diving into dark doorways, squealing with excitement, if you turned to look at them. The kids are distracting. The indigenous groups we met treat kids differently than in the US, or anywhere I have been. Children can come and go without being shooed or shushed, until they do something really grevious. Wherever we met, if there were kids around at all, they ran around, shouted, wrestled, grabbed adult legs, walked right up to someone giving a presentation to an entire room and got in her way, all the while attracting less attention from the adults than a stray cat or chicken. Its something I had read about, historically, behavior common to many American indigenous groups, but it was interesting to experience it. Oddly disconcerting. Awkward, sometimes. What do you do when kids are grabbing at your backpack and no one is chastising them? Despite their freedom, the kids were incredibly shy around us, especially when we started pointing cameras. I would like to believe that they are worried about us stealing their souls, but there are enough cell phone cameras around to make that a silly superstition. The real answer is more distressing: they associate foreign cameras with baby smuggling, which used to be, and maybe still is, a real problem for them. In 2000, in an area we would later travel to, a bus load of Japanese tourists was attacked, killing a tourist. I had not heard of that incident, yet, and after seven years of parenting girls, there is nothing that gets me more excited to point my camera than cute little girls who are smiling and giggling and running away from my camera. First I lured the girls out of the dark, smoky kitchen (no chimney’s here, either) where they were hiding using a rainbow pony. (Even when there are no kids around, rainbow ponies are an important part of my camera gear. They can be used to build makeshift tripods, and can add a splash of color to landscape shots. Sic. ) Handing out rainbow ponies got the boys eager to start grabbing my backpack, so I distracted them with some crayons. Penny, the Trickle up board member, handed them some paper out of her notebook, and pretty soon a half dozen kids were drawing some pretty amazing pictures, and happily sharing the rainbow pony. The older kids were willing to speak Spanish with us. The kids were always 25% older than I guessed, which was also true for the adults. Not having enough protein
ages you. The mothers never seem to have enough teeth: calcium deficiencies from having lots of kids starting very early without a proper diet. The savings and loan meeting ended, and the women hand out woven scrolls commemorating our visit. Then a vaccum cleaner blares from the nearest kitchen and we break for a party. Turns out its not a vacuum cleaner, but a blender. Imagine a mud-‐brick, dirt floor kitchen, filled with smoke from a fire in a brick basin, pots and pans stacked on the floor, with a single stool, and on it, two women working with a blender. They have electricity, they just can’t afford to use it very much. Due to an odd subsidy program, where the government hired a Spanish company to build a rural electrical grid, rural electricity for the rural poor costs three times what it costs in town. This is a special occasion: for us they have made a fruit drink from blackberries the size of my nose. I have a large nose. Each of us gets a bag of three tamales. Hoping the blackberries were not washed before hitting the blender, and betting that nothing can live in a freshly steamed tamale, I eat and drink with gusto, saving a tamale for Jorge, our driver. Under a late afternoon sun, everyone follows us down the path through the cornfields to our cars. We wave goodbye, and drive off. Give Them Luggage It’s a few hour drive to our hotel that night, on the shores of Lake Atlaitan. Panajacchel is a wonderful hippie backpacker town, with cheep international cuisine and lots of trinkets and pipes for sale. Views of the lake and volcanoes are amazing. All the Nicaraguan drug traffickers have villas there. We enjoyed a whole 9 hours, most of which I spent sleeping. Benjamin found time to swim in the lake. Then we were back on the winding, nauseating road to the highlands of northwest Guatemala, in HueHueTenango. Huetenango, not a rich place to begin with, was especially hard hit during Guatemala’s thirty-‐year civil war, a war fought mostly over the intensely unfair resource allocation stemming from the conquistadors. You really have to hand it to the conquistadors. Using sheer nastiness and brutality, they were able to able to set up a long lasting system where a few families control most of the arable land and most of the wealth for the entire country. They had the help of an accidental germ warfare program, and the accident of 20,000 years or so of genetic isolation of the locals, but its still a nifty feat. Any attempts at reform result in deaths, or coups. These families are above any law, even being able to elude the United States. Its just like any other Central American country, just more so.
After a particularly long and unpleasant drive, across rather barren, pine and scree covered hillsides we arrive literally at the end of the road: the community of Aldea Chelam. A set of cinder block buildings have been built around a dirt courtyard by some distant, well intentioned aid organization, the same one that build the road. Its unclear what the buildings are used for, if anything, and several look thoroughly unused. Out of desperate need, I head towards the nastiest latrine in the world, perched on the edge of the soccer field over a mound of garbage, that spills down the hillside into the cloud forest. The courtyard fills with Mam. As they collect for photographs, pleasantries, and discussions about their micro-‐enterprise aspirations, its clear these people are really really poor, making the other people we have met look well off. We start with a big meeting in one of the cinderblock buildings, us on stage, townspeople filling the seats, standing in the back, spilling out the door. I breathe the smells of concentrated wood smoke and dust. Two people from the local partner NGO that Trickle UP works with are familiar to these people, and lead the show with all smiles. They never stop smiling, even though audience is mostly glassy-‐eyed and vacant, or even fearful. One NGO worker, a native Mam herself, is simply captivating, as she translates Spanish into sing-‐song Mam with elaborate hand-‐waving and an amazing smile. After the big meeting, the Trickle Up troupe breaks into two smaller groups to visit some homes. The sky is dark gray, with heavy clouds masking the mountain tops, only a thousand feet farther up. Heavily farmed ravines and hillsides stretch below us. We are at the top of where you can live. We walk along steep trails into corn fields that were probably virgin cloud forest, before the Mam were forced up here during the war, and now are unable to return to wherever they came from. While everyone acknowledges the community is not more than 30 years old, questions as to how they got here, or where they came from are not answered. As always, its unclear as to why we can’t get answers. Do they not know? Are the answers too upsetting? Do they not understand the questions? I have no idea, but I am already used to my seemingly simple questions being unanswerable. Aid agencies have provided Chelam with the road, a building, a school, tin roofs, water collection tanks, and other random solutions to problems aid agencies want to solve. Its not clear that these haphazard solutions are providing real benefits. While every house has an new plastic cistern, courtesy of some Japanese NGO, I only found one house where it was actually connected to a gutter to collect rain water. What happened to all the extra piping? Did it not arrive? Did it get cannibalized to keep the single home working with an accessible, clean water supply? Is it anyone’s
job to keep track of the success of the water program? Not speaking Mam, I didn’t get an opportunity to ask these questions. We spent a few hours questioning, or rather interrogating, two families, both weavers, and both recipients of Trickle Up aid. One used a mechanical loom to create rolls of fabric for napkin holders and table runners. The second used a hand loom to create pants. Benjamen and Penny tried to analyze these businesses in terms of inputs, outputs, costs, marketability of products. To be fair, they asked all the questions I would have asked, but I already knew how it would go. Whether it was language or cultural barriers, trying to tell us what they thought we wanted to know, or outright deceit, I do not know. Suppose space aliens landed in your backyard and said, “we want to learn about your lives. Please, help us understand. Where did the grommets of your shoes come from? Do you work your TV’s remote control with your left or right hand? How much does it cost you to drive your kids to school?” How would you answer? Could you answer? While it struck us as odd and frustrating that these stories were so unaccessible, even though we had the people right there with us, I reserve judgement as to whether there was any outright lying. These people are illiterate, have never read a book or a newspaper. They speak a language I had never heard of before that morning. They have never been far from their mountaintop. I have no idea how their minds work, how they see us or our questions. Never underestimate the power of a simple misunderstanding. Regardless of the reasons, our research into Chelam micro-‐enterprise did not make much sense. Units did not add up. Inventory did not accumulate according to stated rates of production and sales. Products sold did not equal profit gained. After maybe 30 minutes of questioning, we did figure out that while one family could make 4 pants a week, they had not actually made any pants for some time, because they were unable to sell pants. Why not? Too expensive to get to market, to pay someone for the 2 hour truck ride down the mountain? Or no one wants to buy your hand made, patchy pants? Or you do not speak any Spanish, so you don’t know either? I listened with half an ear, and spent my time giving out rainbow ponies, fighting back tears, and shooting video and photographs of sometimes frightened, sometimes rambunctious kids, who probably had not seen a foreigner, a real-‐live Gringo before, much less played with one. It was getting to be dark as we left, and none of us were excited about driving down that road at night. The summary for Chelam was: those people are just F^@cked. At Trickle Up’s request, the local NGO had been tasked with finding the poorest groups, and at that they had succeeded. Yet the idea that Trickle Up or any organization can use micro-‐enterprise to improve the lives of the poorest of the poor had clearly come up against some limits. The residents of Chelam are so isolated,
geographically, culturally, linguistically. There is no local economy. Sub-‐subsistance corn and yucca farming. What goods can they create that they can sell within their community at the top of a mountain? What goods can they create that are worth selling down in the valley? Other than collecting more aide, what hope do they have at all? To paraphrase an old Sam Kinessen joke, Chelam did not need more aid of any kind to help them preserve their community. What they needed was luggage, and maybe subsidized housing, so they could move to where there are jobs and schools and opportunity. On the drive down, clouds stretching between hillsides below us, we debated the value of keeping the Chelam where they are. Workforce mobility is a modern concept. A theme in helping indigenous peoples is that there is cultural value in keeping communities together, on their own land. Perhaps. Chelam only seems to be there by accident. Besides, its too crowded for anyone to succeed. My great-‐ great grandparents had enough the second or third time the Cossaks messed up their woodworking shop in the Old Country and hopped a boat to Ellis Island. That was not an easy thing to do. None of their descendants have ever regretted that decision. We spent the night in a very odd cinder block hotel. Benjamen, who is a vegetarian and who, as far as I could tell, had been fasting for several days now, managed to get in a run to some nearby Mayan ruins, for which I was quite jealous. Oh, this is your cousin’s bakery… - paraphrased from “Troopers” a spoof on Star Wars storm troopers, where the protagonist says to a Jawa, “oh, these are your cousin’s ‘droids…” At Yerbabuena , another community where Trickle Up is just getting started, we sit on a hill and talk. It’s sunny and cool, high up in the hills in another part of Huehuetenango. There is no town center. The community consists of the standard Guatemalan mud-‐brick, thatched huts scattered on the mountainside. The community just gets poorer and poorer, and more and more men spend more and more time working somewhere else, Guatemala, Mexico. The conditions are heartbreaking, the wages unacceptable, but there are no other choices. We hear how there is no livestock in the community, they are too poor for that. Yet 1/3 of them have cell phones, which they claim only use to receive calls from loved ones working far away. As we have this big conversation on the hill, the phones ring fairly often, until someone spreads the word they should be silenced. We walk past eroded fields to visit an open air bakery, past sheep, goats, and a cow.
At Yerba Buena, things are very confusing. Nothing is as what we hear. There are some very nice latrines located in everyone’s yard, each painted with a big white number. Apparently, there is an NGO focused on providing rural communities with latrines. They have done a spectacular job in Yerba Buena . Erosion is very apparent, leaving large fields of volcanic scree on which nothing grows, brilliant red against the verdant green of corn fields and pine trees. Its unclear whether the people realize that cutting down the pine trees and over-‐ farming is destroying the top soil, and once it washes down the ravines, the land is useless. Even if they realize where all the scree is coming from, I doubt they have any choices to make. All the hilltop land is utilized. There is no land to lie fallow. You need firewood to eat corn. Each family has on average 1/8 the land they need to survive. The custom is that land is always divided and passed on to sons. Which means that the next generation will have less land. The time to fix this was a few generations ago, when a father could have said, “Sons, I do not have enough land. You all cannot be farmers. One of you will get the land, and you others, I am sorry, you have to move elsewhere and make your fortunes.” A hard decision to make, of course, but having 1/8 the land you need to succeed as a farmer, but still trying, is that any better? Solutions are so easy when you can drop in on your SUV, look around, and drive away. The bakery is a brick hemisphere beside a house surrounded by corn fields. At the community meeting, we heard there was no bakery, and an enterprising group of three youths were pooling their grants to create a bakery, because their father knew how to bake bread. So we were confused when we walked up to a fully functional open air bakery, tended to by the mayor’s daughter and wife, as well as by someone hired to actually bake the bread. After more questioning, we learn the three youths are going to expand the bakery, hiring people to do the actual baking, and their job will be to sell the bread in town. These guys are kind of slick, wearing gold chains, and something about the way they acted showed they were worldly by local standards. They had probably migrated for work. They had seen things beyond the hilltops. How much they can sell the bread for, and how much it would cost to transport the bread the multi-‐hour trip to town? Answers were vague. They never stopped smiling. And why is the bakery located at the Mayor’s house, when he has nothing to do with the bakery? Deceit, or misunderstanding? Very difficult to say.
It was clear was that Yerba Buena, unlike Chelam, could make effective use of micro-‐ enterprise, even if it meant pooling their grants. The bread they were baking was sold locally, to schools and residents. Could they be successful selling bread in town? Was the whole thing a scam to grab a few hundred bucks? Was the local NGO trying to game Trickle UP? Or does it just look like that to an untrusting Gringo whose suspicions are raised when he can’t get answers to what seem like simple questions? I don’t know. Unsure if it matters. The Land of People Who Wear Purple Shirts For about an hour along the dirt road to Ixquilams, another ethnic Mam community in the mountains, you notice kids doing their homework on the sides of the road, rushing to get it done before dark, and women weaving in doorways, always with dark purple and red yarn. Everyone is wearing the most amazing clothes in purple, blue, and red. Several communities we visited sported some interesting garb, but in Ixquilams, men, women, and children were dressed unanimously spectacular. When we arrive at the community meeting hall, everyone is in the most amazing purple and red shirts. The design in unique and beautiful, with high, rounded collards and folded cuffs. All the men are wearing straw or pine-‐needle hats, and these wonderfully vibrant shirts. We sit on stage and listen to them speak, poetically, with smiles and bright shining faces, as to how they will use subsequent Trickle Up grants to become potato and chicken farmers. There is a wonderful sense of community, equality, democracy, as anyone who wants to, men or women, stands up and talks about their problems. Noone wants to be weaver, and sell wonderfully unique and beautifully made shirts to Gringos. In the land of purple shirt people, the last thing they think is valuable is a purple shirt. Conclusions By now, this trip is several months old. My memories are no less bewildering or confusing. If I were researching the effectiveness of micro-‐enterprise on the rural poor, I could easily have spent weeks or more at each of the sites we visited. Even then I would probably understand very little. Fostering entrepreneurship and micro-‐enterprise, and the Trickle Up program in particular, providing grants, training, and expertise to individual families is carefully
selected communities, can have huge positive impact. In at least some cases a very small grant has had huge benefits to a whole family, and a larger community. It’s also clear that some recipients are lacking in some qualities or support structures, without which its hard to see how Trickle Up’s program, or any program, can succeed. Maybe the qualities have less to do with the recipients themselves than with the relationships between Trickle Up, its local partners, and the communities. Or perhaps it’s simply a matter of patience. In the last three communities, Trickle Up was just getting started. Trickle Up, from their website, “works to provide the poorest of the poor their first steps out of poverty through microenterprise development.” It’s a worthy goal, and its well stated, but its not entirely accurate. I question that the poorest of the poor might not be the most successful recipients of Trickle Up aid. Trickle Up already has a set of criteria to exclude some really, really poor people who are unlikely to succeed in the Trickle Up program. They don’t work in really dangerous places. They don’t work in refugee camps. I think Trickle Up will figure out they can’t work in some other places too, based on some as yet undefined criteria. I think Trickle Up will decide that the $100/person grant structure does not work for all groups that they want to work with, and change that too. Trickle Up realizes this. I think they will figure it out.
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