[Maria Elisa Christie] Hello everybody I'm Maria Elisa Christie, I'm director of Women and Gender in
International Development at the Center for International Research Education and Development.
Welcome to our Women and Gender in Development discussion series,
our first for this semester. We have two more coming up. We want to thank our sponsors
in Outreach and International Affairs that allowed us to bring Dr. Williams,
and want to start by acknowledging the Tutelo Monocan people who are the
traditional custodians of the land on which we work and live, and recognize a
continuing connection to the land water and air that Virginia Tech consumes.
In respect to federal Monacan nations and to their elders past present and
emerging, and we also acknowledge the university's historical ties to the
indentured and enslaved whose labors built this institution.
We have a sign-up sheet, I noticed most of you already signed it but we're going to go ahead and send it
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gender and development and international [inaudible] not things outside of that
topic so don't worry about being spammed.
And now I'd like to introduce Dr. Becky Williams.
Her research has two primary focuses including the connections
between climate change violence and migration, and gender and participatory
development with a focus on natural resources and indigenous communities.
Dr. Williams is an assistant research scientist for the office for global
research engagement and the USAID Feed the Future innovation lab for livestock
systems at the University of Florida. She also teaches as adjunct faculty in the
Center for Latin American Studies and frequently guest lectures in the master
of sustainable development practice program. Dr. Williams holds an MS from
Florida State University in instructional systems design and a PhD
from the University of Florida in interdisciplinary ecology with a focus
on tropical conservation and development. And she will speak for about 30 minutes
and then we'll have about 20 minutes for discussion. We actually have the room a
little bit later than you know so we'll stop officially at 1:30 so you can be
if you need to go somewhere but if you want to come up and talk to her we can still do that.
[Rebecca Williams] Thank you everybody good afternoon
so now that I've gotten here you see that I can dress like a professional to
go and take this off so I'm more comfortable because I tend to get very
very excited about my topic as most researchers do so I'm going to talk to
you today with a little bit of the research I'm doing in Honduras
specifically around the intersection of food security and migration and violence.
I've actually been working with Virginia Tech for about eight years now they
partnered with the University of Florida right in my PhD on a big development
projects and that I was one of the graduate students at University of
Florida that was involved in that then afterwards I continued to work with
Virginia Tech on some other projects and this project that I'm going to present
on today actually comes through Virginia Tech to the University of Florida
because we have continued to partner together so I'm really excited to be
here this is actually my first time in Blacksburg even though I've been working
with Virginia Tech for so long so let's get into this very complex topic first
thing I'm going to do is give you a little bit of background so for those of
you who are not familiar with Honduras it has been ranked as one of the most
dangerous countries in the world since 1999 when World Bank first started
taking information or data on those statistics so we don't really know how
long the intentional homicide and violence rate has been as high as it is
but we know that at least since 1999 Honduras has been in the top five
countries in the world for intentional homicides and we used intentional
homicide as a proxy for how violence a country how bout the country is because
it's the crime that is the least likely to go unreported so if there's a
homicide people are going to report and there's a homicide but there are other
kinds of violence it's much less likely to go report it so Honduras was number
one in the world from 2006 to 2015 that changed in 2016
due to a game truce that fell apart in El Salvador which pushed El Salvador
above Honduras but there's also some interesting things going on with the way
violence is being reported in Honduras where since 2016 there's been this
considerable drop in intentional homicides but on the ground when you
talk to organizations there their view and the pube the people on the ground is
that situation has actually not changed it's gotten worse and so you know it's a
really interesting question is has the intentional homicide rate in Honduras
actually decreased and the scuttlebutt from organizations on the ground is that
the government has actually changed the definition of a homicide so the change
in homicide rates may not actually be a change in the actual homicides that are
occurring but more of the way that they are reporting that because of the
pressure from international donors in the international community for them to
reduce the level of violence in the country so in 2009 when I was in the
Peace Corps in Honduras I was Peace Corps volunteer there from 2009 2011
there was a coup which the u.s. calls a diplomatic overthrow is it's much nicer
language and it really destabilized and already destabilizing country as you
know from 2014 until up until today there has been this immigration crisis
where we've seen tens of thousands of Central Americans trying to cross the
border in Mexico a lot of them are from Honduras primarily from Honduras El
Salvador and Guatemala what we called northern triangle and then 2017 there
was an election in Honduras that was highly highly contested because the
party wanted but basically to stay in power so they changed the constitution
to allow them to run for a second term which is one of the major reasons they
actually Elstad the president in 2009 because he wanted to run for a second
term so this caused a massive outcry in the country the election was very very
close and there is a lot of discussion about whether or not that election was
rigged or stolen but again pressure from the international community basically
forced Honduras to decide that the people who won the election would stay
in power and that has further destabilized all sense of faith in the
government in the political system and so on so some of the other things that
are going on is I mentioned that in two incredibly high homicide rate there's
also a 90 to 95 percent impunity rate for crime in Honduras so basically if
you hurt somebody in Honduras there is a 95 percent chance that he will not
go to jail for it you would not be prosecuted for it and that is extremely
alarming in terms of the safety and security situation in the country there
are also very powerful gaining a narco trafficking organizations there are many
of us that feel like hunters is basically a narco states where the narco
traffickers really have more power and more ability to govern than the actual
government does that's a very complex topic and I will be talking about that
more tomorrow in the geography colloquium if you would like to know
more about how games in narco trafficking are affecting rural Honduras
so another really interesting thing going on is this vilification of young
men this is also directly tied to these issues of violence in the country where
it's starting to become that any young man you know the age is 13 up until 30
is seen as bad as they're doing something wrong there they have a very
hard time getting employment getting employment and Honduras requires now
three or four letters from people about your character in addition to your
grades in addition to also getting a job you basically have to know somebody who
will give you a job so the unemployment rate among young men is around 45% so
this is a really big issue in the country and as you can see from this
picture even the way that they're treated generally when you see here is a
bus where they've pulled off all the men and line them up and they're gonna go
basically the police are going to go it lifts up the shirts of all of the men to
see if they have any tattoos if they have tattoos they automatically be
arrested as part of what's called the mano Dora or iron fist clause where they
are very very aggressive in trying to police what's going on but the in
America trafficking activity but the games and narco traffickers are much
smarter than that they don't get tattoos in the same way that they used to they
actually ask me all the time if I'm part of a gang and I thought the other
interesting thing is this idea of perverse institutions so what does it
mean so these are institutions that are supposed to serve a public good like the
police institution education is a primary one in Honduras but in reality
what they're doing is continuing to support the inequalities in green
basically recycle same issues over and over again through
the system the education system is one of the areas that this is really
important in terms of why there's such a high level of migration and violence
because young men basically feel like they are not welcome at school and so
once you get past the required sixth grade education you see a massive drop
and the amount of boys that are going to school to the point where most of the
schools in Honduras are 70% girls and 30% boys there are schools that I've
walked into Honduras where there is one boy in a classroom of 40 girls so the
kids the boys especially have no faith in the education system and feel like
they are not welcome there anymore so amid all of this there's also I forgot
to put a slide up on their hind ursus also ranked third in the world the
effects of climate change and this is really significant given that Honduras
is still really much an agricultural based economy in terms of how they are -
incredibly dependent on agriculture for food security for basic livelihoods so
the effects of climate change are resounding in terms of what is happening
with agriculture productivity and when you talk to Hondurans they often will
use the word - patented or impotence to describe the way that they feel about
what's going on in the country there is a general pervasive sense of
helplessness of an inability to do anything it's really this sense of a
loss of health so within this you know the in this context my original pilot
study that that dr. Larry Vaughn was nice enough to allow me to have some
funds to go look at was you know can violence serve a perverse form of
empowerment now I want to be very clear here that I am NOT speaking about urban
violence or urban gains and Honduras where youth are oftentimes forced into
participating in the games that they don't then their families can be killed
and that is a very big issue in the urban areas like san pedro sula when i'm
looking at is in the western rural region of honduras the more agrarian
areas of honduras and it does participation and violence serve an
empowering function in the absence of all of these opportunities
so the where our pilot study was and sometimes
the Copan very far west and Honduras and if you are familiar with Kabir's a
framework for empowerment it looks at how resources are connected to agency
are then connected to outcomes and how you define resources and agency is going
to depend on what you're studying we often describe agency as decision-making
but for this I wanted to look at the internal aspects of agency so I'm
looking at does participation and violence improve economic and social
situation and how does that affect a young person's aspirations their sense
of community their sense of identity and their self-esteem so this also is very
closely connected to this idea of social disorganization this is a theory that's
usually applied in the urban United States but if you look at what they're
over considered to be resources if you have economic deprivation your family is
falling apart if you don't have any agencies and you know you have this
absence of resources so it's almost a mirror look of empowerment in some ways
and then you need this idea of conflicting moral values so in the
absence of all of these opportunities wind of your moral choices conflict with
what you may consider as right and wrong so when people say ask about why
hundreds vibrates or why hundreds participate violence this is one of the
things that we can point to in the term of terms of a complete lack of assets of
opportunities when does participating in something illegal or doing something all
people become the viable choices so this was a large large mixed method study I
talked about 1,300 kids in schools through surveys I'm gonna focus down in
four time snakes I really want to talk about my Gration also to the
peer-to-peer orbit Superbowl peer interviews which are basically I had
kids interview other kids and the results that came out of that so from
the youth perspective what are the drivers of violence youth in this
contexts are aged about thirteen to about twenty five roughly that
participated in this this pilot study we're talking about 40 interviews twenty
boys 20 girls and what are their perceptions
in this particular area so interesting leading both male and female
participants identified the family economics and education as major drivers
of violence so a lack of these things and family conditions the obvious there
is domestic violence but it's more than that
it's also the absence of parents so parents who have left because of
migration or have single-parent households it also applies to the
poverty levels within the household the way people parents if they actually they
hit their kids if they talk to their kids how that is it is occurring the
obvious one when you ask people why people commit violence is the economic
reason poverty right people are very poor if you can't feed your family if
you feel like as a young man you can't do the things the other young men do you
don't have the cell phone you don't have the cool shoes and so on and so forth
that goes into your identity and so people commit violence the interesting
one here is education that both male and females put it up education because as I
mentioned earlier boys don't go to school so why are boys pointing out that
a lack of access to a quality education is one of the drivers of violence when
they don't go to school and it's that connection
to not feeling like they are welcome at school there is also an issue of young
men hunters you have to work to provide for their family so their families will
pull the boys out of school to work and allow the girls to go to school because
they don't work as much which is as we know is not necessarily true and then
there's a big issue with the quality of Education which I'll get to a little bit
later so this one I found very interesting that young men are also
pointing out now the girls pointed out two additional drivers of violence one
of them being ambition or this kind of platitude of moving forward in life and
this picture over here of this hunter is actually a picture that I took in that
community and I was talking to the class yesterday and I basically said like why
would you why would you see a yellow Hummer in rural Honduras
there's no good reason no good reason why you see a yellow Hummer basically
that is well a well-known narco-trafficker who drives through that
community drives that area commonly but look if you are a poor rural hunter and
kid with no options I mean take a look at that driving through your community
and how that's gonna affect the way that you perceive of your options right the
other one it is drugs now this is kind of an easy thing to point and say drugs
drugs drugs but we are seeing a massive increase in drug use in Honduras by
young people I think as a way to escape situation that they're in so the boys
point outs to additional drivers and that is that violence is easier than
work now I think this is again one that's easy to say like well violence is
easier but in reality I don't think that violence is actually easier I think
what's happening here part of what the youth are talking about is that they
don't want to be working out in the Sun and agriculture you know digging and all
of that when they could just go take something and then they don't have to
work in that those conditions but the other really interesting thing here is
that the boys point out the need for love belonging now if you know Honduras
very well it is a very macho machismo country there's a lot of masculinity ziz
very much caught up in this idea of like what it is to be a man and violence is
part of that being the charge as a part of that being a provider and so for
young men to point out love and belonging as was lacking was really
really interesting and why I think peer-to-peer about that peer-to-peer
method was successful and listening this because they're basically saying if we
know if young people don't have any where they feel like they belong they
don't feel like they're getting love and attention from there from people they're
gonna sneak it elsewhere and there's a lot of evidence in the gang rich or on
gangs that support this that games can provide these types of things that are
lacking in young people's lives so is violence and this is just out of my
period of your interviews there's other evidence as well quantitative evidence
but does violence form some type perverse form of empowerment well when I
was looking through the materials about half of the people would describe
violence as pathology and an other half who described it as a perverse Harbach
empowerment with no gender difference which I thought was really interesting
so like what do I mean what are they saying
so this young man on the Left says they do not benefit from private violence all
they do is harm other people through the name of the community body oh and family
whereas this other person says youth they need love and if they do not have
it they look for it elsewhere also it can be because they are ambitious and do
not want to settle with a little they have so they decide to do something
about it all right so the way that young people
are talking about violence it's really really different depending upon how they
are viewing it in their day-to-day lives and this is one more example so know
that you only do it just to do it the benefit is nothing more than public
they repel criminals and are badly thought of whereas another person says
you know that they have the power to get an education
you need money sometimes on a lot but to get a good education you need money so
how is a person without valuable belongings going to have the power to
secure a future for his children is going to take it so they are it's very
interesting the way in which people are talking about violence in this area and
to the point where this idea of epistemic or systems-level violence is
starting to creep into the way people are behaving so what do you say about
solutions right well some of them are kind of obvious there's a lot of focus
on the state and policing so there's a high high level of corruption in
Honduras generally but also in policing there's very little trust in the police
institutions and they're incredibly ineffective the other one is education
to reform so though it goes back to wire boys not going to school and also the
quality of education is very poor that access has increased but the quality has
not at all and the last one is parenting and fathers and again these are both
boys and girls reporting this so it's interesting to me that the boys are
pointing out parenting and fathers again moving talk about masculinity
you wouldn't think that was something that they would point to
but they are basically saying the way that fathers are interacting with their
children is largely the either through violence or being ignored right so how
can how can we address these issues and the way parenting is happening in order
for people to feel that love and belonging that's actually missing so the
boys also point out jobs ok well that's really obvious but the girls point out
athletic and youth centers and I found this interesting because there are no
spaces for girls and Honduras there's a soccer field at everybody throw a rock
and hit a soccer field made up even a little itty bitty one with just some
sticks but girls often don't play soccer and Honduras it's very much a
male-dominated sport and there are no recreation or safe places for girls to
go after school but this is also true for boys in the sense that the only
activity available to them is usually soccer with their friends and within the
communities there aren't any types of centers or locations where youth can go
that they feel safe in order to hang out with other youth do their homework so on
and so forth those things just do not exist in the areas that I'm working and
it's one of the things that they have pointed out as one of the things that
needs to change so the way that people see their options in Honduras are
basically the status quo so keep fighting the fight keep working in
agriculture they've no but probably never gonna get out of poverty but at
least they're not doing something illicit you're doing the best they can
they're fighting and so on the second one is migration migration becomes a
primary option in the absence of all of these other opportunities and the high
level of issues that are happening and the third one is just lean in you know
participate in Ann Arbor trafficking participate in the gangs and so you know
and at least you'll have some source of income right so this little bitty
projects I presented the u.s. AFE in Honduras and they had so many questions
that I couldn't answer you know like what about this what about that what
about if you're closer borders you know what about you know and gains a narco
traffickers what about climate change and agriculture
and my answer to them was basically like I don't know you can give me some more
money you know I can go look figure it out
so they decided to do that and they funded a much bigger study that's
looking at all of these different variables and how that is influencing
basically the whole system's picture of what's happening in Honduras so the
study is much larger who want to working on now five sites all in the feed the
future or the food and secure basically areas of Honduras much bigger study so
700 household surveys 4,300 school surveys that are verified so they
actually had about 20% worthy that interviews focus groups and just a
plethora of participatory methods this is basically what's going on now
everybody knows you're not supposed to put a slide up like this and that's
because I just wanted to make you feel anxious so if you feel anxious it works
because the reality is is that we are taking very very complex problems and
simplifying them to the point where basically the information is useless
right so the factors the issues that are happening in Honduras are all
interrelated so what's happening in the ecological system in terms of climate
change is directly affecting what's happening in the economic system in
terms of crop losses inability to pay loans purchasing power labor
opportunities so on and so forth which is also directly influencing and
influenced by the social system so that's external violence coming in gangs
of narco traffickers are starting to encroach into rural areas
interactivities this is brand new evidence that the USAID basically said
we've heard some stories can you get to the bottom of what's happening that's
what we're talking about tomorrow in terms of how being some narco
traffickers are inclusive rural areas community disruption masculinity gender
of food and security so all of these things are converging to basically
become the pointed decision to migrate the red areas are that areas that seem
to be the major trigger points for migration so rather than go through all
of this I'm just going to focus on this one little piece the pointed decision to
migrate and I'm going to again go back to the peer-to-peer interviews so this
is a 90 kids that's about half of our data right
now because we're still transcribing but what do these young people think is
driving migration so boys and girls both point out there's no money there's no
jobs right they also point to stay in them that nobody know drops tink is
really significant and the reason I put this picture up here of this is most
give Duncan I believe the Slover lead white flag and that is basically
destroying the coffee as well as coffee rest and some of the other changes that
are happening because of the effects of climate change so agriculture Oh a lot
of it is which has basically been most kept the country together are also
falling apart because of crop losses because they've very low prices or I
mean people are under selling like crazy their crops they can't sell their crops
there's a lot of reasons why that's happening the quality of props is really
decreased because of climate change and said they're also having a lot of
trouble actually growing on lands because of the increase in temperature
seven years of the drought and then the pests that are starting to come in and
disrupt crops so this is a really big issue it's not just the jobs that we
think of that are more formal but also the informal sector or the agricultural
sector as well the state violence everybody points the state violence
these two things everybody says this is why everybody's migrating right here the
state violence includes massive levels of corruption the perception of the
stolen election the brother of the Honduran President is known to be an
archetype occur basically the entire social security system funds were
embezzled so everybody who had paid into Social Security and lost all of their
money so all faith in the government is
completely gone I mean this also goes to just the way that policing happens with
the corruption within the police system and maybe you asked people in Honduras
about police and there's like oh the police are the one selling the drugs
right so there's not any any faith in the political that
we actually asked about that quantitatively and it was about 95
percent of our per kid out of 4,000 participants that they don't have
anything the government though was community level violence and so this is
the violence that's encroaching into the communities this is not your what we
used to think of enroll honduras is largely the domestic violence issue
within the household this is violence coming in from the outside that is
starting to deteriorate the way people see their communities and is completely
eroding trust so people come in to the communities new people move in people
don't know who they are they don't know their background and they've completely
lost trust in their neighbors so boys also points out climate change matter
culture that makes a lot of sense because in the gender normative role
those men are largely responsible for agriculture production even though being
a gender person I have to tell you that women work in agriculture all the time
but men are primarily responsible for it so they are pointing out this issue the
botting amount of crops this pie right here is looking at a disease that is
affecting that plant and then the girls use this kind of platitude of a better
life and moving forward in life so what does it actually mean right what is a
better life when you press them and unpack that what they're talking about
is very closely related to what we talked about gender empowerment in terms
of the ability to live a life that they want to be in do the people they want
it's very tied to Maslow's hierarchy of needs as well they wouldn't be able to
feed their families they want to be safe and he goes all the way up to
self-actualization they want to be able to go to school get a good job and live
what they don't call the American dream right right now that is basically not an
option in Honduras so it sounds very much like a platitude but when you
unpack it it's basically this inability to live the life that they want and so
what do they think is going to prevent migration the first one that both boys
and girls say 84% I believe of both of them of the 19th say it's just so
dangerous that is the number one thing that keeps over my grade is they know
that is violent and dangerous they hear the stories of what happened
two people on that routes they know what happens to their family members they
have family that disappear they never hear from again they know but they have
family that have been arrested and help the United States all kinds of different
things they know this is not a secret right there is no in anybody that I
talked to there's no conclusion that that road is going to be easy or safe
it's also incredibly expensive the other is a lack of jobs and adequate pay and
the qualifier here is adequate pay right so there are people that are working but
they're not making any money as a matter of fact the wages in rural honduras and
agricultural sector have dropped about fifty percent from what they were just a
couple years ago because a crop failure has meant that they can't afford to pay
their workers right so even when they do work they're working for even less money
than they have in the past so interestingly the boys only point out
these two things you know there's a few here and there that will point out other
for the vast majority of them are basically people don't mire it because
it's dangerous or because they can get a job or they would get a job girls
however point again to the quality of education so everywhere you look in
Honduras the boys have lost faith in the education system because of the reasons
I told you earlier but also because even with a degree nobody can get a job right
so you have people I go into communities and I talk to people and they say well
why are thruway's going to school and the boys will say see those guys over
there they all have high school diplomas none of them have a job see that guy
over there he has a master's degree he doesn't have a job you know they
everywhere they look their colleagues that have struggled and gone through
school which means that they're not working right which means that their
family has to give resources for them to be able to go to school because this
even though it's free education it's actually very expensive but they're not
getting any benefit out of it so this is one of the things that worries me the
most in terms of the long-term trajectory of what's happening in
Honduras is that the massive amount of boys that are not going to school
because they basically are like what's the point
family cohesion was another one they basically say one of the reasons that
people will stay is because they don't want to break up the family so this is
actually a really interesting one to think about in terms of how do you
promote family cohesion as a method of preventing people to migrate in the face
of all these other drivers right and then the last one is reducing violence
okay again that one it seems pretty obvious but they actually specifically
hone in on the community so they basically have given up on the national
level but they want to feel safe within their communities and right now with all
the things that are happening with the intrusion convert by violence externally
they don't feel safe in their own communities and even sometimes some of
these communities are small fifty households you know four hundred
households and they don't feel safe so what is the perception of what is the
positive why do people migrate is always economic every single kid you talk to
they say when they go they can help us move ahead and improve our lives or yeah
the majority leader can't find a job they had the gleet have to leave the
family but then they can send money back it's always the economic reason but the
negative impacts are substantial and if you look at the difference between how
it's reported how few of the boys and girls actually talked about migration in
a positive way versus how many of them talked about it in a very negative way
in terms of the impacts on their lives and on their families so yeah they get
the positive for the economic but I thought this was a really good quote
that hits on a lot of different issues so one of the migrants is my dad my dad
is in the US and he well I don't know him very well because he works so much
he can't dedicate time to his children their parents that are here they could
spend time with their children they can help them in the moment show them love
and yeah my mom goes well my dad know everything is for work I did not know my
dad I feel like it is like slavery there they feel more like slaves so just think
about the impact that this has on the people in Honduras who are have the
absent parents and their perception of like how their family is operating
lack of people that are there if you think back to the drivers of violence
one of them was a sense of love and belonging and the lack of parents and
hearing heart here in migration that that is compounding that issue so really
quickly what do you look across there are all these things that they are the
youth are pointing out so obviously money money money job shops jobs it's
very very big one that's actually kind of tied to issues of climate change and
the kinds of jobs that are available family condition and I have community
violence highlighted there because they are also talking about family violence
or family issues within the community parenting father's family and cohesion
is one of the major issues across both the quality of education and the lack of
access to quality of education it is also tied up very strongly with the
ability to get a job because you go to school you still don't get a job you go
to a good school you still don't get a job the only way you get a job is if you
know somebody that's what they say you have to have contacts you have to know
somebody otherwise there's no way the corruption is that violence surprisingly
is not in here more but there I believe personally when I look through my data
that the reason is that they basically just feel completely hopeless now feted
towards the government they feel like they live in a failed state and then the
idea of violence and all the issues around violence so the relationship
between drugs and alcohol the lack of places for youth to go violence coming
into the community and so on and so forth and then we have this thing about
living a better life it quoted what American Dream and all of
the things that are connected to that which really points to what's happening
is a complete loss of hope so in an absence of opportunities where you can't
get a job school is pointless their crops are failing violence is coming
into your communities what do your are your options loss of hope is basically
the major driver of migration when you put all these things together now that's
very different than some of the reasons people are participating violence which
can be empowering as migration is basically seen as a very
disempowering thing but is the last chance so it's considered even in
families when they talk about it this is their last shot at trying to improve
their livelihoods so it goes back to you can see that across they're talking
about all of these face the external agencies refer to police education
systems and so on as well as NGOs all of that and so when you can do conflicting
moral values this is when they say like we know migration is illegal we know we
can end up going to jail in the US and then they say is what are we supposed to
do so again I am shows you a very very small piece of a very very complex
system where there are a lot of other factors a lot of other issues that are
pushing down more on what's causing the violence of migration masculinity and
gender is one piece of that actually I would argue that math ladies and general
one of these in some way or another is a cross-cutting issue and what I'm doing
now with the time that I have before this project information is due to USAID
is I still have a ton of data to go through a qualitative and quantitative
and quantitatively what we're doing is testing the relationships here to
strengthen relationship so how much is food security a push to migrate vs.
violence in the community where does it become an actual trigger point so how do
these things compile and compound until migration becomes the decision and so
quickly I took a lot use a lot of photos so I have to legally do this my team was
exceptional in the field their initials are there because of danger because the
bones with initials live Honduras and so we made sure not to put them on there
but host families we see the post families pretty much the entire time for
safety they were wonderful and key linkages in the communities I also
really wanted to thank Virginia Tech because I kind of you know I went to
Florida University of Florida but if it wasn't for Virginia Tech I wouldn't ship
been able to go school so thank you to dr. Maria Lisa to dr. Derek Vaughn to
vamp routers not here I also want to thank their team Sophie
who has who would like did her best to like get me to reply to emails when I've
been extremely busy Daniel and palagi who have also been really really lovely
so thank you very much for being in tech for having me and I hope we have plenty
time for questions yes please thank you thank you very of all the factors you
mentioned what did you find the most the most yeah what was the thing that you
thought was actually going against the grain of there are two major points in
this that I found surprising one of them was the intrusion of games narco
trafficking into rural areas which has not been as much of an issue in the past
the issue has been in transit to the cities worked in the cities or in
attacks like almost you know the vast majority of things even when I was in
Peace Corps that happened a volunteer was in transit on buses and so on and so
to see the influence of gang and are trafficking in the rural areas which I
haven't talked about much today is a lot more significant than I realized and is
having a very detrimental impacts on community cohesion but however they will
also tell you how its benefit right because like in one community for
example the narco traffickers are building in the Catholic Church and they
are also building high school so it becomes very messy very fast the other
is I was actually to be to be completely honest I was really surprised how often
the boys talked about the family and the lack the the need for family cohesion
and a need for a different way her father's interact with their sons they
didn't seem to the young people really seem to understand that there is
something missing there those are the two pieces that I found
kind of the most surprising the others like the economics and the state
violence is very obvious really but those two little pieces I think that if
we really start looking into this idea of yummy cohesion there may be ways to
influence that bias choice based off of interventions that really focus in that
area what an interesting question because that has a real historical
component to it when you go back to the Banana Republic and you know the the
area that I'm looking in Honduras is largely indigenous not entirely
indigenous but there's two large indigenous populations the Maya tortilla
and the Lanka that are in the areas that I am in and during colonial times they
were forced off their land into the mountains some of them took refuge in
the mountains as well so the people that I'm working with are largely smallholder
farmers that are up in the mountains trying to survive on subsistence or a
level of agriculture that has citizens with some selling so these are not major
corporations in this area with that said the corporation's they're obviously very
problematic because they they pay very poorly the security issues are really
huge in those areas because the large plantations are located right smack in
the middle of the NARC trafficking routes they also use a lot of pesticides
so you see a lot of issues of Health so on and so forth the GMO argument is
becoming a big one in Honduras I'm not going to give maybe careful about giving
my pain on that because I think it's a complex problem but the issue is seed
saving and having to so one of the things that's happening is because of
agricultural because of climate change and the loss of agricultural
productivity people are not able to invert the money back into their
holder productivity so you know they would have these big parcels that are
getting smaller and smaller and smaller because as they lose their crops as
their crops fail they have less ability to plant for the next year
that is really compounded if their crops fail and they have to buy their seeds so
one of the things that we're seeing is that they are taking out bank loans and
using bank loans to fund their Spanish coming in so most their inputs and but
then the crops failed and the big crops fail year after year which they have
been doing lately they can't pay their loans and the banks are coming after
their land so in the quantitative study that I did with the households the 700
households one of the major drivers of the decision to migrate from the family
heads was an inability to pay their bank loans so more so than the agricultural
corporations it seems like it's the banking institution that's really
causing an issue in the area where I'm working and that's so that I mean if you
think about it like they basically say even just to keep the standard at their
acts they have to migrate to pay off their bank loan or they're going to lose
all their land so now there you become landless so this is a cycle of poverty
just cycles in itself I don't know the answer that because you know that's a
really great question and I would suspect that that the narco traffickers
and the banking institutions are publicly the best friends I don't think
that these narco trafficking operations are operating on cash you know like
Colorado a beef companies you know that this is a this is big money massive
amounts of money and you know the government has been known to just take
over money from banks you know things like that but I'm not really sure in
terms of how that is operating I'm more familiar with how effective these people
directly but it's a good question to look into in terms of like that macro
level economic and so I'll put that on my list of things
that I think about yeah yes have there been any like internal
organizations or social I any any sort of movements within the society that are
that are sort of trying to work in the face of this or trying to involve some
of this into a more positive direction that's what are those levers and are
there any steep very musing any progress that's another another interesting
question so there's a couple things going on there there are groups
organizations that that are trying to fight against what's happening you saw
we saw that a big surgeons of that when ethical status was murdered in 2016 she
was 2016 2016 she was an indigenous link up leader
very very environmentally conscious very very well loved and respected him on the
link of people which is a hundred thousand people strong they are a large
business community and it's widely known that the government was complicit in her
murder but because they wanted to take over this river to put in
hydroelectricity and so the indigenous community was fighting against that
because its neighbor lands she was murdered supposedly by somebody else
see they basically put recently just this year they put seven or eight people
in jail over it even though you know on the on the street everybody knows that
the government was directly involved but when that happened the land of people
just banded together there were massive demonstrations in the street and so on
so you see a lot of protesting even when I was there I was trying to leave one
area the country and I couldn't because the roads are all shut down they're on
fire because of like actual protest protest you see a lot of protesting in
the capital and a lot are protesting a senator sulla but in terms of is it
getting them anywhere no nobody's listening where the government I should
say isn't listening and and so it's they are there are groups that are trying but
they are really against a serious upward upward battle
to get any actual movements every once in a while the government will do
something like in 2016 they reformed the police but but when you dig into it I
was talking about the class yesterday when you dig into it what they did was
they fired four thousand three hundred police then they rehired four thousand
two hundred of them and just retrain them and moved into a new spot so like
even when they are supposedly trying to do reform that reform comes with just
this incredible level of corruption so unfortunately you know I see them see
the people on the ground trying but they're not making a lot of progress
yeah the only way there was interesting I had to cut an interesting conversation
with a colleague it was a Forester a couple days ago and he basically was
like oh did you hear that that the eastern part of Honduras is called
gracias a diós and it's basically like a giant bio reserve and you can't get
there without boats or planes there are no as there's an indigenous community
that lives there not called the Mosquitia but beyond that it's not you
know people don't really go in there he said you know it's really awesome the
government of Honduras gave them autonomy over that land because they've
been fighting for autonomy over that way it it's like yeah that's actually really
awesome except there's another side that right the Honduran government just
doesn't give autonomy to people it doesn't just happen like that even when
they're lobbying the Mosquitia are not a big business group so why did the
Honduran government actually give them control over that land it's one of the
major narco trafficking points in the country so now is their problem right
like a massive amount of drugs goes through that area they drop it by plane
pick it up by both in traffic in the United States it's one of the major are
trafficking points Honduras so did the government give them those key to the
land or did they just hand a problem off something else other questions yes what
is it
yeah so right now AI D is working on climate change projects largely
involving fighting for us to simplify fly things like that they are seeing
some some progress as a matter of fact so that when people in Honduras this
area talk about agencies that are helping they actually be pointer at the
USAID except that with the massive levels of budget cuts that have come out
of White House that a lot of those projects have been
cut or eliminated which if you go back to that issue of loss of hope they
basically just took the rug out under front people who are actually seeing
some success and having some improvements and they just took that
resource company away there are whole projects I mean there's a Pereira's our
project in western Honduras really focusing on youth and ecotourism I mean
it was a cool big project like 40 million dollar project that they were
going to train young people in eco tourism with in Honduras because coming
in from outside right now is going to be it's a hard sell but within the country
to bring Hondurans into these beautiful I mean Hunters cordis country bring them
in to do mountain climbing to do rock climbing you know all these different
eco tourism activities they've got all these together these different
communities they started planning it started doing all this and then
government took away all the money in those communities I suspect when I run
my statistics I know which communities they are we're gonna see a higher higher
level of youth or now it's going to migrate because they literally told me
after that I was like forget it it's over I'm gonna try to migrate so there's
this weird unfortunately this dynamic occurring
where there is a lot of faith in USAID as one of the organizations that is
trying to do good things but with the massive levels of budget cuts it's
really undermining the work that they've accomplished in terms of the people that
are there now they are fighting like crazy to keep
their funding and to expand actually in a way to reduce migration one of them I
met with the director which is the other way doesn't happen very often is I'm
opinion but I met with him he basically said like we are a development
organization we are not an anti migration organization but we're being
asked to function as anti migration he said we have no idea what we're doing we
don't know what's going on we don't know what's causing it we don't know what to
do about it and so that's why they sent me to try to
figure out what was going on so they want this information to go into their
next five years of programming so right now they're working on their country
developing strategy for the next five years and the information from this is
the the purpose of it is to feed into how they are going to address these
issues now whether we're that leverage point is going to be part of that I have
is I have a statistician running the models to see like where that shorter
point is for migration and I suspect that's where they're going to invest the
money now the climate change issue is so pervasive and it's becoming such a big
problem that I don't I'm not sure how they're going to handle it so like with
the coffee rust and this overly white fly you can see it climbing the
mountains where they tell you over the years like five years ago was here three
years ago one year ago now to the top mountain so now this at the top of the
mountain that's a big problem right because the quality of coffee the impact
on the plants and so on that's high quality coffee that you pay a lot of
money for what's being decimated by coffee rust and so they're getting lower
prices which means that their livelihoods are being eroded and so on
and so forth so his USAID gonna try to battle coffee rust and if they do that
are they gonna do it by GMO so they're gonna do it by changing something and in
the plant in terms of being resistant coffee rust how they're going to handle
that is still there but fundamentally when you go back to this the climate
change impacts are just resonating throughout this
yes please you explain what we said education can be free and at the same
time education Honduras is free it's not free at all okay you have to pay for
uniforms in favorite books you have to pay for all your supplies and here's how
good you gave to merchants rural hundreds right the nearest school is in
the cus quarter bono it's in nee the nearest secondary school is going to be
in the city that city is going to be anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours away
from the rural communities so the way they have it set up is that the only way
that they can go to school is they have to come into the city and stay there on
the weekends so they have to have somewhere to live they have to pay for
the bus fare and so on and so forth so there is a picture I will come back to
you really quickly this is my this family here is I've been working for
them for with them for a long time so I felt comfortable in their picture there
he the guy on the right was on my community guides and my dissertation
projects this little guy in the middle I'm sending to high school in the in the
in the rural area it cost me 200 bucks a month right 20 bucks a month is a hell
of a lot of money in Honduras but that is what it costs for his bus fare is
food his books his uniform and his housing so that is beyond the reach of
nearly everybody in rural Honduras so the community that he is from the first
person to go to high school there was his cousin and he's the second yeah and
that's true the other reason why there's such a loss of faith because they go
through all that send their kid to school with the hope that this guy who
is by the way 17 now but this guy is going to be able to get a job that's
gonna be able to lift this whole family up but when he graduates he's not going
to get job so I'm very worried about this so and now not only he's turning 17
but these two girls are about to go at the high school themselves would I
figure out if you're bad because I'm cappellas sure is how I'm not gonna pay
for the bullied in school and not the girls to go to school I have a gender
person that's just not right you know so I got to figure that out
Barbara I'm hoping to get him Spock should be to the college in the hopes
that like the longer we keep him in school maybe things will change right or
the high an education level we can give them like
maybe if I didn't learn English income say bachelor's degree in the u.s. you
know something to kind of just keep them in school that try to hope that
eventually that would pay off yeah it's not a good situation it she's
my tiger just wanted to probably some talk like you guys take her those of you
want me then welcome you to stay grab sandwich on your way out this an eggless
egg less sandwiches brownies and lemon bars and get them for you so we really
have