Gettin´ Busy (finalmente)

After meeting the conflict resolution program director on Monday, Nick, Steph and I finally moved out of Managua and in the direction of the rural community we will call home for the rest of the summer. Rio Blanco´s blossoming conflict resolution program is now in its capacity building stage so the prospective mediators are engaged in daily training sessions while finishing touches are being put on the office space that will be used to house the mediations.

After much pestering and cajoling on my part, I managed to convince our office to let me tag along with one of our field officers as he motorcycled to rural fincas, or farms, to meet with clients serviced by Nitlapan. We left on his trusty steed bright and early at 8am and didn´t make it back til 7pm.

When Nitlapan advertises itself as a provider of rural legal services, it means very, very rural. We drove for about an hour and a half into the countryside, parked when we ran out of road, and then proceeded to hike hours from finca to finca to meet with the clients.

While my work centers on the conflict resolution program, Nitlapan provides a range of programs from helping rural farmers secure land titles to providing micro-loans with more favorable interest rates than those offered by banks. On this visit I was able to see the breadth of Nitlapan´s activities in action. The field officer I was tailing, Mario, presented one woman with the deed to the land her family has called home and farmed for decades.

Nitlapan helped her create a strong case and compelling application to finally be granted title, an emotional moment this picture fails to capture as she did not seem too comfortable being photographed.

At other farms Mario, an agricultural engineer, assessed the effectiveness of the use of the loan money and offered technical advice to the farmers to improve efficiency. While Mario conducted his business, I was charged with interviewing the farmers and their families to assess the nature of conflicts that may eventually appear before the conflict resolution mediators.

This served the dual purpose of helping the mediators anticipate the types of problems that they will likely face while also advertising the existence of the program, a task made very difficult given how spread out the communities are (evidenced by this pic which has a machete wielding young farmer guiding us on the one hour hike to the next finca in search of a client who was not there!).

Since we have not made our final move to the Rio Blanco offices, my interviewing was not guided by the questionnaire that supposedly exists. Rather, the interviews were informal conversations during which I fielded questions about the program and listened to the problems facing the families. A common theme that emerged was land disputes between neighbors. Litigating these in the courts was inconvenient both for the distance the parties in conflict had to travel and for the wait time before a decision was rendered (anywhere from 3-10 years). I was repeatedly told that given these constraints the parties often resorted to violence. Clearly the need for this conflict resolution to get underway sooner rather than later is tied to much more than my desire to get busy.

Nick, Steph and I will be making our final move to the small town of Rio Blanco on Monday and our days (we are told) will consist of travelling to fincas and interviewing the families. One take away from my interviewing experiences this week are that we should delicately find a way to interview the husbands and wives (and children) in isolation from each other. This was not easy to do this week and as such the topic of domestic abuse did not arise, even though Nitlapan officers are adamant that this is a serious problem. Perhaps having Steph along for the interviews will make speaking to the women alone easier.

I have to head to the end of the week briefing but hopefully next time I write it´ll be from Rio Blanco!

Til then,

John