In the Trenches

I met Jose for the first time in January when he returned home to my community after working in Costa Rica coffee harvesting, and he immediately brought a new surge of energy into my community work. He noticed that my house construction project was lagging and started organizing new work days. He made me a hammock out of my leftover string and built benches out of my leftover wood. The next month he was elected as VP of our newly formed Water Committee. Jose came to almost every Sunday soccer game fundraiser, and always donated something from his store to sell. Jose was the one most readily available for surveying days or community meetings, and he actually showed up on time. He was one of the two men I brought to the Leadership Seminar back in July.

Now in Week 2 of aqueduct work, tensions have slowly risen among the community members, which is understandable as they are working every day without pay. That is, except for Jose. For the first few days of construction I was away from my community, and the Latino construction workers noticed how hard-working Jose was and asked him to be their “helper”. This means that Jose was helping haul water from the river to make the cement mix for the water tank, while the rest of the community members were building a trench to bury the tubes in the woods. When I returned back to my community, some of my neighbors let me know that Jose was paid $10 per day for two days for being the helper. Keep in mind that in these parts, a normal 8 am to 4 pm manual labor day wage is $6per day.

This situation made me uncomfortable, as the unwritten law for community projects is that beneficiaries donate all labor. The rest of the community was clearly disgruntled that one of them had been singled out to be paid an exorbitant day wage. Through rumors I heard that the Latino boss found out that Jose was a project beneficiary and therefore would no longer be paid for his work.

A week later, I observed Jose once again working as the helper to the Latino construction workers, and then being invited to eat lunch with them. I built up my nerves and point blank asked Jose if he was being paid for his work today, and he gave me a wishy-washy no answer. I was relieved and returned to my lunch. However, later I questioned the friendly Latino boss whether he was paying Jose. He said yes, and was surprised when I explained that the rest of the community was unhappy about the situation. He claimed he did not know anything about the project beneficiary no-pay rule. The Latino boss did not want to cause any community unrest and said we should all talk.

I thought highly enough of Jose to expect that once the Latino boss and I confronted him with the situation, he would quickly agree to leave the current day’s pay behind him in order to stay on good terms with the community. I was wrong. He claimed that he was not doing anything wrong because he is a harder worker than any of the other community members (more or less true). Later that day he called a meeting to announce he was withdrawing as VP of the Water Committee, pulling his family out of the aqueduct project, and demanding a refund for all of the donations his store has made in the past year to the Water Committee.

I was pretty upset when I returned back to my house before the afternoon rains. I considered calling one of my Peace Corps volunteer friends to vent about it, but instead walked over to my neighbor’s house and told my host mom and 2 host sisters* everything that had happened. They were alarmed, and did a good job comforting me and telling me that Jose has a temper like that, and I did nothing wrong by speaking up. Although ultimately my host mom did say, “I wish I had been there to tell you that you shouldn’t have said anything, we should have waited to say something until after the project was all over”.

Speaking up in the way I did rarely happens here which, I assume, is partially why corruption is rampant all over Panama. Although most of the community is behind me, my words caused more trouble than they were worth. I was speaking up to represent the dignity of the President of the Water Group as well as all of the other community members laboring in the trenches every day without pay. At the same time, who am I to say that a bunch of bad mouthing is worse than $30 earned in an immoral way?

*My host family is a matriarchy consisting of a mom (age 52), her two daughters (31 and 23) and their families, and her daughter-in-law (29) and her family. Four strong spunky women with husbands who make an appearance only every once in a while.