San Cristóbal de las Casas

Andrea and I are settling down into our lives here in San Cristóbal de las Casas. We are staying with the parents of Alex, and the whole family is wonderfully welcoming! Her father has been giving us a ¨curso intensivo en las groserías,¨while her mother has given us more tortillas than I´ve ever eaten in my life (and I´ve eaten my fair share of tortillas)! The city is just amazing, with mountains on all sides of us, and the marketplace downtown filled with people, many of them Tzotziles selling their artesanías. There are a suprising amount of gringo tourists hanging around the city, but I guess I shouldn´t say anything since I would fall into that category as well. The whole Centro still has its colonial style buildings and it just feels so alive there. We just went today to go see the catedral in el Centro where Subcomandante Marcos signed his first peace accords!

As for the project, Alex and her husband went to visit the community last saturday and announced that Andrea and I were coming. We are planning an asamblea with the community this upcoming saturday, in which Andrea and I will be introduced and we will announce plans to construct 3 more sanitarios this summer. We wish it could be more, but sadly our project is grossly underfunded at this point. At these asambleas, it is generally the men sitting on one side of the room with the women sitting on the other...and a translator of course (I´m hoping that I will learn a little Tzotzil this summer...I´ve already learned the word for tortilla). One problem from the first phase of the project was that a few toilets were constructed for people that don´t live in the house anymore, or that it isn´t their primary residence. Since we would like that the toilets be used, we are going to make sure that anyone chosen lives in their house. The original lottery drawing from 2 years ago will be used, and we will just skip the name if they don´t live there. As part of the requisites for the project, we will make sure that each person contributes the sand, gravel, water, and labor necessary for thier toilet, as this will ensure that they are invested in the toilet and will keep up the proper maintenance.

We are also going to be visiting the Municipal President this upcoming saturday as well. In the first phase, the municipality of Teopisca wasn´t very helpful, but there are new people in charge now, so hopefully they will take more of an interest in the project. As for the community leaders, unfortunately the community leader in charge of ¨Usos y costumbres¨ is still a drunk who has not been helpful at all for this project. We are going to try to avoid contact (more than necessary, of course) with him, but there is another person, Domingo, who has been taking a lead role in this project and we will definintely be collaborating with him throughout this summer.

We were talking with Alex and her husband about having the project take a direction of the community demanding rights from the government. They said that the reason why the community hasn´t been more ethusiastic previously about toilets is that they have been more interested in having paved streets and electricity than they are about sanitation, and so streets and the lights have been more what the community has been demanding of the government. Many don´t seem to be interested in toilets because they already have unlined pit latrines, even though these collapse and overflow into their yards. I can´t imagine what it must like to be in a situation in which sewage in my yard was one of my lower priorities. At this current moment, I don´t foresee any group activities dealing with empowerment being a part of our project this summer, but hopefully that will change as the summer progresses. We do plan on making a more concerted effort that we engage the community in participating in the project this summer, and perhaps something more will evolve out of this. I still have the feeling that we are having the typical power structure of the expert outsider coming in with money and building something for people, but I´m still unsure as how to change this power structure.

Andrea and I had a suprise yesterday. Alex´s father was showing us a book put out by La Jornada (sortof the New York Times of Mexico) talking about water problems in Mexico and the world. He was showing us some article and flipping through the book, and all of a sudden we saw an article about Tlamacazapa (the community in Guerrero that we visited this spring break). That was quite the shock to have someone showing us a book that he liked and all of a sudden seeing a picture of a well that we had just visited 2 months ago!

Tomorrow will be the first time that Andrea and I visit to the community of Damasco. This visit is mainly for construction related reasons though, to see exactly what materials were used and how many of them per toilet. This is exciting our visit tomorrow as well as the asamblea on Saturday.

Orientation

Andrea and I are doing the ESW orientation this week at Cornell University. It's very enjoyable and we are meeting some neat people. Not to mention, Ithaca is gorgeous! (or "gorges" as all their shirts say here). We should be flying out of NYC and getting into Tuxtla Gutiérrez on Friday of this week ( May 25).

It's exciting to finally get this project started, but I'm also nervous about how the project should turn out. We've had limited communication with Alex (the leader of COPIN), and so we have no idea what her intentions are for the summer. Andrea and I are so eager to take off with a participatory approach after our course this past semester, but our limitations will be in what direction Alex is wishing to take the project, as well as Andrea and I's lack of experience in actually working with a community like this.

One question is 'What exactly is a participatory approach?' Is it coming in with previously formatted popular education exercises while telling them "Do this, and trust me that you will learn something"? This seems rather methodical, and quite frankly, not much different than the typical expert coming in from the outside and telling them what to think. Quoting Arturo Ornelas in Nurtured by Knowledge ( sorry I'm quoting this so often, it is the book I'm currently reading)

"In doing participatory action-research (PAR) you enter into a process as an ignorant. You start by recognizing your ignorance and working with it...You do not doubt that you will have doubts! But if you begin, already thinking that you have the truth and the tools to go with that truth, then it is not possible to find reality."

So I guess our next steps should be figuring out in what we are ignorant and in what do we think we know the 'truth'. I would say, first of all, that we are ignorant of the community dynamics of Damasco. We know some of the history of Damasco, but only a small glimpse of it. I won't pretend that we fully know the reason that Damasco moved from Chamula, other than religious differences. This will be something that we will need to ask the community about. We know that machismo is prevelant and that men are in charge of the household, but we don't know to what extent women are allowed to participate in daily life. COPIN has of yet had a women's empowerment side to the project, because of the fear that the women will be beaten if they participate. Hopefully, throughout the summer, we can try to determine how much validity is in this statement. Maybe this is true, or maybe it is just a rationalization for not taking action. We know that the community is fairly organized and they have community meetings, but we don't know to what extent they are organized, nor do we know to what extent the community leaders have control. And a big question we need to be answering this summer...We know that the community has sanitation problems. But what we don't know is the extent of these problems and exactly what illnesses affect the people of Damasco on account of these problems. Nor do we know the people's perceptions of these problems. Is curing these sicknessess a high priority for the community, and if not, then why not? Do they understand the link between sanitation and health? If not, then what is the best way to approach it. Talking about coming in knowing the "truth", as engineers, we are coming in, as Arturo warned, knowing that building toilets will improve the health of the community. When someone in the community asks us (assuming some know spanish) "Why are you here?", then the obvious answer is "To build you a toilet." This answer seems to be about five steps ahead from where we want to start, and is by no means the final step we want to take in the process, but I don't think that I could answer the question " We want to use a participatory process so that the members of your community take agency in making changes to your own lives, one of these changes being the sanitary treatment of your waste." First of all, that is a mouthful, and second of all, I doubt that I could adequately translate that to a point where I don't receive a blank stare in response ( I sometimes get a blank stare when I try to explain participation in english!)

It might turn out that participation will just have to be something in the back of our minds while we progress through the summer. Andrea and I will be following the lead of Alex as we begin our project, and she will be the one introducing us to the community. It might just be that our plan for the next few weeks will be asking Alex the right questions.

Volamos para Mexico el viernes!!!

The Chiapas Project

Hola todos and welcome to the web log for our project in Chiapas over the summer 2007! For anyone that doesn’t know me, my name is Robin Lynch, and I am a recent graduate from the University of Texas at Austin in Civil Engineering. I am joined by Andrea French, who is also a recent graduate from UT in Mechanical Engineering. We are working on an ongoing project through the UT-chapter of Engineers for a Sustainable World (ESW) with the indigenous community of Damasco and the newly started NGO of COPÍN.

To introduce the purpose for this blog, I don’t see this as a medium for my self-indulgent ramblings (although I’m sure they will slip out), but rather, I see this as a window into a process, the process of project design and community participation. I hope that everyone who views this blog will be able to understand the importance of community participation in community development projects such as this, as well as get a vision of the needs and wants of the community of Damasco. I also hope that this blog creates an atmosphere of dialog…even one of criticism (preferably of the constructive type). I do not plan on sugar coating any aspects of this project. Too often in development projects, failures are omitted and forgotten about…only to be repeated again. I hate be clichéd about this, but if we don’t learn from our failures, what good were they?

Damasco is an indigenous community of Tzotzil descent, close to the colonial city of San Cristóbal de Las Casas in central Chiapas. It consists of 71 families and was recently formed in 1994 when they were displaced from the Chamula area due to religious differences and the political turmoil of the time. They rely on subsidence agriculture of maize and beans and typically use open air defecation or unlined pit latrines that collapse in heavy rains. This lack of sanitation leads to the prevalence of vector-borne diseases as well as groundwater contamination.

This project was started by Alejandra (Alex), who works for CEAS, the state water commission that supplies piped water to rural communities such as Damasco. Alex had a growing frustration that while water was being provided, they failed to contribute enough resources to educational efforts, project follow-ups, or sanitation. She began the NGO COPÍN (Consultoría, Proyectos, e Investigacción) to address these frustrations. ESW-UT became involved when Greg Landreth, a former student and current project advisor, met Alex through an internship with the World Bank. The project then received funding through a generous donation from the Ann Campana Judge Foundation as well as the Austin office of Turner, Collie, and Braden. Using this money, ESW sent two interns the summer of 2005, UT Chemical Engineering student Amanda Cuéllar and Marie-Andreé Beaudoin from Université de Sherbrooke, to construct dry sanitation toilets. They successfully constructed 9 toilets, however there were frustrations that even though a participatory approach was used, the families were not as engaged as expected in working to build their toilets. The community had invited us to the community, but it was evident that the residents didn’t fully appreciate the need for sanitation as much as Alex or the interns did.

In response to the problems witnessed, ESW-UT established an informal class in collaboration with the organization Walking Together-USA in the Spring of 2007 to analyze the roots of poverty and oppression and how these must be understood before a project like this can be undertaken. In the class, we learned exactly what participation is and how important it is that the community members participate and empower themselves throughout the process. This summer, the intent will be to include participation in all aspects of the project. While this requires more effort, lots more time, and quite frankly, more headaches, we believe this to be the correct approach for development projects. Rather than approach the community already telling them what their problems are (i.e. lack of toilets), we will instead have the community identify what their needs are and how they wish to address them. While this obviously means less toilets will be built this summer, it hopefully will set in place a process in which the members of the community will continue on with improving their community long after Andrea and I have left.

I would like to end this first post with a Mexican popular folklore as told by Arturo Ornelas in the introduction to the book “Nurtured by Knowledge: Learning to do Participatory Action-Research”, edited by Susan E. Smith and Dennis G. Willms and Nancy A. Johnson. I thought this story was relevant to the mindset we hope to have throughout the project and I would also highly recommend reading this book for anyone interested in community development. ( In addition, we got to meet Arturo and Susan as part of the informal class we took!)

The Five Friends and Five Enemies

"One day while walking with an Indian friend, Malaquias, he told me the story of the five friends and the five enemies.

“The first enemy of human beings is fear. If you live in fear, you will live like a mouse in a dark corner and never see the light. Fear will become your enemy and you will never grow up. But if you are not afraid of the fear you will have, then you can live in light, and fear becomes your friend.

“If fear is your friend, then you are able to look around you with clarity. But if you think that you can see all things clearly, then you are really blind, and clarity becomes your enemy. If, however, you strive to see clearly, then clarity becomes your friend.

“If fear is your friend and you can see clearly, then you will have power. But if you keep power to yourself, you will become weaker and weaker. If, however, you share the power, you will become strong and power will be your friend.

“If fear is your friend, you see clearly, and you share power, then you will be wise. But if you think you have all the wisdom, then in reality you are ignorant, and wisdom will be your enemy. If, however, you admit that you do not know everything, answers will come to you and wisdom will be your friend.

“If fear is your friend, you see clearly, you share power, and you have wisdom, then you will meet old age. But if you sit, doing nothing and denying your history, then old age will be your enemy. If, however, you meet old age with grace, having met fear, seeing with clarity, sharing power, and making wisdom your friend, then you will live forever.”