Agros Blog

Joel Martinez, the director of Agros Honduras, gazed at Don Rito, a 75-year old man who had travelled 4 hours from his home near Santa Barbara to the Agros Honduras headquarters in San Pedro Sula. The coffee that Nohemy Funez, the Agros Human Development officer, had offered to Don Rito and his travelling companion, Don Ines, sat between them.

They had come with a proposition. Don Rito had heard from the Agros villagers in nearby Achotales that Agros helps poor people get land, and Don Rito and Don Ines had the perfect plot of land, on the side of a mountain. He also had five families who were ready to create a community and farm it. They had taken the name of Montañita. “It’s beautiful land,” Don Rito said, “You need to see it.” He and the five families were negotiating with the widow who owned it, he said. She was ready to sell to them. What’s more, he added, “We five families have been organized for some time. We are committed to one another, and to this project.” They only needed the money, but no one would lend it to them. Could Agros do for them what they had done for the people of Achotales?

Joel looked at him again. Typically, Agros works with the families first, and gathers a large group. Nohemy and Joel do workshops with the group, which is usually larger than it will end up being. Families drop out—the cost of working together is great, and the commitment gets tested by the informal values of Agros in the field: “Trabajo, trabajo, y mas trabajo”—work, work, and more work. Once the group has self-selected and coalesced, and assuming that Agros has gathered the necessary funds, the group looks for land, with Agros’ technical and financial support. That’s how Agros does things.

Don Rito, wrinkled by years of working fields in the hot sun, convinced of his mission, gazed back at Joel and Nohemy, who had brought the two men to see Joel. Don Rito clearly was a man with a vision.

The man across from him was a man with a problem.

Almost two years ago, Joel and Agros staff in Seattle had convinced a group of supporters to back Joel’s own vision: to combine campesinos—landless rural farmers, day laborers—with people who had moved from the countryside to the Los Bordos area of San Pedro Sula, where they lived in what one well-travelled member of that group had called “the worst slums I have ever seen.” The supporters came from all over the Pacific Northwest: Lake Grove Presbyterian Church in Portland, Oregon was joined by a group of friends from Bellevue, Washington and Ludeman Capital Management in Bellingham, WA. Together, they pledged the support that would be needed for five years of a new village to fit Joel’s vision.

Now that those donors had backed Joel’s idea, he was having trouble getting the right group together for the new village. Agros had tried to place these urban poor into the rural communities, but the fit was difficult. Urban poor are used to having cash and access to quick income; the rural poor work on a different economy, with slower income payouts. Even though they came from the same area of Honduras, there were cultural differences, and—while there had been some successes over the two years, and a lot of lessons learned—the long-term, mutual commitments that make Agros villages possible were hard to find. Joel promised Don Rito that he would look into his idea, and sent him on his way. It’s not the way we do things, he thought. We need to know the people first, without the pressure of a pending land purchase.

Don Rito went home encouraged. He told the Montañeros how well they had been treated: “You should have seen it. The Agros people gave us coffee and a little bread,” he said, “They payed for a taxi to take Don Ines and I to the bus.” Don Rito was convinced that Joel would see what they saw.

Joel was not convinced. Still, he did some networking. He spoke with the mayor of Santa Barbara, who confirmed that the Montañeros had been cooperating on projects for some time, and added that they were trustworthy and had a good reputation. Joel and Nohemy began working with the group. They introduced them to some of the families from Los Bordos slums, who were interested in returning to the land. The families talked with each other, shared their dreams for themselves and their children, and offered each other evidence of their willingness to work hard to see those dreams come true. They agreed to work together.

On the day that the Montañeros—now considerably larger in number– took Joel to look at the land, they were trying hard to be judicious: “He has to make up his own mind,” they told themselves. The more they walked the land together, the more excited Joel became. In fact, Don Rito pointed out later, “Joel was more enthusiastic than we were.”

“But there is no water,” Joel pointed out, “there has to be water, for crop irrigation and for you to use in the new homes on the land.” Together, they searched every inch of the mountainous terrain for water. They found– nothing. That’s also not how Agros does things. The land needs to have water.

A Montañero named Justiniano had a small plot of land with a spring, he said, but it was far away. The Montañeros began negotiating for the access rights they would need to get Justiniano‘s water to their fields. As far as household water for future homes on the land, the Monañeros already had a solution. Four years previous, they had obtained water for their nearby homes from an Austrian non-profit called Agua es Vida. Agros could work with them to get household water for any new home construction on the land.

The Montañeros overcame each obstacle in their way, one by one, until the day came when Agros bought the land, and they signed their promissory notes for their plots. Joel told them later, “You were like Caleb and Joshua from the Bible. Where others saw giants in the land and were afraid, you saw only the promised land.”

On January 14, an unseasonably cold day filled with mist and drizzle, Joel brought Barry Rowan, the leader of the Bellevue group of donors, to meet Don Rito and the rest of the families and to walk the land together. The three visionaries met on that mountainside for the first time: An Agros country director who had dreamed of creating a path of opportunity for reverse migration from the slums to a sustainable life, a group of Americans who had backed the idea and were waiting to see it happen, and a group of landless rural and urban poor who had long dreamed of owning their own land.

January 14 was an important day for the Montañeros: The plan for the equal division of family plots had arrived, and they were going to walk the staked-out area, showing each family the beginning of their personal vision came to reality. Families from Los Bordos were already living on the property, in temporary housing, and all of the families had cleared the land, planted corn for food security, and were about to plant their first long-term cash crop of coffee.

This corner of Honduras has three Agros villages of committed families, each with their own visions coming to life, supported by an in-country staff of nationals who have a vision for their people and their country, backed by donors who know a sustainable premise when they see one.

The visions come together, and the reality emerges out of the mist.

It IS how we do things.

We are fond of technological solutions in the developed world. After all, they seem to have gotten us developed.

The international economist Jeffrey Sachs, for instance, argues that we don’t have to live with 1.4 billion people living on less than $1.25 a day, that the poor do not have to “always be with you.” His excellent book “The End of Poverty” describes a modest proposal for ending poverty in this millennium. It calls for a restructuring of developing world debt, a new way of investment and trade between the developed and the under-developed nations, and a new system of handling aid. These excellent economic proposals were adopted in the year 2000 by the member nations of the UN as the “The Millennium Development Goals.” The goal is to end poverty by 2015.

And Jeffrey Sachs is right: It does not cost much to end poverty. In dollars, pounds, or pesos, that is. The cost is to our way of thinking and our way of living.

This is why I love Agros: We recognize that ending poverty requires nothing less than transformation, and we will not settle for anything less than that. The villagers we work with are told upfront that this will not be an easy road, and later, they report to us that the really hard work was what they had to do in their hearts. The donors we work with are told upfront that international rural development work is long-term, and not a smooth upward curve. The staff knows that we are working long term, and that the true wealth for a village lies in the dignity and hope of the villagers themselves.

Along the way, everyone is transformed. There is a palpable and observable difference between villagers in the first two years and villagers who have made their first land payment. There is a palpable and observable difference between the donor partners who began by just wanting to donate money, and end up in awe of what the villagers are able to achieve through their own planning, leadership, and hard work. And when you hear the staff talk about what motivates them to continue their work, you hear their respect for the villagers who have given themselves to transformation.

On November 7, here in Seattle, we heard from Teresa Sanchez, a woman whose family survived the brutal civil wars of Guatemala, who grew up in the Agros village of Cajixay, took herself through secondary school and university, and has returned to the Ixil region of Guatemala to work as an agricultural specialist for Agros villages. We heard a story of transformation.

Agros people know the power of planning and hard work. We also know that without real, human transformation, hard work and sound economics is just spent labor and good ideas.

When Agros succeeds, it is usually because we have paid attention to three things: We need to have the right families, the right land, and the right staff. Last week’s approval of Bella Vista as the fourth Agros village in Honduras is a case in point. It’s a voyage that began in the spring of 2007 when Bruce Andrews, a member of a delegation visiting Agros villages outside of San Pedro Sula spoke these words:

“If we don’t help these people, we’ll be spitting in the face of God.”

Bruce’s words were the defining moment of reflection for the delegation from Lake Grove Presbyterian Church in Lake Oswego, OR after they had visited Los Bordos, one of the most impoverished slums in the Western Hemisphere. Their visit was guided by staff from Agros Honduras and CASM, the Honduran Mennonite agency that had been caring for the people of Los Bordos. CASM had asked Agros if together, they might be able to help people from Los Bordos move back to the rural area and form successful villages.

The people of Lake Grove were willing to help support the effort, but they were not to be the only ones. Two months later, a group from Bellevue, WA, who were for the most part veteran supporters of Agros, visited Honduras and spoke with the same group that CASM had selected. They also pledged their support. We were going to need more support before we were done, but we were already paying attention to those three things, and they weren’t all looking good.

First, the Bordos families, a group of people originally from a village called El Limonar, were not doing well with negotiations for the land to which they hoped to move. Then our staff leadership in Honduras went through a transition, and Joel Martinez, our new director, wanted to rethink a number of things, including how we went about the difficult process of assisting in the replanting of urban people in a rural entrepreneurship setting.

Urban migration is a worldwide, massive phenomenon for the landless, rural poor who find it difficult enough to feed themselves, let alone make a living in rural areas, and who are subsequently drawn to cities where they can earn cash by competing for menial jobs. The influx is so great that– even with cooperative municipal governments– the migrants end up living in poor shelter and overcrowded conditions, without water, sewer, or utilities and with disease and crime. I’m sure you’ve seen the pictures, if not the reality. In the gloom of these conditions a silver lining gleams: cash from the jobs, and the elusive urban temptation of possibility. By contrast, the rural areas seem hopeless.

This is the environment in which our Agros staff sought to find some of these urban poor who might be interested in returning to the country, taking on long-term debt in order to own land, and learn how to profit from its use. It’s like traveling upstream.

Joel began by finding a few families who might be interested in joining established Agros villages such as Nuevo Amanacer and Brisas del Volcan, working alongside campesinos, country-born and bred farmers who, thanks to their partnership with Agros, were well on their way to profiting from their agricultural enterprises. The experiment was only partially successful. A few families stayed, but others ended up returning to the city, citing the amount of hard work and the long wait for cash as reasons.

In time, Joel could see a way: It helped if Agros and CASM found people who had migrated to Bordos from the area where the new village was to be established. It also helped if the families had only recently arrived in the city, and had not become accustomed to the immediate reward of a cash environment.

He then found a group of campesinos in the La Montañita area of the Santa Barbara region who wanted to become an Agros village, and who were interested in the idea of welcoming back some families who had moved from there to Bordos. He brought the two sets of families– 29 from the country, and six from Bordos– together to talk. The families agreed to work together, and began looking for land. That proved to be a lengthy process as well, since the land required irrigation, and that in turn required obtaining water rights.

Meanwhile, we were still working on the necessary financial support. Two principals from Ludeman Capital Management, financial advisors based in Bellingham and Seattle, also visited Honduras, and provided that crucial final cap. A couple of graduate students from Harvard, moved by their visit to Honduras, joined the Bellevue group.

Finally, everything seemed solid: families, land and staff. The original support partners, who had been so eager to help two years previous, were thankfully still ready, so that when we went through the Agros International board’s due diligence process for approval, we obtained it. The land is situated high, and the villagers decided to call it Bella Vista. The resemblance to “Bellevue” (the French version of “Bella Vista”) may be unintentional, but was not lost on at least one person from the Bellevue group of supporters.

When people from the developed world are faced with the overwhelming plight of the urban poor in the developing world, we tend to have one of two extreme responses: We want to help immediately, or we despair of ever making a difference. If you think about it, both stances are self-centered. The former assuages our pain, that latter attempts to anesthetize it. Either way, the response is about us.

There is a third way: To gently and firmly decide to make a difference somewhere, go about it, and not tire of doing good. This is what the staff of CASM did, it’s what Joel Martinez and the Agros Honduras staff did, it’s what the families of Bella Vista did, and it’s what their supporters from Oregon, Massachusetts and Washington did. As Barry Rowan, one of the Bellevue group said during his visit, it’s what the Pilgrim immigrants to America did: They persevered, over the long haul, to a new beginning.

Bienvenidos, Bella Vista. You are worth the wait.

“There should be an exchange. The rich who have so much should give some of what they have to the poor. And the poor, who have so much faith and who have so much relationship, should give some of that to the rich.” ~ Joel Martínez, Director, Agros Honduras

“You are the first North Americans who have ever visited us. For us, it is a great honor that you have come.” ~ José Pinera, President, Arenales

“Because of your visit, we know that someone loves us. That someone will listen to our struggles, our challenges, our development. We dream of a whole village here, with a school, health care. We are trying to overcome cultural barriers. So if a grandfather among us cannot read, he will want to learn so he can teach his grandchildren.“~ Enrique, Agros village Achotales

We came to walk alongside the poor of Nicaragua and Honduras. To see how they were doing. To listen to their hopes, their struggles, their challenges. To gain a perspective on the place of wealth, an understanding of what it means to share.

We were business people in late career, rising young executives, and MBA students from Harvard and Michigan, hoping to make our mark on the world. We had all decided to set aside eight days to do this. Each of us knew only a few people on this trip. None of us knew everyone. We had a grueling schedule: 6 remote villages in 4 days. And even the most experienced among us was astounded by the outcome.

We went from Agros village to Agros village, bumping and rolling from rut to rut along dirt roads for hours, and then climbing up on foot where our vehicles could not go. When we arrived at the village (always, it seemed, later than we were expected), the men and women were patiently waiting for us. Two of the villages had prepared a lunch (in each case a feast) for us and for them. We discovered how difficult it was to receive so much from those who freely give out of the little they have.After the first village, (El Edén, high in the Matagalpa region of Nicaragua), a pattern emerged. All of us would fan out and talk with the villagers, greeting them in what was for most of us rudimentary Spanish, and asking them how they were doing, asking them to show us what they were proud of, what they had accomplished. They would tour us through their work, and we would then return to a community gathering place, where there would be introductions, speeches, prayers and in one case, a short homily from their pastor.

Some of us were checking up on our investment. We had given to this work called Agros International, and wanted to see how it was doing. Others were kicking the tires, seeing if an investment might be worthwhile. Some were just there to see what this thing was all about, if it was really all that some people said it was.

At El Edén, in the Matagalpa region of Nicaragua, a panel of teenagers formally welcomed us to the village on the parents’ behalf, and went on to describe the village’s master plan. A 13-year-old girl struggled with her first public presentation, forcing herself to look at the Harvard MBAs in front of her, as she described the youth council’s village cleanliness project. At Brisas del Volcan, in the Santa Barbara region of Honduras, Danubia, a woman who seemed to be in her thirties, proudly told us about her work studying with Honduran doctors and nurses, in order to become the village heath promoter. Her eyes glowed with pride as she said, “I was always interested in health, but never thought that I would be able to study it and help others.”

The Brisas village treasurer, Jose Antonio Vasquez, showed us their herd of dairy cattle, a joint project between Agros and Heifer International. Each of the families caring for the cattle had their own cow to milk, he explained. They were giving the calves to new arrivals in the village, families who had fled Los Bordos, the largest slum in San Pedro Sula, to remake their lives as Agros villagers.

Joel Martí­nez, the country director, commented: “In this entire area, these are the only campesinos who have daily access to milk for the nutrition of their family members.”

Midway through our journey, after a long day with two villages, Barry Rowan, an executive who is about to end his leave of absence from his career as a CFO, had an insight: “These people are like the pioneers who landed at Plymouth Rock…they are doing all of this in the hope of a better life and in faith that it could happen. They face tremendous hardship.”

The settlers we were visiting, however, had help: Agros agronomists who were working with them to maximize the yield of their crops and take advantage of the best market opportunities. Agros business people, who were negotiating price and teaching the villagers how to do that for themselves. Agros human development experts, who were supporting communities by building conflict resolution skills and equipping youth councils with their own agendas for the development of their villages. All of these are led by a country director whose vision and commitment to the teamwork of restoring, equipping, and enabling the poor is clearly aimed at lifting his country out of poverty, one village at a time.

Each day was long: Early starts, many meetings, long drives, hikes through rugged terrain in extreme heat and humidity. Over dinner, we would debrief about the many individual and collective conversations and encounters we had had. The table would be animated with conversations and cross-generational interchange: eager analysis and wise perspective, meeting over this act of walking with the poor.

Bill LaMarche, a business consultant for whom the word “retiring” could only refer to his career plans, observed of the villagers he had seen that day: “These are humble professionals. They know what they’re doing.” Jeffrey Clark, a medical instruments marketer, added: “But they have already made huge sacrifices. And it’s clear that they are doing that for their children.” Julia Choi, a Michigan MBA grad whose post-trip move would be to step into a New York City based financial market analysis role, remarked: “I feel like I’m seeing the American Dream. But it’s in Nicaragua.”

“What is wealthy,” asked Drew Jackson, a second year MBA student at Harvard. “We live in the richest country during the most prosperous time in the world.” (Later that night, the students would sit up late, discussing how they would be handling any wealth they might acquire in their future.)

“What’s the next generation of villager going to look like,” asked Josh Archambault, a student at Harvard’s Kennedy School, “that’s what I want to know”. ”

And what’s the ’secret sauce,’” asked Karibu Nyaggah, a Kenyan-American MBA, “what’s the unique thing that makes this Agros village thing work so well?”

The conversation took a pause.

Saona Dove (”my parents were hippies”) Jackson, a student at Harvard Divinity School, broke the silence: “I spent a lot of time with the girls in that last village,” she began slowly, “We played with these girls, whose parents had left everything in order to camp on and farm land that will someday be theirs. They were eager to play with us, to communicate with us, even though they had nothing, and here we were, rich people from another world who did not speak their language.”

“I think the secret sauce is love.”

Near Comí­tan, Chiapas Mexico.

Twelve of us have come to visit them, these people who have asked to be part of a new Agros village. We have been traveling along a secondary road here in Chiapas, Mexico, near the Guatemalan border. The road is dotted with small plots and shacks, most of which are rented for 50% of the income generated by any produce grown. That’s the life here. The glimpses that we have along the road convince us that it’s not much of a living. Most of these people make less than $1 a day.

Agros staff have been working with several groups of people in this region for almost a year, teaching values-based planning, listening to the dreams that they have for the future, explaining to them how Agros works. We are going to visit one of these groups. They know that, if they are selected and agree to it, they will qualify to enter a long-term program to obtain land that they will eventually own themselves, because they will have purchased it with their work. They will receive subsidized credit and for the first time, have food security, as they seek to farm, not just for a living, but for a future.

The staff leads us down a dirt road, to a small area that this group has carved out as a makeshift community center. There is a table around which have been set some plastic chairs, a rough semicircle. We are urged to sit down. Water is fetched, so we can wash our hands. A young woman brings us bottled orange soda and packaged cookies. Some of us crack open the sodas and take a sip. We say that we’ve really come to listen to their story.

The men gather first. They stand opposite us, completing the circle. After them and eventually standing behind them, the women and children trickle in, perhaps 20 people in all.

Sergio asks us to introduce ourselves, explaining that he will toss a ball to the first person, who will pass on the ball to the next one. The first person is one of the women in our group. After the third person, it becomes clear that the women in our group are tossing the ball to each other first, before the men get a chance to speak. There is laughter all around the circle. We’ve broken the ice.

Then it is their turn. Their leader, Pablo Gustavo, is a confident man who begins by describing who they are. Most of them are Guatemalan refugees who settled in Mexico after fleeing the civil wars in their own country. This group is made up of people from five different tribes, each with their own language: Chuj, mam, mimam, acateco, and kanjobal. Most of the men speak Spanish as a second language; they have to, in order to work as hired hands. There are some 20 families in this group, with about 80 children. They have banded together for survival, and their faces show how necessary that is.

“We came here because in Mexico, there is more support for us,” Pablo explains. “And the government here helps us. But we are separate. For us to grow stronger, we need to get land together. The only hope we have is with Agros. We hope to get your support.”

Other men hold the ball and say similar things. We have just come to hear their stories; we’ll have no influence on the selection, but they can’t know that. The Agros Mexico staff will have to make the hard decisions, based on what the people have shown them over a year of working together as a group.

We ask to hear from some of the women. Willingness to empower women is another vital sign of a potential Agros group: we know that women do best with both credit and savings, basic building blocks of the Agros model. They save 4-5 times what a man will save, and are most likely to use the savings for child welfare and education.

Katarina, the eldest woman there, asks for the ball. She has five children. The two-year-old boy at Katarina’s skirts is one of her grandchildren. “We ate once a day in Guatemala,” she says, “I left Guatemala not for myself, but so that my children would not be killed, because (what was happening in Guatemala) was not their fault.” We ask what her hopes are for her children’s future. “My hopes are for my sons and their families, that they can make a living off the land.” It seems that we are holding that hope in our hands.

Mechora has to be coached forward to speak, and our interpreter has to lean over to hear her quiet voice: she has 14 children, she says. Then she remembers: it’s 15. The immediate response from the women in our group does not have to be translated: “Ai-yai-yai!” Everyone laughs, including Mechora, who covers her mouth.

The eldest son is 25 years old and in the United States, likely as an illegal immigrant, but no one asks. It’s a moot point anyway. Since the fiscal crisis of 2008, the remittances from Mexicans employed as day laborers in the States have dropped sharply. Illegal work in the US isn’t the solution it used to be, and it never breaks the cycle of poverty.

We coax stories out of a few more women and then it’s time to go. Someone points out that we haven’t touched any of the cookies. “Take them with you,” they urge. We glance at the table. The pile is likely worth a half-day’s wages. They won’t let us leave without taking two packages.

As we drive away in the van, I ask Julio César what the staff is looking for. “You don’t have to have experience in cooperative work to be successful in an Agros village,” he replies, “but you have to have the skills and the motivation to do so. Between this group and the two others, we will find enough families to make up the 6th Agros village in Mexico.”

The World Bank has given seed money for Mexico #6, but it’s about 25% of what Agros needs to complete the village. Others have given as well, but we’re not at full funding yet, and the Agros International board requires five years of full funding in order to approve a new village.

Breaking the cycle of poverty requires a long-term commitment from both the families and the Agros staff. The people will be selected, but before they can select land, they will have to wait until Agros has the resources. The last time I looked, we needed over $300,000 before we can give the Agros Mexico staff the go-ahead to begin the search for land.

That night, with many things going through my head, I can only hear Katarina’s final remark: “Sin la tierra, no tenemos nada.” Without land, we have nothing.

It wasn’t a plea. It was a simple and accurate assessment.