For the past two weeks I have been wrestling with the situation of Dave, one of my drivers (read “The mudslide story”). As tempting as it would be to do a one-off relief project for this man that I know personally, the scale of the problem makes it difficult to do a quick solution. What really needs to happen is that the whole community would get behind the cause, in order to reduce their vulnerability.
A disaster program specialist once said that a disaster is when a hazard occurs in a vulnerable situation. This means that an avalanche on Antarctica is not a disaster because no one is vulnerable to it, but a monsoon in the flood plains of Bangladesh is a major disaster because millions of people decide to shrug about the imminent risks and live in that vulnerable place anyway (and 200,000 Bangladeshis die each year because of this). This theory and these examples should help us think twice about the notion that relief from the outside is the best way to care for disaster victims.
What’s better than relief? Communities that say, “enough suffering,” and look for ways that they can reduce their vulnerability to likely hazards. I’m currently reading through the training books put out by Tearfund UK explaining how to facilitate such communities.
It’s a lovely thought isn’t it, to imagine Dave’s whole community coming around him and spending their time and money to try to reduce the vulnerability of his and 3 other families. But is that the only perspective from the community about the risks at hand? All of the community would fall into a category we would call “poor”, but are there any differences in their priority concerns?
Leave those questions for a moment, and travel with me to the squatter communities of Manila, Philippines. These are the communities where I first learned about participatory community development. In these communities you find people living in tin, plywood, tarp, or cardboard houses. They live so close together that some families have to sleep in shifts, because there’s not enough space for everyone to lay flat on the floor. No running water, no sanitation, no schools, no health care, and basically it seemed: no escape. Some seemed motivated to get out, and were scrimping and saving and doing everything they could to send children to outside schools. Others seemed apathetic to their misery, and some of those sunk in alcohol or gambling addictions. Going into the squatters there was always this feeling, “man I hope some of these children can get out of here.” I keenly remember one day when I was doing some anthropological study of one community, and a small group of young adults made a sad illustration of poverty in their place. They told of the various ways that their parents’ generation had tried to escape the squatters, but never could. They said that poverty is like a pit, and while there is a ladder, it’s too dark for most to see it. If someone does work hard and think creatively about how to find and climb the ladder, he will never make it all the way up, because while he’s climbing, the others will hear him, seize his ankles, and yank him back down into the pit with them. Painful picture to think about, isn’t it? Doesn’t your heart go out to those ones that try to climb the ladder? What do you think of the ones that pull them back down? Who do you favor in this story?
Hold on to your responses to these questions, and now come back to the village where Dave’s neighbors have just been killed by a landslide, and Dave’s family is in equal danger. Who do you favor in this story? What should the community do?
I was stuck today, to realize that the participatory community effort that I hoped Dave’s community would do for him is exactly the type of thing that grabs at the heels of the motivated poor man trying to climb out of the pit. Dave has to try to grab; he has no other options. What about the others in the community that live further from the hill and thus do not share the vulnerability Dave is in? Do they look at Dave and say, “you were told not to build there, you knew it could be dangerous, now go away, I do not want to share the consequences for your bad decisions because it will pull me back down from the investments and savings I have made for my own family.”
Do you hear these opposing perspectives from the poverty pit? Which one resonates with you? Where do you find your own perspective on the poor, and your posture and response to them?
No comments:
Post a Comment