I’m not one who handles inactivity
well, and I find myself looking around for more projects in Copan.
My Cuso placement is a project, of
course. But at the moment that one is still taking shape and I don’t yet have
enough to do at work.
That will change over time,
especially if the funding comes through next month for a public-awareness
campaign for young people that the Comision de Accion Social Menonita hopes to
do in the runup to the 2013 Honduran national elections.
But in this moment I have time on my
hands, and am casting about for constructive ways to rectify that. It’s much more of a challenge in a new
community, especially one so tightly tied to church and family.
That last phrase sounds a bit
ridiculous even as I write it, seeing as a community tightly tied to church and
family should be exactly the kind of place suited to the work I most like to
do. But I am the outsider in this instance – the foreigner without either
church or family in Honduras, and with all the baggage that any do-gooder
foreigner brings in a country that hasn’t exactly had a history of successful
encounters with outside interests.
It’s certainly not a question of who
needs help here. As far as I can tell, almost everybody does. The dogs are starving. The kids don’t have playgrounds,
let alone toys, books or anything resembling a “green space” where they might
go to blow off a little steam or release the darker energies that can develop
in adolescents with absolutely nothing to do. Fun for teenagers in Copan is the
local billiard hall.
Their parents need work. The streets
need cleaned. Even the local businesses could use help, most having a rather
limited sense of how to market themselves or the specialties of Honduras to the
busloads of tourists who blast into town for a day or two. (The classic example
of that is the Chorti women who make quite beautiful table linens that they
sell in a virtually invisible location in the impoverished pueblo of La
Pintada, where the only buyers are occasional groups of dusty tourists led up
there on horseback.)
Every afternoon I walk past the
string of rough little cantinas along my route to work and see the local sex
workers dancing with the drunken men who frequent the tiny bars. Sex workers will
always have my heart, but I sense it’s too soon for that one. The intentions of the gringa would likely be misunderstood at this point. For now I’ll just
make a point of saying hello every time I pass by, and we’ll see where that
leads.
I’d like to make music with local
children, and have put that offer out there to a few Copanecans. We could start
with clapping and singing and work up to the kazoos that one of my daughters has
offered to ship down here. I sense the kids could use a little more joy in
their lives, and making music is such a joyful act.
But people are busy with their own
stuff, and I can’t fault the locals I’ve talked to for not getting back to me
yet with suggestions on how I can make this happen. I’m generally a
self-sufficient type happy to take responsibility for making my own projects
happen, but that’s a tall order in a new country and culture with none of the
organizational mechanisms I’m used to.
Even trying to organize the purchase
of 70 big water bottles for a village that needs them to access treated water has
turned out to be a frustrating exercise in waiting for others to open doors for
me. It isn’t an option here to just phone up the water-bottle company and say, “Hey,
how much?” because there are mysterious channels to go through first and no
simple way for my partner and I – in our new carless state – to get the bottles
from Point A to Point B even then.
I visited a foster home the other
day, Angelitos Felices, and it was every bit the dark, sad place that you might expect of such a place in a developing country. I laid awake last night thinking: Could I
start here? There are lots of rumours in town about the place but they don’t appear
to have led to much change to this point. Meanwhile, more than 30 children are
passing their young lives in conditions that can only be preparing them for a life
of poverty and crime as adults.
Today I’m going to show up at the
door with a watermelon and just see what happens. Maybe they’ll let me in.
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