Arrived Safe and Sound

For the three of you actually following this - hi Jude - I arrived safe and sound in Managua this evening, Oct 7.  Elena picked me up, and I am at the center.  I had a fruit cocktail - fresh stuff!  Very nice.

We are going up to Matagalpa tomorrow, in the mountains.  I likely will not have Internet.  I'll take my iPod, but not the computer.

Chatted with Jude for a few minutes on Facetime - thank you Steve Jobs.

I read a book by Jane Vella on the way down here - an ex Maryknoll - educator.  Elena gave it to me.  She has done community development training all over the world.  The book is interesting for the pedagogic methods - it's all about dialog - but I kept wanting to know exactly what she was doing with the training, not the way she was doing it.  What exactly is training for community development?!  How does that work?

When I finished that, I started in again on Poor Economics, which David Newman had recommended.  I have it in my iPod.  I like it - it's full of interesting stories and facts about the poor.  It describes lots of attempts to do things with and for the poor - and the actual results.  The authors are trying to establish an economic theory that works for people in extreme poverty.  I like the stories a lot - but there is no underlying rational basis to it all.  They know about Sachs and Amartya Sen and others like that - but they haven't read Harrison's works, like Culture Matters.  I think that would give them a thread to make a bit more sense out of their data.

A lot of the things they are learning about how the poor make decisions, and how different incentives work or do not work, make a bit more sense when you understand that people have completely different world views.  It isn't just about the best economic decision - it's about things like who is in charge, and a sense of control, or fatalism, or things like that.

One of Harrison's contributors had pushed the idea that education is the way to move people's world view around to make them more open to economic development.  The problem with that is the educators.  Based on the research in Poor Economics, the teachers are just going to replicate the current world view of their students.  They may even make it worse, if they don't think the students have an ability to learn.

There is just a bit on micro=loans - which really do seem to be an excellent idea.  There is basically no availability of money to fund development in the circumstances of most of the poor.  My sense is that we could expand this with more funds and see even better results in our community.

The most recent chapter is about insurance.  Some entrepreneurs figure there is a huge untapped market for insurance among the poor.  Subsistence farming or other labor is an inherently risky business.  One would think that there would be a good market for some form of insurance.  But the A few have attempted to offer it have not worked out.  The authors have some ideas as to why that is, but I think a part of it is the time frame that the culture imposes.  Most developing nations do not have a very long future time frame.  Anticipating the need for insurance to cover future risks, and spending money now to obtain it is a pretty sophisticated set of information.  Lots of people in the first world have problems with why they might want to buy insurance.

OK - enough about me!  How are you folks doing? I'm going to bed here in warm and humid Managua.  82 out there - that's Fahrenheit!  Take care.  Remember, we're all in this together - and I'm pulling for you.