Thursday, July 31, 2008.

When the rooster right outside your home begins crowing at 4:30am, you quickly understand why people in the campo wake up so early.  Or at least that was my experience this morning.  The day starts early in Ramon Garcia, with breakfast to make, washing to be done and kids to get ready for school.  I had the great pleasure of spending my days in a small home with a young woman named Yolanda and her two daughters, Maria Jose and Gladys.  This morning while the girls washed in the nearby river Yolanda taught me to make corn tortillas from scratch.  Along with beans, corn is a staple item of this community, and I’ll tell you that the tortillas and other fresh food in this community have been delicious. 

After breakfast, our group met up with Don Julio, a community leader, to visit the school and to see some typical crops that community members grow.  The people of Ramon Garcia rely on the food they grow not only to feed their families, but they also sell their extra yield to generate some income.  So by going around to view their crops, we were seeing a major part of their lives.  We first visited a nearby parcel of land before going on a rather long hike to visit Don Julio’s land.  The walk probably took us at least 45 minutes each way as we picked our way across the river and along hillsides covered with rows and rows of beans, which is their primary crop. 

Hearing Don Julio’s story impressed upon me the power of ownership in an agrarian society.  Don Julio rents his land, and paying rent means giving half of each harvest to the land owner.  A good harvest yields about twelve 100-lb. bags of beans, so that leaves six bags for the family.  Two bags must be saved to plant next year’s crop, and three bags are used to feed their family.  So at best, that leaves one bag to sell – although they must often hire outside help for the harvest, which cuts into that available income that is needed for other food and household items, school fees, etc.

I was also reminded today of a lesson we learned in Ethiopia concerning the volatility of a developing economy that relies on agricultural production, as Yolanda told me about a bad plague that destroyed their bean crop last year.  I cannot imagine the frustration of working so hard to plant and cultivate, all for nothing.  But what is worse, without that source of food and income, Yolanda had to leave her family to hire herself out as a domestic servant in Managua for six months.  Plagues, poor rain and natural disasters are impossible to predict, and in families like Yolanda’s or economies like Ethiopia’s with little resources or social safety nets, such things can be devastating. 

The amazing thing, though, is that these stories are told without a hint of complaint.  Although concessions are made about ways life could be improved in the community, I have been so impressed by how strong and incredibly intelligent the people in Ramon Garcia are.  Later in the afternoon after our hike, we met with some of the women leaders in the community, and the thing that stuck out to me most in this conversation was their clear understanding of their current situation.  “Our most difficult struggle is that we know what we need to solve our problems; we just lack the capacity to make it happen.”  These words of Daisy, one of the women, linger in my brain as I reflect on other times along the way we have heard people, from physicians and educators to community leaders and government officials, say that they know what is required to fight their problems of poverty, but the resources just aren’t there.  This has caused our group to take a second look at the way we think about and do missions and development work and consider shifting from imposing plans made outside the local context and doing everything ourselves to listening to, learning from and trying to resource these local leaders who already possess expert knowledge of their own problems with poverty.

As the sun began to set on our last full day in Ramon Garcia, the community prepared to send our group off in style.  They were going to throw us a fiesta, we were told.  What we were not told is that after a few performances of cultural dance, the gringos would be expected to get up and join in!  After a bit of, well, general awkwardness, we all embraced the dance and had a great time until late in the night.

I am so glad I got to write about this full day in the campo, because I look back on it now as one of my favorites.  And even now, as I go about life back in the US, I cannot help but look at my grocery list and wonder about whose work went into growing that food – whether it was from a community like this one which is persevering against great odds to try to enjoy the work of their hands.  And in light of the things we have learned from Witness for Peace about US policy, free trade agreements and economic justice, I feel like we should ask God to show us how to live out the call in Proverbs to “speak out and…defend the rights of the poor and needy.”

-Jennifer