Agros Blog

We arrived in Honduras in various states of being. Six days later, each of us had been changed.

“We” was a group of graduate students from Harvard University, mostly from the Harvard Business School (HBS), but a few Kennedy Center grads who were working in Washington, DC, a medical student in Public Health who was taking HBS courses, and an Arts and Sciences grad student. The organizer of the group was Barry Rowan, an HBS alumnus and chief financial officer of a major telecomm corporation, who along with his wife Linda (a CPA), has been walking alongside HBS students for three years in an informal mentoring role. Brian Myrhe, a second year HBS student, who had travelled with us to Honduras a year ago on a similar trip, joined Barry and Linda on the leadership team.

The Rowan family supports Agros, and specifically the people of Bella Vista, an Agros village in the Santa Barbara region of northern Honduras. Barry and Linda’s son Mark came as well: his knowledge and love of the villagers and his fluency in Spanish were a wonderful part of our time. And, because that time together was to include some intergenerational dialogue, Barry and Linda invited their good friends Chuck and Katie Kovac.  Chuck and Barry were past associates in business, with very funny stories about the companies they “almost bought”.

Why the dialogue, and what were we there to do? As Barry put it, our mission was “to walk with Jesus as He walks with the poor.” That sounded plausible– if not somewhat ethereal– to most of us, since all of us on the trip would identify ourselves as Christians. But what, asked the participants, were we going to DO? As the Agros staff member who knew, I responded to the question in the best way I could: “We are there to be present to the villagers as they work their way out of poverty. To encourage them, to listen to their challenges, to celebrate their victories”.

At the end of a trip such as this one, people become more forthright. That’s when I discovered from several frank comments that my answer was the statement most likely to be seen as “a load of crap,” as one of the participants put it. “But that’s exactly what we did,” the same commentators added in hindsight, “we tried to be present, and we could see that it made a difference.”

These students are trained in the highest standards of business and policy. As expert investigators, they fanned out and quizzed the villagers. Those who had been to the villages before were drawing comparisons, using their observations from previous years. Brian, for instance, remembered that Piedra de Horeb villager José Inamorado had been slowly building on his one-room home, one concrete block at a time, as the profits from his farming and other work enabled him. Brian made a point of going to see the house a year later. José was proud to show him the second room and dedicated kitchen area, and he opened his wallet to show Brian the truck driving license he had successfully obtained. But José’s widest grin was reserved for the introduction of his wife, who had finally moved on to the village property once the home had been built. (A member of the village leadership council shared with me that there had been a marked increase in José’s attitude and interaction with the community once his wife had joined him: “And now”, he added, “his father-in-law actually comes to visit.”)

The next day, we visited Bella Vista, the newest village. We could not help but admire how they had cleared and planted this formerly wild mountainside with coffee and shade trees and plantains. Then we listened as Juan José leaned on his pando (a long-handled weeding implement with a curved blade), and told us how his life had changed since he had moved his family from Los Bordos, the slums of San Pedro Sula, a little over a year ago: “We are very happy, now, we are in good health. It’s peaceful here. My children, Kimberly Nicole, José, and Edmundo are on school vacation, so they would normally be here in the fields with me, but right now they are with their mami, preparing your lunch.” He paused, thinking about the contrast, about what his children would have been doing at this moment in Los Bordos, with the two parents away, working long hours. “This is my mission,” he said, his voice breaking ever so slightly, “to see them prosper.” He bowed his head and brought his hand up to cover his eyes, but he needn’t have: the rest of the fathers in our group were crying right along with him. It’s a mission we recognize, one in which we all need help: rich, poor, Ladino, Gringo, Central and North American.

Later, Barry remarked, “We have to become poor, recognize our own poverty, to walk with the poor, so that we can be in solidarity.” Juan José gave us a moment to do that.

We spent some time listening to the leadership of Brisas del Volcan, another Agros village, as they presented their progress on their annual plan. What stood out to me, however, were two simple statements from Odilla Zaldivar, the elected president of Mujeres en Acción, the Brisas women’s community bank. Like all of Agros’ women’s community banks, there is a compulsory savings element to the banking plan. Odilla stepped out from behind her peers to report on the various enterprises they had funded and said, “Since we founded the bank in September 2010, we have saved $400.” She paused for the inevitable applause, and seemed about to go back into the shadows, but stopped herself and added in an even stronger voice, “For myself, I have banked $90 in savings.” She nodded twice for emphasis and disappeared from view. Later, Joel Martinez, the director of Agros Honduras who is beginning to take on regional responsibilities for Agros beyond his own country, but knows each villager by name and history, told me: “Odilla is very shy; she rarely speaks in public. For her, just talking to all of you is a great personal breakthrough.”

While the Harvard students inquired about the interest rates, the most efficient land-use schemes, and the profit centers of various small enterprises, I was asking myself the question I ask every time I visit and see how the villagers, old and young, men and women, have changed: What is this power of transformation? Where it is located? How is it most effectively transmitted?

Joel answered my unspoken questions by telling me about his most recent discovery. He had recently insisted that each of the villages have all of their legal papers for land ownership drawn up by lawyers, witnessed and publically signed. Agros normally does that, but not necessarily all at once or in public meetings.

Joel and I were walking along the road that borders the property of Bella Vista, looking down at the houses that had been built since my last visit six month’s previous, with their small gardens and outdoor sinks.

“Ownership is very important,” he commented, “All of our human development is based on ownership. You can see those results here in front of you. When it is clear that you own something, you care for it differently, you participate in community differently.” I thought back to Juan José, whose entire mission is based on his responsibility to his children, on José Inamorado, whose pride of house and home had brought his family to believe in his mission to break the debilitating power of poverty, and on Ursula, whose evident pride in her first savings account had given her the power to interact socially in the public arena.

I thought of something I had read in the Bible, one of the sayings of Jesus: “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” (Luke 12:34) As a relatively rich person, I had always understood the verse to be a warning against materialism, an admonition to invest in spiritual things.

On my visit, I saw this differently. Jesus’ saying got turned on its head. The hearts and minds of the poor were being changed. They displayed dignity and firmness of resolve, all due to their heart being where their treasure was placed.

Returning from Honduras, our exit visas in hand, we entered the upside down kingdom, where the last come in first.