In Nicaragua, there are bucket loads of trainings, forums, talks, investigations, publications...and what seems like slow and little progress.

Almost every flight I have ever taken to Managua has a religious group with logo´d T-shirts, on its way to an annual "mission" to help or save someone.

The boundary between providing resources for people to help themselves and paternalism is a slippery slope that only gets more slippery with time.

The larger the non-profit, the more it feels like just another corporation, only with a privileged tax status and without the ROI expectations of other for-profits.

Things get done in the non-profit world through sub-contracting that requires endless documentation, oversight and a cost with every contract.

In delivering services, non-profits in the development chain focus on the demands of the organization above and not on the needs of the people below.

As we get more "connected" technologically we become more disconnected from realities, manipulated by images...such as these.

An employee in a non-profit is out to survive just like anyone else in a job and responds to the demands at work placed on him/her by the system in general.

The current system is convenient to those within the system who work in it and those who give to it. Needs are met and consciences are appeased.

The current system clearly responds to needs, but what is less clear is to what extent it meets those needs and whether there is another way to meet them.

It's easy to pick holes, it's much harder to fill them, especially when the holes look so large. Never before did the for-profit world start to look like an attractive option.

Where do you start when cell phone coverage (provided for profit motives) is wider-spread than drinking water, electricity and health care?

At what point are NGOs part of the problem if the state doesn't do its part and if people don't do for themselves what thay are able to do for themselves.

Today is a momentous day. I received delivery of the painting in the opposite column.

The picture on the left was taken by a local photographer. I bought the color version of the photo and asked a local artist, Patricio Marin, to reinterpret the photo focusing on the boy and his donkey. The two had come into town for a parade of donkeys, designed to raise awareness about the importance of this animal to local farmers.

The artist has captured perfectly the comfortable relationship between the two. The boy´s face clearly shows a somewhat worn and jaded perspective, appropriate for someone way beyond his youthful years. His secondhand T'-shirt with the word "roar" (something he would probably never do), his Yankee cap and his one pair of "new jeans", which would only ever be worn on very special occasions, tell us a lot about his life, local culture...and the migration of second hand clothes from the US to street markets in Las Segovias.