Datelines
Steif, Mary C. Turck, Lincoln S. Bates, Joan Conrow, and William
DATE LINES Campesina Fights Hunger and Its Causes TEGUCIGALPA, HONDURAS Elvia Alvarado is a fifty-year-old Honduran peasant woman with a second-grade education who, like many campesinas, was...
...A lot of people are concerned about this problem," says Connor, "and we're an outlet where they can be personally involved and see immediate results...
...There's also another avenue...
...The homeless are out there anyway," notes one architect...
...And DOT officials admit that, given the highly competitive nature of the flightseeing industry, if one company kicks over the traces of its helicopter master plan, all the others are likely to follow suit...
...The government should do better with public housing," says Connor...
...An eighth of the cases result from drug use, and about a tenth from AIDS-infected blood transfusions...
...And, she says, "That is not unusual...
...The first requirement, he decided, was to bring information to all segments of the population, and so he founded the Brazilian Interdisciplinary Association about AIDS (ABIA) as a spinoff of his think tank...
...Most residents live in areas that choppers must overfly to reach their favorite destinations...
...Then, with steady determination, they return to the land, plant, and build again...
...Therein lies the catch...
...It's something to worry about when the time comes, if it does...
...If not, he said, they would capture her again, kill her/and feed her body to the sharks...
...Alvarado is only more visible than most...
...Maybe then, he suggests, people will begin to take notice of the issue...
...Occasionally, members will tear down an unwanted structure for an owner and receive some of the materials in return...
...An agrarian-reform law passed in 1975 provides for redistribution of land from the few hundred large owners to the 150,000-to-200,000 landless campesino families...
...Like many of the state's visitor-related businesses, the helicopter industry has proliferated with few controls...
...Construction occurs every other Saturday at an old warehouse in neighboring Cobb County...
...Cofounder Mike Connor likens the effort to Nineteenth Century frontier barn-raising, and feels the volunteer builders recapture a sense of community spirit that has largely vanished...
...Joan Conrow (Joan Conrow is a free-lance writer in Hanalei, Hawaii...
...Mark Phillips, a Kauai member of the Sierra Club who has been active in the controversy, admonished DOT officials for spending two years on the plan "and then telling us to get together with the operators and work it out on our own...
...De Souza and Ramos are conducting a campaign "on three legs": epidemiological control, prevention, and assistance to those who are stricken...
...Cover is important, and Finkle scouts secluded areas in the city...
...But legal petitions under the law languish for years and almost never bring action...
...They clearly saw the link between land and food...
...There is no official position on the Mad Housers," says Constance Curry of Atlanta's Citizens and Community Affairs Department, observing that city government enforces building codes, and these huts don't meet them...
...The need was clear: Honduras is the poorest country in Central America, with the highest infant-mortality rate...
...All estimates point to even bigger earnings in 1989...
...The department also plans to recommend a limit of no more than eight flights a day over populated areas, expansion of the areas to be avoided, and other changes in flight corridors...
...The places should be ready in August, according to Finkle, who says the Mad Housers will also make starter kits for bungalows available...
...Both her mother and father had moved away by then, leaving her with an older brother...
...That was in December 1986, says Silvia Ramos, who runs ABIA on a budget of $200,000 a year...
...And the Georgia chapter of the American Institute of Architects has given the group a certificate for special service...
...Participants come from various backgrounds and political persuasions...
...They battle daily for justice, for land, for human rights, for an end to contra and U.S...
...Alvarado eventually returned to the countryside to live with the father of her youngest three children...
...Only three were registered with the health ministry...
...Connor calls the concept "transitional housing," for which rent will be affordable and occupants can stay from six months to a year...
...These remote outposts are also favored by boaters, hikers, and hunters...
...Last year, Kauai registered about 85,000 helicopter flights—one flight every three minutes during daylight hours...
...And the group plans further efforts to raise public awareness...
...The industry also agreed to make some changes in flight paths and altitude to reduce the noise complaints...
...If the campesinos endure threats, violence, arrests, beatings, and often a death or two, they may finally succeed in forcing the National Agrarian Institute (INA) to give them title to the land...
...The average cat in the United States eats more beef than the average Honduran child or adult...
...A round-shaped area of just 553 square miles, Kauai is the smallest of the four major Hawaiian islands...
...The rugged Na Pali coast, scenic Waimea Canyon, and famed Mount Waialeale— the rainiest spot on Earth and the source of a hundred waterfalls—are on the itinerary of every pilot...
...They seize land, plant corn and beans, begin to build houses, and are driven off by police, military, or goon squads hired by the landowners...
...ABIA uses pamphlets, television spots, and constant meetings to try to change that attitude...
...Residents and tourists alike say they don't care who is responsible, they just want some relief...
...But Alvarado was not interested...
...The FAA, citing budget constraints and an inability to patrol the entire state, has refused to get involved, except when pilots commit flagrant violations of flight rules...
...Lincoln S. Bates (Lincoln S. Bates is a free-lance writer in Atlanta...
...both are dead...
...DATE LINES Campesina Fights Hunger and Its Causes TEGUCIGALPA, HONDURAS Elvia Alvarado is a fifty-year-old Honduran peasant woman with a second-grade education who, like many campesinas, was pregnant at fifteen with the first of her six children...
...She says there are at least 10,000 cases in Brazil and adds that government figures are "at least 100 per cent too low...
...The church abandoned them, but the women had gone too far to stop...
...In 1981, he founded the Brazilian Institute of Social and Economic Analysis, a nongovernmental think tank...
...Like her, they come from peasant backgrounds, suffer from lack of education, and bear the scars of poverty...
...Several admit the industry is out of control, and that both the industry and the public suffer from the free-for-all...
...Why not make them comfortable...
...Working was not much more dignified than vagrancy...
...Children starved because their parents were landless...
...Sometimes she quietly swapped her bowl for the dog's...
...During the 1970s, he got his transfusions in exile while Brazil was under military rule...
...We hope the bungalow concept will serve as a national prototype for public-private partnership," says Connor...
...The total area will be about 700 square feet, with room for four...
...Kauai residents are joined in their outrage by inhabitants of Maui and the Big Island, who endured 45,000 and 29,000 flights, respectively, on their islands last year...
...There we were, in what we thought was a wilderness area, and the helicopter traffic was just constant," she says...
...Under law, most women are barred from gaining title to land, so they joined with men in the work of campesino organizations...
...rides cost $75 to $150 per person, depending on the trip...
...The effort began as "guerrilla housing," a clandestine tactic launched by a few Georgia Tech architecture students who used direct action to circumvent political debate and bureaucratic red tape...
...A current Mad Houser occupant will refer an acquaintance...
...Two decades of military rule, ending only in 1985, have left Brazil's government with the attitude, Ramos says, that "it would pay attention to a problem only when there is no solution to it...
...After circulating petitions, conducting surveys, and making hundreds of largely fruitless calls to the Federal Aviation Administration, they have turned to the state for relief...
...Police in Atlanta generally leave the huts alone, but some hassles have occurred...
...Rio, though, has unknown numbers of unreported cases...
...military presence in their homeland...
...Skills and motivations also vary...
...Steep mountain ranges prevent the construction of roads encircling or traversing the island, but they are no obstacle to helicopters...
...Another ABIA worker adds that "enormous numbers have the AIDS virus, 100 for every one who has the symptoms...
...ABIA produces stunning— and stunningly candid—material...
...Ramos says Sao Paulo has "a very well-developed AIDS program—that's why they show the higher numbers...
...It completely destroyed the tranquility of the place...
...And the choppers usually carry two to eight passengers at a time, so most operators rake in a pretty good daytime take even before they lift off for the popular sunset flights...
...Many operators here have not been happy about their widespread 'bad-boy' image," says Stokes...
...Unable to intimidate her, the government then tried to buy her off...
...Since last summer," says Connor, "a half dozen groups have told us they're building shelters, too...
...More recently, it has earned recognition and unofficial acceptance, has been imitated elsewhere, and has an opportunity to go legit...
...That's what de Souza discovered, too late...
...And they fight on the other front as well—against machismo in their organizations, their communities, and their male co-workers...
...Since a recent change in leadership in the CNTC, she no longer receives any stipend for her organizing work...
...She has been arrested more than once—beaten so severely that she still bears the scars, tied and hung from the ceiling, deprived of food and water for days...
...between men...
...Today, she is in Tegucigalpa getting her papers in order so she can embark on her second speaking tour of Europe and North America...
...Virgin Islands...
...One of seven children of landless campesino parents, her childhood was over by the time she was thirteen...
...Owen Miyamoto, director of the DOT's airports division, says he doesn't doubt the honesty and sincerity of the operators' hotline, but he senses a desire among citizens to have a neutral party administer complaints...
...Others claim the operators have lied about the actual number of complaints...
...Angry residents say they object to choppers buzzing their homes, destroying the solitude of wilderness areas, frightening game animals, and generally disrupting the peaceful-ness of their rural lives...
...The homeless learn of the huts' availability at soup kitchens and shelters...
...So now a lot of the ops are saying, 'Why should we wait?' The state has the power to control these things, but they're not doing a very good job...
...Now, many old-timers fear they'll lose out unless they also break the rules...
...One of the main problems is bad control of blood banks...
...They say they've always tried to be cooperative and good neighbors...
...But others say the industry has been totally ineffective at self-regulation...
...This has been particularly true on the island of Kauai, which probably has the worst situation in the state...
...Ramos, a thirty-four-year-old woman with advanced degrees in psychology and political science, says Brazil is second only to the United States in numbers of AIDS cases...
...Paul, Minnesota...
...Connor realizes it's only a form of first aid, but as one homeless man says, it's a start...
...They're such an intrusion on your privacy...
...I'll never go back...
...But then the campesinas began to look beyond hunger to its causes...
...June Garfield, a Washington State resident who spent four days hiking the rugged eleven-mile Kalalau Trail on Kauai's Na Pali Coast with several friends, was furious...
...Small, spare, and squatting on public land, the huts are the work of the Mad Housers, a two-year-old group dedicated to putting a roof over the heads of those who have no homes...
...It's all a band-aid, knee-jerk approach...
...They're allowing our competitors to get established," says one pilot who doesn't want his name used...
...As a first step, it has urged the industry to fund hotlines, ostensibly to monitor complaints and chastise offending operators...
...They insisted on organizing to confront basic issues of land ownership and justice...
...Following initial publicity a year ago, the group developed "starter kits" for interested people in other parts of the country...
...ABIA has been hounding Brazil's government to clamp down on the blood banks, which buy blood from poor people who often have no other source of funds...
...There have been 2,768 deaths, the ministry said, and the bulk of the cases have been in the prosperous, urbanized southeast of the country— 62.5 per cent in Sao Paulo, a metropolitan area of fifteen million people, and 13.5 per cent in Rio, a metropolitan area of seven-and-a-half million...
...As a result, complaints about helicopter flight paths and altitudes and about the frequency of flights have taken off in the last two years...
...So she and three daughters and six grandchildren who live with her do what they can to support themselves and her work—planting crops, sewing, selling tortillas...
...We were all disappointed...
...Pasted into the back is a packaged condom manufactured in Dothan, Alabama...
...Feeding children is women's work, so organizing women to feed children didn't seem threatening...
...A few have been burned...
...A sixteen-page pamphlet for homosexuals, for example, is titled sexo sem riscos . . . entre homens— "sex without risk...
...Visitors pay well for the privilege of aerial sightseeing...
...We have a very intensive program among prostitutes for use of condoms," says Ramos...
...In checking a hospital there recently, Ramos found forty-six AIDS patients had been admitted over the preceding two months...
...Last December, Mayor Andrew Young presented the Mad Housers with an award from a New Jersey foundation that honors community workers...
...Others say there are simply too many helicopters and the state has been hesitant to address the issue of limits...
...Other efforts might involve renovating vacant or decrepit houses for use by the homeless and putting small "guest houses" on private property where owners will permit homeless people to stay...
...But recently, mavericks have begun challenging state rules and getting away with it...
...A clinic worker might mention the possibility and show a photo...
...The way to stop starvation was to gain control of the land—not just to hand out free milk...
...In 1980, when an amnesty for political exiles was declared, de Souza returned home...
...Mary C. Turck (Mary C. Turck is a free-lance writer in St...
...She helps women take inventory in a small cooperative store, goes to INA offices to plead someone's case, brings bundles of Catholic Relief Service used clothing to distribute, assists in a meeting to discuss the literacy program in a cooperative...
...But, as she herself confirms, there are many others...
...It's something that needs to be done," says a Georgia State University student...
...Alvarado is an organizer, trudging along mountain roads as she visits some of the twenty-five small groups with which she works...
...Sections are trucked to preselected sites for final assembly...
...And nearly all the helicopters share the main airport with passenger jets, creating what airport officials call an extremely hazardous condition...
...Ramos says the first need is to get useful information to all Brazilians, not just middle-class residents of the cities but also poor farmers in the northeast, miners in the Amazon, residents offavelas, the urban slums...
...Both contracted AIDS through transfusions...
...Mad Housers Help Homeless ATLANTA More than five dozen solidly built wooden huts—some alone, some in clusters—dot booming Atlanta's glass-and-concrete cityscape, giving shelter to a fraction of the estimated 10,000 homeless here...
...And in 1968, her life began to change...
...We also have an 'aftercare' committee to check on clients, perhaps supply some food, clothes, and Social Security information," says Connor...
...That hasn't been discussed," says Curry...
...The group asks clients-most are male, but there have been a dozen or so females and even a family—to help erect the huts, which then belong to them...
...If we scrounge the maximum amount, we can build a hut for $40," says cofounder Brian Pinkie...
...with a hut you've got something...
...Some of the old-timers who built the flightseeing industry are particularly bitter...
...But she didn't stop...
...Barry Stokes, a scientist at the Hawaii Volcanoes National Park and leader of the Big Island chapter of Citizens Against Noise, supports the use of local zoning to regulate helicopter-flight routes, noise limits, and flight frequency...
...Tourist Choppers Roil Islands HANALEI, HAWAII In Hawaii, where some of the most spectacular scenery is remote or entirely inaccessible by automobile, helicopter operators have carved themselves a lucrative niche in the state's tourist-based economy...
...While insisting on their right to make a living as a legitimate, tax-paying business—often at the expense of residential peace and quiet— helicopter-industry representatives appear willing to accept rational controls, as long as they apply equally to all operators statewide...
...The Mad Housers salvage materials from construction sites and other sources...
...During recent public hearings, state consultants declared the voluntary noise abatement program successful...
...she just started taking some security precautions...
...The homeless have already found most of them," he says, "Their only security is concealment...
...But they're better than a kudzu patch or freezing on the street," she adds...
...93 per cent of the land redistributed to campesinos by INA since 1962 was initially claimed through recuperaciones de tierra...
...Many who met Alvarado on her 1987 tour thought she was an anomaly...
...A half dozen to dozen volunteers and members show up to put together walls, floors, and roofs for one or two huts...
...Alvarado works with the CNTC—the National Congress of Rural Workers...
...Her place, she says, is in the mountains, organizing...
...Arriving penniless, she slept in a park for two nights...
...As a concession, the state will establish its own twenty-four-hour hotline...
...Brazilians Take On AIDS Epidemic RIO DE JANEIRO Sociologist Herbert de Souza is a hemophiliac who needs blood transfusions...
...Before she was released the last time, Alvarado says, an officer held a gun to her chest and ordered her to stop organizing campesinos...
...In late February, Brazil's health ministry reported that a total of5,477 AIDS cases had been registered with it from 1980 through the end of January 1989...
...She's wearing a pretty, spring-green dress and laughs with friends who tease her, "Ay, Elvia, you don't look like a campesina today...
...Connor concedes there may be a point at which the public finds the number of huts or the sight of them intolerable...
...When she became pregnant at fifteen, her brother was furious and threatened to kill her, so she left her village for Tegucigalpa...
...They lack heating and plumbing, but carpeting on walls provides a measure of insulation, and each structure has a lock on the door...
...In one domestic job, she had to cook for the family dog as well as the family, and the food she prepared for the dog was better than what she was allowed for herself...
...Many months later, in 1987," she says, "de Souza was tested and found to be carrying the AIDS virus as a result of his blood transfusions...
...Two-by-fours form the skeleton and plywood panels the skin...
...And five years later, as the scourge of AIDS descended on this huge nation of 145 million people, de Souza saw that "the government lacked money and competence" to deal with AIDS...
...The gable-roofed huts run forty-eight square feet...
...Plywood is scarce, and normally the cost is $80 to $100...
...What happens if the number of huts runs into the hundreds and becomes more obtrusive...
...Unofficially, we're glad they're using that sort of ingenious approach...
...But, Ramos adds, health ministry estimates of how the disease is transmitted are about right: Almost 71 per cent of registered cases were transmitted sexually, with two-thirds of those involving homosexual relations...
...But as helicopter pilots and their passengers happily hover over puffy clouds tinted pink by the setting sun, those who have to put up with the deafening noise—residents, hikers, boaters, hunters, and park rangers—and airport officials responsible for safety see a picture that's not quite so rosy...
...The state's Department of Transportation removed a couple of huts from its property, and the city took some from a park in an upper-class area...
...And we tell drug addicts, if you can't stop, please don't share needles...
...Shelter should be viewed as a right, not a commodity...
...There are more choppers here than in Nam," says Don Woolson, a resident of Kauai's North Shore...
...Her goal, and de Souza's, is to change that attitude...
...William Steif (William Steif, a former national and foreign correspondent for the Scripps-Howard newspapers, is a free-lance writer based in the U.S...
...The Mad Housers are seeking tax-free status, and they've received a $30,000 grant from the city to build two bungalows, each with two occupancy sides and a common core with kitchen and bathroom...
...Two of his brothers, a well-known cartoonist and a singer, also were hemophiliacs...
...The number of helicopter companies and the number of craft owned by each company have been increasing steadily, creating an industry bringing in $55 million last year...
...We've never denied anyone a hut," says Finkle...
...The politicians passed legislation directing the state's Department of Transportation to develop a plan for regulating the helicopter industry...
...The government should have a serious prevention program," says Ramos, "but all it does is to put out a pamphlet during iCarnival as a kind of show for foreigners...
...So he has a reason to be interested in Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome—AIDS...
...Like her, they emphatically insist on the need to organize women...
...Women's ardent, active membership in campesino organizations stems from this time...
...INA offered her safe, comfortable jobs that would take her out of the countryside...
...So the campesinos have devised a more direct strategy they call recuperaciones de tierra—land recoveries...
...That's when she got involved with a Catholic church program organizing women to set up feeding programs for malnourished children...
...Latin American peasant women, everyone "knew," are submissive and apolitical, suffering under a triple burden of poverty, racial prejudice, and machismo...
...The state, on the other hand, says it has no real jurisdiction...
...This one had to be an exception...
...Many helicopter operators, on the other hand, blame the state because it failed to come up with a workable plan years ago...
...In any event, the Mad Housers plan to continue building huts...
...But critics say the state's plan falls short in a number of areas...
Vol. 53 • May 1989 • No. 5
