Some Analysis

Meeting Sister Victoria and her coworkers at the Ati compound yesterday made me think: These ladies are in over their heads.

"We are only three," Sister Vic had said. "We can only do so much." They didn't think to count the 65 families they worked 'for'. Nor the countless other indigenous people who are being oppressed by poverty in Aklan, who could be fast allies.

Theirs is charity work first and foremost. And there was an element of religious fatalism guiding them: "If it is God's will" they said numerous times.

So now to explain the title of this blog. It came from something I heard Dr. Hugo Slim say at an Oxfam conference on the use of participatory research in humanitarian aid and development.

Slim, the director of Corporates for Crisis, and author of Killing Civilians: Methods, Madness and Morality in war, told a room full of development professionals that "we are getting the grammar of development wrong."

He argued that when we say the simple sentence: "We help people," we are putting ourselves as the subject, and the people that we help as objects. In this construction they are recipients of the action. They are passive. They are being acted upon by "us."

Development professionals know that this kind of aid is ineffective and that the best kind of help is self-help. We use words like "participation" to get at that idea.

The conditions of the Atis are much like the conditions of indigenous people all over the world. Landless as a result of development, they are incapable of maintaining their traditional lifestyles. Without a formal education, they don't have the skills to join modern economies.

Unlike the Atis, the Chiquitanos of Bolivia were additionally prohibited from owning land and were forced to work unpaid for local authorities, landowners and the Church.

Still in the 1980s, they managed to organize, first through soccer leagues, of all things. They managed to learn what their rights were. And then they managed to demand them. In 2005, one of their own, Evo Morales was elected president of Bolivia. In 2007, the Chiquitanos won the land title to 1 million hectares of territory.

This version of the Chiquitano success story is oversimplified. Clearly their success was incited by a lot of factors, including nationalism sparked by the '52 revolution, bad structural adjustment policies in the 1980s which galvanized protestors, changes in Washington Consensus policies in the 1990s which made it easier for people to participate in local government, and a history of strong social institutions in Bolivia.

Nevertheless, one wonders what this example could mean for the Atis.

Duncan Green, head researcher at Oxfam Great Britain, quotes a village leader from Cambodia in his book, From Poverty to Power. Correcting the oft-quoted idiom of teaching a man (or woman) to fish, she said:

"That woman already knows how to fish. She would like her river left alone by illegal logging companies or fish poachers. She would prefer that her government not build huge dams with the help of the Asian Development bank, dams that have damaged her livelihood. She would prefer that the police not violently evict communities to make way for the dam. She doesn't want charity. She would like respect for her basic rights."

I couldn't help but think that this is also how the Atis must feel, despite the generosity of the three Sisters who look after them.