Change of Plan

When our feet first touched Nicaraguan soil we knew virtually nothing about the so called world of ‘Sustainable Development’ and the many projects that are initiated under its banner. We don’t really know a whole lot more now but our understanding of what is an appropriate and sustainable intervention into somebody else’s country and life is light years ahead of our previous ignorance. When you need to learn quickly about something the best place to start it to talk to people who have spent their lives doing it. There’s no shortage of ex-pats in Nicaragua who’ve put their blood sweat and tears into development style projects. We managed to share a coffee here and there with quite a concoction of these battle weary folk. We were fortunate to be bestowed with some nuggets of tried and tested wisdom.

The best questions are always those that probe the most fundamental elements of any given thing or decision. What is its purpose? If a development project is to become sustainable it must be in response to what a community has stated it wants to achieve and it is the collectively agreed upon course of action to achieve that aim. If a development project is to become sustainable it must ultimately enable the community without external support to deliver a product or service that is appropriate, affordable and desirable to the community. Ok so that’s perhaps a bit wordy but it’s not a bad effort to capture the key lessons from the front lines.

So we were a month and a half in to our planned six months and were seeing and sensing what was happening with the project we had attached ourselves to and we had managed to tap this great knowledge of what would make our time here really sustainable. With our new more sophisticated lens we looked afresh at Grupo Fenix the project for which we were volunteers. The cracks started to appear. The realisation flooded over us that it was unfortunately a project that at its route (like most of them we understand) was a good well intentioned idea but didn’t pass the basic sustainability tests. The product was neither appropriate nor affordable and it was about nice to haves not must haves for our community. Our work will not only eventually be assigned to the volunteers scrape heap but our very existence here (the artificial temporary stream of money we have brought) has further bread unsustainability. Recognition of the flawed premise of the project coupled with its command and control structure driven from outside of the community and we were already packing our bags.

The new plan we leave the project after three months at the end of November. Tune up the Spanish with a couple of weeks of full-time classes and then head out on our roaming a few months earlier than scheduled. Our learning curve has been colossal it is just very unfortunate that our sustainable impact here will be nothing.

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