Frustrations of the job

So in the end I decided not to move.

It came down to logistics, pathetically enough: the messyness of upping sticks and the expense of setting up in a new place, set against the delights of squirrels frolicking on the terrace. I'll always miss the squirrels I never had, but I can make the most of the giant butterfly/bat creatures, become their friends, maybe even learn to communicate.

I've been thinking lately about how, months and months ago, I stopped blogging about work. My hope with this blog had been to be a kind of citizen reporter, dispatching stories that you couldn't possibly imagine, from the heart of the struggle. Some of my frustrations over the last 10 months have centred around the nebulousness of the struggle, and the elusiveness of its heart. And around my inability to see what must be blindingly obvious to others. In this, as in all things, I'm impossibly agnostic.

My colleagues are excited about the changes that are coming to pass in Honduras. There's a growing movement of peasant farmers determined to fight CAFTA - the Central American Free Trade Agreement. The movement overlaps with another one of people demanding fair distribution of land. International NGOs - the policy driven ones, at least - are there, pushing, encouraging, training, funding: maybe this time, maybe here, the popular mandate can overcome the interest groups who the government has always protected/ been composed of.

But on the other hand, it's so thick, this political atmosphere, and I struggle to understand what's going on. Rivalries are intense. Organisations protect their information, their techniques, and most of all their bases. Civil society is like this everywhere, but to different extents. Here, the levels of suspicion and manipulation are intense, as is the extent of personal identification with a particular group.
Culturally, it's staggeringly difficult for me. Once, I spent three hours in a room with five board members of a local economic justice group, listening to them explain how a richer, more powerful group was infiltrating THEIR bases, and doing THEIR work, undermining them in the field. Enter the richer, more powerful group, who had, incidentally, informed me that the local organisation was corrupt and incompetent. Face to face, nobody would criticise anybody else. Nobody would even make masked reference to the problems. Invited to consider what difficulties they faced (as two organisations in the same region, with the same aims), nobody would hazard anything more challenging than a lack of resources.
This happens all the time. Organisational survival is more important than the larger aim (enabling the poor to participate, accessing productive land, fighting corruption). This year, I've spent a lot of time in dark offices with tight, angry campesinos; and not enough time on the streets doing battle with the economic powers.

I feel this is a post that deserves a counterpoint. But this morning I'm not worked up to give it. Local democracy, participatory democracy is slow, and very hard to catch as it emerges. Here are three men who can bring together 30 or 40 families in a community, sit them down with the mayor, and tell the mayor how THEY plan on spending municipal funds. The same men refuse to cooperate with the NGO working in the very same community with the same families. Possessiveness and suspicion. The models change, but politics never does. But look at them! Their families can barely read, they're hardly educated, and they're challenging the controlling forces of their society. And whatever I think of their methods, and their hopelessly closed, paranoid attitudes, these three men can mobilise hundreds of people, because those people believe in these men. (The women had left already when I chose to take the picture. They have an equal nunmber of female counterparts).

So I'm leaving soon, and I still haven't found the inspiring example I came here to find. But I do believe that's my fault, and not Honduras'. I'm looking in the wrong places, with the wrong expectations. I'm dedicating my last two months to looking harder, and better: lots of fieldtrips and conversations with real people.
Starting from Wednesday, I'll be out of contact for a little while: I'll update this when I can, but it may be a few weeks.