by Russ Rutter
NICA Fund investor and study tour participant
In January of 2008, my wife and I joined WCCN’s winter study tour to Nicaragua in order to learn more about the country and about the ways in which micro-loans help Nicaraguan people build better lives for themselves and their children. We paid a visit to an agency called Habitar, whose mission is to improve housing. There, our group watched a video that showed men, women, and children as, with minimal machinery, they built, moved, and piled up large wirework containers of rock called gabeones. The folks dwelling in this barrio had built gabeones, stretching for almost 500 yards down the riverbank, that hold back floodwaters—but that also bear witness to their desire to brighten the corner where they live.
We soon visited this barrio. It lies within sight of tall buildings, wide streets, and other features of a large city. Yet that same barrio has dirt streets and open sewers, and in fact had not, until recently, been identified on official city maps. One goal of Habitar has been to provide new houses of 360 square feet (say, 24’ long and 15’ wide), but these houses have proven too expensive to build in large numbers, and too large for the land on which they must be placed. Thus, Habitar also builds casas semillas or seed houses, (also called casitas) of 180 square feet. A casita, about the size of a modest room in one of our own homes, offers living space for up to 10 people. At one of these seed houses, a grateful woman told us, “Now I don’t have to watch where I walk to stay out of the mud, because I have both a hard floor and a roof.”
One house especially stands out in my memory. Its owner, the end borrower for a microloan, was not present, so her 18-year-old daughter showed us the improvement that this loan had made possible: a new toilet and shower in a backyard concrete shed. “What do you think of your neighborhood?” someone asked. “Lo quiero,” she said: “I like it.” When she attends university, she will realize her mother’s dream, which we saw dreamed again and again—to give children a chance to gain a better life through education. “Will you move away to attend university—or after you graduate?” someone else asked. “No,” she replied, “estoy acostumbrada aquí. Es mi hogar”: this is my home, the place I know.
How many of us, in such circumstances, would think—you supply the cliché—of “moving to the ‘burbs,” of “throwing it all over,” of “making it all new?” But no, this young woman will brighten the corner where she lives by gracing it with her presence after she graduates from university. As I left, I asked what better way there could be to brighten my own place than to become a small part of the effort to empower people like this young woman, as they continue to brighten the places where they live?
Photo: A family in the door of their casita. Photo by Michael Kienitz.
