Extreme poverty eradication projects ill-adapted to people’s needs. Colloquium ” Extreme poverty is Violence. Breaking the Silence. Searching for Peace” at UNESCO House Thursday 26th January 2012

Ms. NGUYEN Hoang is a social worker. She has worked with a group of families who used to live and work on a public garbage dump in a southern province of Vietnam. Their project includes community activities and alternative livelihood programs as the public dump is being closed down, relocation and access to housing, schooling of the children, prevention of sexual abuse and human trafficking

In our project, we try to build on what we understand from the families. Local authorities and organizations we partner with see our project as a model that can be applied in other places. However, they tend to focus on what looks good from the outside.
For example, they admire the nice houses which the families formerly living at the garbage dump were moved to; they admire the charity school we built for the children – these children could not register at public school because they do not have birth certificates, or they are older than other children in the same classes, or because their parents do not have money to pay for school expenses. These partner organizations are happy enough that there are no longer people living at the garbage dump and that some of the people found work at the company that got the concession from the city to recycle the garbage. Local media show all these good results. What they do not mention is how much the families themselves do to overcome their difficulties.

In reality… All the new houses have been built in the same way according to a _ model for a family with two or three children — including a living room and one bedroom, plus a space for a kitchen and a toilet. Each house is 32 square meters in total. But most of the families have up to 7 children. One has 9 children. Many of them have grandparents staying with them. To save money, the houses were built in a way that every four houses share common walls and ventilation. Noises in one house can be heard in the other three as if people were sitting in the same room. As a result, the nice looking little houses are not quiet and offer very little privacy or security. Having a lock on the front door is of no use when someone can climb in from the back.
When the families said that the houses did not meet their needs, the project partner told them they had no right to ask for more, because they got these houses at a very cheap price. People started to say that they would like to go back and live at the garbage dump because it was better there.”
Why would the families prefer their old shacks in a bad smelling environment to these new houses?
To stop working at the garbage dump was one of the criteria for the families to move to the new house. Since not all of the families found a way to earn their living other than at the dump, some would go back there to work in the night time. To improve their livelihood, some families raise chickens or ducks. Having no garden at their new houses, they turned their bedroom into an animal pen and the whole family now sleeps in the living room.
The lack of privacy and the cramped living space leads to tensions and even violence among families and neighbors. They did not fight like this before. They say that as a community they felt like a family before, now they find it hard to trust each other.
Before, they used to visit each other and have fun together. Because the shacks were not as close to one another, there were less people getting into their family life. The people say that there is not as much unity among the neighbors as before.

Learning from this experience, our organization now plans a new project for housing the 70 families: We want to plan the new houses together with the families, to take into account the family size for the allocation of square meters. And we want to ask the families to help with the building of their house, so that they have a say at every step of the process. There has to be space between the houses, a garden area, a playground for the children, a community center and a plaza with benches under trees where they can meet and play together. The local authorities have already made available 2 hectares for this project. In response to the tense atmosphere among the people, we hope to be able to create a group of what we call “peace makers”. This group would consist of people from the community and staff of our organization.
I dream that the people of the community be the project creators, implementers and monitors themselves. And I hope that through this project people can rebuild trust and peace together. I expect from myself and my co-workers that whatever we do with the families comes from love, trust and honesty.