DAY 2 OF RITU’S DIARY

Worldwide, over a billion people … 1 out of every 6 human beings worldwide … live in extreme poverty … less than $1/day. What does living on a $1 a day look like? Ritu Sharma Fox, President and Co-founder of Women Thrive Worldwide, traveled to Nicaragua, one of the poorest countries in the Americas, and spent a weekend trying to live on $1 a day. $1 USD equals about 20 Cordovas, and an estimated 831,000 Nicaraguans live on less than 20 Cordovas/day.

Women Thrive Worldwide is a nonprofit that develops, shapes and advocates for policies that remove barriers and improve economic opportunity for women living in poverty, with a focus on USA international assistance and trade policy. A Dollar-A-Day donation program is one of the many programs supported by Women Thrive Worldwide.

DAY 2 - SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2008 - RITU’S DIARY
8:30 AM - Betilde del Salmeron Rojas

Betilde has a husband and 5 children ages 23, 22, 19, 16 and 14. When she heard about FEMUPROCAN’s work organizing women, she became curious and began to attend meetings. Not long after she became a member of the cooperative.
 
Betilde describes her typical day as “light.” I’ll let you be the judge of that: She wakes up at 5 am, lights the fire, prepares coffee, washes the corn, hand prepares tortillas, cooks breakfast for her family and packs food for those who work outside in the fields, cleans, washes the dishes and does the laundry. She then attends to her youngest children, feeds the family’s animals, and leaves lunch for the workers on her plots. THEN, she says she goes to “work.”  I’m not sure what all the previous activity is….
 
Betilde does not own any land, but rents the plot she works on from a neighbor.  She lives on far less than 20 Cordovas a day. During the rainy season she has food for her family and is sometimes able to sell her surplus crops for income. In the dry season, however, she has almost nothing to eat or sell, and receives support from other FEMUPROCAN women, and from a government program called “Zero Hunger.” The assistance consists of 5 hens and a rooster, a cow, and a pig. This is helpful, but doesn’t fundamentally alter the poverty she is in.
 

11:00 AM – Leticia Manzaranes Lanza

Next we arrive at the house of Leticia Manzaranes Lanza, one of the founding members of FEMUPROCAN. Like Leticia, she lives on less than 20 Cordovas a day.

Leticia’s typical day is one of hard work and hard choices. She wakes up at 4 am and fixes and eats breakfast. She must always choose between two essentials: Rice OR Beans? Tortillas OR oil?  She can rarely buy both. Next she feeds the animals, cleans the house and works with a day-laborer in her plot of vegetables. She goes to bed at 9 pm, and because her children are grown, she says she has fewer caretaking responsibilities than before. She smiles and tells me that Nicaraguan women are the first ones to wake up and the last ones to go to bed.

Prior to FEMUPROCAN, Leticia tells us, most women were left out of cooperatives. 

When FEMUPROCAN was founded many husbands resisted letting their wives become involved, a mentality she called “machista” (“sexist”). In fact, Leticia’s own husband left her because of her involvement in FEMUPROCAN. Nowadays she is thrilled to see young husbands encourage their wives to work at the cooperatives.
 

2:00 PM – At the Market: What Can a Dollar Really Buy?

That afternoon, we stop by an outdoor market on our way back to lunch in the town of Terrabona. We calculate the cost of our food and transportation and conclude that I have lived on a little over two dollars a day for the last two days. Still, I am curious to see how much a dollar could buy for women like Leticia and Betilde. This is what I am able to buy in the market:

• 1 very fresh tortilla, hot off the pan—what one very poor person might eat for an entire day.
• 400g of rice—enough for a family of six to have 1?2 cup of rice each.
• 1 500g bottle of purified water—1/6 of the amount a person needs in one day. Clean water is simply not possible for women like Leticia and Betilde.
• 1 egg—enough for one person, splitting an egg in half is pretty pointless
• 1 small piece of candy—with the 50 Centavos I had left over

That’s it. Not enough to meet one person’s daily nutritional needs, let alone a family of four, five or six. I think about my two boys and how I could possibly feed them with 20 Cordovas a day.

And this is just food: if medicine or clothing or bus fare are needed, women and their children will have to forgo food for a while.  It makes me feel pretty upset that this kind of poverty is still going on in our world.

7:00 PM — Final Thoughts

Back in Managua I sit down to reflect on the last two days. So many things struck me about the experience.

The first is how critical it is that women living in poverty be organized into a group. Alone they cannot access credit, land, or help.  Together they support one another, empower one another, share with one another, and teach one another. 

The second is how tremendous the obstacles are that the women of Terrabona face. At first sight, many of the women we met didn’t fit the stereotypical image of a poor person: they were far from emaciated, had on clean clothes and beautiful clear skin. But as soon as we delved even a little into the details of their lives, we saw how extreme their poverty was. We saw that every day was a constant struggle to eat.

Which leads me to my third reflection: how truly incredible FEMUPROCAN’s work is. They are taking women with almost no means and giving them the loans, training, and support they need to improve their lives. Even more importantly, they are doing it in a way that is sustainable, organic, and viable for their communities. It is so  vital that our international assistance support local groups like FEMUPROCAN, groups that know their communities and know what they are doing.

Finally, I was moved by how much women here help one another, giving each other things they grow, even if they themselves are surviving on very limited means. The eggs, tomatoes, peppers, onions, and maize for tortillas all come from their fields or in-house (literally in the house) chicken farms. It is the only way many families in extreme poverty survive.  Teach a woman to fish (or grow tomatoes or peppers or corn), and everyone really does eat.