January 21, 2005

The disaster worse than Hurricane Mitch

Everyone who has a television set can remember some part of the disaster of Hurricane Mitch. We saw scenes of La Casita volcano in Nicaragua, where the entire side of a high crater lake collapsed, and more than a thousand people living downhill were buried alive in the mudslide that ensued. For most of Central America, Hurricane Mitch was a defining moment in just how bad it is possible for things to be. Over 10,000 people were killed, hundreds of thousands injured, and over a million left homeless.

I first visited Nicaragua after Hurricane Mitch, having organized a small group from the community where I was living to work in helping to rebuild. During that first visit, we worked in the community of Susulí, in the mountains east of Matagalpa. We worked hard and built wonderful relationships, laughing together and working shoulder to shoulder with the delightful people of Susulí. Among other things, we dug (by hand, of course) the foundations for eight houses, all in a row, at the edge of town. We were there long enough to see concrete foundations for three of these houses and even brick walls a few feet high on one of them. It was a time of high hopes, with the future beginning to look up. CEPAD provided a loan for one-half of the material, the other half was donated through the denominations in the United States or Church World Service. The work was done by people from the community, with some help from volunteers like ourselves. All the recipients would have to pay is half the cost of the material, and that was done without interest over a five year period.

Not long ago, we at CEPAD took a group to visit Susulí, and I found a very different community. It still looks the same. We worshiped in the same church, led by the same pastor. The little “tiendas” (small stores) are still there. But I walked to the edge of town to see the eight houses where I, and my friends from Pennsylvania, had worked so hard. There is still no water or electricity to these houses, but it doesn’t matter much because only three of the eight are occupied. The other five are sitting there empty with their owners gone!

Why would people leave a good sturdy new house in their home community and go somewhere else? The answer lies in the disaster that is hurting Nicaragua, not as quickly as Hurricane Mitch, but in the long-term it is even worse for most of the population than Hurricane Mitch. That disaster is the way that the global economy is affecting the local economy in Nicaragua (and the rest of Central America).

Shortly after we were there to build these houses, the Nicaraguan government took the advice of the International Monetary Fund and sold off the distribution of electricity to a private company. They were promised that a private company would run the system more efficiently and less expensively than the government, and that, therefore, the system would expand and electricity would be cheaper for the people who need it. The system was not sold to the highest bidder, but was a “sweetheart” contract to a large Spanish energy conglomerate named Union Fenosa, which paid about a third of the actual value of the assets they received. One of the first things Union Fenosa did was to refuse to run any more “unprofitable” lines. Extending power lines to eight new houses wasn’t profitable, even though it is less than a quarter of a mile from the nearest line. Therefore, the houses we worked on still don’t have electricity.

The worst culprit in sending these people away from their homes is the lack of jobs. Small, Nicaraguan-owned factories that used to operate in Matagalpa or other nearby communities have been closed by the increasing competition of goods from the United States and China. The only thing to do in Susulí is work on your own land. Every morning at 3:30 a bus goes through Susulí picking up young women who work in a “Free-Trade Zone” in Sebaco, about 50 kilometers away over some of the worst roads in the country. They return around 8:30 p.m. For this, they earn about $65 a month (no, that is not a misprint!), out of which they pay their bus fares, childcare, and meals.

For the men, there is only farm work, and less and less of that. Almost everyone has a small plot of beans and corn, which supplies the basic diet. However, in order to have clothing, shoes, medicine, education for your children, or to pay back the 50 percent of the materials costs of the house, someone has to earn some money.

So where have the five families gone from the houses we helped to build? One of our friends, Don Tomas, is working on a farm about 30 kilometers away, and his wife is in Managua working as a domestic servant. The other four families are all in Honduras or Costa Rica, where Nicaraguans suffer great discrimination and sometimes open persecution, but (like Central American workers in the United States) at least they can get the lousy jobs that no one else wants.

As the grip of global economics tightens, more and more people are completely squeezed out of the economic system. Some communities of Nicaragua are even emptier than Susulí, as large numbers of people have left to find jobs elsewhere. The problem is likely to continue. The number of jobs in Honduras and Costa Rica is likely to shrink, as it has in Nicaragua. The economy of Nicaragua is a dismal picture, made continually worse by the advice of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. While the gross domestic product increases, and a few people become very rich, most of the people of Nicaraguan become poorer.

As a footnote: In the last three months, the price of beans, the mainstay of the Nicaragua diet, has risen from seven córdobas a pound (about $0.42 US) to 15 córdobas. Causes: poor crop because of drought, and large amounts of Nicaraguan beans being shipped to El Salvador under a new free-trade agreement. The companies that sold the beans in El Salvador made a lot of money. The people of Nicaragua are hungry.

Doug

The 2005 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 57