Book Review: Living Poor

Living Poor: A Peace Corps Chronicle

Moritz Thomsen

Thomsen is a 40 something Agriculture volunteer in Ecuador. After a few medical false-starts, he settles into the quaint little town of Rio Verde and thus goes the process of completing his service. As a volunteer, his projects (the size and scale) and his willingness to use his living allowance to help fund them and his neighbors astounds me. This book came at the perfect time as I am starting to see the deeper levels of relationships, both good and bad, in my own community and starting to become disillusioned by the mechanism and paradigm of poverty while also coming to grips with the dynamic and two-way  street that is development. As a Volunteer you hear stories about PCVs who were practically adopted, but this glosses over the subtle (and not so) requests for money and gifts and attempts to put a pricetag on the gringo. Thomsen describes this perfectly as the “search for a patron:” for someone who will take care of you, who will do what you have been trained to think you can’t-support yourself. I laughed and cried throughout the struggles of the chicken project, the fishing projects and the trials and tribulations of the co-op. And the eventual financial understanding of the community, where a dollar is a fortune, is heartbreaking but familiar. There are hilarious moments interspersed as well, like machete fights, miscommunications, overturned fishing boats and of course the rides into the city crammed into a truck with livestock inside and on top of the vehicle. Thomsen does make a profound difference in the lives of Ramon, Orestes, and Vinceta, his co-op corps, nit at what price? As he says, “living poor is like being sentenced to exist in a stormy sea in a battered canoe, requiring all your strength to stay afloat, living wave to wave.” We are taught as Americans and PCVs to develop, to improve, to better people. But it’s impossible to do this equally for everyone. So benefits are unevenly distributed and then the jealousy and isolation begins. Like the city kid who is shunned by his own for going to college, the corp co-op members are threatened and almost destroyed by petty rumors and exasperated fueds. The people will truly be happy when they find peace and success within their own culture and customs. Projects fail and flounder because people are afraid of change, afraid to trust, and afraid and threatened by what change might bring: the audacity of hope is crushed by the comfortable familiarity of abject, but communal, poverty. There’s no way the people in Rio Verde or Thomsen could have known the social consequences before they happened but it is heartbreaking to read how the co-op general store suffers from theft and the storekeeper can’t help himself from buying too many new things.  There is Ramon, who uses his money to take his wife out of the town to give birth in a hospital and start a life properly nourished and nurtured (Protein deprivation for the 1^st 5 yearsof life permanently destroys up to 25% of human intelligence). We are taught to think this should be the norm; that with new money, everyone will be Ramon and invest in health and education. But the truth is that the Ramons, who are the shunned city kids (to beat the metaphor into the ground), are the exception and the material luxury goods and status symbols are too tempting in addition to a lack fo experience and knowledge of how to invest and save for long-term planning. I knew development was hard and dangerous, but this 1^st hand account of a PCV stands as a warning and a guide for my own roller-coaster of feelings towards paradigm of effective and sustainable change.