Welcome to the Yanapuma Weblogs!

The development of Yanapuma since its inception in September of 2006 has been rapid, and we have often struggled to keep up with the pace and the changes that have been required in order to continue to grow successfully. Things will probably continue thus for at least a few years, with continuous challenges ahead as we strive to learn and adapt to ever changing situations. While our website offers information about our programs and projects and presents our philosophy and objectives, there is a lot that happens day by day that cannot easily be communicated in the conventional webpages.

For this reason we have created these weblogs that offer an inside view into the challenges that we deal with daily as we strive to make Yanapuma a foundation that really achieves solid and sustainable results in the field of development.

Please feel free to send us your comments.

 

Those of us who use PCs every day are used to dealing with viruses, worms, Trojan horses, etc. We install a free or paid antivirus program and trust it to protect us without really ever thinking about the people who spend their time writing these destructive programs or what drives them. If I have thought about it at all I have supposed that they are generally anti-corporate, anti-materialist, against middle-class values, and generally see themselves as renegade outsiders fighting against the great machine, bored and alienated youth out to score points on the web by bringing down as many PCs as they can.

But working as we do as a foundation has made me realize that those who actually suffer the most are not these supposed intended victims.  Most of us can afford to buy anti-virus and anti-spyware software, or use the free versions that we regularly update. But what about those who are at the bottom of the computer-use ladder? I am talking about the small rural schools in developing countries like Ecuador, like the school in Bua de los Tsachila which has four old computers that they use to try to teach some of the 280 children the basics about computer use so that when they go on to college afterwards they are not quite so far behind their counterparts from the town schools, who are used to using Word, Excel, etc, and the internet. Memory sticks bring viruses to computers that have no anti-virus programs installed, or maybe an outdated version that was installed when the machines were first set up in the school which of course has no internet for updates.

The result is that their computers crash regularly, and staff have no experience in how to solve the problem. Nor does the school have the resources to pay a technician to resolve things for them. So the school’s PCs sit unusable and unused much of the time, brought down by one or more of the thousands of viruses that appear. Even if we as a foundation can get someone to spend a day sweeping them and reloading operating systems when necessary, we know that within a very short time they will once again be infected and the children will once again be deprived of one of the most useful tools for education.

I started to realize how it affects just one school in one community that we are working with. Then I began to realize that this must happen all over the world, all the time. So the real victims of those who write malicious software are the tens of millions of children worldwide in small rural schools that are struggling with scarce resources to educate their children for a better future. Like the school in Bua with its four chronically infected computers that lie idle.

I wonder if any of the writers of viruses have ever stopped to think about who their victims really are. Would they care to learn that the result of their work has been to deprive poor children in under-developed countries the chance to advance in life and learn vital skills? What would they feel to realize that it is not rich corporations nor middle class kids in comfortable homes who suffer from virus-infected computers?

  

 

On the 1st of September Yanapuma turned 2 years old. It seems like only yesterday that we were celebrating surviving our first year. This year we were all a bit more tired. It has been a year of continued growth. We have probably doubled by most indexes of growth – financial, number of students attending the school, staff, donations received, etc.

This year we decided to go to Puerto Quito, about three hours from Quito in the low tropical lands towards the coast. Here we spent the weekend in a new hostería with a nice pool, relaxing more than planning for the coming year. For most of us it was the first entire weekend off for at least 6 months, so it was nice to just unwind, see each other in a different context, and not talk about the school or foundation for a day.

But we are all optimistic for the coming year. We know that we need to keep on developing and promoting the Spanish school in order to have sufficient income to pay our overheads and basic admin costs. As with many smaller foundations, a constant shadow lurks – where will the funding come from, and what if it doesn’t? Our plan is to be as largely independent and self-financing in this respect as possible, with basic funding from the school and group volunteer activities to keep us afloat. Our personal aims are to reach a salary level that is appropriate by Ecuadorian standards for the work that we do and the commitment that we make, a reasonable middle-class salary. At the moment we are about 35-50% of the way there, depending how you calculate what is average here in Ecuador. So we still have a good way to go yet.

We have to keep reminding ourselves that we have actually achieved a huge amount in the past two years. Not only getting a successful and reliable Spanish school up and running, but developing a foundation with its methodology and approach and beginning to achieve positive results in several communities. From the original 8 founder members we dropped down to 6 in the first year, but now count around 13 salaried employees plus a number of contract teachers.

At the beginning the foundation was very reliant on the input and work from its student interns, and remains so today, but we are moving away from this way of doing this which has had both positive and negative effects. We are focusing instead on having employees doing the major development of the foundation with the aid of interns and students. But there will always be a place for dedicated students of development to carry out research and work on various projects. I often joke with new interns that they set out with ideals of working in this field, bettering the conditions for the less fortunate. They reach a point of realizing that, firstly there are relatively few jobs and little money in development, and that secondly, they have to work for free for organizations like Yanapuma to even get a toehold on the career ladder. It would be nice one day if we could get some funding to at least pay some expenses for our interns to save them having to go into debt in order to move forward with their chosen careers.

From the point of view of the development of the foundation, the learning curve has been very steep. I find myself questioning all the time our aims and methods in light of our developing relationships with the communities and projects that we work with, sometimes wondering if what we are trying to achieve is even possible. We work with cultures that are so different in their outlook on life that it becomes obvious that there are no quick fixes. To change the entrenched belief systems and cultural experience of any group has to be a long and delicate process. We do not seek to impose a new set of values or practices on any community. But if they do not develop the intellectual tools to deal with the globalized context of their lives, they will always suffer from under development and abuse from those around them.

This problem has become abundantly clear with the Tsa’chila culture, but exists in relation to all. A people who were forest-dwellers until 20 or 30 years ago have seen their culture and relation to the environment change drastically for the worse. Unable to comprehend the changes that are taking place they have allowed these processes to continue, developing a lack of self esteem and devaluing their own knowledge and traditional practices, copying the practices of those around them without any understanding of the consequences. Many of them are unable to read or write very well, and although they form the committees that represent an imposed structure of governance, they have no clear idea of what a “president,” “vice-president,” “secretary,” etc., actually do. This simple fact is easy for an outside agency to miss. Without any internal structure to their organization based on shared responsibilities, things fall apart all the time with disastrous consequences. The result is a dependence on people from outside to do things, organize things, and a willing acceptance of paternalism and hand-outs that further undermines their ability to be self-determining. In any community this makes developing any sustainable project difficult, worst for tourism and related projects where dealing reliably on a daily basis with foreigners is a necessity. Solutions to these problems have to be clearly defined and consistently applied over a long period, to the point of being woven into the curricula of the schools where the best hope is for the emergence of a new generation that both value their culture and traditions and are able to deal with the globalized context.   

This is the work we have chosen to do as a foundation and which will remain our focus for the coming year. We hope to count on the continuing support of our current and previous partner organizations, students, interns, volunteers, and all those interested in promoting sustainable development.

 

I often comment to students and interns that if we had set out to be the kind of organization that just focused on achieving one narrow goal then our work would be easy. Let’s say for instance that we vaccinate children. We could just arrive in a community, vaccinate all the children and leave congratulating ourselves on a job well done. But if those same children still have poor education, inadequate nutrition, parasites, poor hygiene, etc., what have we achieved?

Our aim as an NGO is to work in an integrated manner to promote sustainable solutions to the problems of developing communities. This means much more intimate contact and involvement with the community over a longer period of time. And it means becoming embroiled in local struggles and conflicts that have direct bearing on the state of the community and its needs. This becomes increasingly obvious to us in our work in the Tsachila community of Bua, and is both a challenge and a source of frustration.

From an anthropological perspective I assume that behaviours that a particular culture exhibit, like the Tsachila, have served an adaptive purpose in the past, allowing them to survive in their environment and maintain a relatively stable social system. Today however some of their social traits work against them, making it impossible for them to advance or to receive the kind of help that they need. The Tsachila are a classic case and our work is constantly being undermined by gossip, rumour, misunderstandings and misinformation, the latter sometimes deliberate.

There is a cultural belief that the Tsachila have always been abused and taken advantage of by non-Tsachila, consequently all outsiders are suspect. But the real enemy is within. It is their inability to come together as a group, to identify their needs, to work towards generating solutions to their problems, that has always left them under-resourced and ignored.

A good recent example was the donation by the municipality (of whom the Tsachila say that they have never done anything for them) of 2000 trees. I was at the meeting of the assembly where our full-time worker there, Giovanny, was instrumental in organizing the collection of these saplings from the municipal nursery. The process took over an hour to organize, with reluctant discussion about who was to pay the gas, who could supply the trucks, which particular organization was going to be responsible for how many trees collected. It was like pulling teeth, as they say, and I was left in no doubt that had the Tsachila been left to themselves they would never have got organized to pick up these freely donated trees.

So how do we change this? Clearly it is a deep seated cultural issue that requires a concerted effort to begin to shift. One way is through the school, educating a new generation of Tsachila in leadership and participation. But that is for the future. We also need to work now with the existing structures to try to make them aware of how their attitudes and behaviours negatively affect their ability to develop. Currently we have a student intern carrying out workshops with different groups within the community of Bua, using puppets, drama, exercises and discussion, to begin to change the ways that the Tsachila interact on an organizational level. But we don’t expect miracles and understand that this will be a long process. In the meantime the work that we do in every sphere has to be defended from the rumours, gossip and misinformation that get passed around daily. This can be disheartening at times, but we have to remain aware that this is one vital aspect of sustainable development, and that if we do not work to strengthen the Tsachila’s own abilities then they will never be able to escape from the mindset of paternalism and dependency and suspicion that all outsiders are only interested in taking advantage of them.

 

It is one of the defining aspects of Yanapuma that we work with a unit identified by the term “community” to promote sustainable practices. Another is that we seek to work using participatory methodologies that involve all segments of this unit known as “community”. But what is a community? Our growing experience, combined with more recent work carried out by our interns Matt and Linda in La Chimba has set me to questioning these central concepts that we set out to work with.

Last summer we worked with a bunch of interns on participatory methods in two communities, carrying out one three day workshop in one community and two three day workshops in another. One of the challenges that I posed to these interns at the time was to tell me what they had learned from these workshops that could not have been learned by just talking to key members of the community. Not that I am against participatory methodologies, quite the opposite, but I am always concerned to get the best result for the least use of precious resources both in financial and human terms. The interns were all studying or had recently studied development from different angles in their universities, and were full of the idealism and sense of mission that such study brings. This included the conviction that nothing should be initiated by the foundation without first engaging in exhaustive participatory processes. Only this way would we be able to truly get to understand the community’s needs.

My reactions to their work during the summer were mixed, although generally positive at the time, but I was left with some sense of unease that I could not quite put my finger on regarding the processes that they had carried out in these two communities. Now I realize that this was caused by a confusion, as yet insufficiently defined, over exactly what a “community” is supposed to be.

What we encounter at a superficial level when we arrive in a “community” is a group of apparently similar people living similar lives under similar conditions, and we automatically assume that there will be a broad level of agreement over what needs to be done to improve conditions. But what we have come to realize is that community is only a broad term with a geographical meaning, a group of people inhabiting the same physical space.

Within this unit known as a community are a number of competing viewpoints, rivalries, enmities, hierarchies, historical conflicts and irresolvable issues that produce a fractured entity lacking the implied attributes of “community.” Our investigations in both Bua and La Chimba have amply demonstrated this, and in the process have undermined my support for the type of participatory approach that was carried out last summer, revealing them as only having scratched the surface of a very incoherent situation.

The question is how then to approach development in a way that takes account of the needs and preferences of the population that we are working with and that is participatory and empowering.

Most often our point of entry into any community has been through the invitation of one individual who is part of a local organization that is working towards ends that we can support, such as rescuing cultural identity or generating income through tourism. From there we have been able to begin to spread out, getting involved in other local development needs as our resources permit, always with one eye on how everything fits together into an integrated picture of sustainable development.

What we have come to realize is that our presence in the community is always both simultaneously welcomed and contested, the object of appreciation and suspicion, a source of needed resources and political leverage, an answer to some and a threat to others. How do participatory methodologies pretend to function in such a mixed climate? This is going to be an ongoing question for us at Yanapuma as we seek to define our methodology and practice.

 

Yanapuma seeks to work in an integrated manner across 7 principal axes. One of these involves seeking to develop sustainable forms of income. This implies economic activities that may be seen as “capstone” activities, which is to say that everything is in place in a metaphorical arch of integrated systems in the community, providing them with a sustainable base upon which to engage in a business or businesses that will bring them economic gain. Tourism is often the most obvious potential enterprise, as it can be done in a way that does not harm the environment or degrade the culture, and in fact can help to preserve both. When the project is set up by and for the community, a community-run tourism project, the potential gains can be significant. And as long as the community has its stable base it will not be destroyed through an over-reliance on this one source of income if the tourists should one day stop coming.

The concept should sound attractive, and we have recently been conducting a survey amongst tourists here in Quito to gauge their reactions to the idea of community-run tourism and their likelihood of supporting it.

We have also been designing and implementing over the last year and a half a Cultural Exchange Program that is intended as a half way stage before a community can really deal with full paying tourists. Visitors on this program arrive with the understanding that the community needs a little help from the outsider to hone its skills, and thus are not too disappointed when things don’t work perfectly. And results have been very encouraging, with everyone who goes on this program agreeing that the experience is worthwhile.

But my big concern in all of this revolves around the final end product of all our work, ie a fully functioning community-run tourism project, specifically around the question of who is going to buy this product. There is currently a gaping hole where the market is supposed to be and pretty much everybody, it seems to me, has been proceeding on the supposition that “if you build it they will come.” But I have grave doubts at the moment and think that a huge amount of effort has to go into creating the product as something that tourists can relate to and will want to buy in order for there to be a market that is sufficiently large for it become a worthwhile activity for small communities to undertake. This means promotion and branding at an international level as well as working at the end that we are at – trying to create credible community-run tourist destinations. Several agents that I have spoken to from other countries have commented that, although they are very sympathetic to the cause, their clients pay a large sum of money to get to Ecuador and are not going to be interested in cold showers, biting insects and hard beds.

In order to offer a community a reasonable proposal, we need to work backwards and calculate what they need to receive as income against the investment and effort they need to make in order for it all to be worthwhile, as well as figure out who their clients are and how to get them there. I have seen too many half-assed projects that end up with everybody disappointed, community members and visitors alike, squandered resources and lost time, and don’t want to create more of the same.

So our Cultural Exchange Program (volontourism) is a stage in the process and has to be treated as such, with a clear trajectory from there to the final outcome of the project. The presence of volunteers in communities can have negative as well as positive effects, and as we as a foundation become more involved with individual communities, we begin to learn more and more about the pitfalls and the ways in which volunteers and visitors can unwittingly undermine local processes and cause or increase divisions. As outsiders we talk about “communities” without often being aware that the community is actually composed of numerous factions and may have little internal cohesion. We need to always be very careful about how we approach a community to create a workable partnership that will allow volunteers and visitors to make significant contributions. This is equally true of an activity as seemingly innocent as teaching a bit of English in the local school.

It is always much easier to get development wrong than get it right unfortunately, so while it is easy for us to draw up plans and begin to form organizations, getting the service correctly inserted into the community is the vital step where things often go wrong. Having said that, it is what we are committed to doing, and we are aware that we need to help the communities that we are working with to recognize exactly what the pros and cons are to working with volunteers, visitors and tourists. We need also to ensure that the different stake-holders in each community are aware of what is happening and can reach agreement on how to proceed.

Thinking integrally about each project requires a lot of time and effort. But without it any initiative is doomed to failure ultimately.