Trying to help Johana with her math homework. Note iPod headphones on the table; for a couple of days, she was able to focus while listening to Bach's cello suites..JPG)
One particularly colorful neighborhood in Quito
Isaac Suntaxi Suntagsíg, who referred to me affectionately as gringuito, or "Little White Boy"
"Pilsener - The beer we will never have to drink again" - DuncAfter two years in Ecuador with Manna Project International, I’ve hung up my cleats. I have landed safely in Shreveport, had my first (and tenth) Southern Maid Donut, my first encounter with an old Magnet High schoolmate in Barnes and Noble, and begun slowly to relearn the rules of the American road. I leave my work in Ecuador in the capable hands of Bibi, a former Peace Corps Volunteer and Tulane public health graduate who replaced me as Ecuador Country Director last month.
At the close of this two-year journey, I want to thank you and your family for your gracious support of a project you may have understood only in vague terms when it began. Admittedly, when I first asked for your help in the summer of 2007, I had only a rough outline of how I would spend the next two years of my life. Your confidence inspired and challenged me to make these two years count and pushed me along in more difficult moments.
I would like to take the opportunity to describe how your donations and my time in Ecuador were spent. Upon first landing, MPI-E’s founding team inherited a skeletal mission: to create a community of young volunteers who would live in service to a "community in need" in the developing world. We were invited to work in a valley southeast of Ecuador’s capital, Quito. We began slowly, with an after-school program and English courses.
Very quickly, we had to discard many of the assumptions we brought with us to Ecuador. This was a lower-class community, to be sure, but children were not starving. The neighborhoods of San Francisco, Rumiloma and Tena were full of people already working to better their own communities. What constructive role could a handful of young, eager, Spanish-learning Americans play here?
Our answer was simple: we could build up, connect and support those Ecuadorian institutions, networks and people already in action. We set to work connecting a locally owned cooperative to microfinance training; we began talks with a school/foster home to open a health clinic; we helped a teacher and entrepreneur develop his English curriculum. The shift from talking about communities in terms of ‘need’ to talking about them in terms of assets and resources allowed us to see people as actors rather than clients.
Missing in our grand new scheme, however, was a sensitivity to the valley’s edifices of trust and power. After a year and half, we were still an unknown quantity: the nice gringos who taught kids’ classes in the community center, but little more. In communities where traditional ideas of trust (confianza) and authority run deep, the library and teen-center which we launched in March of 2009 granted us the presence necessary to approach larger institutions, provided a platform for building personal relationships, and created spaces in which to experiment with educational programming.
The library and teen center have met enormous success, even as Bibi’s new crop of volunteers determines their role in the valley’s development. For my part, I leave Ecuador having learned how to be a plumber, mediator, volunteer coordinator, librarian, US embassy warden, disciplinarian, and entrepreneur. My own path remains an open question. I’ll be traveling in the US for two months to visit old friends and am looking toward graduate school in 2011. The last two years have prepared me for just about anything, an opportunity for which I thank you all dearly!
Un abrazo (A warm embrace),
Mark Hand
To stay in touch with MPI-Ecuador, head to openhandsdirtyfeet.blogspot.
My dad always says that when you study something in enough detail, then you end up studying everything. That happened a bit in this book - now everywhere I look I see founding fathers and divisive aristorats and democratic rabble-rousers. two examples from today's news. First, Congress's refusal to pass the $700 billion Wall Street bailout (700,000,000,000? What does that number even mean?) harkens straight back to Andrew Jackson's anti-banking instincts, and all the populist rhetoric that it rode on. Second, watching Ecuador fight over and pass its new constitution - a 444-article tome, and Ecuador's twentieth in 200 years - makes me marvel at how sturdy our own little constitution has proven, despite the hardly guaranteed development of democracy in the first half of the 19th century. It was a rough ride, no doubt about it.
After the meeting, I headed to the Sangolquí notary to process more visa paperwork. My regular readers know what a happy hassle this process has been. I'm happy to report that after today, and if all goes well tomorrow and Thursday, I will be free of visa paperwork (or tramite) until our next group of Program Directors comes in July 2009. That means less time for me in offices and more time losing at basketball to Ecuadorians like I got to do this afternoon.
"...will focus on bottom-up development by concentrating on micro-finance, vocational training and community development programs."Over the last couple months, the MPI-Ecuador team has been working on solidifying our approach to community development. Our three areas of focus:
Oppose the Colombia Free Trade Deal: While the Colombia Free Trade Agreement has some labor and environmental standards, these protections are undermined by persistent violence in Colombia. Labor protections remain useless in an environment where union leaders are routinely assassinated. Barack Obama will work with Colombia to bring the perpetrators to justice and protect labor activists.What this position ignores is that labor union leaders have a lower rate of assassination than Colombians at large, and that the current Colombian administration has overseen a vertiginous drop in violence in Colombia. That doesn't speak to Colombia's safety, but it does undercuts the argument that labor union leaders are assassinated "routinely." And in a country as shorn as Colombia, President Uribe's Weberian monopoly on violence, finally bearing fruit, may be the only way to transition the country out of its four decades of guerilla warfare. Punishing Colombian businesses and consumers by cutting off trade hardly inspires Hope and Change.
Jul 31st 2008 | QUITO
From The Economist print edition
Correa dictates his socialist credo
IF ONLY size, novelty and good intentions were everything when it came to constitutions, Ecuador would be a paradise. The document approved on July 25th by a Constituent Assembly dominated by supporters of Rafael Correa, the leftist president, is a 444-article behemoth. If approved by a referendum on September 28th, it will become Ecuador’s 20th constitution and the third in as many decades. It is nothing if not politically correct: it bans foreign military bases, promises a “just wage” and enshrines manifold rights, including that to sumak kawsay, or “good living” in Quichua, one of two indigenous languages whose use it now makes official alongside Spanish. Whether it will improve real life in a chronically misgoverned country is another matter.
Mr Correa insists that it will. He says the new constitution puts an end to “partyocracy”, “neoliberalism”, and the rule of economic “mafias”. One of his main aims is to reduce the clashes between the executive and a powerful but fragmented legislature that has seen the past three elected presidents fail to finish their term. The new text does this by substantially increasing presidential power. The president will be able to dismiss the legislature. Mr Correa’s nominees seem sure to form a majority on a powerful new Constitutional Court.
The constitution officially declares Ecuador to have a “social and solidaristic” economy. It gives state-owned companies a dominant role in oil, mining, electricity, transport and telecommunications, reflecting the government’s mistrust of the private sector. “The market is an excellent servant but a terrible master,” says Mr Correa.
This socialist pitch is popular in Ecuador largely because the country was scarred by an economic collapse in 1999, which featured a mishandled banking crisis, hyperinflation and the adoption of the dollar as the currency.
Opponents of Mr Correa worry that the constitution imposes an earlier failed economic model on the country. Although the state already controls much of an oil-dominated economy, the private operators of a handful of water utilities and airports face an uncertain future. The new constitution bans international arbitration and gives priority to local investors over foreigners. So it is certain to drive away almost all foreign investment. The Central Bank will come under presidential control: that paves the way for a possible future abandonment of the dollar in favour of a new local currency, and for the potential massaging of economic statistics.
Mr Correa, a youngish Catholic economist, who took office 18 months ago, remains popular. High oil prices have given him money to spend on social programmes. Public investment is running at twice last year’s level. He is likely to win the referendum, and a fresh election next year. But his success depends on oil money. By writing into it his personal political creed, Mr Correa has almost certainly guaranteed that Ecuador’s latest constitution will not long outlast his tenure of the presidency. And if Ecuadoreans do see much of the good life, they are likely to have to pay for it dearly in the future.
That's a pretty compelling narrative, at least literarily speaking. It sounds like a plot for a Michael Moore film, or a companion to Blood Diamond.Narrative number one:
For the last fifty years, big bad Chevron has been operating, with total impunity, across the globe. In Myanmar, they constructed a pipeline that has provided the financial life support to the vicious Burmese junta. In Ecuador, they carelessly dumped/leaked 18 billion tons of toxic waste into streams and lakes, contaminating the only drinking sources in an isolated area the size of Rhode Island. Now that it looks like the latter decision might pinch, Chevron has ramped up its lobbying efforts in DC, pressuring the Bush administrationto punish Ecuador if they don't squash the case.
The key question, of course, is: How then to tell which is more accurate? More background information welcome.Narrative numero dos:
In the tradition of American litigiousness, a handful of high-powered American lawyers have convinced a couple of Ecuadorian NGOs that they can pretty easily suck some cash out of Chevron for alleged contamination of lands in Ecuador by Texaco, which Chevron purchased in 2001. Ecuador's schizophrenic political system makes it as likely as not that a friendly administration will award damages in an otherwise frivolous case. If the coin flips well, the lawyers and NGOs (not the indigenous folks, mind you) will be swimming in cash.
