Today’s class was one of my ultimate favorites.  It always amazes me how alive and passionate everyone is at eight in the morning.  I always leave class feeling a little on fire-in a good way.  Today was the final, final day for deciding a mission statement.  Dr. Humphrey really wanted something that “made your hair stand on end,” but we kept coming up with phrases like “overcoming the indignity of poverty” that we found were too epic and grandiose.  It was so difficult to find the balance between realism and emotion, or to avoid sweeping, idealistic statements like “We believe in a world where hard work lets an individual reach their full economic potential.”  I was initially really into this statement, but as I sat with Katie and Dan in a separate classroom, Katie burst out, “That world doesn’t exist!”  It felt like everyone was having some sort of crisis between realism and idealism, all from creating this mission statement.  

      We hadn’t even though about changing the word “poverty” in our mission statement, until the last ten minutes of class.  I suddenly realized that this mission statement wasn’t just for our donors.  I kept thinking in my mind, while I was editing this mission, of a donor behind the computer screen.  However, this mission statement was just as important to our customers in Honduras.  How could I have overlooked this?  I imagined saying to the women, “to help overcome the poverty,” and for some reason the word poverty really bothered me.  This might sound trivial, but imagine yourself standing face to face with a La Ceiba client.  You’re standing in her home made of iron sheets and newspapers, and you blatantly say in more or less words, “You are in poverty. You are poor.”  Although this fact is obvious, we’re trying to move away from this identity as a “poor person.”  I rather address our clients with the same respect that a commercial bank would give a upper-middle class or middle-class client. When the group thought of this, we decided to change the word poverty to inequality.   The classroom went into a total debate match between poverty vs. inequality.  Someone made the point that La Ceiba was not just dealing with the inequality of poverty, but also the inequality of being a woman in Honduras.