The Existential Development Worker

Scene: A development worker is lying on a hammock in an unspecified developing country.  The hammock is swinging slowly, and the worker is staring intently at the leaves of a mango tree above.

What am I doing here?  Is this just another form of tourism?  Is it poverty voyeurism?  What am I doing?  Am I just here for bragging rights?  To win some imaginary future argument, where I can reference being down in the trenches and seeing it first hand?  For their reaction?  The way their eyebrows jump up like a cat startled by its own reflection.

But no, I’m doing something.  People express sincere gratitude at the services I offer.  They bless the Lord.  They appreciate what I do.  I am doing something.  But…what am I doing? Am I some tool of a foreign power?  Am I a crusader?  Am I imposing alien values?  Am I a missionary?  No.  Not a missionary.  Not some Jehovah’s Witness sent to enlighten the people with nonsense.  I actually do something.  Build latrines for communities who still shit in bushes; build bridges for villages that are stranded in the rainy season; teach people computer skills to compete in the labor market.  Yeah, some missionaries might also do similar work, but their main goal is to convert.  And a poor Catholic is no different than a poor Mormon.

But, and here is where you start to see the cracks snaking up the pillars, maybe I am a missionary.  Maybe I am just a missionary of progress.  Whose to say my idea of self-improvement (based as it is on the promotion of a skilled labor force, on the diffusion of modern technology, and on certain dietary and health practices) isn’t just as much nonsense as Joseph Smith’s golden tablets?  Aren’t I proselytizing in the name of the modern socio-economic world order?  A world order shaped by the industrial revolution and spread by its powerful disciples.  I am spreading the gospel of the modern technological-industrial system.

Valparaíso

Valparaíso is an abandoned beach house.  A deserted mansion inhabited by young, bohemian squatters.

A late nineteenth century creation, haphazardly constructed, as if several architects had been fired in the process of its erection, the building is hexagonal, with varying angles and side lengths.  The numerous stairwells crisscross each other like a Escher painting; the hallways, varying innumerably in width, zigzag around the many floors, leading to other meandering passageways, or to endless stairwells that, like water wells, fade into darkness;  the antique elevators (the ones with the metal doors that open and close manually like an accordion), long ago out-of-service, at one time rose to unknown heights at a snail’s pace.  Pipes are always bursting, ceilings collapsing at the slightest tremor, and fires are constantly being sparked and charring entire wings.  But the building remains.

The squatters have given the building their personal flavor.  The hallways and stairwells are covered in elaborate street art, stencils, and graffiti.  There are hookah-smoking rooms, cafes, music rooms, bars, arts and crafts rooms.  Downstairs there is a projection screen that plays old Godard and Antonioni films.  The corridors are littered with book stacks.  Dogs roam free, and on some floors outnumber their human companions.

Crossing the Border: The Gold Rush

This is the second installment in a six part series on a Nicaraguan's journey to the United States.

In the United States, the standard caricature of an “illegal immigrant” is that of a desperate human being who cannot make ends meet in his or her poverty-stricken homeland, and therefore sets off on a grueling expedition into an unknown and mystical land of dreams.  The Hispanic immigrant is perceived as “fleeing” a bleak and arduous lifestyle for the opportunities and comforts of the “first world.”  He is the miserable Polish family being greeted by the Statue of Liberty and its “Give me your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”  He is an indigent who chooses to migrate for the sake of his or her own survival.  Why else would he cross deserts, dodge bullets, or be stuffed into suffocating cargo trucks?

The destitute immigrant image satisfies the needs of both the left and the right in the United States.  For the left, it creates a sympathetic character entitled to the economic advantages found in the US; for the right, it is a pitiful image of misery that, like a disease, threatens to infect the sacred homeland.

The truth, however, is that the current wave of Hispanic immigrants may be not be so much like the wretched Eastern Europeans passing through Ellis Island, but more like the Northeastern Americans rushing to California during the mid-nineteenth century gold rush.

In Nicaragua, the term for traveling to the United States illegally is to go mojado, or “wet.”  Rather than being destitute, the mojados I have spoken to, and the common Nicaraguan perception of a mojado, is that of an adventurous, ambitious lower-middle class entrepreneur.  The mojados I have met tend to have stable, at times arduous, jobs that afford them a wage that is good enough to get by.   The lower classes that struggle to maintain a healthy diet are far more preoccupied with their daily chores (and perhaps even satisfied by their life routine) to yearn and dream of other worlds.  The struggling middle class, on the other hand, earn enough to survive comfortably, and, in general, comfort can lead only to bored, apathetic dissatisfaction or to an insatiable, ambitious drive.  The mojado is the latter, part of the eager middle class, anxious to move up the income ladder at any cost.