Too broke, or too disorganized, to keep the national gallery open

The Honduran National Gallery of Art locked its doors this week.

The government hasn’t provided any money since January. Staff haven’t been paid since November. They finally quit coming to work, and now management has chained the doors and started packing away some of the works.

The gallery is good. We visited, looking to kill time in Tegucigalpa, the capital, and liked it.

It’s in a 450-year old convent, a beautiful two-storey building with an open courtyard. There are about six galleries, and they cover art in Honduras from pre-Columbian carvings, through the religious art of the Spanish era and into the contemporary scene. There is a nice auditorium, and gardens in the courtyard.

The displays are basic, but that adds to the power of some work, especially the religious paintings and spectacular silver from the colonial-era churches.

I gave it a glowing review on TripAdvisor.

It’s a bad sign, I think, when a government can’t make the budgeted payments to the national gallery. It’s not even big money; gallery managers say $45,000 would be enough to open the doors and get through the next four months. The total annual budget is about $135,000.

None of this is surprising. Stories of government employees going unpaid for months - teachers, health workers, anyone - are regular features in the newspapers. Sometimes, it seems the government simply can’t get its act together to issue the cheques. Sometimes there is no money. (Sometimes, I’m sure, the employees’ claims are bogus.)

What’s surprising, for a North American, is that people keeping showing up for work for months without getting paid.

Mostly, that’s what happens when people really need a job and have no other prospects. You keep on heading into work, hoping some day that you’ll get some of that back pay and the regular wages will start flowing. Why not? There is nothing much else to do.

But it might also reflect a cultural value of just accepting life’s blows and keeping on. (Written down, that looks practically noble; in practice, it look more like learned helplessness.)

The failure to pay people also illustrates another problem. Hondurans talk a lot about ‘impunidad’ - the ability of some people to ignore laws without consequences. 

Honduras has a fine set of laws and regulations. They just aren’t enforced.

There are legal minimum wages, for example, based on the nature of work and size and location of company. But employers can ignore them without fear of consequences. Or they can simply refuse to pay people for months at a time.

It’s new to be in a land where the government doesn’t have the money to pay the bills. Canadian governments, even in deficit years, can borrow whatever they need to cover budgeted costs.

The Honduras government can’t do that. Tax exemptions and evasion are widespread, so revenues are low. The domestic borrowing market has been tapped out, and foreign borrowing is difficult and interest rates are high. Some months, there just isn’t enough money to cover costs, or pay salaries. And, eventually, people get fed up.

A national art gallery isn’t essential. (Though Tegucigalpa has few attractions for visitors - a couple of other museums, a great nearby national park. The gallery could be a draw. And it is a refuge just a few blocks from the central square and the quite ratty downtown - the neglected office buildings call up the end years of the Soviet bloc.)

Government could even have decided to close the gallery’s doors to save money in tough times.

But it didn’t. The Finance Ministry just failed to send the promised money, month after month.

And, finally, the national gallery closed its doors, for who knows how long.

Four reasons the Liberals won, and the NDP lost

So why did the NDP lead in the polls evaporate?

Sure, the $17 million in taxpayers’ money spent promoting the Liberals was a factor, as were the negative ads. 

From far away, I’d offer four more basic reasons.

Christy Clark and the Liberals ran a tidy campaign with a simple message. The Liberals, they said, would manage the economy better and protect jobs. They gave people something to vote for, in a vague and not particularly credible way.

They also ran gave people reasons not to vote for the NDP, arguing Adrian Dix was at best an unknown quantity and the party platform unclear. (And talking a lot of rubbish about the NDP as well.)

Adrian Dix and the New Democrats did not give people something to vote for. There was a platform, of course, and excellent positions on some issues, like banning corporate and union donations. But by the end of the campaign, the main message seemed to be that the New Democrats would be careful. That’s a laudable quality. But it’s not a substitute for a vision of what B.C. would be like in four years, or 10 years.

And the New Democrats failed to give people reasons not to vote for the Liberals. It’s welcome that the party pledged to avoid the kind of slimy attack ads that too often pollute politics. (Like the ones the Liberals used against Dix and Cummins.)

But it would have been completely legitimate to suggest that voters should be suspicious of the Liberal campaign, citing the example of the HST and the 2009 pre-election budget that turned out to be fiction. It would be just as legitimate to talk about the Basi-Virk payment, or growing secrecy, or attempts to limit the role of independent watchdogs like the auditor general and the representative for children and youth, or cronyism. Or the current budget, which falls somewhere between dubious and bogus.

Of course, everything is clear after the fact. And, as it said on a coffee mug a reporter gave me in my days as an editor, ‘Everything is easy for the man who doesn’t have to do it himself.’

Julia the banana seller: Putting a face to Honduras' poor

Julia Pérez Alvarado and part of her large family

On a good day, Julia Pérez Alvarado makes about $6 selling bananas in Tegucigalpa neighbourhoods. Not much for a single mom with eight children.

But pretty typical for the way many, or most, Hondurans scratch out a subsistence living. In fact, Alvarado’s take on good days is pretty typical wage for a laborer or household worker. 

La Tribuna has been doing regular stories on poor people around the city.

For me, they’re great. It feels pushy to start grilling strangers about their lives in bad Spanish. 

But I’ve been curious about the women who sell bananas outside the market in Copan, crouching on the sidewalk.

Statistics are important. This week, the Honduran national statistic’s agency reported 69 per cent of Hondurans live in poverty. About 24 per cent survive on less than $1 a day.

People’s stories are important too.

More children? 'Only God knows'

Alvarado’s business model is simple, according to the paper. She leaves her house - a shack really - at 5 a.m. each morning and walks an hour to a largish market. She buys 200 minimos - a variety of small bananas - for about $4, or two cents each. Then she walks kilometres selling them door-to-door in neighbourhoods for five cents each. (Which is the same as I pay at the market.)

Is she sells out, she makes $6. If she doesn’t sell at least 80 bananas, she loses money.

At 41, she has eight children, the oldest 23. She left her husband because he was jealous and beat here, she told La Tribuna, and a second man in her life turned out to be a louse.

“Men today don’t work, they go into the streets and find other women,” she said. “They stay for a while then they rush away  and don’t help me in anyway.”

Based on conversations with Hondurans, that seem a problem. About 34 per cent of households are headed by a single woman. That’s much greater than in Canada (about 13 per cent), and there is no structure for child support or safety net. 

You can survive on $6 a day, even with a family. The print edition of La Tribuna showed Alvarado’s house, which was two rooms, cobbled together out of sticks and corrugated tin, likely squatting on the land. So her housing is free

 Food, even for all those kids, would be manageable, at least in terms of enough calories (though not remotely adequate for nutrition). Tortillas are cheap - about five cents each - and filling. Beans are 30 cents a pound and rice about 60 cents. (Beans, corn tortillas and rice make up about 60 per cent of the calories consumed in a typical Honduran diet.) 

The problem is that people living that way are always on the edge of disaster. If Alvarado wrenches her knee and can’t walk to the market, or someone robs their house or the school demands kids pay fees, then things fall apart. (Alvarado told La Tribuna all her children in school, some at night and some in the day. That doesn’t actually guarantee they’re learning much.)

There is an obvious question. Why would anyone have eight children without any ability to provide for them? The online comments on the article included some pretty forceful expressions of the same question.

Religion, partly. The interviewer asked Alvarado if she was going to have more children. “I don’t know,” she said. “Only God knows that.” (Though she added “je, je, je,” which often means a person is joking.)

About half the population say they are Roman Catholic. That church says members can’t use any birth control measure except abstinence when women are most likely to conceive. That’s the equivalent of no effective birth control for poor people with little education. 

Religion aside,  there are issues of access and education. About one-quarter of births are to women under 18, a rate 26 per cent higher than the average for the region. A 2008 HDR report on Honduras found 46 per cent of first-time teen mothers had no education.

But even with no children, for many - maybe most - Hondurans, poverty is just reality, and disaster just one piece of bad luck away.

Speaking Spanish, and the challenge of criticism

It’s tough to serve up criticism in a second language.

Or it is for for me. I spent a day last week working with four other people on a funding proposal for a Honduran NGO. In Spanish. 

Luckily, one woman was making notes on her computer, which were projected on a screen in the meeting room. Instead of struggling to grasp spoken comments, I could read them. My personal effectiveness increased tenfold. (Another occasion to give heartfelt thanks for technology.)

Responding still wasn’t easy. While meetings leave me feeling like my head will explode, there is now a point - maybe 45 minutes in - when something in my brain clicks into Spanish mode. (That fades, like a superpower granted by a genie. By the six-hour mark, the simplest sentences are hard to decode.)

More importantly, I am prepared to sound stupid in order to participate.

That’s probably a triumph of ego. I don’t like to sound dumb in front of other people, or course. But, even more, I can’t resist offering ideas and comments. (The Honduran women from the development agency were encouraging, which helped.)

It’s a weird experience. I was good at meetings in Canada. I had insights, and usually an idea of the optimum outcome. I could help win support for good ideas, and might have even been a little pushy. Here, I am a struggling, well-intentioned amateur.

The hardest thing, I have realized, is to offer criticism. It’s difficult in a first language - look at how useless most managers are at offering guidance to employees on their job performance.

But it’s really challenging in a second language. In the meeting, the group came up with a lamish statement of the objectives for the project. 

In English, I could say ‘what a great start, let’s see what we can do to make it even better.’ 

In Spanish, all I could say was “That’s very general and generic. We need to be more specific about how the project will bring the changes the funder wants.” It sounded judgmental even to me. (I don’t know why I felt the need to criticize the main objective as both general and generic. Either might have sufficed.)

When we offer criticism in our first language, it’s all about tone. We make people think the new ideas are actually their own, or create an imaginary consensus, or make an overwhelming case.

None of that is possible when you’re struggling to come up with a semi-coherent sentence. All subtleties are lost. 

It’s not just a problem in meetings. Our organization uses one taxi driver in Tegucigalpa to keep everyone safe. (We walk in Tegus, in the daytime and carrying nothing that would attract bad guys. But it is a dangerous city.)

He's great. Mostly. But if you call him, he will always say he is 10 minutes away. Then he doesn’t show up for an hour, which can be discouraging at the end of a difficult day.

After two one-hour late pickups at the end of the working day last week, I wanted to complain to him and and the staff who rely on him. I couldn’t judge how harsh I was being in my challenged Spanish - a pushover, or a crabby, time-obsessed gringo?

My Spanish efforts are already producing benefits. Hondurans like it when you can speak their language, even badly. And I’ve seen the weight lift off store staff when they realize I can communicate and they don’t have to launch into a stressful, crazed version of charades with yet another gringo.

I’m sure learning a new language is helping my brain.

I’m also learning a lot about humility and what it’s like to be scrabbling to make your voice heard. And I’m wondering how many great insights have been lost because people haven’t been given the space and time to explain them.

Photo radar and taxes and the power of political myths

It’s interesting the way political orthodoxy emerges, without much real evidence.

Take two examples - photo radar and irrational tax phobia.

Photo radar, it was clear during the leaders’ debate, is seen as political poison. Asked about reinstating it, all four leaders said  no.

The evidence from around the world is conclusive - photo radar reduces crashes and health care costs and saves lives. In the six years that B.C. had photo radar, road deaths averaged 408 annually. In the previous six years, an average 534 people died on the roads. That’s 126 families spared the death of a loved one each year. (You can read more stats here.)

And the politicians can’t claim they’re reflecting the will of the people. A 2007 poll for the Canada Safety Council found 75 per cent of British Columbians supported photo radar on the highways - and 90 per cent in school zones.

So why the fear about an evidence-based public policy move - one accepted in Alberta? Maybe the opponents are considered passionate enough that they’re not worth riling. Maybe the politicians have bought into a myth of public opposition.

The more dramatic and damaging myth is around taxes.

Somehow, politicians have reached an agreement that they have to pretend all taxes are bad. If they plan increases, they offer elaborate apologies.

But the public isn’t stupid. Government services cost money, and have to be paid for. If you want a hospital bed, or a road, or a school for your children, then taxes have to be collected.

Further, people have indicated they’re willing to pay more for better services from government, just as they are in any other area of their life. A B.C. poll several years ago found 60 per cent of residents would pay more in property taxes to improve services. 

And an April poll for the Roundtable of Community Social Services of BC found 53 per cent of British Columbians would pay higher taxes to ensure better services in their community.

There is an important qualifier there - more money in return for better services. Not for convention centre or fast ferry overruns, or endless re-orgs or government advertising.

Still, it’s odd that politicians have largely accepted the myth that citizens reject all taxation, and allowed it to shape their policies and the public debate.

Sinking in a sea of garbage

Tegucigalpa floods: Take hills, garbage-blocked ditches and drains, add rain

I’ve been wondering about garbage-per-kilometre as a development indicator, along with all the formal measures like stunted children and GINI indexes and poverty rates.

Maybe when a society gets a handle on garbage, it’s reached some sort of turning point.

If so, Honduras has a long way to go.

Early this year, slick new recycling containers sprouted on the streets in Copan Ruinas. We saw them in Tela too, so it must be some sort of national program. They had their own little concrete pads and were abut four-feet tall tall and slender, with ad posters for banks or tourist sites on two sides. There was an opening on each end, and signs said one was for organic waste, and the other for plastic, cans, glass and cardboard.

Pretty darned green. Except if you looked inside, all the trash dropped into one open area. It was a really fancy and, it turned out, easily vandalized garbage pail.

That’s not surprising.

The “Don’t Be a Litterbug” stuff hasn’t caught on down here. When you ride the buses, people finish their snack or pop and toss the garbage out the window without a thought. (If the window is broken and won’t open, they toss it on the floor.) We’ve waged a continuing battle with the kids from Angelitos to use garbage pails, since their inclination is drop garbage anywhere.

The results aren’t pretty. A stretch of green roadside becomes an impromptu dump. The river - especially after a holiday - is littered with styrofoam food containers, bags of garbage and whatever detritus is left from the day’s fun.

Rivers and creeks are generally treated as good places to throw garbage, even whole communities’ garbage. In part, that’s because when the torrential rains come the garbage is swept away.

A Utila beach, and mainland garbage

Not good news for the people downstream, of course. Ultimately, the garbage ends up somewhere, and oceanfront communities complain the big rains bring a flood of garbage into the Caribbean and onto their beaches. We wandered along a dirt road to a deserted cove in Utila, which would have been stunning except for the dune of plastic garbage, likely largely from the mainland.

Even the rains can’t sweep all the garbage away. Tegucigalpa, the capital, was hammered with a two-hour rain during Semana Santa and had massive flooding.

A big part of the problem was garbage. “The floods in the capital were generated by the large amount of garbage dumped in streams, rivers, streets, curbs and gutters,” La Prensa reported. Drains were blocked, creeks and ditches overflowed and streets filled with black, garbage-choked water.

Maybe worrying about garbage comes later, when two-thirds of the population isn’t living in poverty. 

Maybe the lack of easy access to markets for recycled materials, especially outside the cities is an issue. (There are people who scavenge the loads as they come into the Tegucigalpa dump, grabbing cardboard and plastic and metal and selling them to brokers on the fringes. We get garbage pickup three times a week; I assume the guys on the truck grab what can be sold. My partner met a guy who scavenged plastic bottles, crushed them with his truck and took them to the city to sell when he had enough.)

Or maybe getting people to think about garbage - about shared responsibilities and shared losses - would be a step toward a society that thought about tackling some of those harder issues.

The children's education fund: Even really stupid commitments should be honoured

Martyn Brown raises an interesting point about the NDP pledge to kill a really stupid piece of public policy the Campbell government put in place in 2007.

The Children’s Education Fund never made any sense. The Liberals said the government would put $1,000 for every child born in the province into a fund. Beginning in 2025, when the a teen graduated from high school, he or she would get the money, plus interest, for postsecondary training or education. Figure $2,200.

It was a goofy policy, pulled out of thin air when Gordon Campbell needed something to announce at the party’s 2006 convention.

And there have been suggestions for a couple of years - OK, perhaps just by me - to get rid of it.

In 2011, I wrote that the government was committing $47 million to the fund that year, money that was needed for services.

“There’s no logical basis for the government to decide that a tuition subsidy for students starting school in 2025 is a priority today — more important than caring for the disabled, improving health care or offering a tax cut to encourage employment growth," I wrote then.

“In fact, the notion that the government can predict the needs of students two decades in the future is dubious. Imagine the outgoing Socreds trying to come up with a tuition plan that would work for students in 2011.

“The amount, for example, could be a pittance compared to the cost of education more than a decade from now.

“Or alternately, a future government, given the need for skilled British Columbians, could have decided post-secondary education should be free to some qualifying students, or even all students. That’s not an outlandish notion, given the shift to a knowledge-based economy in the province....

“Why not take the $47 million and address today’s needs, through scholarships or education credits or tax breaks, or target First Nations’ high school graduation rates, or address other educational needs?

“It’s also bizarre that the fund makes no distinctions based on the needs of either the province, or the students.

“A multimillionaire’s child will get $2,000; so will a youth coming out of care, living on income assistance and trying to get an education. 

“A smart program would target bright students who couldn’t afford an education, and be based on merit and need. Or it could support education for students entering fields that were critical to the province’s future.”

By 2025, I noted, the government would have stashed more than $1 billion in the fund.

The government changed the plan this year, pledging to give parents a cheque for every child on their sixth birthdays, to put into an RESP.

Brown’s point is that parents who had babies between 2007 and today had a right to count on the money and taking it away violates a “social contract.” (And he acknowledges, implicitly, the irony of the argument, given his role in the Campbell government’s illegal ripping up of contracts with pubic sector unions.)

The programs needs to be axed.

But perhaps there was a commitment here, at least to the parents of children born since in 2007. It might be right to preserve the program in its original form for those families. After all, the money has been set aside.

Even stupid commitments probably should be honoured.

Vote for our musical Cuso volunteer video

This is utterly shameless, I admit.
Cuso International had a contest, inviting volunteers around the world to submit videos about the experience.
We entered, with a song featuring the accordion stylings of Jody Paterson and my guitar fumblings.
I kind of like it.
What I would like you to do is go the Cuso Facebook page and watch the video.
If you think it's kind of OK, you have to like both the Cuso Facebook page and our video to vote for us.

Footnote:
Should you want to sing along, here are the lyrics, to the tune of Leaving on Jet Plane,

All our bags are packed, we're standing here

About to be a volunteer

In a country Peace Corps left just weeks ago

Will we get gunned down? Or take up coke?

Will our workmates think we're quite the joke?

With our high-school Spanish messing up the show?

But we're flexible Cuso stock

We'll survive this culture shock

If capacity needs building, count us in

We're working in a new land

Don't know when we'll be back again

Our world won't be the same

We've met campesinos by the score,

We've learned most folks here are really poor

We know more about la roya than we should

We've been bounced down dirt roads, left to wait

Learned that 6 o'clock is more like 8

And that sunshine in December sure feels good

We're flexible Cuso stock

We'll survive the culture shock

If capacity needs building, we're your team

The power failures don't get us down

We've landed in a real nice town

And the guns aren't aimed at us, just worn with jeans

Are we changing culture? It's hard to tell

Communications is a real tough sell

In a country that has faith and not much more

But they love the photos, think the website's cool

The Facebook friends and the PowerPoints too

But will they keep it up when we walk out the door?

We're flexible Cuso stock

We've survived this culture shock

We're thriving in a most appealing way

Thank you for this chance to shine

In a land that has no sense of time

O Cuso...can we stay?