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Sample Essay #5

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Note: This essay appears unedited for instructional purposes. Essays edited by EssayEdge are substantially improved. For samples of EssayEdge editing, please click here.

After college I served for two and a half years in Honduras with the U.S. Peace Corps. During my time there I worked on several development projects. My experiences left me with mixed feelings about development and what is realistically achievable. Projects often proved only thin band-aids against larger endemic problems. I found potential for changing some of the larger problems of development in a surprising arena, maquiladoras, or textile factories.

While in Honduras, I talked to many women who worked in maquiladoras. Unlike what I had read in classes, these women were happy to have their jobs and suffered no health problems or abuse. They earned more money working in the factories in the cities than picking coffee in the mountains. Women could leave their homes and find work without having to depend on husbands or families to survive.

The factory jobs had other positive side effects. I saw wealthy families driving to the countryside to find maids because all the city maids quit to work in the factories where they earned more. Wages for domestic workers had already risen and these families were trying to avoid paying an even higher salary. Also, factories required a sixth grade degree. This, if nothing else, could motivate an illiterate farmer to keep his daughters in school.

How to balance these positive factors with the often exploitative and abusive methods of the factory managers, or how to control the problems of rural-urban migration are questions I am still investigating. However, economic opportunities outside of the home, such as those in maquiladoras, could play a key role in changing traditional attitudes that prevent women from developing and using their full potential.

With the new U.S. policy focus on trade with Latin America and with more and more businesses using labor abroad, labor conditions in maquiladoras will be a growing human rights issue. At the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), I have been able to write letters to the USTR pushing for the continued review of the Generalized System of Preferences in Guatemala, to the President of El Salvador to encourage the enforcement of their labor codes, and lobbied for a labor petitioning amendment to the Caribbean Basin Trade Security Act.

A law degree would give me a tool to continue to work effectively and realistically on this and other issues that contribute to the well-being of people affected by U.S. policies and investments in Latin America.

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