Talanga

Sorry about the last entry. Petulant I know. I'll try to be more grown up in future.

Today I went back to Talanga, whose transparency commission I visited in January, to see the participatory budgeting in action. I was, as I'm sure you can imagine, very excited.

It works like this: communities get together to agree what their single greatest priority is in order to combat the poverty that's endemic among them. After a presentation to local government, there's a public municipal assembly where collectively civil society and the county council agree which community projects will make it into the municipal investment plan for the year. Lovely? Lovely.

We arrive in the Lord Mayor's office at 9AM. It's your average pomp and ceremony: framed photograph of the fresh faced mayor at his inauguration; 5 full-sized flags of different Central American Republics (Honduras and the municipality of Talanga at the centre); giant desk to dwarf the Big Man, and more importantly his visitors; murals of native wildlife. In general, space isn't wanting in Honduras, and this is a large office in a large municipal building - nonetheless, some enterprising administrator has also stashed the municipality's supplies of plastic cups in brown boxes in the corner of the vast and otherwise intimidating room.

At the centre of the room is a big oval executive-style desk, with 10 executive chairs around it. Around the edges of the room are hard wooden benches. County counsellors sit around the fancy desk, poor people line the benches, waiting their turn. This is the flagship municipality in the whole country for citizen participation; still, the authorities are in a position to physically look down on their constituents.

Order of business. One, a long, rambling prayer. Two, the national anthem played from a laptop, scratchy sounds, but no matter: everybody belted out the tune. Even I felt proud to be Honduran. Next, the reading of the minutes from the last meeting. This took half an hour, in which I wrote a list of the people I expect to attend my going away party, and the woman beside me stitched away at Christmas decorations. After the reading of the minutes, there followed half an hour of bickering about the redaction of same; which words were appropriate and which weren't. "You said the mayor signed the declaration, whereas in fact he approved it."

Next up, the community representatives take turns to present their needs. Each one of them represents a a gathering of all the heads of family in their neighbourhood, and brandishes the signatures of the attendants (many are thumbprints) alongside their proposal, in a yellow paper folder. I find myself idly thinking that there's no stationary shop in Talanga, that we'll have financed all these yellow paper folders. Not to worry: yellow paper folders give people a certain sense of professional pride, of respectability.
One man presents his plan to train single mothers to make and decorate piñatas. I try to imagine the meeting in which an entire community decided that what would really rescue it from poverty is if all the women were qualified in a single skill - piñata making - for which they (as mothers) are the sole market. Christ. The majority of people are claiming for the costs of repairing the road (all are dirt roads) to their neighbourhood, improving the sanitation system or electrification.

It's all depressingly basic. People shouldn't have to choose between these projects: all of them are priorities (except for the piñatas). But what it does ensure is that at least these projects are executed in a more or less transparent fashion, and that the municipality has a certain responsibility to the poor. Which is, I repeat, depressingly basic.

At the other end of the scale, the national electricity provider is losing money hand over fist through mismanagement (after it collapsed earlier this year, the president handed control over to the army), and is wrapped up in nasty - and true - corruption charges and a union threatening to walk out. The impact is constant power cuts (the union sabre rattling), and - given that the rich are essentially exempt from paying electricity charges - rising electricity costs for the middle and lower classes. A captured state. In the pockets of its own monstrous institutions and the interests that control them.

Here we are trying to bridge the gaps. And me leaving just as things get interesting.