kristin-a-musings

Should We be Saving Soles in an Age of Worry?

What’s in the bag? Body parts? I tried to joke while maneuvering my suitcase into the trunk of the car, which was already occupied by a large, bulky garbage bag. Shoes, my Honduran friend Fredis replied.

Prior to my arrival in Tegucigalpa a year ago, I had told Fredis about my fear of traveling again to Honduras, the Central American country where I had met him more than 30 years earlier. Back in the early 1980’s, when we had met for the first time, the news from Central America that made it to the U.S. was minimal, particularly in the case of small, impoverished civil-war-free countries like Honduras.

Today Honduras is a favored base-of-operations for international gangs and drug smugglers transporting the goods that feed our addictions in the United States. It is also among the more violent and dangerous places in the Americas, according to the U.S. State Department and the testimony of migrants who streamed across the border from Mexico into the United States last year. Joking about the violence was my way of confronting my fear, but Fredis didn’t laugh.

We parked in a guarded lot in downtown Tegus (Tegucigalpa), and Fredis pulled the bag out of the trunk and hoisted it over his shoulder. Over time, he explained, he had amassed a number of lightly used, well-cared-for shoes—about 8 pair—and he was bringing them to his brother. Mi hermano can put these to good use. He smiled and winked. He wears my size, so he can wear them himself. Or sell them. Whatever he wants. Whatever he needs.

Shoe Privilege

I take my footwear largely for granted, much as I do food and clean water. Apparently this gives me a distinct advantage in the International Privilege Games, which I automatically qualify for because of my race and social class. Privilege is the advantage you bring to any situation because of where you were born, your gender identity, the color of your skin or other characteristics that you were born with. It is the “luck of the draw”—like winning the lottery without actually buying a ticket.

While some find the notion of privilege tiresome or offensive, it is a certainty in this world of “haves” and “have nots.” Most often in the United States, we hear discussions of White Privilege, a reality that isn’t unique to this country. White Privilege is always there as long as the amount of melanin in our skin manifests itself to the eye. It has also occupied the forefront of our national consciousness in recent months, as police killings of unarmed black men, some of them videotaped by witnesses, have given new currency to a reality we too often dismiss or deny.(1)

As a traveler in the age of globalism, the advantages of being born in the United States bring another kind of privilege—economic privilege. In fact, in our information-saturated world, even if you never venture far from home you can understand your economic privilege simply by surfing the internet. When you see photos of hungry children in barren lands flash across the screen of your mobile device and compulsively avert your eyes from their faces to look out the window at the river flowing just beyond your garden, you probably feel “blessed” or frankly, lucky. You might even think about the fact that you didn’t choose to be born in a climate that favors food production as a hobby anymore than the child on your screen chose to be born in a land prone to parched earth and famine.

I recently read an account of U.S. migrant workers who travel from southern Mexico and through the desert of the American Southwest to get to their seasonal jobs as farmworkers in the lush orchards and fields of western Washington State. At times, shoes figure prominently in the narrative. The migrants rub their shoes with garlic to repel snakes and bugs as they cross the desert, and they articulate the clear relationship between work, shoes, and survival that I seldom contemplate:

In Oaxaca, there’s no work for us. There’s no work. There’s nothing. When there’s no money, you don’t know what to do. And shoes, you can’t get any. A shoe like this [pointing to his tennis shoes] costs about 300 Mexican pesos. You have to work two weeks to buy a pair of shoes…Do we have to migrate to survive? Yes, we do. (2)

The road to a better life in one’s own country sometimes leads through migrant camps and low-wage jobs in the U.S. And to walk that road, you need among other things, dependable shoes.

Migratory Freedom: The Inter-American Dream

There was a time in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when the road to a better life for Northern Europeans was more likely seen as a one-way street to opportunity and prosperity in the Western Hemisphere. The American Dream in the era of snail mail and trans-Atlantic sea voyages was fulfilled by leaving old ways behind and heading to the Americas. My forebears believed in the possibility of economic mobility for their progeny in a new world, a place where opportunity was thought to be accessible to all. For the most part, they did not expect to return to their countries of origin to live, although I’m sure that they may have missed the old, familiar ways, gotten homesick, and in some cases, they may even have gone back.

The Inter-American Dream of today strikes me as a different dream. Desauciado está él que tiene que marchar a vivir una cultura diferente are the last lines of the last verse of a Latin American folksong written in 1978 by Leon Gieco and popularized around the world by the legendary folk singer Mercedes Sosa. Hopeless is the one who has to leave and live a different culture.(3)

Both Gieco and Sosa were from Argentina, a country where the Guerra Sucia or Dirty War (4) forced many into self-imposed exile, including artists like them. Argentina was not alone among Latin American countries of the 1970s and 1980s. A number of countries in the region struggled through eras of civil war and brutal dictatorships that forced millions to emigrate. Over several decades, waves of refugees fleeing violence made it to the United States from Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and other Latin American nations. Seeking refuge—temporary or permanent—in El Norte seemed the best option for survival.

Trading in Violence

Another kind of insidious violence also emerged in the 1980’s when Neoliberalism began to reshape the economic policy of governments around the world. The effects of those policies —free trade agreements, deregulation of labor and industry, privatization of services, and government austerity—have strangled the poor and small farmers everywhere and have widened the gap between the rich and everyone else.

At the beginning, Free Trade agreements sounded promising to many of us in our naivety about economic privilege and power. The North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), signed by Canada, Mexico, and the United States in 1994, was heavily promoted from its initial conception as a way to promote economic well-being across the region. The realities, though, have been very different, especially for small farmers. As trade barriers were reduced or eliminated, enabling goods to cross borders more easily than bodies, local markets in countries south of the U.S. Mexico border were flooded with cheap staple crops and other produce from the United States and Canada. Small farmers could not compete. Many lost their farms. The industries and agricultural sectors that were supposed to compensate for such losses by adding new jobs, failed to do so. So although countries like Mexico touted free trade agreements as a way to “export goods, not bodies,” the trade agreements fueled the great migration for work. The unemployed poor from countries south of the U.S. – Mexico border learned how bodies could, in fact, cross into he U.S. without a visa. In fact, facilitating undocumented border crossings has become a profitable business for some as the cross-border trek has become markedly more dangerous in this era of heightened investments by the U.S. government in “border security.”

In Honduras, neoliberal policies had a devastating effect on local farmers who were generally small producers. They could not compete with the low price of imported staples like corn, rice, and beans. Many switched their production to more lucrative export crops or sold their land for little gain to large landholders who could “scale up” and plant large tracts of palm trees to produce palm oil for export.

Combining these economic challenges with catastrophic natural disasters—most notably Hurricane Mitch, which hit Central America in 1998–migration northward increased steadily in the form of economic refugees. Today the export of human capital from Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean, as migrants flee violence and economic hardship in their homelands, is one of the region’s most lucrative exports. (5)

Missing Shoes and Family

This migration phenomenon stole headlines in the early days of the North American summer of 2014, as tens of thousands of Central Americans tried to cross the border from Mexico to the United States. The threat and trauma of gang violence and government corruption in their home countries, combined with high unemployment and economic insecurity, was driving people northward, especially children, who it was rumored would be granted permission to remain in the United States as refugees even if they entered without papers.

Recently a colleague related the story of a five-year-old Honduran boy who arrived in New York a few months ago after making that harrowing journey. The boy’s teacher had noticed that he came to school every day but spent much of each day in tears.

My colleague, who is working with children in schools that were devastated by 2012’s Superstorm Sandy here in New York, found a way to let the boy tell her his story. He wanted to tell his story, and he needed to tell his story. He was quickly joined by another 5-year-old boy who had had a similarly traumatic migration experience, a boy who hovered at the edges of the conversation until he was invited to join in.

Together the boys sat with my colleague and drew pictures of their journey to the U.S. from Honduras. As they drew, they narrated their experiences, real and fantastical. Two separate but similar stories of violence and terror, of men with guns, bullets flying, helicopter pursuits, and raging rivers, emerged.

And, yes, a shoe, figured into one boy’s narrative, too.

He told my colleague that one little girl, a fellow traveler in his group, had lost a shoe while crossing a river on her way north. The little boy remembers seeing the shoe float off. He still thinks about that shoe and talks about retrieving it for her. She needed that shoe, and he knew it. Even a five-year-old knows that you can’t go very far in life without shoes or other basic necessities.

“I miss my mommy every day,” the boy said as he drew the shoe floating in the roiling river. The other boy nodded in agreement. “I miss my mommy every day,” he chimed in. One little boy had left his mother in Honduras several months ago; the other had left his mother just that morning when he had come to school. And yet both were speaking the simple truth inherent in the loss of something—or the separation from someone—you truly need.

Shoe Privilege

Here’s a checklist for signs that, like me, you may enjoy a well-shod privilege in our globalized economy:

✓Shoes are ubiquitous. Any time that shoes are on your mind, they are comfortable, cute, and affordable, even at more than $100 a pair. You may not have thousands of pairs like Imelda Marcos famously did, but you have, shall we say, more than enough.

✓Shoes are easy to acquire. Shoe shopping, especially for those who don’t relish a trip to the store, is a snap in the era of digital technologies. From sneakers to heels, anything you want is just a click, or a touch, away, and, if you’re lucky, free shipping is included with your order.

✓Shoes are accessories. Do you rarely think of shoes in a context of necessity? Do you rarely distinguish between “wanting” a pair and “needing” a pair? Do your thoughts rarely take you down a path of wondering about what your life would be like without shoes?

What is Floating in your Pool of Worry?

Here is another potential sign of your well-shod privilege: Shoes are not part of your limited pool of worry. Limited Pool of Worry theory offers an explanation for humans’ inaction and inability to address big issues, such as climate change or income inequality, because of more pressing personal issues.(6) The culprit is our limited human capacity to respond to more than a finite number of challenges at any one time. Face it: we are not wired to be effective multi-taskers, even, or especially, when it comes to worry.

The challenges that make it into a person’s personal pool of worry tend to be those that are directly related to the satisfaction of immediate needs. If you fear your job may be lost today, or if you are uncertain about how you will feed or clothe your children tomorrow, you are unlikely to be able to focus your concern on challenges that seem less immediate but will affect you in the long-run, such as global warming. Why worry about what can be done to reduce your carbon footprint or what you can do to promote renewable energy policies so your children can grow the food they need to live to a ripe old age in the world of the future, when you have no rice or beans to feed them right now?

El Catracho Santa Claus, my svelte, reedy friend Fredis with his sack full of shoes was ready, as always, to deliver a share of what he has to someone who might need it more. For the moment, he would ensure that there would be no shoes floating in his extended family’s pool of worry. His bother could turn his attention to other pressing needs.

I lost a pair of shoes once many years ago when I was 16. For a few months, it floated around in the collective worry of some of my loved ones. At the time, I owned three pairs: a pair of closed-toe Earth shoe knock-offs, a pair of basketball sneakers, and a pair of sandals. I had just arrived in Cochabamba, Bolivia for a year-long stint as a high school intercultural exchange student. As I unpacked my bags in my new home, I discovered I had left my Earth shoes at the hotel in the mountains outside of La Paz, where I had participated in a three-day exchange student orientation.

Those shoes were never recovered by me, and to this day I wonder about whether the person who found them was able to use them or resell them because of this basic fact: Due to my large feet—a woman’s size 10 at the time—the shoes proved to be impossible to replace locally. My Bolivian (exchange family) father claimed to have visited every shoemaker in the city and stated that not even a shoe-form for a man’s shoe in my size could be found. My Bolivian mother asked relatives en route to Buenos Aires and to Brazil to shoe shop on my behalf, but all returned empty-handed.

I survived the cool winter nights of Cochabamba—Bolivia’s “City of Eternal Springtime”—by wearing socks with my sandals and alternating the sandals with my tennis shoes on days when I had gym class or a basketball game. Then, in the early days of the Bolivian spring, which correspond to early autumn days in the northern hemisphere, a pilot for Lloyd Aereo Boliviano, the Bolivian airline of that time, who was also a friend of my host family, agreed to a mission of mercy: He flew two pairs of women’s size 10 shoes to me from Miami among his personal effects. They arrived, duty-free, in Cochabamba a full seven months after I did, and in time for me to wear one of the pairs to my end-of-school-year graduation ceremony.

This solution spared my U.S. family some hefty international shipping costs. More important, it circumnavigated all parental worry—both my birth parents’ and my exchange parents’—about the fate that might befall a pair of shoes traveling by ship to land-locked Bolivia and then surviving the final leg of their journey through the notoriously corrupt Customs Office. But even with the shoe drama that ensued in my young adolescent life, I always believed that I had options where shoes were concerned, and that eventually, I would also have the shoes I needed.

Shoe Ministry

My trips to Honduras last year and my nearly simultaneous awareness of the surge of Honduran immigrants crossing the United States’ Southern Border on foot have refocused my thoughts on shoes. It seems that once you are aware, there is always a shoe story waiting to be told.

In December 2013 on a flight from Miami to Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, a 20-something Christian minister occupied the seat next to mine. It was my third trip to Honduras, and my first time traveling there in more than 30 years. It was the minister’s ninth trip to Honduras in 2013 alone.

Reverend Mike was on a four-day missionary junket with some fellow Christians to a church in the Department of Olancho. Olancho is located in heart of Honduras, an area known for ranching, land disputes, and in more recent times, drug trafficking. When I asked the minister about the purpose of his trip, he told me that he had a “shoe ministry.” He explained that his desire was to “plant” a church in a small town in Olancho, but that it was far too dangerous an undertaking at that moment. Instead, until some local blood feuds were resolved, Reverend Mike was continuing his shoe ministry, based out of Houston, with the hope that one day it would be safe to relocate permanently to Olancho.

“Shoe ministry,” which was a new type of evangelization to me, is, in fact, a worldwide phenomenon. Giving shoes to the shoeless, promoting health and well-being, and in some cases, reaching the illusory twin goals of saving of soles and souls by accompanying the brand-name giveaways with a dose of Jesus, is a popular form of charity.

Look it up. On lists of the basic necessities that many impoverished people lack, you will find clean (potable) water, food, and, yes, shoes. Shoes are too important to be termed a Band-Aid for the poor, but in many ways, they have the same function a Band-Aid does in promoting their health and well-being. They ensure our feet are not exposed to cuts, infections, and parasites. They enable us to run, jump, and play with greater abandon. They protect our lowest extremities both while we work, and on our way to work. “Shoe ministers” run the gamut from TOMS, a multinational footwear company based in LA, to Shoes for Orphan Souls, a multinational Christian ministry out of Dallas. (7)

Understanding shoes as a necessity made me more curious about the phenomenon of shoe-focused charity. How do multi-national giveaways of such basic necessities affect the local economy? How, for example, does the Honduran shoe industry fare, or the local shoemaker, when there is a great shoe giveaway? Does a shoe ministry that is fused with local shoe makers exist? If I accept a pair of shoes from Reverend Mike’s stash, must I also accept Jesus as my personal savior? Or in the case of TOMS, must I show my children’s vaccination cards or evidence of indoor plumbing improvements to join the ranks of the well-heeled?

“Shoe ministry,” which appears to involve the informal and formal import of shoes can’t hope to address the entrenched problems of poverty in a country where more than two thirds (67 percent) of the people live in poverty, and well over one third (43 percent) live in extreme poverty on the edge of subsistence. (8) Those with the fewest resources in Honduras are unemployed or underemployed, working not in the maquiladoras, tourist resorts, or for multi-national agribusiness. They survive by hustling a life as street vendors or as subsistence farmers. A good number manage to scrape by with the help of cash remittances sent home by members of the diaspora. Cash sent home from abroad accounted for 20% of the Honduran GDP in 2013 alone. Not only has Honduras borne the distinction of being home to the “murder capital of the world,” the city of San Pedro Sula, it is the country in the Western Hemisphere with the highest dependency on money sent home by its citizen-workers abroad, many of those dollars earned by undocumented workers in the United States.

Informal, non-sectarian shoe charity is also a worldwide phenomenon among the more connected immigrant populations in the United States. My Cuban neighbors have solicited lightly used shoes from me for a relative in Cuba, a tall woman who wears a Size 11 shoe, as I do now. My Colombian-born friends who travel from the U.S. to Colombia to visit relatives inevitably pack a pair of Nikes or some other well-known brand of shoes for at least one relative in need of better footwear.

Walking Onward with Compassion

I asked a friend from Adelante Foundation (9) a small micro-finance non-profit that is based in Honduras, about her thoughts on shoe ministry, charity giveaways, and their impact on Honduran workers.

My friend drew a distinction between development efforts that support economic growth and education, like Adelante Foundation, and charity efforts that meet an immediate need in a specific moment, like shoes for bare feet, or food in a famine. Clearly Adelante is a non-profit that fits in the first category by providing low-interest loans and entrepreneurial education to poor women so that they can better their lives from a non-sectarian economic and social perspective. The Adelante Model is based on the Grameen Model championed by Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammed Yunis. It is designed to give people a boost out of poverty by offering them low-interest credit, education, and agency to help them sustain a livelihood for themselves and their families.

The other approach—the giveaway approach—has a place, my Adelante friend said, in times of natural disaster, for example. It’s not an approach that addresses structural issues related to poverty. In either case, she points out, the important element in how one gives is that it come from a place of compassion and not from a place of pity. Compassion, she said, is rooted in a vision of justice and stems from a greater interest in seeing the situation of another improve, and of being part of that change when possible.

Of Love and Shoes

Shoes are no more of a given than potable water or adequate food or shelter for the majority of people on our planet. This basic truth brings to mind another story that El Catracho once told me. It’s a shoe story, and it’s a love story.

In the late 1960’s when El Catracho was about seven years old, his mother learned that she had uterine cancer. It was a death sentence, and she knew it. She moved her three young children with her from the rural town where they lived to the capital city, where she sought treatment to prolong her life until she could settle her affairs. I cannot die yet, she used to tell El Catracho’s older sister, a daughter from an earlier marriage who was about 14 years old at the time. I cannot die until I know my little ones will be cared for when I’m gone. Once I know this, I can die in peace.

El Catracho’s mother knew, as mothers often know, that the children’s father loved his drink. He loved it more than he loved her. More than he loved the children. More than he loved his own life. She knew he would never be able to provide for her children as she would have provided for them. It pained her more than the illness that was consuming her to think her little ones might end up alone, without a home, an education, or any opportunity of consequence. She was sick, but she was also determined to make sure her kids had a fighting chance to survive without her.

One day, shortly after his eighth birthday, El Catracho came home from school, as usual, to their rented flat. His mother was lying on her bed in a far corner of the room. She wasn’t moaning that day, El Catracho remembers. That day, she was all business. Put your coat back on, she instructed him. See that Señora? She nodded toward a tall blonde gringa who stood behind him by the doorway. Put your coat on, and go with her.

She didn’t even cry, he remembers. No hug. No kiss. I was an obedient kid. I put on my coat, and I walked out the door without knowing I was walking into a new world, a new life. Somehow, El Catracho’s dying mother, a devout Catholic, had arranged for her three young children to go to live at a newly opened orphanage run by Evangelical Christian missionaries in Valle de Angeles, a small town in the valley abutting the mountain-ringed capital city. That inexplicable encounter with the newly-minted missionary, or ‘evidence of God’s will,’ as El Catracho might testify, seems in of itself somewhat miraculous. It certainly changed the course of El Catracho’s life.

But shelter, food, water…these did not quite cover all the needs in his mother’s “finite pool of worry.” El Catracho’s mother had one remaining need, one wish she wanted fulfilled before she died: Shoes. Not for herself—she was not impractical or vain. She wanted shoes for her children, all of her children. She pictured them at her wake, clean and well-dressed from head to toe, and this image gave her strength.

She was an amazing mother and woman, one of El Catracho’s older sisters told me. She knew how to read and write. She knew how to run a business. She loved every one of her children. Her only weakness was that she did not know how to choose good men, men who were partners in these things.

So El Catracho’s dying mother summoned her son René to her bedside. René was one of her oldest children. He had learned a trade and was working as a shoemaker. Por favor, she said. Please make shoes for my little ones to wear to my funeral.

One morning some time later, Doña Josie, the young missionary who took El Catracho and his siblings to live with her in Valle de Angeles, woke them early. She instructed them to wash up and get dressed in their best clothes for a trip to the city. She gave each of them a new pair of shoes to wear, courtesy of their older brother René, and when they’d put them on, she bundled them into the truck for the trek over the mountain to attend their mother’s velorio. (11)

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End Notes

(1) See Tumulty, K., Ferguson, Staten Island: Similar events bring very different reaction, Washington Post, December 4, 2014 available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/ferguson-staten-island-similar-events-bring-very-different-reaction/2014/12/04/bf4a482c-7bd9-11e4-b821-503cc7efed9e_story.html

(2) Holmes, S. (2013). Fresh fruit, broken bodies: Migrant farmworkers in the United States. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.
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(3) Sólo le pido a Dios, words and music by León Gieco, 1978. Gieco wrote the song, “I only ask of God,” in the face of growing repression and disappearances in Argentina in which an estimated 30,000 Argentinians were “disappeared” by the military dictatorship. According to Gieco, he resisted the option of self-exile until 1979 when a woman warned him to watch out because the military even knew where his daughter went to kindergarten. He went into exile for one year in Los Angeles, California. See “León Gieco: historia de música y poesía comprometida” in “Abro Comillas by A. Colangelo, November 20, 2014, available at http://abrocomillas.com.ar/efemerides/leon-gieco-historia-de-musica-y-poesia-comprometida/.

(4) The Guerra Sucia, or Dirty War is the term applied to State-sponsored domestic terrorism activities carried out under Latin American dictatorships in the 1970’s and 1980’s. The term was applied by the military dictatorship of Argentina to its policy of state security designed to “clean out” so-called “subversives” through a state-sponsored campaign of kidnapping, torture, and murder of regime opponents in order to restore “the values of Western Civilization and Christianity.” See http://www.enciclopediadelapolitica.org/Default.aspx?i=&por=g&idind=746&termino=
in the Enciclopedia de la Politica by R. Borja.

(5) For more information on the impact of agribusiness, land struggles, poverty, migration, and globalization in Honduras see Grabbing Power: The New Struggles for Land, Food and Democracy in Northern Honduras by Tanya M. Kerssen, Oakland, CA: Food First Books, 2013; and The Broken Village: Coffee, Migration, and Globalization in Honduras by Daniel R. Reichman, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press (ILR Press), 2011.

(6) Nesbit, M.C. (2011, December 3). The economy, climate change, and our finite pool of worry. Retrieved from http://bigthink.com/age-of-engagement/the-economy-climate-change-and-our-finite-pool-of-worry.

(7) For more information on TOMS charity programs see http://www.toms.com/one-for-one-en and for Buckner Shoes for Orphan Souls see http://www.shoesfororphansouls.org.

(8) Economic Commission for Latin America, “Latin America (18 countries): persons living in poverty and indigence around 2005, 2011 and 2012” available at http://www.cepal.org/sites/default/files/pr/files/51780-Tabla-ENG.pdf (last accessed May 2015).

(9) I came across Adelante Foundation (see http://www.adelantefoundation.org) while searching for groups in Honduras that might help a young mother get a formal education and/or job training who had arrived in the U.S. She had arrived in the U.S. at age 9 without a visa and had been deported from the U.S. back to Honduras at the age of 19 without having achieved more than an eighth grade education. Although Adelante Foundation works only with very poor women in rural Honduras, and thus did not have a program that would meet the young mother’s needs, I’ve had the good fortune to meet some of their dedicated staff and to learn more about their work. As of summer 2014, Adelante was serving more than 7,000 women with a program of micro-credit and small business education and was seeking to reach many more of the estimated 5.5 million people who live at or below the poverty line. Check them out at the link above. You can also donate to Adelante’s loan programs and help empower more women by clicking on the Donate Now button or following this link: https://interland3.donorperfect.net/weblink/weblink.aspx?name=E194414&id=1.

(10) See the Global Development Research Center’s description of the Grameen Model: http://www.gdrc.org/icm/model/grameen.html (last accessed January 2015).

(11) The velorio is akin to the tradition of a Catholic wake for a deceased person. Generally, the body of the deceased lies in an open casket, and those who attend say prayers for the departed soul and say goodbye to the corpse of the person who has died.