Social capital

At 8.00AM (by no means early morning by any standards, but certainly not by those of subsistence coffee farmers), we arrive in what functions as the meeting room of the denizens of Santa Maria de la Paz. I think it's probably actually a cattle shed. We're here for a meeting of the junta directiva of the region - in so far as I can make out, their function is to serve as a link between the people of the district (poor, badly-educated people) and the services of the municipalities and the state. This committee investigates the non-completion of government promises and rsponsibilities, it submits denuciations of unfair or illegal activities, and it educates people on their rights and responsibilities. It does all that through occasional meetings in this windowless, wide open cattle shed, which is freezing cold, terribly damp and completely empty. Nobody has shown up.

Don Javier, the area coordinator, is unfazed: he suggests we go around the corner to the shop. There, on the side of the highway, we shelter under the eaves and watch the rain soak the community: if I were a village democracy volunteer, I wouldn't haul myself down the mountains for a meeting on a day like today either. But this spot is a much more effective meeting place, and soon there are 6 of us discussing the likelihood of anything taking place: me and Don Javier, a couple of men and a woman with a large name badge proclaiming that she is Carmen. In addition to the planned meeting, there's a workshop on today on the subject of social audit. Whether the meeting takes place or not, I mention, I'd like to go along to the workshop.

We hang out a little longer under the eaves of the pulperia, chatting. An elderly man emerges through the clouds pushing a wheelbarrow full of stones which keeps getting stuck in the mud: a boy on the road with a donkey looks on in indifference as the man tries time and again to make his wheelbarrow move. Everyone around me is missing teeth, many replaced with gold ones. Everyone wears layers and layers of impractical clothes; everyone is wet to the skin. Eventually we haul through the mud up the hill to a school room for me to join the workshop.

I'd like to report an atmosphere of dynamism and determination. I wish I could say that in that room I met angry people, passionate people: or even exhausted, disillusioned people. Certainly I met incredibly poor people, who weren't benefitting in the least from the modest growth their country was reporting, from the trade deals or the debt reduction, and for whom the only tangible improvements in their day to day lives had come courtesy of international NGOs. The workshop was turgid: a confusing lecture on the structures for citizen participation, in which group work involved regurgitating the same information, only at an excruciating pace, given that the majority of the participants were only barely literate.
I struggled to connect these activities with the ideal of citizen participation. Is this what it's like in Puerto Alegre? Confused individuals who come along to the workshops and the meetings for a bit of warmth (Christ - not much though) and to be part of something? The same people who volunteer to be part of the village services committee and the committee for vigilance of NGOs and the construction training team? Of course it is. It's the same in Ireland, it's the same everywhere; what Lisa Carey once described as the "professional be-er on committees". But instead of energy and spirit, I encountered a dull confusion. What would he do with his new-found skills, I asked Gerber, a kind man in a typical campesino hat (I love being up there, I love these people who'll talk to me about anything and who are so kind and open)? Ah, you know, he said. It's like all the workshops, you know more at the end of it. It's important to know your rights.
Fine. But why? For what?

So I'm a little unsure whether this is how we're going to change the world, but I don't see any better offers. The idea is genius, but man, it's asking a lot of people. And it's based on an assumption that every community has its leaders, its fighters - but what if they don't? If nobody wants to fight, that doesn't mean their rights are less important. Some people just want to go to workshops...