Today was the first day I really worked alone in Passabe. Of course I got asked a bunch of questions I was unsure about, especially about designs that the engineer who had been managing the projects had mandated. I don’t know exactly what he was thinking, and I can’t call him as there are no phones where I’m at. All in all I felt confident enough in my experience to give direction to the technicians I’m managing.
I’m managing the construction of 11 water systems in and around the town of Passabe. They are in varying stages of completion, with one mostly complete and a few not started. By not started, I mean the designs are done, but just construction hasn’t begun. I have about 15 technicians who look to me as head engineer to help them with the many curves that construction throws them. Being that Passabe is between 2 and 3 hours by car from the town where I normally would be living, I live during the week in a house rented from a local family in Passabe. The family moved out of their nice house and into an old traditional house in the backyard, so as to make a little money. The company pays them for rent as well as cooking my meals, though if I want anything other than white rice, spinach, and super fried eggs I need to give them some money to buy nicer things.
Today, we were to a cast a concrete tank in the community of Oelbonat. This is a difficult process and must be done quickly, so it requires about 50 community members, to do the job. Today, none of the community members showed up to work. My technicians just told me that the community didn’t come to work today. Generally, this is a problem on Wednesdays as it is market day in Passabe, but today was only Tuesday. As I walked around the community I could see many healthy and strong men sitting doing very little. Such a problem is not new to me as it occurred frequently in Honduras as well.
For me such action always brings up the question of laziness. I find it a common and convenient accusation by many in the developed world that the locals are lazy, and thus this explains the local’s poverty. Of course there is a healthy group of contrarians that claim that these peasants are hard working but are held back by those favoured in our capitalist, neo-liberal world.
What do I think? First, the peasants by my definition do hard work, but don’t necessarily work hard. Most of the work that is done is solely for the local’s personal and familial benefit. This is a far contrast from the highly specialized work we participate in in the US, where you don’t necessarily know who your work is benefitting, but that you receive money for the tasks you do.
Since it is difficult to separate home chores from work chores as they are so often one and the same, it is difficult to define a day’s work in hours. However, it certainly appears that they do work fewer hours than 8.
I still don't believe that they are lazy. There really aren't all that many opportunities to work. To do eight hours of work, requires that there is eight hours of work worth doing. Laziness would imply that they wouldn’t do all the work that needed doing. Of course, one can always find work to do, but much of the work that is searched out, because it isn’t obviously apparent, would probably be mindless, and with little payback other than being busy. In other words, the work that can be found is not worth doing as it would hardly improve local quality of life. As I found with so many Hondurans, when they were offered the opportunity to immigrate to the US, either with or without documents, they were willing to work bad jobs for long hours for a mere $10 to $12 an hour. The remuneration definitely motivated the laziness out of them.
Oh well, I just hope that a comfortable community with a deeply ingrained peasant work structure, where time is definitely not of the essence, why keep track of it anyway, when you aren’t going anyplace, will be able to work enough days so I can get these water projects finished by the end of September.
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