(Lauren zipping through the treetops on the de rigeur Canopy Tour. No, this photo has nothing whatever to do with the topic of this post. But I had to put it somewhere.)
A few years back, I read Barbara Ehrenreich's "Nickel and Dimed," in which she describes her experiences working various dead-end jobs in a sort of year-long immersion expedition into American poverty. While I didn't find it all that earth-shattering in its observations, one commentary really rang true: that people who've never lived in poverty imagine there is some sort of shadow economy of the poor, where things are somehow cheaper, perhaps at a lower quality. And in fact this is not the case; the people she got to know were paying standard rates at the hotel where they stayed (because they couldn't afford a security deposit or qualify for an apartment). They just had to suck it up and not spend any money on anything else, or cram five people into a room.
I think many people have a similar misperception of developing countries. After passing through the first, naive stage of shock that things work differently in a foreign country than they do in the States, it's all too easy to fall into the opposite trap of assuming that local people have their own solution for every problem the tourist encounters. But it's not true: the paucity of transport means that the vast majority of people, who don't have their own cars, rarely go anywhere. The lack of street signs and reliable directions means that FINCA credit officers waste hours every week wandering around strange neighborhoods asking everyone they meet, "where does Doña Ana live?" and getting six different misinformed opinions until they finally find the place. And what did I see in a client's house this morning but a BIIIIG bottle of anti-amoeba medication, smack dab on the mantel - help yourself, kids!
We spend a lot of time wondering about the fatalism that infuses so much of life here, and what seems to us to be a pervasive fault of problem-solving will, a lack of dot-connection from "there is a problem" to "steps need to be taken to solve the problem." As just one example: Lauren and I stayed a night at a fairly upscale hotel in Pochomil (upscale is relative, but this is the sort of place vacationers go, with transport from the airport and everything.) In the morning, the electricity and water were not working in our room. She went downstairs to the front desk: "Excuse me, but I was going to take a shower and we don't have any water in our room." The laconic fellow behind the desk: "Oh yes, sometimes that happens." Long pause. "Okay, um, well, is there anywhere there is water?" "The first floor has water." Long pause. "Ok, well, could I take a shower in one of the first floor rooms?" "Sure, I guess so." It wasn't a Soviet-style hostility to customer service - they were perfectly happy to accomodate Lauren's request once she pulled the teeth to get there. It's just that in Nicaragua, 1+1 often doesn't equal 2. It just equals 1+1.
"You can take the bus to Rincon del Olvido that leaves at 8:00 and meet the credit officer there."
"And when does the last bus get back?"
"12:00."
"But as we mentioned before, our interviews will take at least four hours."
"Oh, then I guess that won't work."
Followed by the patented Nica LONG PAUSE BLANK STARE - until one of us starts digging away for a possible alternative. Nothing will be volunteered, no brainstorming will take place, because what we think of as premises that lead to conclusions are just random facts in the Nicaraguan mind, none more meaningful than any other.
"So, is there another way to get there?"
"Hm?"
"Is anyone else from the office going there?"
"Well, the driver will be leaving around 7:30."
LONG PAUSE BLANK STARE.
"Um, so can we go with him?"
"Sure, that would work."
One more example: about half of our survey questions have to do with expenditures over the past year. "How much did you spend in the last 12 months on the house?" "How much do you spend per week on food?" "How much do you spend per month on utilities?" The first question always elicits a response of "Oh, a lot," or "yes," and then we explain that we want an estimate, in cordobas, of how much they spent. OK, fine - we've explained this concept which might be strange to them. But then we have to go through the same explanation for every single question.
Where does this resistance to connecting the dots come from? Is the concept of a number, as opposed to "bastante," really so hard?
Some of it is surely the despair of poverty, leading away from an active approach to shaping one's own world. But it's more than that - reasonably well-off people, credit officers and hotel staff, drive us crazy with this pulling-teeth deficiency in logic. I think it stems from having to deal, day in and day out, with an irreparable lack of things and processes that really shouldn't be lacking, a society-wide learned helplessness in which the fix-the-problem impulse has withered for lack of opportunity.
It's true that a naive religiosity suffuses the Nicaraguan countryside. Sure, liberation theology swept over the country in the Sandinista times, but FINCA's more religious clients are not talking about social justice; they're talking about "follow the rules and don't complain, and you'll be rewarded in heaven." Vatican II might as well never have happened here (OK, OK, mass is in Spanish.) But hey, if people believe with good reason that their lives are unlikely to change substantially here on earth, can you blame them for seeking solace in heaven? It's easy to dump on religion, but ultimately, I think the "pie in the sky" mentality is a symptom and not a cause of people's hopelessness.
Another explanation for the logic gap is that chronic parasite infections, plus heat, plus malnutrition, lead to both a constant level of apathetic tiredness and sub-par cognitive development. However, the real cause must be the lack of education. Before this trip, I took a certain level of critical thinking for granted, basically feeling that while one learns *about* things in school, smart people will be smart and stupid people, stupid, regardless of their level of education. I am now seeing that this is not true.
In training, we were warned that we would be shocked and saddened at the poverty of the clients. Honestly, though, while many of FINCA's clients are indeed poor, the vast majority are not destitute. Since I'd traveled in Central America before, the material standard of living was sometimes sad to me (not always: many clients are doing just fine) but not shocking.
What was a shock was the lack of education. This is my first experience dealing primarily with people who have mostly not completed secondary school, and many of whom have not completed primary school. I was reading another traveler's blog in which she asked a front desk clerk about hotel prices. He said "it will be $25 for the double room and $15 for the single." She said "So $40 total," and he looked confused (LONG PAUSE BLANK STARE); her traveling companion speculated that he wasn't able to do the math that quickly. That's the sort of thing that would never have occured to me.
FINCA clients can do math (they're all vendors, after all) but the literal-mindedness, the failure to extrapolate patterns, is so foreign to my experience that it's taken me this long to connect it to nineteenth-century rants about the inherent slowness and stupidity of the poor, none of whom had much schooling.
Education matters. Who woulda thunk it?
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