Fun to be home, but harried

I'm feeling like the blog's just a little too much "all about me" lately, but hey, it's a big week. The Times Colonist team I was part of won the Michener Award on Wednesday for its coverage over two years of the plight of families dealing with Community Living B.C., and today's my big day at the University of Victoria, when I receive an honourary doctorate of laws.
So allow me one more indulgence: A link to Jack Knox's very kind column on me in the TC this morning. Nice thing to wake up to in this rushed and harried week back home, and such things certainly do make my mother happy.
We'll be returning to Copan Ruinas bright and early Monday. I'm enjoying all the food and friends here in Victoria but I have to admit, it's a bit of a culture shock coming back and I'm looking forward to our rather quiet, simple life in Honduras. But first, a big party and lots of great, greasy snacks.

Safe in Honduras, victimized in Victoria

Back in Victoria for a week and here's an irony - we went to our storage locker yesterday only to discover that  things are missing and somebody had put a different lock on. So we come back to sleepy Victoria after six crime-free months in one of the most "dangerous" countries in the world to find ourselves victimized at a storage place we picked expressly because it was supposed to be safe.
We were dealing with an 18-year-old alarmed-looking clerk yesterday and had arrived 45 minutes before closing, so we still don't know anything about how this could have happened. She called the manager and he said he'd meet us there this morning, which is kind of alarming in itself when you think that he couldn't be bothered to deal with a troubling turn of events at that very moment.
At any rate, we're going back today at the moment the place opens, and I'll be in full-on indignation mode. Here's hoping that "24/7 video surveillance" they promise turns out to be true, although I fear that all we're going to see is somebody breaking into our locker. Video footage won't bring back our stuff.
Let me tell you, there's nothing more disorienting than opening a combination lock that you've never seen before (with the combination still handily taped on the back, just to make it easier) to find that indeed, that IS your stuff in there behind the door - and yes, some of it is missing. The most obvious is our bed mattress and two bags of all our favourite clothes, which is completely inexplicable and part of the reason why my partner Paul thinks there has to be a logical explanation. Here's hoping.
Double-checked the self-storage Web site this morning just to make sure that security was one of the things they promised, and found this promise on every page of the site: "Your valuables are safe with us!" Particularly galling is a rather smug line about how they look after your stuff as if it was their own, adding: "This isn't a friend's basement."
Alas, we would have been better off if it had been.
Who knows, maybe I'll be happily deleting this post a few hours from now because it turns out there was a good reason why somebody cut our lock off, took our mattress and God knows what else out of there, and put on a new combination lock that allowed anyone with the sense to flip the thing over to be able to break in again. (Does rather seem like the point, doesn't it?)
Like I say, here's hoping.

The storm before the calm

Storms come slowly here. This is my first rainy season in a tropical country, and it's taken me a while to understand that there's no need to hurry if you find yourself outside when the clouds start building over the mountains and the first ripples of thunder rumble overhead.

It's not like Kamloops or the Prairies, where storms roll in so fast you can barely get the picnic supplies packed up fast enough. Here, hours might pass in between the start of the thunder and the first drops of rain. It gives you plenty of time to admire the gorgeous clouds that develop as the heat of the day builds into the storms that come every night.
I'm liking this season, with the foliage vivid green from all the rain and the river - barely a trickle three weeks ago - now running fast and furious. This must be the time for lizards to breed, because I hear them skittering like crazy in the leaves at the side of the road as I walk along. Unfortunately, it's also a happy time of year for mosquitos, so I'm back to using bug repellent as my morning skin cream.
I've learned to get up early and get the wash out on the line before 8 a.m., to make sure it dries before the daily rains set in. I know to get my walks in before 3 or 4 p.m., because it's almost certainly going to start raining right around then.  I've never liked umbrellas, but I don't leave home without one anymore. One day when the rain was particularly fierce, we saw a young boy running past our house crying, and I could sympathize; it's the kind of rain that hurts.
Most nights, I awake to the sound of rain pounding down, lightning flashing bright in the night sky. Sometimes we went to bed having forgotten to close up a couple of the more vulnerable windows, which means I have to jump up to do that before the water starts pouring in through the screens and down the walls. When the rain's really heavy, the water comes in through the windows even if they're closed, and in one particularly big storm came in under the doors as well.
And then the morning comes and it's sunny and clear again, and the only hint of the storm that came and went in the night are bigger and bigger puddles for me to manouevre past on my walk to work.

Resistance is futile

A friend asked me recently if I ever felt “Third-Worlded out” living in Honduras.

Daily life in fact feels pretty First World here in Copan, what with cable TV in our comfy living room, hot showers every night and a good pizza place just down the road.

But the patterns of your life change even when you move across town, let alone to the second-poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere.  The comment got me thinking about what I do differently now that I live someplace where even a $10,000 annual volunteer stipend puts you in the ranks of the well-off.

I do the laundry by hand. This is an amusing development, considering that in my former life I didn’t even hand-wash the things that you were supposed to hand-wash, let alone things like towels and sheets. But we don’t have a washer or a dryer anymore and there’s no laundromat in Copan. I could probably take it to somebody, but mostly it just seems easier to do it myself.

I don’t have a car. Gas is the same price here as it is in Canada. That’s pretty good motivation for going carless. Add in the horrendous condition of the roads and the crazy way Hondurans drive, and walking looks better and better.  We live about three blocks from the commercial centre and my workplace is a pleasant 15-minute stroll away, so it hasn’t been as big as an adjustment as I thought it would be. It does rule out fun little day trips into the surrounding countryside, however, unless you can find someone with a horse to rent.

I leave my iPod at home. I used to love long strolls with nothing but my Nano for company. But you just look too much like a rich gringo with your earbuds in and that distracted, I’m-in-my-own-head look that you get when you’re grooving to your own personal soundtrack. It’s not just about the risk of getting your  stuff stolen – it’s about the way it sets you apart from everyone else in the community, seeing as I’ve yet to see anyone here strolling around with a personal stereo.

I dress very plainly. Those who know me might say, “Yeah? So what’s new about that?” But I’m talking really plain – I’ve got maybe 3 skirts, all in drab colours, and three pair of hopelessly practical shoes to be able to manoeuvre around the obstacle course of crazily canted cobblestones, gaping holes, dog poo, ragged concrete and mud that you deal with any time you walk out the door here. I’m not sure if my plain dressing is a deliberate attempt to minimize my profile or just what happens when you live in a really hot country with a lot of dirt roads.

I coexist with bugs. I’d be freaking out back in our land at the giant cockroaches and ants that wander at will around the house. But here I’m trying to just let it go. Nothing’s built airtight in a tropical country, so there’s no way to win this one. However, every now and then I do make my partner sweep a particularly large cockroach out the door, and today we put a towel under the door near the kitchen to stop the stream of ants scouring the ceramic tile for bits of food.

My eating habits have changed.  I was a happy carnivore back in Canada, with a long list of “treat” foods that I indulged in whenever I needed a little pick-me-up. Alas, neither meat nor treats are common here. The best you can say about any baked good here is, “Well, it’s not that terrible.” The chocolate is scarce and mediocre to boot even when you do manage to find any. I have been reduced to buying bags of wrapped caramel candies called “Bianchis” – the only tolerable candy I’ve found in Copan – and eating two or three whenever I feel desperate.

I throw my toilet paper in a garbage can. I don’t know what it is about poor countries, but their bad plumbing seems to be universal. At any rate, you can’t flush toilet paper down the toilet here.  I’m not happy about it, but so it goes.

I pour dog food onto my front step every night. Virtually every dog here, owned or stray, is underfed.  I don’t know which dogs are coming by to eat the food I put out, but all of them can use it so it doesn’t matter.

I’ve adjusted my customer-service expectations down, down, down. Things go wrong in Honduras on a regular basis. Resistance is futile.  

Power goes out randomly, sometimes for hours. Bank machine says it gave you $200 when it didn’t, and you know you’ll never see it again.  You pay for two gigabytes on your Internet modem and it runs out in two days, which is not possible but it doesn’t matter. Giant manhole cover collapses in your street and leaves a gaping hole big enough for cars to fall into, and three weeks later the hole’s still there.

You buy the wrong cord for your computer and the store refuses to take it back, receipt or not. People you work for tell you to put together a one-hour PowerPoint presentation for a big meeting and then forget all about you.  Your cellphone stops working because the company wants you to text them your identity number, but you don’t have one because you’re not Honduran.

And yeah, at times it’s all just a little too much. But I can roll with it.

A fuel-efficient fogon rises from the mud

Adan Garcia and Don Antonio Garcia building a fogon

I feel a bit like the family dog at work sometimes, mystified much of the time as to why my workmates are bundling me into the truck to go somewhere but always happy to be taken along. One of my co-workers in particular likes that I take photos of his projects to post to the CASM Facebook site, so I'm getting to go on new adventures pretty much every week now.
Yesterday, we spent the day at a local Copaneco's house building an energy-efficient fogon - a new twist on the wood cooking stoves that are staples in most Honduran homes.
Electricity is scarce and gas is expensive for a population that in many cases gets by on not much more than a buck a day (you don't know "poor" until you see it up close in Honduras). So wood is still the fuel of choice  for poor people - bad news in a country in which more than 60 per cent of the population lives in poverty AND the trees are disappearing at an alarming rate. The other big problem with wood fires is that the poorest families don't even have proper stoves, just blazing-hot fires inside their little mud houses that result in burned children and much lung damage from smoke inhalation.

The small firebox creates lots of heat
while burning 45 per cent less wood.

The fogons that CASM has been helping to build for the last five years cost about $60 each in materials and labour. They are cleverly engineered so that a very small fire box creates a big area of heat for cooking, using 45 per cent less wood. They're hot on the inside and cool on the outside, with a chimney to vent the smoke outside.
I've seen various ones in my travels with CASM, but yesterday was the first time I got to see the construction process from the ground up. And it really is from the ground up, starting with a big mud cube that forms the base of the stove and making use of all kinds of odds and ends during the process that the average dead-broke Honduran might actually have access to.
CASM foots part of the bill, including labour costs, because $60 is way beyond the reach of the people the organization works with. But the person receiving the stove is expected to buy or scrounge up as much of the materials as possible and to participate in the construction.
So we arrived at the one-room adobe home of Adan Garcia to find a fully-formed mud cube behind the house, two buckets of wood ash for packing around the firebox as insulation, a half bucket of cement for the top of the stove, and the big steel plancha used for the cooking surface. The four-person family has a gas stove tucked into their rough little 8x10 house alongside their two beds, but the wife was clearly looking forward to having a cheaper and roomier option out back.

Wood ash is poured into the cavity around the firebox
to keep the stove cool to the touch on the outside.

Adan had been able to buy about a third of the 28 bricks needed for the fogon. We headed off to the construction yard to buy the remainder and then went down to the river to dig a bucket of sand for mixing in with the cement.
The river is the sand and gravel source for everyone in town judging by the amount of pickups, dump trucks and excavators I see down there every day, but it's trickier right now because the river's high in the rainy season. We almost got stuck. Back at Adan's house, Don Antonio Garcia was rolling up his sleeves. He's a whiz from La Cuchilla who has built a lot of fogones on behalf of CASM. He was adept at sticking bricks together with mud while keeping the whole thing level and square, and a master at cutting bricks to size with a machete.

Adan tears a board off his house
for the concrete form

It took about five hours to build the stove. The process attracted quite a crowd of curious men from the neighbourhood, who brought along their tape measures and observed the construction carefully. That's another benefit of such projects: Each one is like a mini-workshop. As he worked Don Antonio also amazed the group with tales of his biodigester back home - another CASM initiative - that transforms the manure from his cow into methane gas for cooking.
When it came time to pour the concrete, I was reminded again how close to the bone life is for so many Hondurans. Adan didn't have enough wood to make the form for the concrete, so he had to pull a couple boards off the structure of his house. The nails that were set into the mud to add strength to the concrete were a mish-mash of bent and crooked things in various shapes and sizes that he'd clearly scrounged. Nobody blinked at any of it; that's just how it is here.

Don Antonio fits the plancha - the cooking surface

It was a day that reminded me what I like best about CASM. They do practical things using whatever's at hand. They add in just enough of their resources and skills to make things possible.

They do projects that teach people new skills so that they in turn can help others build a fuel-efficient fogon in their own back yard, or turn cow manure into cooking fuel. Feet firmly on the ground, common-sense strategies that empower people and make a tough life just a little more bearable. That's how it's done.