Thursday, February 7, 2019, Delray Beach, Florida


From My Work-in-Progress Basket

The Challenge of Charity: My Failure to Help Marcus and Gabriela

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First I felt ashamed. Then I was hopeful. Then I was disappointed. Now I’m resigned.

Marcus and Gabriela came to work for us in 1999 after we built a second home in Nicaragua.

Marcus tended the landscaping. Gabriela kept the house. Antonio, my Nicaraguan partner, had recommended them to us. Their parents and siblings had worked for him.

They were very young at the time – in their late teens or early twenties. But they were already burdened with the responsibility of being parents. Gabriela’s husband worked in construction. Marcus’s wife worked part-time cleaning at a local restaurant.

Neither spoke a word of English, so we had to communicate in the very rudimentary Spanish I had at the time. They showed up every morning at 7:30 and worked, not energetically but dutifully, until 3:30. Then they were gone. In those early days, they left without saying goodbye.

They were shy and I did my best to relax them in that American sort of egalitarian way. But Nicaragua, like all countries, lives with its history. And the vestiges of Spanish colonialism still existed. Most upscale households in Nicaragua employ domestic workers, who are, I gathered from observation over the years, treated with respectful condescension.

I asked Antonio what I should pay them. He told me $150 a month.

“A month?”

“That’s the going wage,” Antonio assured me. ”If you pay them much more, it will cause problems in the community – for them now, and for you later on.”

I knew that he was right, but I wasn’t going to accept it…

I sat down with Gabriela and Marcus and told them that if they wanted to earn more money, I could give them jobs that fell outside of their normal duties. Marcus could give a room a new coat of paint. Gabriela could plant flowers along the side of the garden. That sort of thing.

And they could do these extra chores during their regular hours, I told them. (Which would work out just fine for me, because I didn’t really have eight full hours of work a day for them.)

I thought they would be delighted with the opportunity, but they were not. Nestor, a local friend and colleague, explained their lack of enthusiasm.

“They probably think you are trying to take advantage of them by asking them to do extra work,” he explained. “Even for extra money.”

“Huh?”

It was another vestige of the country’s history – in this case, the years it had existed as a Communist state.

But although they were reluctant to do “extra” work, they were not averse to asking for financial “help” with family problems – a sick parent, a leak in the roof, etc. I was more than happy to give them what they needed, but I insisted that they work the “extra” hours for the extra money.

For a few years, it seemed to be working well. They used the extra money they earned to buy themselves bicycles, cell phones, and clothing.

But when I had the opportunity to visit their homes, it was clear that the extra money had bought them all sorts of things that put them in the upper economic ranks of Limon, the hamlet they lived in. Still, like everyone else in the area, they were living in simple mud and wood shacks.

Despite free-market views to the contrary, this huge gap between their homes and mine bothered me. I had to find a way to increase their income yet again so they could at least have proper windows, doors, and floors.

So I came up with a solution that was popular among charity advocates at the time: I’d give them micro-loans to start their own side businesses. My idea was that they would follow the strategy I’ve recommended for years to other would-be entrepreneurs: Start small. Test the product and the pricing and the pitch as quickly and efficiently as possible. And then, if the business starts to take off, expand.

Considering their earlier reluctance to do extra work for pay, they were surprisingly open to the idea of having side businesses, businesses that could be run by an unemployed sibling or relative while they were at their regular jobs.

I told them, stupidly in retrospect, to choose the businesses they wanted to have. (I thought that this would provide them with the extra motivation they might need to succeed.)

Gabriela decided on a children’s clothing store. Marcus decided to open up a pulperia, a rustic version of a mini 7-Eleven, in front of his house.

Two very bad ideas! READ MORE

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Notes From My Journal

The Pain of Climbing Kilimanjaro and Other Humiliations

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Sunday, January 20, 2019

Rancho Santana, Nicaragua.- At 43, Bonner Paddock has already accomplished what, at 68, I have failed to accomplish three times: He has retired.

I was intrigued by his story, So I pressed him for details.

He told me that he had busied himself with “various projects” for several years, and ended up moving to Nicaragua. (He pointed out where his house sits, on the beach directly past Mag Rock.) He’d had a successful career as a marketing executive for a large western US beverage distribution company… and decided, one day, that he had enough money to retire.

I wondered how much “enough” was. As an employee of a brick-and-mortar business, even as superstar marketer, he could not have accumulated, at his age, the sort of money that most people feel comfortable retiring with.

I asked him if he knew of Mr. Money Mustache. He didn’t. I explained how Mr. MM had also quit working at an early age, and then wrote a blog about his ongoing attempt to live well on an income of only $30,000 a year.

Then I told him about my three failed attempts to retire, and how (with my therapist’s help), I had finally gotten to the point where I don’t beat myself up for doing what I obviously want to do.

We were there to talk about working together: FunLimon, my family’s community center in Nicaragua, and his charity, which helps children in developing countries with cerebral palsy and similar disabilities get the therapy and special education they need. (CP, by the way, currently affects more than 500,000 children worldwide.) The idea was that we (meaning FunLimon) were going to provide a facility and equipment for the programs. And he was going to find the people and the equipment to make it happen.

Bismarck and Number Three Son Michael, co-directors of FunLimon, had agreed in principle to the joint venture. I was there because everyone wanted my input.

I won’t get into the details of our discussion. What I liked, and very much, was that Bonner agreed with me on the challenges of charitable giving. He believes, as I do, that charity brings with it a great responsibility.

I asked him how he got involved in his charity. He told me it started when he climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. “No shit!” I exclaimed. “So did I.”

We slapped five. (I know. Don’t say anything.) And I told him my horror story.

“I was miserable, too,” he agreed. “Every step of the way.”

“I wrote an essay about it,” I said. “I’ll send it to you.”

He thanked me and then told me why he did it… which made me feel like an idiot for even mentioning how much I had suffered on the climb. I had done it because… I don’t know why. But he had done it for a reason. He had cerebral palsy, he told me. And he had done it to bring attention to the challenges that are faced every day by people like him. Turns out he was the first person with CP to climb Kilimanjaro unassisted.

Then, rather than offering me an essay on his experience, he promised to send me the documentary movie he’d made about it. And, if I wanted, his NYT bestselling book.

And if that were not enough humiliation, he went on to tell me that he had taken on another challenge to raise money for his charity: to be the first person with CP to complete the Ironman Kona triathlon.

I must admit that when Bismarck first mentioned his name to me, I was dubious. “Who gets to have a power name like Bonner Paddock?” I thought. So just to be sure, I googled him. And sure enough, he is the real thing.

So I am inspired and motivated to make our partnership work. And confident that Michael and Bismarck will work with him to make it everything it can be.

But I’m also simultaneously inspired and humiliated by how Bonner Paddock has thrice outdone me in a lifespan that is 25 years shorter than mine!

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Wednesday, January 16, 2019, Rancho Santana, Nicaragua


Notes From My Journal

If I Were in Charge of These Hills

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There is an unwritten rule when building your house on top of a hill: Keep the roofline below the treetops. When you violate this rule by setting a two-story structure at the very crest of the hill, you create an ugly and permanent blemish on the profile of that landscape. Any sensitive someone looking at the hill from afar would have his pleasure ruined – the vista’s soft and undulating strata of green interrupted by an ugly man-made block.

We have such violations in Nicaragua, along the Pacific coastline north of Rancho Santana. One of them is a restaurant called Mag Rock (short for Magnificent Rock), a barn-like, three-story structure perched at the top an outcropping of rock that rises above and juts out from the shoreline like a prow heading into the ocean.

Every time I look at it, I get annoyed. What kind of shallow, selfish, and aesthetically demonic person would do this. And stupid. You can get your view, even of both sides, without destroying the tree line. All you have to do is cut the structure into the hilltop. (See illustration below.)

So when Andy and Cecily said how much they enjoyed their lunch at Mag Rock, with its “mag-nificent” view and all, I had to say something.

“I’d like to burn it down,” is what I said.

Cecily decided to ignore me. Andy took me up. I explained my theory about building on hillsides.

“There should be a law,” I said.

“Maybe there is,” he said.

I like to think of myself as a classic Libertarian – i.e., that if forced to choose, I’d choose freedom over other social values. But when it comes to beauty – and let’s be real for a moment, sooner or later nearly every ideological view comes down to deeply held views about beauty – I’m a law-and-order monger.

“Lots of people think the world would be better if they were in charge ofeverything. I just want to be in charge of beauty,” I said.

“A Grand Minister of Aesthetics?” Andy offered.

“Exactly.”

I smiled and thought about it.

“It would be a big job,” I admitted. “I’d need help. Several ministries beneath mine. I’d need a Ministry of Landscape, a Ministry of Architecture…”
“A Ministry of Interior Décor?”

“Certainly. And a Ministry of Attire… and Jewelry… and Watches… and Cars…”

“With you at the helm?”

“Naturally. Someone has to set and approve the standards.”

“And would there be penalties? Fines perhaps?”

“Not tough enough. Corporal punishment. Torture and death.”

Seriously, just think about how much better – i.e., more beautiful – the world would be if we could do away with all the ugly things.

Forget about eliminating war and poverty for a moment. Think about how wonderful it would be to wake up each day to a world devoid of aesthetic abuse.

Think of all the things that would not be. Such as:

* Buildings built upon hilltops

* Brightly lit, quasi-Italian restaurants

* Boca-styled mansions

* Boca Raton itself

* Duck backs and comb-overs

* Gold-plated faucets

* Almost any fixture plated in gold

* Which is to say Trump Tower

* Earth shoes and tube socks

* Plastic furniture coverings

* Renoir reproductions

* Any sort of stretch material on unattractive bodies

The list goes on.

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Notes From My Journal

Dinner at Mad Dog Pizzeria

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Monday, January 14, 2019

Rancho Santana, Nicaragua.- Dinner last night was at Mad Dog’s, located about 20 minutes west of Rancho Santana on the coastal road by the turnoff to Guasacate.

It sits in the corner of a brand-new shopping mall that is said to have been built by “the Italian guy that owns that huge house with the giant blue dome on the beach.” I find that easy to believe. Both structures are wonders in bad taste.

Partly because it is new, but mostly because tourism in Nicaragua has all but disappeared since the political protests began early in 2018, the mall has only this one tenant. (And three cars in the parking lot last night.)

It’s called a pizzeria. And although it does serve pizza, one can see that it’s really a wannabe restaurant, with a menu that includes appetizers and entrees, as well as wines, beers, and desserts.

The layout is unfortunate: one oversize room, heavy on the marble, topped by a ceiling fresco of the sky and ducks (of all things). And the place is lit up like an operating room.

I’ve seen restaurants like this in some of the smaller cities of Italy. Just last year, we had dinner with Peter and Jill at one in Salerno. We would have never thought of entering based on its appearance. But it was recommended confidently (and correctly, as it turned out) by a pretty young woman on the street as having the best pizza in town. But that was Italy. This is Nicaragua.

Andy and Cecily were still on their way, coming back from a day-long adventure that included climbing the Mombacho volcano, visiting a coffee plantation, having a late lunch in Granada (the most perfectly preserved Spanish Colonial city in the Americas, according to UNESCO), and then zip-lining. (“We never got to take the boat tour of the isletas of Lake Granada,” Cecily complained. “We ran out of time.”)

So there were seven of us for dinner at Mad Dog’s, including my sister Gaby, who has lived in Rome for 30 years; Cecily and Andy, who met while working for me 30 years ago; Tommy, my friend of nearly 60 years; and Tommy’s 180-pound, 11-year-old son Billy, who was halfway through a warm-up pizza when we arrived.

The waitress spoke some English, which would have been unheard of 20 years ago when I first came to Nicaragua. She was far from fluent, but she was familiar with such idioms as, “I’ll check it out.” (I wondered about the history of that.)

The menu was odd. Light on salads and vegetables, heavy on pizzas, and featuring six entrees, half of which were not available. I chose the pork belly, which turned out to be a mistake. But everyone else’s meals were reported to be “good” to “very good.” Tommy said his lamb was the best he’ ever had. And “little” Billy finished his pizza and ordered a few tacos to boot.

As near as I can recall, the dinner conversation was mostly about nothing. But there were two discussions that I did enjoy.

One was about the difference between sweet potatoes and yams. (Most yams – and almost all sold in US supermarkets –  are actually a type of sweet potato, softer and more orange than the harder type that retains the name. True yams are entirely different. They come from a plant that is native to Asia and Africa, and are sold only in specialty shops.)

The other one was a brief argument about the meaning of the word “Palladian.” I had come across it during my daily exercise of looking for new or unfamiliar words. The reference I used defined it as somehow related to the goddess Athena – in particular, as “something that gives symbolic protection,” like the many statues of Athena that you see all over the classical world. But Cecily thought it had to do with architecture.

I looked it up – and we were both right. Palladian architecture is a 17thcentury neoclassical style – symmetrical and balanced – that was inspired by the work of the 16thcentury Venetian architect Andrea Palladio (1508-1580).

It looks like this:

Driving back to the ranch in the blackness, the car’s suspension system rattling from the hard dirt and rock road, I thought about how lucky I am to be having ordinary dinners in such extraordinary places with people I’ve known for so many years.

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Notes From My Journal

Thanksgiving Morning in Nicaragua

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Thursday, November 22, 2018

This year’s to Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade featured a musical vignette from Prom, a new Broadway play that opened to great reviews. My niece, Izzy McCalla has a leading role in it. They were scheduled to be on TV at 8:15. At 8:00 we turned on the TV in the den of our house here, but we couldn’t locate it. So we rushed down to the clubhouse, begged the workers to turn on the bar TV and then Number Three Son Michael frantically searched through their larger selection of channels looking for the international channel that would be carrying it.
At 8:14 he was still searching. Everyone — including from Helen my mother in law to Francis my grandson — was yelling at him. “Hurry!”
Then, at 8:15 exactly, the image of Izzy and her costar appeared on screen. We had found it at the very moment it began….!
So we saw the whole thing, thanking our lucky stars and bragging to the restaurant workers ….Esa es nuestra prima! Esa es nuestra sobrina!

 

It’s Thanksgiving – a Good Time to Count Your Many Blessings

Nicaragua

Your wealth:

You haven’t hit the Forbes list of wealthiest humans, but you have enough money to put clothes on your back, a roof over your head, and food in your stomach. “The Pilgrims made seven times more graves than huts,” H.U. Westermayer reminds us. “No Americans have been more impoverished than these, who, nevertheless, set aside a day of thanksgiving.”

However meager your financial assets are now, they greatly exceed those of the great majority of the world’s population. So be thankful for that.

Your health:

You have aches. You have pains. You may have illness and infirmity. But if there are times during the day when you can enjoy yourself by yourself or with other people… you have something to be thankful for.

Your wisdom:

There are so many mysteries, so many unanswered questions. You know only a fraction of what you’d like to know, but you understand the most important things. You realize that of the gifts of life, three are most important.

* Consciousness: the greatest natural gift — your innate and inalienable (see Today’s Word, below) ability to experience the world around you, to notice and to appreciate a million possible things.

* Connections: the limitless possibilities you have to have good and loving moments with your family, your friends, and with virtually everyone you have the chance to speak to every day.

* Creativity: the potential of your imagination — the capacity to do what you want with your mind, which is, after all, where your life is located.

Be thankful for that.

Your work:

For many, work is a chore. But it doesn’t have to be that way for you. You have the ability to find work you love, or love the work you do. It’s about freedom — the freedom to desist from seeing yourself as a victim and to take responsibility for your future, regardless of whatever disadvantages you have now or obstacles that lie before you.

Be thankful for that, too.

Oxygen:

Each breath is another gift.

Be thankful.

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Notes From My Journal

I’m back at Rancho Santana for Thanksgiving week…

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Tuesday, November 20, 2018

Nicaragua – It’s a beautiful time to be here. The ocean is steel blue and the hills are myriads of green. Because of the recent political troubles, I was initially reluctant to bring the extended family. But day-by-day, homeowners are returning, feeling more assured that it is safe.

It took nearly 20 years after the Sandinista revolution of 1978-79 before gringos were willing to venture down here and buy property. It had been peaceful for more than 10 years at that time. But word traveled slowly back then.

Today, thanks to Facebook and Instagram, news – good and bad – travels at the speed of light. And that is why the resort is nearly half-filled already. If things continue to stay quiet, it’s possible that the resort will be back to full bookings by the middle of next year.

This morning, we stopped by FunLimon, our family’s community center, to watch Rancho Santana’s baseball team compete in the regional playoffs. As you can see from the photos below, the parking lot and the bleachers were overflowing. Despite the tension that still exists from the government’s lethal crackdown on protesters, people are trying to get back to the luxury of living in this beautiful place.

 

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Miscellaneous Essays

Nobody Owes You Anything: From Gardener to Entrepreneur

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The average Nicaraguan is born in a shack with a dirt floor. He earns less than $15 a week.

Enrique, my gardener in Nicaragua, does much better than that. But he is still, by U.S. standards, poor. Since I am in daily contact with Enrique when I’m there, I often think about how I can help him earn more money. He wants more material goods — and who can blame him, when he sees how “well” we gringos live (in person and on television)?

Several years ago, I was tempted to give him the few thousand dollars it would have taken to make his house one of the nicest in the hamlet where he lives. But I knew from experience that it would do him no good. It would go as quickly as it came. Given money always does.

Worse, it would reinforce the very bad idea that money comes from me to him, instead of from his own labor and ingenuity.

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Miscellaneous Essays

The Ten Commandments of Charity

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Down the road going north from my vacation home in Nicaragua, you pass two hamlets, both bearing the same name: Limon.

Most of the families that live there have at least one member who works for Rancho Santana, the residential real estate development my partners and I started 13 years ago. Some work as guards, some as groundskeepers. Others work as housekeepers or gardeners. Still others have found employment as bartenders, waitresses, lifeguards, plumbers, carpenters, mechanics, electricians, or laborers.

The homes they live in are two- or three-bedroom wood-framed or clay-block structures. They travel to and from work by bus or bicycle. They get their water from community wells. Their children go to local schools. When they get sick, they get medical treatment at the clinic, which is financially supported by Rancho Santana.

It is a simple life but not without its pleasures. There are baseball games and soccer matches on Saturdays, church-sponsored events on Sundays, and many birthday parties and weddings and baptisms.

And ever since Rancho Santana erected a tower three years ago, everyone has a cell phone.

When I first came to Rancho Santana, these same families were living in abject poverty. Their houses were shacks put up on dirt floors. Their diet was rice and beans. And there was no medical care available less than an hour’s bus ride away.

The reason things are better now has nothing to do with international development agencies, government initiatives, or non-profit organizations.

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Miscellaneous Essays

Why People in Need Should Be Treated Like Children

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The following is an interview that was published November 2, 2011 in The Palm Beach Letter. The subject: charity.

Ellen: In the office the other day, I heard Tom say, “Mark doesn’t believe in charity.” Is that true?

Mark: If I ever said I don’t believe in charity, I misspoke. I believe in charity. But I also believe that charity can be dangerous.

Ellen: Dangerous? How?

Mark: Charity has the potential to create dependency, destroy initiative, and promote entitlement. If you give a beggar a five-dollar bill every day for nine days, then give him one dollar on the tenth day… chances are, he’ll ask, “Where’s my other four dollars?”

Ellen: That’s pretty cynical.

Mark: I don’t think so. Cultural economists tell us that human populations tend to do what they get rewarded for doing. When you provide unwed mothers or unemployed workers or homeless people with substantial financial subsidies, you are, in effect, rewarding them for such behaviors. You are creating an ever-expanding culture of people who feel entitled to stay pregnant, jobless, and homeless – and be paid for it.

Ellen: You seem to have a dim view of human nature.

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