US Embassy to the Rescue

Today two American soldiers from the US embassy came to Tacuati in a huge truck to deliver tons of medical supplies to the city to help with the wildfire situation. The fires are mostly out now thanks to last weekend’s rain, and there are families 50k from the city or so who have lost everything. Health problems include throat and eye problems, smoke inhalation, and general health needs that many families can’t deal with because they lost crops or animal in the fires, or because when the departmento (state) of San Pedro declared a state of emergency the lumberyards were closed and so many people were out of work for at least a week.

I was invited, as a bit of an afterthought apparently, to go to the municipality and say hi to my fellow Americans, both of whom spoke Spanish and were new to Paraguay but seemed pleased with their assignment. The Paraguayans were super impressed with the female soldier who was tall and built and could have kicked one any of their butts. One of them took me aside and said that the embassy likes to have Peace Corps involved in helping with the distribution of these materials, so that they don’t end up being resold in pharmacies or gathering dust in a closet somewhere. So as the mayor, city councilors, priest, nurse and various others talked about the supplies, I pretty much invited myself to help out.

It’s intriguing, this situation. For one thing, there are more supplies there than these folks have ever seen. Boxes and boxes of diapers, rubbing alcohol, wheelbarrows. As the nurse said, the health center receives two bottles of rubbing alcohol a month – here were six boxes of it! Issue one: do the supplies get out to the people or do they go to the health center, where they’re still being used to help people but not quite in the way expected. He also said that he doesn’t know what a lot of the stuff is, and that next week a licenciado in nursing (someone with a college degree) will be coming to Tacuati and possibly can help with that. Issue two: the embassy dumps all this stuff on people who don’t necessarily have the training on how to use it. We talked a bit about doing a census to figure out what the needs are in various areas so as to best decide how to distribute the supplies, though the longer we organize the longer folks have to wait to receive the help. Issue three: organization and distribution. The folks in the muni are the best educated in Tacuati, and have some experience in large-scale organization but nothing like this. It’s a little overwhelming to think about what needs to happen next – I can’t imagine how aid workers deal with large crises like hurricanes or tsunamis or earthquakes. It’ll be interesting for me to see this side of development work. We have only about 12,000 people in the whole municipality, and though they’re spread out over hundreds of kilometers that’s still not very much.

Issue four: how involved do I have the right to be, these supplies having come from my tax dollars, and also in my role as a pcv? Or rather, what responsibility to I have here? On the one hand, if the nurse decides that the rubbing alcohol is better used in the health center over the next year, who am I to tell him no? On the other hand, when aid comes with specific purposes, don’t the recipients have a responsibility to use it for that purpose? This kind of charity can have so many unintended consequences. The city councilors were only half-joking when they asked the US soldiers if they could leave their truck here too, and someone pulled me aside to ask if I could ask them for help in the project for more street lighting. Charity breeds dependency, and a sense that we here in Tacuati need American help in order to succeed.

On the one hand, don’t we??????? There simply isn’t enough money here right now to help the families who need it to recover from this disaster, and these medical supplies will help people to live longer and healthier. On the other hand, I hate to see Americans once again as the knights in shining armor, swooping in to shower money on the poor Tacuateños and then leave. When I saw the soldiers in their uniforms with their American flags I felt both proud to be an American and a little confused as to what our role in Tacuati really should be.