Quarterly Report Number 1
Okay, so I know that this is going to be really long, but it is some little synthesis of my experience in Nicaragua. So, read it if you want, keeping in mind that it is the first thing I have written and had to turn into anyone since graduating from college six months ago. Eegads! Soon to come will be some more things about the last couple weeks, sorry for being so slow!
When I found out I had received the Watson in March, I had an overwhelming sense of “What the hell have I gotten myself into?” and “How in the hell am I actually going to do everything that I said I was going to do?” I was excited, nervous, and slightly overwhelmed. When I arrived in Nicaragua, in Matagalpa, at the office of the cooperative, and at the home of my first host family, I had an overwhelming sense of exactly the same thing. I realized that for all of my liberal arts education, my theory, my anthropology classes, I had (and still may have) no idea how to do fieldwork. I struggled with what questions to ask people and with how to get to the information that I wanted to extract. I decided to apply myself to doing interviews, and focus on learning everything that I could about all aspects of the lives of small scale coffee farmers.
My greatest challenge has been how to concretize my project even as I argue with myself about whether it should be more concrete. I am gaining immense experience and knowledge on many disciplines, all related to coffee, to cooperatives, and to the lives of the people that I am meeting. The knowledge that I gather is vast and varied. It is all related, but there are so many aspects that I need to come up with some means of thinking about them separately in order to have an accounting of all of the elements. Part of me struggles to create a system to understand what I am seeing. There is the social aspect of cooperatives, the organizational aspect, the business aspect, the coffee production, the coffee processing, the coffee trading culture, as well as the national culture and individuals that I am encountering. As a successful and dedicated student, I struggle internally with whether or not it is enough to just have this experience, try to absorb it, or whether I need to look at everything more analytically, as if with a mind to produce a thesis, or “something” of value. I struggle with these questions almost daily.
Along with these struggles, living the last three months in Nicaragua has taught me a great deal. I have had countless moments where I have felt lost, figuratively and literally. I have also had countless moments where I have looked around and felt that I was seeing exactly what I had come to see. I have attended cooperative meetings, accounting capacitations, programs on the development of ecotourism, assemblies on passing bylaws for a system of communal banks for women. I have been to schools that have been built by communities with the help of their cooperatives. I have bought enchiladas from a woman on the street who hardly left her house before the women in her community formed a coop, and I have walked the five kilometers to secondary school with kids who pay for their notebooks and uniforms on cooperative scholarships. I have learned to cook food grown on family farms, to make coffee without a French press, passed hours in cupping labs, and spent days picking coffee cherries, walking through fields, and learning to identify everything from diseases to plants that I couldn’t have imagined three months ago.
I have found that my desire to work with cooperatives really means working with people. The majority of coop members are happy to participate, but being in the coop is not their sole identity. It follows then, that much of their attention is focused elsewhere. In Nicaragua, “cooperative business” has not meant individuals debating theories every day, or meeting to talk about the coop, or anything so abstract.
Living in small scale farming communities has de-romanticized the processes around Fair Trade and cooperative organizations. This has been interesting, taxing, and touching. One of my goals in this project was to gain a better understanding of what development priorities are in communities of small scale coffee farmers. It is important to know, but also difficult to comprehend, that many of the crucial things needed in these communities are hugely practical. The physical and immediate needs mean that the focus is often on latrine and highway projects, on essential, daily necessities. Although the literature on Fair Trade implies that social premiums and long-lasting trade relationships utterly alter the situation of poor farmers, the changes are not as drastic as they make them seem. They are big and important, but it is not as if people move from adobe shacks to homes with tiled floors. Rather, they may move from a stick hut insulated with plastic to a cinder block house with wooden windows and a dirt floor. They have an easier time getting their coffee to the market on a road with a new level of gravel, but are still getting it out on their backs or maybe on a cart. I have not been disillusioned by seeing this, and have actually been inspired, but it is interesting to note how the actual reality differs from the one that I had imagined and which some of the literature presents.
I am attempting to discern what ways cooperatives have influenced the relationships of families and communities. Within these situations of pressing daily necessities, it has been wonderful to see how many people are also working on less tangible questions, on how to create a more just and inclusive society, on how best to support one another so that the communities can flourish, on how to provide opportunities for concerts and exhibitions that validate the joy and humanity that are present in their lives. The cooperative projects are more than economic; they are social and human. People cite opportunities that they have had to learn about women’s history, or accounting, and how those skills have helped them, but also how the simple act of getting together with their neighbors has enriched their lives. In this way, the projects are important for the physical changes that they foster, but also important in many immeasurable or intangible ways. They make it possible for people to enjoy and nurture one another.
It also becomes clear when one arrives here that cooperativism is one among many models for development. It is not the one, the only one, or indeed the right one. There is also not one form of cooperativism. There are small and large cooperatives, secondary coops, coops that are largely supported by outside funds, and others that are mostly self-sufficient. I have met both organized and unorganized farmers, and there is a whole conjunction of factors that contribute to the success or failure of particular groups or individuals. I am faced with the questions of how to separate the two: how much of success is based on a communal model for development, and how much on the capacity, determination and vision of the particular people involved? I am also faced with the knowledge that the two are inseparable, that they affect each other, which leaves my liberally educated brain wishing that I had more tools to analyze the issue analytically, rather than just being able to say that this is what worked in one place and not in another.
For this reason I am trying to record what are the essentials of successful cooperatives. What are the qualities of the leaders that work with successful cooperatives? What measures have they implemented that contribute to success, participation, and tangible changes? What resources do they have at their disposal? How do they utilize them? What resources are lacking that would aid them even more? All of these questions I now attempt to include in my interviews and conversations, thereby learning more about what makes particular cooperatives work or not work.
On a personal level, the last three months have been challenging and exhilarating, confusing and lonely, and full of new connections. I have been completely awed and impressed by the people that I have met, by the way that I have been taken in, cared for, and accepted. That is not only including the wonderful families with whom I have had the opportunity to share this experience, but also strangers on buses, street corners, or entering a convenience store. Nicaraguans have been quick to offer me their help, their phone numbers, meals in their houses, after knowing me for only moments. Acceptance and generosity, particularly among people who by many standards have very little, have been what I have encountered most.
It is extraordinary to no longer think about Fair Trade, producers, Nicaragua, coffee fields, as abstract places, but rather to have friends who live here, to have been able to incorporate these concepts into my life. I have come to understand that even in the places that I read about in books, that are talked about as poverty stricken, or as models for development, or as any other term, really are just communities of real people, living along and doing the best that they can. They are people that get up in the morning, that work, that laugh, that struggle, that cook and read and play with their kids. Their lives, while on the surface very different from what mine has been, are based around the same activities. People have the same insecurities, the same joys, whether they live in a mud shack or a mansion or a college dormitory. I have met people that remind me of my parents, of my heroines, of my friends, speaking other languages and living different lives, but with similar conceptions of justice, progress and fulfillment. Living this knowledge and experience has been eye opening for me, making the world seem a smaller and more connected place. It has also affirmed for me the existence of an extensive and diverse community of people who share some of my values, and are also working to “make the world a better place”.
As the first three months of my project come to an end, so does my stay in Nicaragua. It is challenging, sad, strange and exciting to think that from here I am moving on to another part of this journey, in another country, another culture, another context. I feel that I have taken advantage of my time here well, but also feel that there is so much more to learn, so many connections to continue to nurture. I am already trying to think how I will be able to return to visit the families with whom I have bonded, and wonder how I will incorporate them and the knowledge that I have gained while here into my life after this year. Moving from the time when I first asked these questions hypothetically, to actually working to answer them, I ponder how my inquiry will evolve over the next nine months. How universal are the issues that people are struggling with? What are the unique solutions small scale coffee farmers are creating to confront those issues? Realizing that with every day another part of the experience that I have imagined for myself becomes a memory, I am more determined to get out of this time everything that I can, in all the ways possible. It reminds me that it is an unbelievable gift to get to be here, making these connections intellectually, but even more important, humanly.
When I found out I had received the Watson in March, I had an overwhelming sense of “What the hell have I gotten myself into?” and “How in the hell am I actually going to do everything that I said I was going to do?” I was excited, nervous, and slightly overwhelmed. When I arrived in Nicaragua, in Matagalpa, at the office of the cooperative, and at the home of my first host family, I had an overwhelming sense of exactly the same thing. I realized that for all of my liberal arts education, my theory, my anthropology classes, I had (and still may have) no idea how to do fieldwork. I struggled with what questions to ask people and with how to get to the information that I wanted to extract. I decided to apply myself to doing interviews, and focus on learning everything that I could about all aspects of the lives of small scale coffee farmers.
My greatest challenge has been how to concretize my project even as I argue with myself about whether it should be more concrete. I am gaining immense experience and knowledge on many disciplines, all related to coffee, to cooperatives, and to the lives of the people that I am meeting. The knowledge that I gather is vast and varied. It is all related, but there are so many aspects that I need to come up with some means of thinking about them separately in order to have an accounting of all of the elements. Part of me struggles to create a system to understand what I am seeing. There is the social aspect of cooperatives, the organizational aspect, the business aspect, the coffee production, the coffee processing, the coffee trading culture, as well as the national culture and individuals that I am encountering. As a successful and dedicated student, I struggle internally with whether or not it is enough to just have this experience, try to absorb it, or whether I need to look at everything more analytically, as if with a mind to produce a thesis, or “something” of value. I struggle with these questions almost daily.
Along with these struggles, living the last three months in Nicaragua has taught me a great deal. I have had countless moments where I have felt lost, figuratively and literally. I have also had countless moments where I have looked around and felt that I was seeing exactly what I had come to see. I have attended cooperative meetings, accounting capacitations, programs on the development of ecotourism, assemblies on passing bylaws for a system of communal banks for women. I have been to schools that have been built by communities with the help of their cooperatives. I have bought enchiladas from a woman on the street who hardly left her house before the women in her community formed a coop, and I have walked the five kilometers to secondary school with kids who pay for their notebooks and uniforms on cooperative scholarships. I have learned to cook food grown on family farms, to make coffee without a French press, passed hours in cupping labs, and spent days picking coffee cherries, walking through fields, and learning to identify everything from diseases to plants that I couldn’t have imagined three months ago.
I have found that my desire to work with cooperatives really means working with people. The majority of coop members are happy to participate, but being in the coop is not their sole identity. It follows then, that much of their attention is focused elsewhere. In Nicaragua, “cooperative business” has not meant individuals debating theories every day, or meeting to talk about the coop, or anything so abstract.
Living in small scale farming communities has de-romanticized the processes around Fair Trade and cooperative organizations. This has been interesting, taxing, and touching. One of my goals in this project was to gain a better understanding of what development priorities are in communities of small scale coffee farmers. It is important to know, but also difficult to comprehend, that many of the crucial things needed in these communities are hugely practical. The physical and immediate needs mean that the focus is often on latrine and highway projects, on essential, daily necessities. Although the literature on Fair Trade implies that social premiums and long-lasting trade relationships utterly alter the situation of poor farmers, the changes are not as drastic as they make them seem. They are big and important, but it is not as if people move from adobe shacks to homes with tiled floors. Rather, they may move from a stick hut insulated with plastic to a cinder block house with wooden windows and a dirt floor. They have an easier time getting their coffee to the market on a road with a new level of gravel, but are still getting it out on their backs or maybe on a cart. I have not been disillusioned by seeing this, and have actually been inspired, but it is interesting to note how the actual reality differs from the one that I had imagined and which some of the literature presents.
I am attempting to discern what ways cooperatives have influenced the relationships of families and communities. Within these situations of pressing daily necessities, it has been wonderful to see how many people are also working on less tangible questions, on how to create a more just and inclusive society, on how best to support one another so that the communities can flourish, on how to provide opportunities for concerts and exhibitions that validate the joy and humanity that are present in their lives. The cooperative projects are more than economic; they are social and human. People cite opportunities that they have had to learn about women’s history, or accounting, and how those skills have helped them, but also how the simple act of getting together with their neighbors has enriched their lives. In this way, the projects are important for the physical changes that they foster, but also important in many immeasurable or intangible ways. They make it possible for people to enjoy and nurture one another.
It also becomes clear when one arrives here that cooperativism is one among many models for development. It is not the one, the only one, or indeed the right one. There is also not one form of cooperativism. There are small and large cooperatives, secondary coops, coops that are largely supported by outside funds, and others that are mostly self-sufficient. I have met both organized and unorganized farmers, and there is a whole conjunction of factors that contribute to the success or failure of particular groups or individuals. I am faced with the questions of how to separate the two: how much of success is based on a communal model for development, and how much on the capacity, determination and vision of the particular people involved? I am also faced with the knowledge that the two are inseparable, that they affect each other, which leaves my liberally educated brain wishing that I had more tools to analyze the issue analytically, rather than just being able to say that this is what worked in one place and not in another.
For this reason I am trying to record what are the essentials of successful cooperatives. What are the qualities of the leaders that work with successful cooperatives? What measures have they implemented that contribute to success, participation, and tangible changes? What resources do they have at their disposal? How do they utilize them? What resources are lacking that would aid them even more? All of these questions I now attempt to include in my interviews and conversations, thereby learning more about what makes particular cooperatives work or not work.
On a personal level, the last three months have been challenging and exhilarating, confusing and lonely, and full of new connections. I have been completely awed and impressed by the people that I have met, by the way that I have been taken in, cared for, and accepted. That is not only including the wonderful families with whom I have had the opportunity to share this experience, but also strangers on buses, street corners, or entering a convenience store. Nicaraguans have been quick to offer me their help, their phone numbers, meals in their houses, after knowing me for only moments. Acceptance and generosity, particularly among people who by many standards have very little, have been what I have encountered most.
It is extraordinary to no longer think about Fair Trade, producers, Nicaragua, coffee fields, as abstract places, but rather to have friends who live here, to have been able to incorporate these concepts into my life. I have come to understand that even in the places that I read about in books, that are talked about as poverty stricken, or as models for development, or as any other term, really are just communities of real people, living along and doing the best that they can. They are people that get up in the morning, that work, that laugh, that struggle, that cook and read and play with their kids. Their lives, while on the surface very different from what mine has been, are based around the same activities. People have the same insecurities, the same joys, whether they live in a mud shack or a mansion or a college dormitory. I have met people that remind me of my parents, of my heroines, of my friends, speaking other languages and living different lives, but with similar conceptions of justice, progress and fulfillment. Living this knowledge and experience has been eye opening for me, making the world seem a smaller and more connected place. It has also affirmed for me the existence of an extensive and diverse community of people who share some of my values, and are also working to “make the world a better place”.
As the first three months of my project come to an end, so does my stay in Nicaragua. It is challenging, sad, strange and exciting to think that from here I am moving on to another part of this journey, in another country, another culture, another context. I feel that I have taken advantage of my time here well, but also feel that there is so much more to learn, so many connections to continue to nurture. I am already trying to think how I will be able to return to visit the families with whom I have bonded, and wonder how I will incorporate them and the knowledge that I have gained while here into my life after this year. Moving from the time when I first asked these questions hypothetically, to actually working to answer them, I ponder how my inquiry will evolve over the next nine months. How universal are the issues that people are struggling with? What are the unique solutions small scale coffee farmers are creating to confront those issues? Realizing that with every day another part of the experience that I have imagined for myself becomes a memory, I am more determined to get out of this time everything that I can, in all the ways possible. It reminds me that it is an unbelievable gift to get to be here, making these connections intellectually, but even more important, humanly.
posted by Hilary King at
12:55 PM
1 Comments:
This is fantastic, Hilary. To share in your creative and more analytical processing is helping me learn more about you, about the part of the world you are in, about myself...I am going to write something for myself, too even though Fulbright hasn't required it.
i don't know what else to say except...i read often to keep up with you and where you are.. i love you.
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jacquelina, at 7:52 PM
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