in the mud.

in all of the talking, visiting, analyzing, and planning in the informal settlements that Habitat works in, there has been one emergent theme that has surprised me more than all others. and one that keeps coming up. and sticking around. and leaving a mess. mud.

like I mentioned in previous posts, the neighborhood streets after a rainstorm are decidedly difficult to travel. since the streets are largely unpaved, standing water and mud very often dictate what families can do and access: whether they can send their kids to school, or make it to the corner store and back, or get to work on time. one family I worked with chose to send their 5 year old to kindergarten in the afternoon specifically because it seemed to allow more time for the streets to dry out (from a previous day or evening of rain) and therefore consistently get him to school. you can see a bit of the pedestrian experience in Santa Fe from the photos below.

as part of building or re-building a neighborhood, addressing flooding and drainage and mud makes a lot of sense. people need safe and reliable pathways to walk and transport their families. settlements need sustainable ways to drain excess water (and sewage!) from their homes and yards. but in settlements that are in such urban, dense cities, it’s easy to forget that these areas haven’t gotten there yet. that mud is still a ruling force here. the reality is that the poverty I see in these settlements resembles (from a U.S. perspective) a far more rural area: leaning shacks, rambling, precarious structures, roaming animals, piles of metal scraps and building materials and trash. several of the American volunteers I worked with made these same observations, that the neighborhoods have a distinctly rural feel to them, at least coming from what we’ve seen in U.S..

the poverty we see in U.S. urban areas has a distinctly urban feel to it: homelessness on the streets, crowded and under-serviced high rise buildings, neighborhoods emptied by foreclosure and left with rundown family homes. as far as I can tell, the urban poverty here in Argentina is far less institutionalized, much more informal, and inherently self built. even once a family has managed to built a safe and satisfactory home for themselves, paving a neighborhood is a difficult task to “self-build,” no matter how many neighbors you involve.

in the case of Hábitat, the focus, the knowledge, the volunteer base, is all focused around building housing and community and the way those two concepts and realities are intrinsically linked. which is not to say that asphalt and street lights and running water and municipal sewage and police presence aren’t significant, because of course they’re crucial! but as one NGO with limited resources, a limited focus is key. I’ve bumped up against this limited focus a couple of times this week, prompting me to think about the muddiness (pun intended) of working with informality on this kind of scale.

the first was a professional in the international development field who was entirely taken aback that Hábitat isn’t partnering with any other governmental organizations or international agencies to do “slum upgrading” as we work on housing projects. I’m not sure if this is a realistic option, or how Habitat would want to approach this kind of work, but I’m eager to find out.

the second conflict around our limitations comes with our volunteers. the Tienda Hábitat program provides technical, architectural assessment to families who want to make progressive improvements to their homes, all free of charge. mainly families want to add a new bedroom, repair their roof, or build a bathroom within their home. even when proposed projects are small, like repairing a leaky roof, the task of gearing up can seem daunting because of the informality of the area overall or the precariousness of the house, especially when looking at the situation from the point of view of a detailed, exacting architect. here’s an example of the designs we’re using:

I have one technical volunteer who’s feeling this dilemma particularly now, as we gear up to complete “technical portfolios” for some of the families before the end of the year. he expressed that he feels some of the designs we’re doing are futile or unnecessary, because it’s unrealistic that the families will be able to make these changes, for structural or financial or social reasons. the point stands that we never know for certain what a family will be able to take on, whether now or in the future. and we’ve been surprised by the successful, effective home improvements that the program has spurred, especially when we provide a family with a solid set of plans and suggested improvements. so we keep plugging, offering the most formal guidance that we can, in the most informal of settings. as I was explaining to him this perspective, flitting between my vocabulary of  idealism and human rights in English and my technical vocabulary in Spanish, I couldn’t help but think that we were a bit stuck in the mud. 

so there’s a reason this keeps coming up, I think. a lesson to be learned here. because these neighborhoods (and the work within them) are complicated and unresolved and muddied in so many ways, but we haven’t given up! the mud is still around because the work is still happening and the families are still committed and we haven’t left for higher ground just yet.