COCA-COLA, THE NEW WORLD CURRENCY

Every time I travel, I always end up writing about Coca-Cola.  It is far and away the world’s most globalized and ubiquitous product.  It is everywhere I have ever gone, no matter how remote, no matter how snobbish towards American cultural influence, no matter the poverty that inundates a place.  I have written about being offered Coca-Cola in a village a six hour walk from the nearest road; the Coke came in on the back of a mule.  I have written how in Guatemala, when you ask for “agua” you get a Coke; you have to ask for an “agua pura” if you want regular water.  I have tasted Coke in big cans, small cans, plastic bottles, glass bottles in 8 oz, 12 oz and half liter sizes, and the mostly in America, Coke from a soda fountain.  I have tasted the differences in sweetness depending on the local community’s preferences.  In short, I have been around a lot of Coke ......... Coca-Cola!

After all this, I was surprised to have a new Coca-Cola experience yesterday that yet again defined the drink’s worldly ubiquitousness.  I was given coke as money.  After buying my lunch yesterday, the woman didn’t have enough change to give me bills, so she gave some bills, some coins, and a Coca-Cola.  Move over, the dollar, the euro, gold, Coca-Cola is the new world currency. Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating this one instance’s importance, but it is an interesting insight into a global product which we almost don’t even notice any longer, it has become part of the background of our lives.

WATER AS A RIGHT AND THE PROBLEMS IT CREATES

Working in and around water, especially water politics is a messy affair.   People, rightly so, have a lot tied up in water.  It is essential for life, obviously.  We need to consume a couple liters a day in one form or another to stay living.  It needn’t be said that if a society has any civility and humanity at all, water should be a right regarded to everyone, .............Right?  It seems pretty straight forward, but the longer I’m around water talk the more complicated it gets.

The determination that water is a right has many complications.  If water is a right, it should be free, or at least very cheap, seems to be a common mindset around the world (why are we so adamant about cheap water in the US?).  While in Honduras, I dealt with this issue on a daily basis.  The Honduran Constitution clearly states that the water in a river or stream is owned by no one and so can’t be charged for, though the landowner can raise a stink about water conveyance infrastructure crossing his land.  As a part of the water projects I was implementing, there was a finance component.  Connected households were to be charged a minimal fee, about $1 to $1.50, so as to fund system maintenance and minor repairs.  But the local people, due to the Honduran Constitution and local beliefs about water being a right, felt that their water should be free.  I commonly had to use the counter argument that the water is free, so feel free to walk to the water source fill a bucket with water and carry it back to your home.  The point being that the water is free, but it is the infrastructure that brings it clean and conveniently to your home that costs money and should be financed by the local community.  This is where the problem lies; to provide free water is expensive.  

Interesting, the very notion that water is a right and should be free makes the poorest pay more than the rich for clean water in much of the developing world.   Having good water access is generally confined to well established, wealthy areas of developing world cities.  Reasons for this are that having access to an amenity such as a high quality water system raises land prices making it unaffordable to the poor and the systems were generally built by the old colonial power to serve the colonizers’ homes in the city center, exclusive of the poor masses.  The poor masses live in the surrounding slums and low income housing areas.  A policy of cheap or free water means that by providing water infrastructure to the poor areas does not payback the costs of implementation.  More so, if existing water sources are limited, new areas added to the network are usually not provided water at the same service level as the old, but politically influential, colonial center;  any reduction in the quality of the center’s service delivery to provide more homes water is vehemently opposed.  But new water sources are progressively more expensive to develop as the cheapest sources are developed first meaning that new water for the poorer outlying areas has a higher marginal cost than the water currently provided to the central city.  This may mean that the new areas are charged more, subsidized so the cost is the same as the central city’s, or a rise on average between the cost of providing water to the center and to the new area ,raising the center’s price slightly.  The poor slums that don’t receive piped water are many times supplied by private services which spring up in a piped system’s absence.  These sources may be a truck that comes around, a neighbor who sells water from a local well, or any assortment of other means.  What is certain is that this water is usually many times the cost of the highly subsidized water in the piped system.  The point I’m trying to get across from this is that, in developing countries government subsidized piped water systems encouraged by the idea that water is a right, disproportionately serves the wealthier citizens, while the poor pay a significantly higher price to obtain water by other means. 

A second major problem with water as a right is that, how much water should be rightfully delivered to each person.  A person may only need a few dozen liters of water to maintain proper hygiene and living standards in day to day life, but this discounts the many other ways that water ensures economic livelihood.  For example, a poor Indian farmer may depend on water to irrigate his crops, providing him with much needed food.  If the water needed for him to economically maintain his limited lifestyle is not allowed him or goes up substantially in price, he will economically falter.  Thus, he needs many more than a few dozen liters daily.  Agriculture around the world is by far the largest consumer of water.  In California, something like 85% of all water in the state is used to grow our fresh produce.  Farmers rightfully argue that if you take away their water you are also taking away their economic livelihood, though it should be noted that they could use the water much more efficiently.  If the farmers’ economic livelihood depends on the water, then do they have a right to it?

I’m not arguing that water is not a human right, as it is clearly a human necessity and I feel that as people, we should at least try to assure that water is fairly distributed.  The problem is, what is fair? Currently, the very terminology of water as a right is not very well defined in the societal consciousness.  The idea that water is a right often prevents many of the neediest from getting it.    The day a consensus is reached on how we should manage our water resources will be an important day.

THE POWER OF MONEY

Money, we desire it, but we despise the greed it induces.  We wish the world could operate without it, but we pragmatically realize that it is how we value goods and services.  Others will claim that the coldness that money inspires (i.e., business economics) is proof that money drives us humans away from the very nature that defines us as human, are warm caring emotions.  Well!  I really would like to have the cold, heartless power of money on my side right now.

The water systems that I am implementing are done so by the community which will benefit from it.  The community is not paid for their labor, as it is seen as their contribution to the cost of the system, since they are unable to provide any significant funding.  I find this method both fair, and it allows them to receive a water system even though their local and/or national governments can’t afford to provide the funding.  Not all agree with me on this, I have heard that it is not fair that the poor should have to work for free to get water while the rich in the big cities get their water system (in the wealthier parts of the bigger cities) through paid labor.  

Having the community build the system limits the speed of construction, complicates logistics, and makes for an unreliable construction crew.  The community only can work so many days a week on the system.  They have fields to tend and, maybe even, money to earn (though there aren’t many sources of paid labor in Passabe).  Sure, water is a monetary benefit, but they already obtain it free of monetary cost; they pay in the labor of carrying it, which is not from too great a distance.  Since the project is rushed, I have to complete the eleven systems that I have quickly.  Being that I am limited on the speed with which I can work in any given community that means to finish quickly I must work in all or most of the communities simultaneously, making for a logistics nightmare.  I would much prefer to work in two or three systems at a time and I as I finish one move on to a new one.  The third is that the work force that I might have in a community is highly unreliable. Some days we will have sixty or more community members, but not enough work for them.  The next we won’t have any, but a lot of work.  If it is market day, people won’t work.  If the morning starts out rainy (like today) it is difficult to get the community to work.  Sometimes the community will decide the night before that they want to work and won’t tell us, while another community will decide at the last minute that they don’t want to work after having stated that they would.  This leaves us with technicians and materials in the wrong communities.  Furthermore, many of the communities are experiencing system construction fatigue.  My projects take months to build. In the beginning the communities are excited and motivated making them eager to work, but after months of construction and no water their motivation has faded until work is a chore. 

Even though I agree with the projects policy to not pay the local communities to build their own water system, I wish I could pay them as it would really speed up the construction time and decrease logistics issues.  A good example on how money speeds up the construction process is are method of obtaining gravel.  To build concrete tanks and water catchments, we need gravel.  However, as I’ve written before, there is no easy way to get gravel as there is no quarry.  So, in Passabe, we decided to start a local operation to make our gravel.  We pay them $1 for a box of gravel which is around 40 centimeters cubed (I should know this but I can’t recall at the moment).  The community on their own motivation will break big river rocks into gravel of the size we need for 8 or 10 hours a day.  When we need a lot of gravel, the rock breakers will be hammering away until while after midnight and start again at 8:00 in the morning.   It is needless to say that we have never run short of gravel.

If I could pay the communities, I am certain that I would always have plentiful labor.  I could get my work done in a timely matter.  And I could be done with this frustration of changing my weekly work plans and priorities on a daily basis.  Oh, that would be nice!

Reflections on my nearly finished time in Timor-Leste

In under two weeks I will be flying to Vietnam.  I will have finished my work in Timor-Leste and be doing some travelling before I need to decide what is my next step.  With so little time left, it is not surprising that I’m beginning to reflect on my time in Timor-Leste, whether I should continue doing international development, and how my view has been altered of the world.

Timor-Leste has had its challenges, not the least among them, the seclusion I have felt in my work site.  I work in the department of Oecussi, which is cut off from the rest of Timor-Leste by Indonesia. I have been in one of the more distant reaches of Oecussi, the town of Passabe.  My only relief is when I’m in Oecussi town on the weekends where I have internet at night, though that means that it is very early the previous morning in the US.  Life without daily phone or internet is hard.  I know many of you will laugh about the absurdity of needing to be connected and you wouldn’t be wrong to point out that just 10 years ago, where I’m at, there was no phone and internet at all.  I wouldn’t have been able to have any contact with the outside world, except when I would go into the capital, Dili. 

I both love and hate international work at the same time.  I love being in new places, places that are exotic to my norm of American-ness.  The immense stimulation of daily life in a new place is extremely exhilarating.  The constant riddle of the local culture and daily life leaves my mind a whirring and my senses heightened.  But the sensory highs mean that there are lows, where the longing for the normalcy and comfortableness of home creates a nearly debilitating homesickness.  All in all there is a cycle, where I want the stimulation of being overseas when I’m in the US and I want the comfortableness of home when I’m away. 

Also, the very purpose of international development work as a whole leaves me conflicted.  On the one hand I want to help develop a country like Timor-Leste, but on the other hand I feel like the family supporting the drunk uncle by giving him a place to stay and food to eat.  The support in a way supports the uncle’s drunkenness furthering the very problem that I would like to wean him from.  Sure, you can try to give him help to break his pattern of drunkenness, but in the end it depends on the uncle whether he dries up or not, and not you.  In other words, no matter how much support you give, it is still the uncle that needs to make the effort to come dry, the support you give only facilitates, but doesn’t guarantee the final result.  International development work is similar in that you are trying your best to help the country develop, but no matter the support you give, it is the local culture, and governing bodies that often determine how successful a program is.  Some places, you can give them a few rocks and they will build a bridge, others you will give them abundant rocks to build a hundred bridges and they will just throw them at their neighbours.

In the end, local cultures are difficult to change.  Often the very reasons that keep a country undeveloped are the result of local culture.  This does not mean that the local culture is solely to blame, as it is a response to local conditions, geographic placement, past history, which may have been influenced strongly by outside forces (think colonization), or any assortment of reasons.  What I’m saying is that the culture that develops is not directly the fault of those who are dealing with its consequences in the present.  Would we blame Henry Ford for the unwalkable, car oriented, suburban culture that the automobile affordable for the masses brought upon the United States and its urban form?  Though it is obvious that American society and culture is heavily influenced by widespread access to automobiles today, we wouldn’t go so far as holding Ford solely accountable, as many other factors, like government policy, personal choice, land market rates, and technological innovations also contributed to the car culture we currently have.  All I can wonder is what will be the impetus that pushes Timor-Leste from its stagnation into a virtuous cycle of development and when will it occur.  Will it be the result of a powerful but somewhat benevolent dictator like in Singapore in the 1960s?  Will it be the result of an outside force imposing its will upon the country, like General Perry’s fleet forcing Japan to open its doors in the late 1800s?  Or will it be a combination of subtle factors?  Who knows?

An observation that always surprises me is how similar societies are throughout the world.  I am always surprised by how similar I find people to be throughout the world.  The biggest differences I find seem to fall upon economic and educational lines.  I find that there are great similarities between class tiers in different countries, a greater similarity than among different classes within the same country.  For example, I find the wealthy and educated classes in Timor Leste to be more similar to the wealthy and educated classes of the US than with the poor classes within their own country.  I know, that I just made an enormous generalization, and I’m certain that if you want to look at the details in each individual country you can prove my point wrong in some instances.  What I’m trying to state is that I feel from personal experience that the divisions between class and education levels are greater than the divisions between cultures.

I think that is enough for now.  I’m ruminating as I write, and probably now as I finish my views may have changed on what I said at the beginning.  Your comments and insights are most welcome if you so desire to offer them.

BIGFOOT!

Yeah, I have big feet!  I know that.  I’ve accepted that.  I wear a size 13 in the US and a size 48 in most of the rest of the world.  The problem is that there isn’t a place in all of Timor Leste that sells footwear of this size.  I actually had a couple friends look in Bali when they were on vacation, and they couldn’t find any in my size there either. 

Last Friday, I broke my flip-flops.  They are unrepairable.  But, flip-flops are the day-to-day attire for all locals.  Actually, I can’t imagine wearing anything different around the house.  But what was I to do?  I went flip-flop shopping and couldn’t find anything larger than a 45.  The 45 fit more like a much smaller shoe.  Finally I bought a pair of size 42 Adibas for $2.50.  Look closely at the spelling of that brand. “Adibas.”  They are small but better than nothing.  

SOCCER WITHOUT SHOES

I was invited to play soccer after work. I’m bad at soccer but I always have a good time playing. It was convenient since the field is directly in front of the house I stay in, in Passabe. The field isn’t in very good condition. It is full of gravel and small rocks. But it suits the community as it is quite a large open space. I keep telling those who play soccer that they should spend ten minutes before they play each day to pick up rocks. After a week there would hardly be any rocks left, I’m sure. But I guess they don’t mind the rocks as much as I do.

Another problem presented itself. I didn’t have any shoes. I had a pair of hiking/work boots and flip-flops, not quite the ideal attire for soccer. So, I went native and played barefoot (probably half of the players play barefoot. This would have been fine if I didn’t have wussy, privileged American feet. My feet were so bruised from stepping on rocks after the game that I could hardly walk the next day. It was worth it.

THE COLOR GREEN

There are those moments when you see a color in the natural world around us and you say to yourself, “Oh, when they assigned the name blue to the color, that is what the person was looking at,” for example, the deep blue of a clear sky on a day with low humidity.  I remember many times as a child lying in the grass in my backyard looking into the blue expanse of a cloudless, deep blue fall sky, trying hard to see through the blue.  My eyes were always getting lost in the infinite blue with no object to focus my eyes upon.

This week, I saw the sight that green was named for.  As I was passing a recently planted rice paddy on my way back from Passabe, I looked over and was overwhelmed by the deep brilliance of the green.  All I could think was, “Now, that is green.”  It was not a light green, an aqua green, but green GREEN!  And it was beautiful!

THEY ROBBED MY RICE

Do you remember those stories you hear as a kid, or maybe you still hear them now, about the bank robbery in the small western town?  The bandits rob the bank, making off with all the gold and cash.  The fearless lone sheriff hunts down the outlaws and all ends happy.  Up until today, I had never thought about what happens when there is no cash left in town, especially in the days before electronic purchases.

The state of Oecussi is isolated from the rest of Timor-Leste, as it is surrounded on three sides by Indonesia.  The fourth side is the ocean.  There is only one bank in the entire state to serve its population of 70,000 or so.  Cash is the only way to make purchases.  If you don’t have any Washingtons, they use the American Dollar as the currency here, you won’t get anything.  Of course some businesses will allow a credit line to regular customers, for example, we don’t pay the gravel breakers for each truck we carry, we pay them weekly, but they are few and far between. 

The project I’m working is funded by USAID money.  The USAID program wants the community to contribute their labor since they aren’t paying for the material costs of the system.  Thus, the community to build the water system.  But since it is difficult to get a community to work for nothing, the project supplies the community with food when they are working.  Here, that means rice, lots of rice.  Today, I ran out of rice.  I called the warehouse wondering where the rest of my rice was.  There was no rice.  Why? There is no money to buy rice with because the project couldn’t withdraw cash from the bank since it was all stolen. Now, I’m facing a halt in most work, because we can’t get the communities to work if we have no rice.  So goes my hope that September would go smoother than July and August went.  Now, did this happen in the old West after the bank was robbed?

NIGHT TIME MAGIC

Today is Tuesday, though it feels like Monday since yesterday was a Timorese National Holiday.  That first day of the week often sets the mood for the rest of the week.  I just hope for a good Monday to keep me motivated until the week.  Sadly, this hardly ever happens.  Having a Tuesday as a Monday didn’t change the pattern.

I was tired of the day as soon as I got out of bed.  I don’t know if I was lethargic from a long weekend, or whether I hit my limit of bull s**t last week for this week.  All I know, was that I was dreading coming here.  The morning started off with one of the big supply trucks, crashing into one of our small pickups (of course one of the two coming to Passabe).  It didn’t have any brakes. Who would need brakes on a truck going up and down mountains roads?  I guess it was good that we found out the brakes were a problem early on.   A series of other mishaps and bull s**t put me in a foul mood and I chewed out the coordinator of the local NGO who employs the technicians I work with.  I finally got back to the house at 8:00 to eat some supper, do some maintenance on the motorbike and get in some reading.  I needed something to relieve me of my foul mood.

The town of Passabe has a generator that it uses most nights so that homes have light.  But often the community runs out of fuel and the community stays dark.  Tonight, I didn’t mind.  I walked out under the night sky and, Wow!  It looks like someone spilled sugar across a black countertop.  There isn’t a cloud in the sky, though the Milky Way stretching from the Southwest to the Northeast looks like it could be clouds.  The moon won’t rise until well after midnight so the sky is exceptionally black.  Venus, bright when compared with the surrounding stars, is setting in the west with Jupiter (or it could be Mars) rising in the east.  There is no light pollution only starry perfection.  The stars are so numerous that it is almost difficult to make out any constellations, as the brighter stars are lost among the masses.  Since I’m in the Southern Hemisphere, the Southern Cross makes its way across the southern sky pointing due south as it has for seafarers for eons.  All in all, just a few minutes of star gazing relaxed me, put me in a happy mood, and reminded me why I come to places like Timor-Leste.