The Comedor and the Panadería, by Jacquelyn Koehler

Once on of the ten richest countries in the world, recurring political corruption and an economic crisis in 2001 has greatly impacted the economic stability of the country.

The Argentine “comedor” is a mixture of a soup kitchen and community forum depending on the location. Generally comedor’s provide one daily meal for people living in the community. These meals are either eaten at the comedor, or taken home to eat. Some comedors even act as a daycare or after school program where kids can come to do homework or other activities.

My name is Jacquelyn, I am from Kansas City, Kansas. I graduated in 2006 with an economics degree and was unsatisfied in my job. Wanting to enter the world of microfinance, I felt hands on experience working for a microenterprise would be essential in getting a feel for how microloans effect a community. In June 2008, I came to Argentina to work with a comedor and the baking cooperative they wanted to implement.

La Estrategia de Caracol is located on a dirt street and is a light green building thanks to a fresh coat of paint. The neighborhood is referred to as an “ausentimiento” or essentially privately owned property that was usurped by people moving to the area after the 2001 economic crisis. Houses in the area are precarious built using any materials they could find, cardboard, tin, wood boards, bricks, concrete. The street running past the comedor is not paved (as a majority are not in the area), which also means that no services pass by, including trash trucks, so people have taken it upon themselves to throw their waste in the street. Just the other day I noticed a tennis shoe embedded in the dirt road…

The building consists of two rooms, one for the comedor and one for a Panadería. The comedor side is slightly older and has a tin roof speckled with holes left by a hail storm last fall. (Eventually they will lay a thin layer of tar over the roof to prevent the leaking every time it rains.) During the week, a couple women come each morning to cook lunch for the community. Community members come with their own containers in order to take the food to their homes.

However, the kitchen is lacking various basic cooking utensils. The knives in the comedor are comparable to steak knives. These small knives are used to cut hard vegetables such as carrots, potatoes, and butternut squash, not an easy task – I have blisters to prove it! They did not have a can opener and one day I used a wooden stick to pound a broken knife blade and into 15 cans opening them inch by inch. After telling my host mom this, she immediately donated a small manual can opener which they have made good use of since. Old wooden cutting boards and stirring spoons are used, whose potential hazard for bacteria prevents me from eating the food as much as possible. The same three dirty, grungy dish towels are used over and I have never seen anything disinfected or a table washed with soap.

This prompted me to raise funds from friends and family members in the U.S. in order to buy some of these kitchen supplies that you and I take for granted. Thanks to their great philanthropic spirits, over $400 was raised to buy these materials. In my final week here I will be buying the supplies for the comedor. I will also be holding a “hygiene” workshop to talk about proper cleaning and disinfecting procedures.

I accepted this internship to get experience working with a microenterprise. La Estrategia de Caracol started the idea of a panadería or bread baking cooperative early 2008 spurred by the construction of a mixed material oven due to the help of another local NGO, Biosfera, and the previous intern, Arvil. Thanks to a grant received by Arvil, they were able to buy many of the materials to realize the baking cooperative, including a 30 kilogram industrial mixer. However, when I arrived in Argentina, the baking cooperative had not yet been fully realized. The comedor provided a room in which the cooperative could be housed, but it need various repairs, including fully sealing the room (large cracks were left between the ceiling and walls), routing water and electricity from the other side of the comedor and adding locks and sufficient security to protect the expensive equipment. Many of the materials to do the repairs had already been bought with the previously received grant, the man power is what was needed. Marta’s husband, Daniel, was fully capable of doing most of the repairs, but was very busy with his job, so most of the work was put on hold.

My seeds fund grant was used to pay for some of the work to be done. My host dad, Claudio came and installed all the electric work (using both volunteered time and materials). Daniel installed the sink (though as of today water had not yet been installed.) The lock has been bought for the door. Once the lock is installed, materials can be moved to the panadería and the women in the community can start their business. Hopefully I will see some movement toward this by the time my internship ends next week.

Working with the comedor and panadería has been quite an experience. It has taught me that expectation are not always met, and just because they are not met as intended does not mean that outcomes will not have an impact. It has been difficult for me to see work that is being done that I feel does not meet my “American” standards, but I have had to learn that what is acceptable for me and what is acceptable for them are two different things. They are making the best they can out of their limited resources. Whatever assistance I or other interns can give them along the way is greatly appreciated by them. We are then repaid with the satisfaction of knowing that the work we have done has hopefully helped them take another step towards a more sustainable future.

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Grandmother Entrepreneurs, by Vu Ndlovu

This is my 9th week of a 10-week internship here in Jinja, Uganda. I am mostly working on my final reports, which involves the exciting task of organizing receipts, tallying them up to make sure all the numbers add up and making sure we haven’t overspent. I am also spending this week making sure that implementation of the project I’ve been involved with is near completion.

I’ve been placed with the Organisation for the Good Life of the Marginalized, or OGLM, which works mostly with marginalized women and children. I spent the last 9 weeks working with grandmothers whose grandchildren have been orphaned by AIDS. Most of them live in the village of Buwaiswa. After doing a needs assessment involving 20 grandmothers, we discovered that most of them look after about 4 or 5 grandchildren and don’t have enough income to properly feed or clothe them.

We’ve been working to increase their incomes by getting them involved in income-generating projects. Most of the grandmothers have wanted to start projects but don’t have the capital to do so –- they don’t have the collateral that would allow them to borrow at reasonable rates. The goal of the project is to give the grandmothers low-interest loans for all the inputs they need as well as training sessions in any skills they might need to run the projects successfully. To begin with, we have focused on two groups: a group of 6 grandmothers is going to start an agriculture project in which they grow and sell crops (beans, maize, groundnuts) and a group of 4 grandmothers is going to start a paraffin/kerosene (a resource used for light in rural Uganda) project in which they sell paraffin to the rest of the community. The idea is that the funds from their repaid loans will be recycled as new loans to new groups of grandmothers. The project has received a grant of $498.45 from FSD to fund the initial loans for the two groups. OGLM has funded of group of 8 grandmothers who will be running a village kiosk.

OGLM was supposed to receive a $150,000 grant from the Ugandan Government in November 2007 for its microfinance program. It still hasn’t arrived and no one seems to know when it will come, so for now the microfinance program will be limited to the FSD and OGLM funding mentioned above. Lack of a constant flow of funding and a failure to plan for reduction or cessation of funding seems to be one of the major challenges faced by organizations here. It has certainly been a source of frustration while I’ve been here. Other frustrations (that are now funny in retrospect) include not having electricity at the office for the first 3 weeks and people turning up for meetings 3 hours late on at least 2 occasions.

While we were out visiting the grandmothers yesterday we managed to get the kiosk group to agree to buy their paraffin (for re-sale) from the paraffin group. We anticipated there would be concern and disagreements over the price at which the kiosk group would buy the paraffin. To our surprise, the two groups quickly came to an agreement on the price. No, the major concern for the two groups was who would provide the 20-liter container in which the kiosk group would need to transport the paraffin! We had also provided some notebooks to the groups to encourage them to keep records of their sales and had asked them to bring the books to the record-keeping training session yesterday so we could evaluate their progress. When we asked the agriculture group why they hadn’t brought their books, they promptly responded by asking us how we expected them to keep records when we hadn’t given them any pens!

My host family has been great. Both my host mum and host dad are high school teachers, but my host dad is an avid environmentalist and runs a (plant) nursery out of his back yard. I pretty much live in a forest–he’s planted trees and plants everywhere. It is very beautiful though. My host parents have 3 girls (10, 8 & 2) and look after about 7 relatives who are between the ages of 15 and 23. All the girls sleep in the main house where I am, while all the boys sleep in a smaller house on the property.

Below are some excerpts from a diary I’ve been keeping with observations and stories about life with the family:

Sunday February 24th.
Samuel (not his real name), a neighbor, took me for a four hour hike this morning. I think it might have been punishment for revealing that I was a Manchester United fan. He is a Chelsea fan. Almost every Ugandan Samuel is a passionate supporter of English football (soccer) teams Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool or Manchester United. Samuel is currently training to be a teacher at a teachers’ college in Gulu, northern Uganda. He says it takes about 13 hours to get there by public transport. The school year started about 3 weeks ago, but Samuel is still at home because he can’t afford the trip to Gulu. He would like to work odd-jobs to raise the money to go, but he can’t because when he’s at home he has to take care of the family’s only cow. He doesn’t feel he can leave the task to his mother, though it’s not entirely clear who looks after the cow when Samuel is at school. Samuel doesn’t really want to be a teacher. He would like to join the army. It pays much more and it would give him tremendous pride to serve his country he says. Samuel says he’s a patriot and he would never want to leave Uganda.

Tuesday February 26th.
I had my first chat with Janet, my host family’s 10 year old daughter. I asked her how school was and if she had any homework. School was fine and she did have homework – she had to read four pages about Uganda’s leaders. She read about ‘some who were already dead and some who were not dead.’ Janet says she enjoyed learning about her country’s past and present leaders. I noted to her that I was feeling a little cold and asked her if she was feeling the same. She said not. Janet lost her school sweater back in P3 (Grade 3) and hasn’t had a sweater since. She’s in P5 this year. At first, she did feel cold on the early morning walk to school. Once she got to school, she would have to ask her friends if she could wear their sweaters for a bit to warm up. On some mornings she would wear a ‘jacket’ on her walk to school, but she would have to take it off when she got to school because it isn’t part of the uniform. Now the jacket is only useful for keeping her dry when it rains because, she says, not having a sweater for the last three years has meant she has ‘gotten use to the cold and [doesn’t] feel it anymore’.

Friday March 7th.
My host family’s house, built just under a year ago, is set back from Victoria Road, the street they live on. You can’t see the house from road because of all the trees and vegetation Charles, my host dad, has planted. Closer to the road is their old house where the boys they look after now live. Behind the new house, and partially visible through a thin but dense row of trees, is a cluster of mud huts and houses where one of Charles’s older sisters and her family live. Charles says his sister was supposed to have trained to be a nurse, but ended up as a housewife with a ‘useless’ husband and is now partially supported by Charles. She would have trained as a nurse, but Charles’s father refused to pay a bribe that the head of the school demanded to guarantee her a spot. Charles’s father was a magistrate at the time and as a magistrate, Charles says, he was “too principled and too honest to pay a bribe as little as 100 shillings.”

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