After writing the first coup de grace post, I didn't really expect to be double-checking how to spell deux (those tricky French). After all, everything else has been going swimmingly. A few weeks ago, Jon and I were crossing off some smaller punch list items (painting, sheathing tubes, etc.) near the source only to find someone had fallen a few trees, breaking tubes in a few places.
A brief digression. That's the unwritten story of development. Bono and George Clooney aren't talking about failure. The non-profits and NGO's don't talk about what happens after they leave in their quarterly newsletters. I'm not saying that there aren't successes and those successes are certainly worth celebrating. But equally important is monitoring, follow-up, and accountability, something a bit lacking in most development organizations.
At this point in service I have made friends with failure. No longer the awkward guy making a scene at the party, Failure is someone you can talk to, even joke with. And so you learn to brush yourself off and go at it again. We would make the repairs to the system and keep moving forward.
A week later came the more crushing blow, a certain je ne c'est quoi, le coup de grace deux. Jon and I went back to the toma (source) with the parts needed to make the repairs to the system. When we got there we found this.
Someone had cleared much of the rain forest, with huge trees breaking tubes in even more places, including one of the bridge crossings. Even worse, the new clearing is adjacent to an existing potrero where cattle graze. This means that cows could soon be closer to the water source. In one fell felling, someone had broken a bunch of tube, added the threat of cattle contaminating the water source, compromised water retention in the cuenca (watershed), and potentially flushed thousands of dollars and man-hours of work down the drain.
The next couple of days where spent trying to figure out who owned the land and next steps. Here's a handy guide of the key players.
- Paulino: Jon's counterpart in Kwite, current water committee president
- Roberto: Owner of nearby potrero, brother of my counterpart in Calante
- Fernando: Owner of nearby potrero, lives in Calante
- Chavela: Fernando's sister, lives in Kwite, past water president
- Mechikon: Past volunteer's Ngabe name, started the Kwite aqueduct
Jon discussed what happened with Paulino. That afternoon, Fernando stopped by Paulino's tienda and Paulino questioned Fernando, who said the land wasn't his and claimed ignorance to all that had transpired. Well, if it wasn't his land, it had to be Roberto's who owned a nearby potrero.
The next day, Jon and I set off to talk to Roberto. We found him clearing grass about 10 minutes away from the land in question. He graciously stopped what he was doing and walked with us. "That's not my land. That's Fernando's."
After thanking Roberto, we set off back to Calante to track down Fernando. I want to pause a bit and state that none of this is out of the ordinary. People lie and pass blame all the time. I'll post some thoughts on ethics at some point in the future.
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Fernando greeted us from his hammock. He knew why we were there. He said he in fact owned the land. Fernando then stated that he had only cut down smaller trees that hadn't broken any tubes. They had. He said he had burned the larger trees at their base and had left. He couldn't be held responsible if the trees fell down from the breeze.
"But you burned the base so that the trees would fall, right?"
"Yes, but don't worry. I'm done cutting down the trees there."
"Great. Can you sign a contract that says you won't touch the remaining trees?"
"No because I may cut more trees down to build a house."
We weren't going to get anywhere with Fernando. It's too bad that the fact that his sister's family lives in Kwite or screwing an entire community in general wasn't enough to stop.
Jon and I then went to Chavela to see what she had to say. There we learned that Fernando had said that he was never consulted about running the tubes through his land. He was. He had originally reached an agreement with Mechikon, but we had to reroute the system and across his potrero because the original path went higher than the source. At the time, we asked Fernando it was OK before rerouting. He said that was fine. That was six months ago. For six months the tubes were there without a peep from Fernando. Now Fernando was voicing his concerns, that the tubes had been rerouting without his consent. Furthermore, she said that Fernando took issue with the original toma placement and had voiced his concerns with Mechikon. Pretty convenient for Fernando to say considering she left quite some time ago.
Fast forward a week or so. We had left it all in the hands of Kwite. The community needed to reach an agreement with Fernando or the project would not move forward. It isn't the responsibility of the gringos to force people to care, to force people to sign contracts, to force a Western code of ethics upon people that truthfully don't seem to be excited about the water system in the first place.
It's a tough pill to swallow and probably not representative of the average volunteer experience. But there it is. For everything that this experience hasn't been in terms of successful development work, it's been tenfold in terms of personal development. And while that was part of the reason why I signed up, there are days where I wish I could trade in some personal growth for a few small wins. After all, this whole experience is about "them" too, right?
