Dear friends: 
     Pascuala Gomez travels for three hours every day to San Bernardo, carrying a plastic bucket that she hopes to fill with shrimp heads. If the dump truck comes and she fills her bucket, then she turns around and travels three hours back home to her village of El Triunfo. 
     Gomez belongs to a family that used to earn its living from the sea, harvesting fish and shrimp from the wide Gulf of Fonseca that borders on Honduras, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. Yet in the last decade many of the rich estuaries of the gulf have been taken over by giant shrimp farms, and the access of poor families to their old fishing grounds has been drastically reduced. The giant shrimpers, who have converted shrimp into the third largest foreign currency earner for Honduras, place armed guards around ponds they have built in what used to be mangrove swamps. The guards often open fire with their AK-47s on the small fisherfolk. At least ten people have been killed in recent years, including one already this year. 
     So Gomez is today a scavenger, travelling to where a truck from a shrimp packing plant arrives to dump the shrimp heads that have been cut from the harvested shrimp. While the shrimp bodies are frozen and flown off to seafood restaurants in the U.S. and Europe, the plant sends the shrimp heads away to be dumped in a landfill. That's where Pascuala Gomez waits every day, along with more than 200 other women and children who flock to the dump site to harvest what others consider garbage. 
     Once she's filled her bucket--at times getting lucky and discovering some "trash fish" among the shrimp heads--she starts the journey home. Back in her village she sells some of the shrimp heads for one lempira a pound (about 13 pounds for a dollar) to her neighbors. The rest she fries for dinner for her husband and four children. 
     The situation in which Pascuala Gomez finds herself today is the product of U.S. economic policies in the 1980s. The U.S. Agency for International Development came to Honduras and pushed shrimp farming as a way for poor Honduras to get ahead in the new global market. The AID claimed shrimp farming would provide a good model of "sustainable development"--an economic activity that wouldn't damage the environment and would benefit all the population. Yet after hundreds of acres of mangrove swamps have been bulldozed and more than ten coastal residents killed--with no one arrested or charged in any of the deaths--people like Pascuala Gomez are poorer than ever. With traditional small-scale fishing under attack by the giant transnational companies that today control many of the estuaries, small fishing families have to find other means to survive. Although some can get jobs in the shrimp packing plants, many are just out of luck. But they can always eat shrimp heads.  
     Having lived in the region for more than 13 years now, we've come to appreciate that "sustainable development" is not easy to carry out. The increasingly globalized marketplace discriminates against the poor and damages the environment. Yet many of the approaches pushed by AID--which is financed by our tax dollars--only make the situation worse. Promising development and yet delivering economic dependence, AID has historically exacerbated class differences, helping the rich to get richer and the poor to have shrimp heads to eat. 
     On the other hand, we've worked with several nongovernmental church organizations that do an admirable job of working with poor people to carry out long-term development. It's not easy to do, and no one does it perfectly, but we've visited countless communities where people's lives have really changed for the better, where the poor have taken charge of their destiny, refusing to be objects of someone else's history and insisting on being subjects of their own. Where it has worked well, development has meant helping the poor to be empowered to make their own decisions about their own communities. However well-intentioned, outside do-gooders just aren't helpful in the long run, whether they want to build latrines or houses, pull teeth or drill for water. While outside assistance can be useful and even critical, the important decisions must be made by the people themselves. 
     I got to know Pascuala Gomez in November while researching an article about the social impact of the giant shrimp farms. I interviewed her and several other women as they waited for the dump truck to show up one day. I spent three days interviewing people involved in the issue, ranging from environmentalists to the widows of assassinated fishermen to the owner of the country's largest shrimp farm. 
     Earlier in the month I'd spent a week visiting communities in the west of the country where the Christian Development Commission (CCD) works. CCD is the agency with which Lyda works, and they asked me to photograph several community-based development projects with which CCD had cooperated, in order to provide photos of the work to European and U.S. church agencies that fund the work. 
     I enjoyed the trip, except for the afternoon when I got my jeep stuck in river. It was a rather traumatic experience, as the two oxen we borrowed from a nearby farm couldn't pull the vehicle out. And the water was rising. Finally, well after dark and with the jeep completely flooded, we obtained a tractor from a nearby sugar plantation that pulled it out. It ran for about five minutes before the flooded fuel lines squelched the motor. To make a long story short, it ended up costing about $1200 to fix the ruined diesel fuel injector system. But that's not the point of this letter... 
     The community I had crossed the river to visit was called Gracias a Dios--Thanks to God. It was a village of 40 poor families that had invaded some unused farm land almost a decade ago. They turned that farmland into a productive cooperative, feeding their families, discovering some of the abundant life that God promised them. That's why they named the village as they did. 
     Yet they've also faced opposition. Several times they faced down army troops that tried to drive them off the land at the request of the wealthy landowner. Their leaders were jailed. Yet over the years they persevered. And through it all they had the help of CCD, which provided them with legal assistance, organizational training, agricultural workshops, small business credit, and plain old physical accompaniment.  
     I walked through the community's fields, admiring the food crops they've grown, and drank lemonade in the shade of the houses they've built. The lemonade was made with water from a system they installed to bring water from a spring four kilometers away.  
     CCD helped with the harvest and the houses and the water system. People in the community told me they were thankful for that assistance, but they were clear that the projects had been conceived and carried out by them. They were proud of what they'd done. 
     Most projects that receive support from agencies like AID have huge signs listing all the politicians and agencies involved in sponsoring the project. Not so in communities like Gracias a Dios, where the most important sign of change can be seen in quality of life for the people who live there, as well as in the ownership they feel for the process of change. 
     As U.S. taxpayers, you helped provoke the changes that make Pascuala Gomez feed fried shrimp heads to her children. As members of the United Methodist Church, which supports CCD's ministries, you also helped make possible the bountiful crops, decent houses, and healthy children in Gracias a Dios. 
     On behalf of the people of Gracias a Dios, many thanks. And for your special encouragement of our ministries here, even more thanks. Know that we keep you and your ministries in our prayers. 
     We're doing well. We celebrated Abi's ninth birthday party earlier this month. She got a 20-inch green iguana for her birthday. She's named it "Liz." 
     In the next month we've got to get out our next newsletter, which will help you catch up on some of the changes in our lives. We'll be in touch. Shalom.