El Chilar

On Friday past we were able to go up to a small village above Copan and give certificates to several students who finished a grade. It was cold (18' C or so) so all were bundled up. I was so happy that the car we rode up in had a heater.

At the gathering, I was able to show the students how to prepare a banana flower and the stem of the plant. It is painfully obvious that malnutrition stalks the children of this area with a vengeance. Any plants that can augment their diet are desperately needed. We also left some Lablab seeds (a type of bean that provides a great deal of green manure, edible leaves and seeds).

Manuel and I checking the boundaries for our next housing project - not seen ... the tiny insects that left our ankles itching for the next 6 days.

El Chilar graduates in the local primary school

Carol, an Albertan, who is providing the computers for these students.

The banana evangelist showing the edible core of the banana stem. The white debris below is, likely, also edible. It is certainly a good feedstock for animals.

As we drove up the hills to El Chilar we passed two trucks offloading groups of people. They were families with young, primary school children among them. They were returning from the higher hills where they had all been picking coffee for a week. I have no idea where and how they slept, what they ate (and if?) and what the sanitation facilities were like. It was a sobering reminder of the cost of a cup of coffee in social terms.

Accounting update:  It seems as if all the staff are keeping track of their money now. A couple showed me their books from a week of recording. Amazing. Edel, who supports a mother and two sisters, bought a small notebook for each of them and, last Tuesday, told me that the next day was the day of reviewing their week's worth of records. I have yet to find out how the "judgement" day went.

Everyone is amazed to see how the money is spent. A friend of Edel's noticed his notebook and asked why bother. They talked and Edel asked the friend what he had for lunch each day. The friend said he had a coke each day. The upshot of the conversation was that Edel did the math with his phone calculator and showed his friend how he was spending over 10,000 lempiras ($500.00 and about 1.75 month's salary) a year on soda. He also has to buy medicine to deal with the stomach problems caused by the coke. Both of them were totally shocked.

Last weekend we drove along the coast of Honduras. Enormous swathes of the coastal plains are being planted to oil palm. Millions of plants are being grown in nurseries and then being planted out. It was deeply troubling to see this monoculture robbing the area of diversity and potential. Oil palms provide income for large landowners but very little employment per unit of area. As well, there is no biodiversity and nothing of nutritional value for local people to benefit from. For the landowner, oil palms are a great option. They don't really have to protect the harvest ... hand production of oil hasn't really hit the scene here. They don't have to pay large labour costs and the trees last for many years.

For the peasants, after four or five years the canopy closes over and there is no space to plant maize, beans, edible plants and fodder. Large acreages of land which would, at the least, have provided small pockets of places to grow food are now taken out of the picture. The palms allow no ground cover so the soil is bare and open to erosion.

Of course, the processing of the oil is controlled by a handful (or fewer) of plant operators. They control the price, the transport, the production and the sale. Wealth becomes concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.

That is enough for today.

TTYL

BB

Town Square Demonstrations

Happy New Year.

 After a Christmas break, the staff are back and things are bustling. I thought that Monday would be a sort of relaxed, get-back-into-things sort of day. And it was ... for about forty minutes. By then, mothers and children had begun lining up to see about registering for our school year. For the next three days we have had people waiting outside for most of the day. Truly amazing and very rewarding.

Other centres are also gearing up to start with our program this year. That is very exciting to see the program spreading slowly to more corners of the country. Yesterday and today, we are setting up computers in the town square to show off the program. It is fun to have a program which is interesting enough and simple enough for people to stop and understand quickly.

Yeni and Edel (in school uniforms) - two students working on the computers

Potential students checking out the screens

Yesterday, another group of potential students came to visit. There are a group of poor women who sweep the streets in Santa Cruz. The Mayor told them about our program and they came to see if they could study with us. We will have to organize a way for them to study. These are, for the most part, single mothers who make enough for subsistence living keeping the streets clean. Of course, from my perspective, this is what we are all about. It will be so exciting to get them studying.

A diabetic lady has been coming to buy Moringa leaf powder this week. It is nice to have it available and to know that it is actually making a difference in her health. Even though it costs me money to produce, I hate to charge for it. But ... it needs to be worth something. We will try and find a scale this week so that we can measure out the powder more accurately.  A new dryer system will hopefully increase the amount of powder we have available.

I noticed the staff looking at a bookkeeping program Wednesday afternoon. We talked about accounting and I mentioned that all accounting is simply "In", "Out" and Balance. Everything else is just an extension of that principle. We talked about how, for the most part, people who have money know where it is going and those who are poor generally don't. So, I gave them some exercises to do. Surprisingly, three of the staff went home and wrote down a simple journal of their expenses for the day and brought it to show me the next morning. Last night, another staff member was in a store buying tiny notebooks for his two sisters so that they would begin writing stuff down. So ... maybe the little notebook that I carry in my shirt pocket to record my spending is having an effect. (Do not expect to see family pictures of me and my family all sporting pens and notebooks in their shirt pockets any time soon.)

Each of my staff have people who look to them to provide some money. So, they are all vulnerable to having their salary get eaten before they know what has happened. By keeping track of their spending, they have an opportunity to see who and how their money disappears. In addition, having access to computers here at the school means that they can design spreadsheets with multiple columns to show their own particular types of expenditures over time.

Wednesday evening I found that a young mother who does some work for me had been stung by a scorpion the night before. Her foot was quite swollen and she was in obvious discomfort. We took her to the clinic and she got some help. Obviously the effects of scorpion stings here is different from those in Africa. As my friend in Kenya put it, "A scorpion sting is 24 hours of pain. But only 18 hours of that is agony." This sting was lasting much longer and with more problems. She is okay now though.

Well ... that is about it.

TTYL
BB