La Ceiba Blog

The past month has seen a lot of change for La Ceiba, and for Honduras. Our second loan cycle has begun for our clients, and so far their repayments have been timely. It's exciting that our clients have been able to customize their loans to a repayment schedule that fits their unique financial situation. I think that this is a signal of something bigger for La Ceiba and for microfinance in general. One of the benefits of our organizational structure is that we have direct one on one relationships with each of our customers, which lets us take advantage of their detailed information about their household finances.

While we’ve been researching the Savings Program for the last three months extensively and I finally feel like I know enough about it to extensively talk about and teach it once we get down to Honduras. That is, if we get down to Honduras. Humphrey mentioned in passing that we may not even be able to go down this year due to the political climate. I guess we’ll have to wait and see how the November elections turn out.

For the past few weeks we have been catching up on everything that has happened with the loan initiative in Honduras since last January, researching all possible avenues (through theoretical and empirical evidence) for implementing our savings and graduated loan programs this January, and wracking our brains in an attempt to figure out what it is that we can do to make a difference in the lives of our clients.

LaCeiba offers us an opportunity or more accurately a responsibility to assist the women of Siete de Abril and Villa Soledad in bettering their current situation and we are in a position where our presence, our actions can do harm just as easily as good, something that weighs on all of us throughout this process. In reading and taking note of articles like “To Hell with Good Intentions” and “In Microfinance, Clients Must Come First” we like to consider ourselves well informed of the adverse consequences of our actions. And yet, each and every one of us might like to fool ourselves into believing that we can be the exception to this rule, that we can somehow escape the inevitable missteps along the road to building a successful MFI. Even so, we aren’t entirely delusional. The members of LaCeiba recognize that their will be mistakes and setbacks to our programs, that harm will be done no matter how hard we try to avoid it.

Most economists believe that impoverished individuals remain poor as a result of a combination of the three following variables: institutions, macroeconomic policy, and geographic conditions. So the relative ease of lifting the poor out of poverty is dependent on the location, the involvement of the government, and the resulting institutional framework of a society. Since none of these variables can be sufficiently impacted by our short-term projects, is everything we are doing and about to do an effort made in vain?

I have no idea what impact we are making on the people of Siete de Abril. I know what we are attempting to do, and I understand the logic and theoretical concepts surrounding our plans. Is there a way to minimize the tension between what we are trying to do and the negative impacts that our actions cause? Our intentions are not always our outcomes.

I believe that the only responsible way that we can approach constructive work in Honduras is by adopting the manners of a surgeon. We must begin by assessing our patient, and attempt to anticipate negative reactions, and ways to mitigate them before we make as even the tiniest incision. We must feel confident in our diagnosis, yet understand that there is a chance that we can be wrong.

Once we have evaluated the circumstances of our patients, we can begin to consider possible treatments. We must be careful to restrain ourselves from intensive operations. Instead, we must present our assistance as an experimental treatment with no guarantees of success. Curing ultra-poverty in a village as small as Siete is still an incredibly large task, and full of variables that we cannot control.

As an American student from a middle class background with absolutely no personal experience of living in poverty and yet an intrinsic want to help the poor “help themselves”, I am undoubtedly an embodiment of Monsignor Ivan Illich’s worst nightmare: a “do-gooder”. I cringe as a write the word recognizing all the ill connotations that come with it. The brand implies that I know (or think I know) what would effectively aid the poor and that I have taken action to achieve some measurable level of good-doing. The reality remains that doing “good” is entirely too simple of a phrase to even begin to describe what aid should entail.

“I am here to challenge you to recognize your inability, your powerlessness and your incapacity to do the "good" which you intended to do.” Ivan Illitch

Illitch's speech struck a chord with me. It also struck a nerve.
Volunteering is an important tool that can help make the world a better place. Knowledge and expertise are scarce goods. There is a lot to be said for someone donating their time and service to an organization or cause that they believe is worthwhile. There is important work that needs to be done around the world, and giving of your time and skill is admirable.

What if volunteerism is not motivated by a wish to help others, but instead an attempt to advance ones own agenda, or even worse, a chance to play the hero in a destitute world for the validation of your own ego. There are organizations, institutions and individuals who aim to put the needs of others above their own, and in doing so perform many good works for various causes. There are also those who view a week spent among those less fortunate as a chance to build their resumes, or to simply help them feel like they are 'being a part of something.'

My initial response to the Illich speech was that he makes a valid argument—individuals and groups in pursuit of relieving poverty around the world must first consider the opinions and feelings of the impoverished, and remember that the poor have choices too. It is entirely possible that the do-gooders’ presence is unwelcome in certain situations, and that the poor themselves can stop the process of eliminating poverty entirely from the start. Maybe they don’t want help or even believe they need any. My second thought was that this argument is obvious. It is simply human to feel the need to protect your pride, just like it is human to have compassion for others. While Illich seems to believe that we should just leave the poor to themselves to solve their own problems, I believe that it is possible for willing individuals to come together on both fronts and make change happen together. The point Illich makes really just boils down to being respectful of your peers and to do whatever is in their best interests. In truth, this is simply just good customer service. Individuals and groups seeking to provide services to the poor, regardless of whatever their incentives may be for doing so, must consider the needs of their customers. For this reason, I think that client-based microfinance has the potential to be the most successful tactic to reduce poverty.

Humphrey has asked us to consider the topic of stress for our next journal entry. He went over stress in terms of the basics of the time commitment, the possibility of adverse effects and expectations. Just hearing him list the different types of stress we were supposed to be undergoing had me tugging on my hair anxiously. Stress is something I am familiar with and having it brought to the front of my mind did nothing to reassure my fears and anxieties about our project.

While I am aware of the significant implication and possible consequences of our actions, my coping technique is not to think about it. Pushing that part of our project to the back of my mind until October when we are done with the theory and ready to start with the on the ground research. This is probably not the best method of coping but the alternative is to be so concerned about every step I make and every word I write that I am incapable of researching objectively. While I am dealing with some stress, I learned last year to better manage my time and reorient my mind so that I would be able to function and function well.

Humphrey had assigned readings that pretty much slashed everything we were aiming to do in Honduras as well as undermining our goals as the misguided attempts of upper middle class white “do-gooders”. While not necessarily comforting these readings were, in my mind, absolutely essential. To anyone else that is attempting to do the impossible (help raise people out of poverty), I absolutely suggest reading Ivan Illich’s “To Hell with Good Intentions”. Not only did it make me question my own motivations for agreeing to sign on to this project but it also made me upset and frustrated. I struggled to defend our project and define it so that we were the “exception” to his generalization of all volunteering groups as being hypocritical with a blind ambition to “do good” but actually make situations much worse.