Alexis Ritvo

Ser en Confianza: Participatory Development, Public Health and Moral Engagement in a Highland Honduran Community Alexis Ritvo

I spent the summers of 2003 and 2004 working in the highland Honduran community of "El Pueblo" first as a volunteer and then project supervisor of the Child Health Promotion Project with Amigos de las Americas and the Honduran Red Cross. This book constitutes the senior honors thesis in social anthropology I wrote as a result of investigating and analyzing the project. Through description and analysis of various components of the project, I reveal the contradictions between AMIGOS' discourse and practice of participatory development and examine the power dynamics between actors. I also demonstrate that over two summers I created intimate interpersonal relationships with community members. Through the process of coming to "ser en confianza" [be in confidence] with others, a term taught to me by one community member, I built mutual friendships with others. These friendships enabled us to gain a moral understanding of and respect for what is at stake for one another within the project and beyond it. However, at times the value of these friendships was overlooked and the weaknesses of participatory health development influenced an inadvertent but unproductive paternalistic tone.