The Gift of Christmas

The site of the birth of Jesus, Bethlehem

And when we give each other Christmas gifts in His name, let us remember that He has given us the sun and the moon and the stars and the earth with its forests and mountains and oceans — and all that lives and moves upon them. 

He has given us all green things and everything that blossoms and bears fruit – and all that we quarrel about and all that we have misused – and to save us from our own foolishness, for all our sins, He has come down to earth and gave us Himself.

Sigrid Undset

Seeds of hope

What are all these people doing gathered outside the door of the church in El Limon?

They are members of the church council for the San Miguel zone of the parish of Dulce Nombre de María.

They are getting vegetable seeds, which Adán is distributing.

The past few years the parish has had an agricultural project to help villages throughout the parish. The first year the three field workers did a lot of work helping small farmers improve their practices in the production of basic grains – corn and beans. There was also a component of vegetable production in groups which has continued. Another component has been the promotion of small family gardens not only in the 18 villages where they worked but also with the pastoral workers of the parish.

One of the most popular aspects of the project was providing seeds for family gardens. People are diversifying their diets and are also selling the surplus for a little needed cash.

The funding for the project ends this month. A proposal was sent to the Spanish Catholic organization, Manos Unidas, which funded the project up to now, but there has not been any response.

I hope we can find a way to continue this project.

Any suggestions for funding or other help are most welcome.

Rest in God's love, Aunt Mary

Aunt Mary with extended family, 2008

Last night, my Aunt Mary Barrar died at 5:01 pm Eastern Time. She was my last living aunt. A generation has passed away.

Aunt Mary with cousin Mary, December 2005

I have many memories of Aunt Mary. Her husband, Uncle George, was my godfather. Her daughter, Mary, is only 30 days younger than I am. Her son, George, is younger than us.

Aunt Mary with cousin George, October 2010

I remember many visits to their home in Norwood, outside Philadelphia. It was always a welcoming place. Often my parents and I would spend an evening after Christmas with them – dinner, with Aunt Mary’s famous delicious rolls. When the grandsons were old enough, we usually played board games for hours. It was always a delight to be there.

I vaguely remember that she and my uncle George (who was my godfather) were foster parents at times, taking in children in need.

After Dad moved to Iowa in 1993 we would often stay with Aunt Mary. After Dad’s death, I would stay there until a few years ago.

I stayed with her the night we buried my father. Aunt Mary, cousin Mary, and I were looking over photos of Dad that I had put together. I ended up mentioning how my Dad would go on Friday nights to turn off the lights of the observant Jewish family that lived across the street.

That story opened up a series of stories. She told how she would go with the cantor to turn the lights off in the synagogue

She then talked about the neighborhood – the Meadows – in west Philadelphia. She remembered the black families who lived there. She talked about them as the holy rollers; the black Pentecostals with their tent meetings were a little startling for her. But she accepted the people.

She mentioned the basketball games in the gym at the Catholic Church, St. Raphael’s, where in the 1920s and 1930s people of various faiths and races would play basketball together.

This was a very different neighborhood – with real mixing of races and religions.

That night Aunt Mary gave me an idea of why my parents were the way they were.

Aunt Mary with cousin Judy

The last few years (except for this year) I’ve had a chance to see Aunt Mary when I visited the US, about once a year. I would often arrive around the date of her birthday, which she shared with her first great-granddaughter. It was a delight to share with her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.

Celebrating her birthday, October 2009

I’ll miss her. She was a woman of faith who was so welcoming.

Celebrating her birthday, October 2010

May the angels welcome her into Paradise and may she rest gently in the arms of God.

A good woman has gone to her Maker.

Aunt Mary with extended family, February 2008

COFFEE in Camalote

Because my car is finally fixed I set out for the village of Camalote on Sunday, to bring the Eucharist for their Celebration of the Word.

This is something I am always glad to do. But this time there was an added bonus.

Over lunch the two pastoral workers began talking about coffee. It is the coffee harvest season, after all. We talked a little about the effects of roya, a disease that is affecting some varieties of coffee, the varieties which most of the small poor farmers plant.  Two varieties (noventa and lempira) seem to be resistant, but they give a smaller yield than the other varieties.

That probably means that these farmers and the hundreds of coffee pickers will not get as much money as previous years and we can expect some serious social consequences – probably down the line in May and June.

But we talked more about the coffee process and the prices they get.

A medium sized coffee de-pulping machine

Ripe coffee is a berry – with the seed inside a pulpy mass. After it is picked the pulp has to be removed. Many people have a small machine to do this. The coffee bean then has to be washed and dried. This is called coffee in “pergamino.”

Coffee (yellow) with the pulp (red) removed - in pergamino

After this it needs to be dried thoroughly so that the husk (the parchment-like covering) can be removed. Then you have the coffee bean in “oro” – gold.

Those who pick the coffee generally get 30 lempiras ($1.50) for a five-gallon container of the coffee berries. This container is called either una lata or un galón (even though it’s actually five gallons).

But what are the prices for the small farmers who sell their crop to intermediaries, sometimes called coyotes in Spanish.

I was told that a cargo – 200 pounds of coffee beans– will get 3,500 lempiras (about $175) – that’s about 88 cents per pound of coffee. Not too bad. But that’s not what most small farmers get.

If the beans are still wet, the intermediary will calculate the 100 pounds brought in by the farmer as 48 pounds. If the beans are dry, 100 pounds are counted as 55 pounds. If the beans are dried and have the husk removed, 100 pounds are counted as 88 pounds.

So it would be profitable to have dried beans and even better to have dried coffee beans with the husk removed.

     

The men figured that selling wet coffee to the intermediaries (taking the full price as17.5 lempiras a pound) would give them 8.4 lempiras a pound, whereas selling the coffee dried and with the husk removed would bring 15.4 lempiras. That would mean, for a 200 pound bag of beans, a difference of 1400 lempiras ($70).

But to be able to sell dried and husked beans means having a place to dry them. In the sun, it can take more than five days. And each afternoon you have to take them in, and if it’s raining you have to get them in as soon as possible.

In addition a 10 meter by 3 meter concrete drying area could cost 50,000 lempiras - $2,500.

A traditional cement area for drying coffee

And so people are dependent on the intermediaries who buy the beans and then dry and husk them and finally sell them.

A commercial drier – my friends suggested – was about 1.5 million lempiras. (Salvador knew about this since a coffee cooperative in Dolores is trying to find a way to buy a drier.) The coop was not functioning for a few years because their de-pulping machine was broken, but they restarted their work about two or three years ago.

Then they told me about solar driers.

A man in the community has one and we stopped to see José Antonio Pérez. His solar drier is 10 meters by three meters, though the inner meter is a passageway.

Inside there are trays with mesh so that the beans can dry all the way through.

Inside Antonio's solar coffee drier

There is also a second layer of trays – which on sunny days can be pulled out to take advantage of the sun.

Maynor (Antonio's son) demonstrates the pull-out tray to use when it's sunny.

Antonio made his drier with the help of a US AID field staffer – to the tune of 10,000 lempiras (about $500).

With this drier, it takes about 4 days to dry the beans. Last year he dried about 75 quintales – 7,500 pounds.

This year Antonio will only prepare the best coffee for selling directly to Bon Café, a Honduran coffee exporter. To do this well he will pay his pickers 35 lempiras a lata, but they have to pick only the mature berries.

Antonio and his sons and sons-in law have about 7 manzanas of coffee, though 1.5 this year were seriously affected by roya. He suggested that a manzana might yield 20 quintales (2000 pounds) of well-dried coffee, though with better production methods one might be able to get yields of 30 or 40 quintales.

I asked about the altitude of the fields, a serious question for coffee production. His are between 1,050 and 1,100 kilometers above sea level. He also told me that they prune the coffee plants so that they are not much higher than 2 meters, which will make it easier to harvest.

Antonio also showed me a biodigestor that he made, with the help of a Honduran agency to provide gas for his family. It cost between 800 to 1200 lempiras ($400 -$600).

The biodigester (under the plastic)

Some friends of mine, Iowa State grads, have a great project in Nicaragua, with biodigesters and other technologies for the poor. Check out their website here. I think they can make it available at a cheaper rate.

The biodigester (with a vine on top)

 

Antonio's  is the only solar drier in this part of the parish, though he knows of one not too far away (as the crow flies). I have heard that there is at least one other person I know who has a biodigester.

José Antonio with his sons, Maynor and Denys, by their solar coffee drier

I find this very interesting and it’s stirring me to think more about how we can find a way to get small coffee farmers a better price for their crops.

Fair trade is a long and hard process, but there are some examples of direct trade coffee, where groups in the US help farmers by buying their coffee to be sold in the US. I know of three examples of this and it seems to work.

This may be one project I’ll have to do some more research on, with the hope of helping people here start something so that they get just prices and their families can have a better life.

Education by the poor and for the poor

With the people in Newton, Connecticut, I mourn the deaths of the children and others killed in a school there yesterday.

I will not comment - but only offer my prayers. 

 

However, I just finished an interesting book on education and had finished the review below before I heard of the killings. Though the review has no real relation to the killings, I decided that I wanted to publish it as soon as I could.

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The Beautiful Tree: A personal journey into how the world’s poorest people are educating themselves by James Tooley is an intriguing book that I find very hard to review.

I recognize some of my biases toward the obligations of society, often managed through government agencies, to provide good education for all, especially the poor.

But I also recognize that all of my education was in private educational institutions – four different Catholic institutions and one private grad school.

This book is, generally, a compelling read, full of great stories of people who provide education with the poorest.

Against all odds and against the incredulity of many government and aid agencies, James Tooley found hundreds of private schools for the poor in the center of slums and in remote villages in India, Africa, and China. These were often small makeshift schools which one person had started to educate local children, sometimes because of the poor quality of the local public schools, sometimes because there were no schools that were nearby. Sometimes a person, often a woman, had started a kindergarten and then the parents asked her to offer first grade, and subsequent grades.

These efforts are admirable, most often with good results, despite the lack of decent facilities. In studies the author oversaw, these schools generally did better academically than most public schools that were also meant for the poor.

I was appalled, as was the author, at the attitudes of development specialists and public officials to the schools, who denied their presence or degraded the quality of their education, claiming that the owners were only in education for the money.

These private schools have some major advantages: smaller classes, dedicated teachers who show up every day, mostly local teachers, and a proprietor who is interested in the education of the children.

There is also a system of accountability: the parents can always take their kids out of the schools if the teaching is poor; then the school suffers. So the proprietor of the school has to see that the educational experience for the children is as good as possible.

There are problems: poor facilities, teachers who are not always highly trained, and in some places the schools are highly vulnerable to the demands of officials for bribes to be recognized or to avoid fines or closure.

These schools are, to a great extent, a response to a terrible public education system with incompetent teachers, some of whom don’t show up for classes or only do minimal teaching. The children suffer because many of these public school teachers cannot be fired or even held accountable for their failure to work. The teachers in public schools are often fairly well paid and have strong unions, but they do not always have the spirit of working for the common good that the founders of the small private school often manifest.

Supposedly there are parent-teacher associations in the public schools but these often have no power and are at times bought out by the teachers

 Tooley proposes small private schools as the way to deal with the education of the poor. He even cites Gandhi to support his position.

But I fear that he has a one-dimensional approach to the problem of the education of the poor. He appears to see the “profit motive in education” and these small privately-owned schools as “the silver bullet” for the problem, as the “Holy Grail.”

He briefly mentions non-profit schools but does no in-depth study of them. He only notes that in some cases their test scores are lower than ether the privately-owned or government schools.

I believe that Tooley’s analysis does not take into sufficient consideration that there is more than the free market at work in the schools he visited. From his descriptions of the owners and even from part of his analysis, these owners often come across as persons who are really interested in the betterment of the poorest children in their area. Many even provide free or subsidized education for the very poor. These people are motivated not merely by the desire for gain but, perhaps more so, by their concern for the common good. They cannot be reduced to entrepreneurs.

In the last chapter the author makes some suggestions, including vouchers for poor children. I’m not sure that is not a good idea. Yet he goes on to talk about the possibility of chains of private for-profit schools with their own “brand,” as ways to advance this type of schooling. He even talks about “franchises.”

I fear that this reveals a blindness to the problems of bigness, of the power of big money.  Could this be just another example of an ideological approach that unthinkingly advocates the free-market model, without moral constraints?

He also writes approvingly of Milton Friedman’s proposal of “privatization of education."

I believe that Tooley’s suggestions and analysis are clouded by a negative vision of the role of the state, as opposed to the Catholic viewpoint that society, including governments, have  a duty to promote the common good.

It seems appropriate, then, that the book is published by published in 2009 by the Cato Institute, a Washington DC–based think thank, that promotes, in their own words, “dedicated to the principles of individual liberty, limited government, free markets and peace.”

I fear that this reveals a blindness to the problems of bigness, of the power of big money.  Could this be just another example of an ideological approach that unthinking advocates the free-market model, without moral constraints?

I hope not, but I have my concerns. I don’t think either big governments nor big financial enterprises can give enough voice to the poor. I guess I’m just too influenced by E. F Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful and some of Gandhi’s writings on swaraj.

For Gandhi’s vision was different. His goal was swaraj, self-rule, in which people participate in the lives of their community and take responsibility for the community as well as their won families. Gandhi realized that the good of one and the good of the community are intertwined.

Gandhi knew the tyrannical power of outside governments and institutions. I think he’d be as suspicious of large foreign investors in chains of private schools as he was of the British models of centralized, standardized education.

He would applaud small efforts, efforts that don’t overwhelm the role of the people in the poor communities who want decent education for their children and are willing to sacrifice to send them to private schools. He would encourage the proliferation of small efforts of parents and communities, together with leaders or small entrepreneurs, to work together to provide a liberating education.

And so, instead of looking to the market for solutions, I think we must look to the already present bonds of community as well as the good will and community spirit of small entrepreneurs.

I am not opposed to private schools, but I cannot approve Tooley’s free-market, anti-government ideological approach.

I do hope that he can continue to support and promote small scale private and community-based but I wonder if his proposal of chains and franchises will lead to the bureaucracy and power of big money.

My next question, of course, is whether something of this can happen here in Honduras?

There are, of course, some very good public school teachers who are devoted to their students and do wonders. I have seen them and you can see the difference in their students: they are eager to learn, they grasp the course material, they want to continue to study after the sixth grade.

These teachers need to be lauded, encouraged, and rewarded so that they can continue to serve the children here.

But overall, we have a terrible educational problem here: poorly equipped public schools, few and widely scattered middle and high schools, terrible teacher-student ratios, teachers who do not get paid on time, teachers who arrive late and leave early, teachers’ position dependent on the patronage of the two major parties, strong teachers unions that often go on strike (often for good reasons), and a teaching style dependent on repetition and memorization.

What can be done to change this? That’s another post altogether.