ture of"Aid" was comfortingly vague, but in the '60s it got clearer that military assistance helped mainly us, not them, and that what they really needed was food. Then the "help-the poor to help themselves" gang took over (Green Revolution and The Pill), and most recently we've seen our mission as being to help them technologically. The bulk of technological aid has concentrated on creating dependencies on the multinationals, the rich countries and the U.S. Partly this was intentional in the name of expanding overseas markets·, partly unintentional in that we naively tried to help the only way we knew how, showing them how we do it here. We were told in Guatemala in 1975 that in the whole country, with all its monoculture-based insect pests, that there were no free-lance entomologists. Every last bug e~pert worked directly for the chemical companies' agricultural pestifide divisions.· Much of the aid we gave primed pumps which kept on pumping in imports long after our people had gone back home. Following the 1976 earthquake~, Guatema_lans were handed out, for free or at a subsidy, huge qu~ntities of corrugated steel roofing, imported from the U.S. A country of traditional thatch-and tiles throws up a tin . roof landscape overnight. Ostensibly this was a boon. Lightweight steel roofing isn't so likely to kill anyone in later earthquakes and lighter roof structures mean less drain on scarce forest reserves. On .closer examination we see a clear chain of consequence. Look carefully: (1) disbandment of the local tilefodustry, which had used only local resources; (2) built-in obsolescence (steel lasts 10 to 25 years, tiles are good for several centuries); (3) repeat orders in a generation's time from people who have by then forgotten how to make tiles; (4) emulation of earthquake-styled houses by folks in unaffected areas ("they came from the U.S. so this is how Americans roof their homes . . ."J; (5) a new balance of trade which demands further exports from a country with few naturM resourc~s except labor;-and (6) depression of the national labor market, keeping wages down1md tying workers to employm~nt in export-based industries. • • • ' The social consequences of each rapid technical change are far reaching and one can extrapolate whole webs of disturbance caused in a traditi_onal society by this kind of example. We are left in a situation where traditional tile makers with .no demand for their skills must pick cottonfar from home on the steamy lowlands for $1.25 a day. Foreign corporations control.the land use, the crop, th,e export • _faciliti~s and the price. July 1980 . RAIN Page 9 Gringo as Superbeing Native ingenuity has solved problems well for a long time. Local people are usually adept at dealing creatively with their extreme shortage of resources. Yet a sinister effect of our influence is t~e undermining of native peoples' self-confide.nee in their own abilities to be creative. They come to expect that our ways are somehow better than theirs, that we have answers to their problems (many of which were caused by u~ in the first place) and worse still that they _should tackle problem-solving in the way we do. We reinforce the illusion that we know and they don't by sending missionaries (who know the real God), military advisers (to help them hate each other), technical salesmen ("these gooks don't know how to farm"), and technical volunteers ("I wanted ·to go to New Guinea to teach them org~nic gardening"). <:::onsistently in poorer countries you will hear local products and· methods put down in favor of ours: "oh, that's just an old bike I .made into a knife sharpener-; don'r even look at it; I'm.sure you have more modern tools in the U.S.'' ''We have to apologize for the bathing facilities; they're very simple (an ingenious rock bathtub cut into a tropical flower glade) but we're just poor p·eople and we • can't afford anything better" (my italics)~both,real quotes from Central America. Let's Sum It Up Living in Guatemala in 1975-7:il, we constantly found ourselves discussing the seeming hopelessness of the situation. Basically what we came up with was: • • 1. There are more of them than us. 2. We're changing as stuff runs -out. 3. We're smarter than we look to them. 4. They're a lot smarter than they look to us. 5. We undermine their self:-confidence by teaching our stuff. : • 6. They know stuff we've forgotten. 7. ·we'd like to know some of that stuff because.we're going to need it and it's a good time to take some of it home and spread it around if they'll only teach us so we'd better ask them politely cause there're·an awful lot of them and they're real hungry yet they need to be needed like us all so maybe they'll say yes thep • perhaps we can show them some of us are less ugly than others.O foreign access , "Mechanization is Progress? For Whom?" fromMinka, Vol. I, No. 2, $8 (U.S.)/yr., from: Apartad.o 222 Huancayo, Peru Minka is a Spanish language popular tech- . nology magazine published by a Peruvian organization called Talpuy. In this, their, second issue, they describe the effects on a small agricultural town when the local cooperative buys a tractor. . Two centuries ago, everybody in the world either used-plows with draft animals .. . or where the land did not permit plowing, it was worked with pickaxes, sticks, shovels, or chaquitaclla [a-traditional Peruvian implement, see i{lustration]. Ei-. ther way was entirely controlled by the peasant .. . He was able to plow the fields not according to a uniformly excellen't cont.
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