Inflated human trafficking statistics serve nobody

     Found myself making a long, ranty comment on a Facebook thread this morning and realized, hey, that could be a blog post. Those of us who write for food appreciate writing that lends itself to more than one application. 

     So here's the article that started everything, a Washington Post piece on the vast and profoundly misleading inflation of human-trafficking figures around the world, and why that has happened. 

     Posting it on Facebook brought out some interesting comments from people I don't usually interact with, but in the end I feel like we had the chance for a good conversation, each of us writing in our little boxes one after the other. Here's the thread if you want to take a look at how it went. 

     Talk of human trafficking has become something of a flash point for me in the last couple of years, as it was wrongly used and amply abused to justify the terrible injustice enacted against adult sex workers last year in Canada when their customers were criminalized for the first time in the country's history. I am all about rights for sex workers, and it has been devastating to see the number of otherwise thoughtful Canadians who can't get beyond the word "trafficked" to consider the actual impact of our poorly considered laws on the lives of tens of thousands of rational, informed and unvictimized Canadian adults earning a living in the sex industry. 

     Somewhere around the 4th-comment mark in the Facebook thread, I weighed back in with these comments below. Would love to keep this conversation going, so I hope you'll share your own thoughts on this. 

Even when you look at what drives human trafficking, it's largely the demands of the developed world for cheap goods and services. You'll hear some people going on about the maquilas in Central America, for instance, but who do we think those internationally owned clothing factories are making clothes for?? In countries like Nicaragua and Honduras, where there are loads of maquilas, people there are actually forbidden from buying those clothes, made by them in their own country!

      Nobody can get snippety about issues like human trafficking without fully understanding that our easy way of life totally depends on the labour of poor people. Like everything else in this world, it's all about demand. As long as a market exists for something, there will be people somewhere who will have to do the work of that. We can't morally object to that fact while at the same time happily enjoy the products of that labour. 

     And we are way beyond boycotts of one product or another - the labour of poor people is completely integrated into the lifestyle of North Americans, from the clothing we wear to the vehicles we drive, food we eat, cost of our cellphone service. And that's not even counting the labours of poor people from other lands in our own countries - the farm workers, construction workers, nannies, etc, legal and illegal. The people who we have decided should live by different rules than the rest of us in the same country because we want to reap the benefits from cheaper labour right here at home. 

     Meanwhile, poor people of the world would be completely hooped if the developed world suddenly decided to quit exploiting them and close down all the international operations and genuinely crack down on illegal migration. 

     A fifth of the Honduran GDP is generated by migrant Hondurans working in the U.S., a vast number illegally, and sending money back home. When you leave home to do the long, hard and horribly dangerous scrabble from Honduras to the US, and pay money for somebody to get you through that final bit across the river, are you being trafficked or are you just trying to dig you and your family out of poverty by doing what you see as your only option? I mean, it is a COMPLEX subject. 

     But we do it a huge disservice when we try to make it about good and evil, heroes and villains. A whole lot of money gets thrown around on buzz about "human trafficking," and the fundamentals go untouched as always.

The Cashew Girls of Guasaule

      

   I crossed back into Nicaragua from Honduras yesterday at dusty, dry Guasaule, on my way back home to Leon after a work trip. 
     Crossing a Central American border by bus is often a mysterious, confusing process that involves everyone getting out of the bus in a big herd and wandering to and from various unmarked buildings. So it was kind of nice to see the familiar face of Carmen the Cashew Girl as I descended the Tica Bus stairs yesterday.

     She was wearing the brilliantly coloured eye shadow and matching shirt that the Cashew Girls clearly favour as a strategy for getting groggy, overheated bus travellers to remember them. There is something of the sex worker in the visage of the brightly painted and sexily dressed Cashew Girl, who like a worker on stroll has only minutes to get you to take note of her and decide to buy her wares rather than those of her (friendly) rivals.

     Carmen and I had first met last Sunday, when I’d been a bus passenger heading into Honduras and had emerged from the bus into the stark, dry border zone for the first time. Carmen had blinked her vividly made-up eyes at me, touched my arm and called me amiga to be sure she had my attention, and urged me to buy some cashews from her.

     Marañónes, they’re called here. They’re sold unsalted and home-roasted in cheap cellophane bags at street intersections in Managua, but the Guasaule border crossing in northern Nicaragua appears to be a particularly popular place for hawking the nuts. Carmen says hers come from the Honduras side.

     The Cashew Girls come running when the buses arrive at the border, and there’s at least four waiting at the door by the time you get off the bus. Hence the eye shadow, layered on in stand-out hues of pink, purple and blue, the colours helping to distinguish one Cashew Girl from another in the minds of overwhelmed bus passengers (who descend into a clamorous crowd of money-changers, food vendors, cellphone chip sellers, and scruffy kids begging for money). 

     I don’t know if Carmen is particularly skilled or if her pitch simply works well with people like me; at any rate, I spent $5 last Sunday and again yesterday buying cashews from her.

     I resisted at first. “Not right now,” I told her that first time, distracted by the mysterious border crossing process I was about to undertake and unprepared to consider whether I felt like any cashews right now. “Me recuerde,” she told me as I made my way past all the other Cashew Girls vying for my attention – “Remember me.” The colourful eye shadow and matching shirt helped, I admit, and later I bought some cashews for the bus ride.

     Yesterday she was there again as I got off the bus. Once again, I wasn’t at all sure that I even wanted cashews. But she upped her game, guiding me from one building to another so that I always seemed to be at the front of the line for the bewildering process of crossing the border.

     What could I do? I bought some nuts.

     I would have liked to know more about her. How much money did she make in a typical day? Where did she live? Did she have children? Were the Cashew Girls an informal co-op that shared their profits, or was everybody in it for themselves?

     But just like any working girl, time is money for people like Carmen. She can’t afford to waste time chatting. Once she’d made her sale, she touched my arm one last time, told me to take care of myself, and started making her way toward an incoming mini-bus. 

Nicaragua versus Honduras: One survived violent past, other still living in it

On the malecon in Managua

    There's nothing quite like the smell of tropical air. We got off the plane in Managua, Nicaragua last night and there it was, that delicious aroma of heat and humidity that I have come to associate with our new life in Central America.
      My partner and I are back here for our second round of Cuso International placements, having completed two-plus years in Honduras in April and eager to do it all over again in Nicaragua. On the rainy ride to our hotel last night, Managua looked much like Honduras's two big cities where we passed a lot of time during our time living and working in that country. But within minutes of starting into our city tour this morning in Managua, I was already seeing a lot of differences.
       Hugo Chavez, for instance. There's a huge monument to the late Venezuelan president on the boulevard heading into the centre of Managua, a reminder that we are in a country with strong socialist roots and a long history of bloody revolutions and uprisings. On a hilltop high above the city sits a memorial to the many campesinos who died trying to wrest Nicaragua from the control of the powerful Somoza family and their very good friends in the U.S. government. Honduras, on the other hand, is not a country prone to revolution or to much left-leaning political activity.
      The colorful malecon - waterfront walkway - that runs along huge Lake Managua is also very different from anything we saw in  the big cities (or the small ones, for that matter) in Honduras, where the concept of beautiful and accessible urban public space remains elusive. It will take time to gauge just how much support the Nicaraguan government provides for public amenities like the malecon, but it already appears to be a darn sight more than the Honduran government cares to pony up for.

Viva la revolucion. A painting of  Augusto Cesar Sandino,
the father of the Sandinista movement

     And then there are the children's playgrounds, which are for the most part large, well-maintained, and perhaps most importantly, not sealed off behind locked gates. Nor are there armed guards in anywhere near the quantity of our former homeland, or dramatic and depressing vistas in every direction of barbed wire, electric fencing and cement walls topped with broken glass that were so common in big Honduran cities like Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula.
      Honduras has the highest murder rate in the world, which came in at around 85 per 100,000 people in each of the two years we were there. Nicaragua's murder rate is 11 per 100,000. That is one heck of a difference for two small countries that share a border, a language and so many cultural attributes.
       I don't know how Nicaragua and Honduras ended up with such differences in their cultures around violence and crime, but even just the act of fearlessly pulling my camera out in one of the big public squares we visited today - and carrying it around boldly! In my hand! - was something I never felt safe to do when we were in Honduran cities.
    This is not to suggest that everything is rosy here. Today we passed a scratchy little collection of "houses" made out of cardboard, corrugated tin and duct tape that was poorer than anything I saw in Honduras. In the 2014 United Nations ranking of countries based on human development, Nicaragua ranks 132nd out of 187 countries, behind Honduras. It will take time to grasp what the big problems are here, but I have little doubt that they will be significant.
     For now, I'll just take Nicaragua at face value: Pleasant, warm, and friendly, with way less guns or horrific news stories detailing a constant stream of assassinations and vendetta killings. I know a lot of hondurenos who are dreaming of the day when all that can be said about their country, too. 

The Angelitos Felices gang gets a great new home

  A miracle happened yesterday in our old town of Copan Ruinas: The 13 remaining children at Angelitos Felices orphanage were relocated to a much better organized, resourced and caring facility, Casita Copan. 

    It's a dream come true for Emily Monroe, the young Pennsylvanian who has worked so hard to realize this dream. She met the children of Angelitos in 2010 and was so disturbed by the conditions that they lived in, she set out to open a new children's home using a model that ultimately strives to place children back into their families and support the whole family. 

    She was the one who introduced us to the children in early 2012, shortly after we arrived. We went on to raise almost $30,000 through friends and family back home to improve living conditions and day-to-day supports for the Angelitos children at the home, but the dream was always to see those kids moved over to Emily's new place once she launched it that fall. 

    As we were getting ready to leave Honduras this spring, Emily had no idea if the children would ever be relocated to Casita Copan, despite her many efforts. But on the very day we left the country, April 1, the branch of Honduran government responsible for abandoned children (but not responsible in any way that includes financial support) finally acted and told Emily that Angelitos would be closed at the end of May and the children moved over to Casita. 

    Emily, her staff and supporters scrambled like crazy to get ready, but the date came and went without action. That happened several more times.
    But on July 1, it happened for real - admittedly with more initial trauma than anyone would want for the Angelitos kids, who arrived crying and confused in the control of armed police. But they have known Emily for years and have many friends at Casita Copan, and word is they were already calm and happy by the time evening came and they were in their new pyjamas (another first for them) and ready for bed. 

    Casita Copan is going to need lots of ongoing support to be able to manage the big jump in operating costs that these additional children will require. I hope the many people who supported these kids while we were in Honduras will also support them now that they've relocated to their new home. Paul and I raised $4,200 for Emily at our fundraiser June 5 in Victoria, and will be looking for other ways to support her great work.
    Big congratulations, Emily! You're one tough cookie, and doing wonderful work. We're honoured to be supporting you in all of this.

Racism in Honduras: Not Just On The Soccer Field

    
    
    This is a great read from the Washington Post on the roots of racism in Honduras, which I definitely saw during my time there. There were occasions when I asked someone if they were part Garifuna - the Afro-Hondurans who live along the Caribbean coast - only to see such questions were perceived as a grand insult. 
    
    One woman pulled me aside after I asked and confirmed quietly that yes, she was part Garifuna, but quickly added "I don't like the blacks." Another laughed nervously and said no, she was just from an area of the country where they didn't use chlorine in the water and as a result, people's skin was darker. 
    
    You tend to think of poverty as the great leveller in a country like Honduras, whose citizens certainly have much bigger things to worry about than the colour of a neighbour's skin. But no. White people against brown people. Brown people against darker brown people. What a world we live in. 
     Thank you to Joshua Nadel for putting some history around the mystery. Tragic how racism always finds its way through.
     
    In 2011, a number of incidents surrounding soccer and racism grabbed international headlines (most notably the  John Terry-Anton Ferdinand and Luis Suarez-Patrice Evra affairs). Outside of the limelight of most of the international press, Afro-Honduran players voiced their own charges to end racial discrimination. Osman Chávez, then a starting center back for los Catrachos (as the Honduran national team is sometimes called) and many of his teammates decided to boycott the national media as part of a campaign called “journalism without discrimination.” Racist comments on newspaper webpages appeared regularly, which disparaged him and many others on the team. He could understand racism in Poland, where he played professionally, as partly stemming from not seeing many people of color. But “in your own country, brother, where you were born,” he said, “it is intolerable, you just can’t fit that in your mind.” In October of that year, Johnny Palacios, also at the time a national team player, accused a referee in the Honduran professional league of racially abusing him during a game.

Racism is certainly nothing new in Honduras. Honduras identifies itself as a mestizo nation — of mixed indigenous and European roots — and officially only about 2 percent of the population is of African descent (though the actual number may be as high as 10 percent). And the fact that roughly half the Honduran national team at the 2014 World Cup is Afro-Honduran only serves to suggest that other issues are at play, such as access to education and job opportunities. But history is at stake as well, and the team exposes the contortions that the Honduran state historically attempted to “whiten” the nation.

So in the early 1900s, Honduran intellectuals and government officials began searching for ways to highlight Honduras’ indigenous heritage. In the 1920s, they “found” their new national hero: the Lenca warrior Lempira. He had waged a futile war against Spanish conquistadors in the 1530s, but he was rewarded nearly 400 years later. Though no images of Lempira existed, the Honduran government produced one, which still graces the Honduran banknotes that bear his name.In the early 20th century, Honduran nationalist leaders adhered to ideas ofmestizaje — a valorizing of the mixed race nature of Latin American nations popularized by the Mexican thinker José Vasconcelos — as a way to inspire national pride. While mestizaje uplifted the indigenous, it was still based on 19th century racist ideology, which placed Africans at the bottom of the racial hierarchy. People of African descent were seen as an impediment to national development, and their presence had to be minimized. Blacks,according to Honduran thinkers of the era, were “retarded ethnic elements” and represented “a problem for the purity for the ‘Honduran race.’ ”

In embracing Lempira, Honduran nationalists not only created a cultural icon for a nation supposedly built on European and indigenous bases, but also explicitly rewrote the history of the nation’s African roots.  According to the early 20th century thinkers, Honduras’ black population arrived as part of the influx of Anglophone Antillean workers for banana plantations in the late 1890s, and they remained confined to the north coast and the Bay Islands. They coupled the discursive reconfiguration of Honduran history with practical racism: Immigration laws in 1929 and 1934 banned blacks from entering the nation.

In fact, however, Honduras’ African roots are much older. People of African descent arrived in four different waves. Many Africans arrived in Honduras in the 1500s along with the first Spaniards (and may have fought against Lempira) and played a crucial role in the development of the colony and its economy.

While history books sought to de-Africanize Honduras, census data also played a role in minimizing the presence of non-mestizos in the nation. In a linguistic sleight of hand, the Honduran state erased the possibility of claiming African roots. The 1910 census enumerated seven different races:ladino (a catchall term for people of mixed race), indigenous, mestizo, white, blacks, mulattos and “yellow.” But by 1916, there were only two (indigenous and ladino), and by the 1920s racial categories ceased to exist. There were no blacks in Honduras, because there were only Hondurans. Racial identification would eventually be added back into the census, but no categories that allowed for African descent — ladino, mulatto or black — existed until 2001.A second African-descended population emerged — in the 1600s — from intermarriage between shipwrecked and runaway slaves and indigenous populations on the north coast. The Miskitos, as they are known, aligned themselves with the British and intermittently raided Spanish settlements. The third major influx of people of African descent came in 1797, with the arrival of the Black Carib — runaway slaves and members of the Carib indigenous group — who were deported to the Bay Islands after losing a war against England and France. These exiles moved quickly to the mainland and became known as the Garifuna, who remain the largest African-descended ethnic group in Honduras. And the fourth wave — the so-callednegros ingleses — arrived in the late 1800s from the British Caribbean to work on banana plantations.

Yet Afro-Hondurans have always been visible in the nation, and especially on the national soccer team. While the team for Honduras’ first international match — in 1921 — is unknown, in 1930, when Honduras won its first game, at least four members of the team were black. And this at a time when Brazil would not to allow Afro-Brazilians to represent the nation internationally. So too in 1982, when Honduras shocked hosts Spain with a 1-1 draw, Afro-Hondurans made up much of the team, including defenseman Alan Anthony Costly (father of current Honduran striker Carlos Costly) and goalkeeper Julio Cesar Arzú.

Presence on the soccer team, however, does not equal acceptance. For most of the 20th century, the Honduran state has ignored its African-descended population — or worse. In 1937, the government of Tiburcio Carias massacred 22  Garifuna leaders in the village of San Juan. Garifuna language was banned in school curriculums until the 2000s. Social indicators among black Hondurans tend to rank near the bottom; access to education and jobs lags behind much of the rest of the country. And in soccer, racism persists as well. In 2006, a politician claimed that blacks brought the level of play on the team down because they were not as “intelligent” as other Hondurans. In response to Chávez’s 2011 anti-racism campaign, a former Honduran national team psychologist argued that“blacks, by nature, have low self-esteem and therefore look for ways to call attention to themselves.”

In other words, while Afro-Hondurans make up a large portion of the national team — and always have — their presence has not yet led to greater tolerance. Nor has it occasioned a change in Honduras’ dominant narrative about race. What does this mean? The persistence of racist attitudes in Honduras implies that soccer, which many claim capable of changing attitudes about race and creating a more just world, may not be the panacea that many would like it to be.

 Joshua Nadel is author of “Fútbol!: Why Soccer Matters in Latin America.” He is an assistant professor of History and associate director of the Global Studies Program at North Carolina Central University.

Fresh from the experience of a lifetime - join us June 5 for photos and stories

   

    Picking the photos for our event tomorrow night has been like a kaleidoscope journey through our two-plus years in Honduras, immersed in all the memories packed into however many hundreds of gigabytes of pictures and videos we collected over that time.

   As always, I’m reminded that it’s the people that make a photo. In the moment I’m drawn to the scenics – and we’ll certainly be including a few of those at the Victoria Event Centre tomorrow. But the ones that make me smile are the ones with people: Bustling about in our little town of Copan

Ruinas; packing a gun in their back pocket to a farming workshop; lovingly tending the graves of their loved ones; horsing around on the beautiful beaches at Batalla in the Moskitia.

   What a place. What an experience. We have been home 2 months now, and I’m really feeling grateful to Cuso International and the Comision de Accion Social Menonita – my placement in Honduras – for such an amazing opportunity. It has been a time like the three-year period when I headed up PEERS Victoria a decade ago: Life-altering, in

ways that will shake up my opinions, decision-making, passions, work habits and approach to life for years to come.

   I hope you’ll join us tomorrow, June 5, 7 p.m., and share some of our Honduran stories with us. We’re raising money at the event for a group of abandoned children growing up in the little town where we lived, Copan Ruinas, but the night itself is more just a chance to share the experience of living and working in a Central American country for the past 28 months.

   I know there are many people out there wondering about work opportunities like this, wondering what it would mean to step out of their lives for a while and into something completely different. Please come to the Victoria Event Centre, 1415 Broad St., and let us fill you in. I find myself using empty phrases like “an amazing experience!” and “A fabulous opportunity!” when people ask me how we liked our time in Honduras, but I’m hoping we can get past the platitudes tomorrow night and impart more of what it really felt like to have this experience.

    We’re asking for $20 at the door, with all proceeds to Casita Copan and Cuso International. And hey, a bonus: Drinks, 20 or so terrific silent auction items, and a chance to meet each other in person, not to mention a guest appearance from the dog we brought back from Honduras, Maggie (aka White Dog). 

    Big thanks to Anne Mullens, Vivian Smith and  Sante Communications Group for organizing the evening!

   To Honduras With Love   7 p.m. Thursday, June 5   Victoria Event Centre, 1415 Broad Street

What to do about temporary foreign workers: Help them find work

   

Underneath all the current noise around temporary foreign workers are a couple basic truths. One is that people who need money and work will always be drawn toward countries that appear to have an abundance of both. The other is that people already settled in those countries will find ways to exploit that desire.
    And so we have this latest news of Israelis lured to Canada to work in mall kiosks, falsely promised wages and sales volumes the likes of which many Canadians would be happy to earn themselves. But of course, events didn't unfold like that, and now we are neck-deep in embarrassing allegations of modern-day slavery and an astounding absence of regulatory oversight.
    My perspective on temporary workers has changed significantly since my time in Honduras, where I saw things from the other side of the line. Legal or illegal, a job in a land like Canada or the United States changes everything for the families who suddenly have access to money they could never hope to earn in their own land. I'm quite sure that any one of us could be converted into people who would enter another country illegally if it meant the bills would get paid and the kids would be fed and clothed.
     Developed countries worry a lot about migrants sneaking into their countries to take under-the-counter work and then staying. But what I saw in Honduras was that many, many migrants returned home after four or five years, having earned enough money to build their house, launch their business, put their children through decent schools. That seemed especially true among illegal migrants, who often had quite focused plans about where they were going to go, how they were prepared to live while there (low-cost to the extreme) and how they would use the money they'd be sending back home. There's a style of house in Honduras that I came to think of as "U.S. Migrant" because its higher quality and North-American influenced design made those very attractive, well-built houses stand out so much from those around them.
    From the receiving country's perspective, the discussion almost always goes fairly quickly to the question of migrants "taking good (insert country here) jobs," or lowering work standards because they work for less and aren't able to complain if some of the working conditions are breaking the law. Much of the news coverage of the exploited Israelis is portraying the matter as one of employer exploitation and lack of regulatory oversight, but underneath such issues is always the lingering question of whether such jobs really needed to be shopped out internationally in the first place.
    Having heard countless hair-raising stories as to what people are prepared to do to sneak into another country if it means they'll find well-paid work, I am now of the view that there's no way a developed country is ever going to build a wall high enough to stop the flow across its borders of people seeking a better future.
    I am also of the view that human nature being what it is, there will be no end to people who seek their own better future by exploiting the basic desires of desperate people to have a better life. During our time in Honduras, there was a tragic news story about a scam involving fictional temporary jobs in Canada that left dozens of struggling Honduran families destitute. They'd sold land, borrowed from their families, done whatever they had to do to raise money for huge fees for the supposed work program, only to find out the program didn't exist.
    What to do? Short of wishing on a star for an end to global poverty and unscrupulous people, I think all you can do is look at the reality of things and act accordingly. Canada can't stop gullible people from other lands from believing some scamster's story that our country is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, but it can prevent said scamster from simply doing whatever he wants once the people arrive. Canada has the regulations and laws needed to prevent such exploitation, but what recent high-profile cases are revealing is that we no longer seem to have the will or the resources to enact them. That's a pretty big problem.
    And were it all up to me, I would create more legitimate temporary-worker programs. Nothing I saw coming out of development aid in Honduras rivalled the economic power of the country's migrant tradition. A fifth of the country's GDP comes from money being sent home by Hondurans working outside the country, legally or illegally. Why not help countries like Honduras at the grassroots level by permitting more people to come here to work for four or five years?
    As for "good Canadian jobs," we have no one but ourselves and our poor choices of governments to credit for the deterioration of that vision. Free trade may be better for the world, but it's not better for workers in the developed country jobbing out the work. Salaries have stagnated while costs have soared. I know, because I remember how my first husband and I, at the tender ages of 21 and 17, managed a household, a child, a mortgage, two cars and an annual holiday to somewhere like Disneyland or Hawaii on his resource-industry salary. How many young couples could say the same nowadays?
   As a nation made up almost completely of migrants, Canadians should know more than most that there's no stopping the drive to seek greener pastures. People are going to come. But surely there are better ways to manage that reality more effectively than to cut regulatory services to the bone and then act surprised when desperate foreigners pack their bags anyway and bad people lead them astray.

A tire goes flat, a meeting starts: Defining a culture

   I suppose I’ll be comparing here with there for a while yet, even though I’m a big believer in living where you’re at. But just two weeks back, I’m seeing the differences between Honduras and Canada so clearly right now with these newly returned eyes, and it’s pretty interesting to reflect on what’s good and bad in each of our cultures.

     I've come up with a little story that I hope demonstrates what I think is a fundamental difference between the cultures of Canada and Honduras. Here’s the scenario: A person is in a car going down the highway, headed for a morning meeting at 9 a.m. Just the day before, this person fixed their own flat tire, so happens to have a tire iron on the car floor. As they drive along, they pass another person broken down at the side of the road with their own flat tire.

     What I think would happen in Canada: The driver passing by might consider stopping, but would check his or her watch and realize that would make them late for the meeting, and probably get them in trouble with their boss. The driver would also remember advice from somebody or other that no one should ever stop at the side of the road to help a random stranger. And besides, surely the person with the broken-down car would have BCAA or at the very least a cell phone to be able to call somebody else for help. So the passer-by would keep on driving, and the meeting would begin on time.

     What I think would happen in Honduras: Not only would somebody stop to help, but probably three or four more would as well. They would emerge from their cars greeting each other and spend at least 10 minutes joking and talking about this or that. At least two people in the group would discover they were related. Meanwhile, one of the many people who sell tamales, fried-chicken dinners and fruit on the buses would notice a group starting to gather, and would come by to sell them food. They’d buy some, perch here and there along the roadside while sharing food and banter, and eventually they’d patch up the flat tire with whatever was handy and everybody would get on their way.

     Were there anyone among them who had been on their way to a 9 a.m. meeting, that person would have arrived an hour or more late. But a lot of other people would have arrived almost that late to the meeting as well, so in fact he or she wasn’t really late at all. Sometime later, the meeting would get underway.

      There’s good and bad to each scenario. If you’re the driver broken down at the side of the road, nothing could be better than a whole lot of people passing by who want to help, and damn that 9 a.m. meeting start time. But when people don’t arrive at meetings on time, things get sloppy in all kinds of ways. Honduras’s relaxed culture shows its dark side in all its failed systems and inability to control massive social problems. Got to be organized to make all that complex stuff work.

     But there’s something profound lost as well among those who choose organization over human relations. Yes, they end up with one heck of a nice country due to all their collective striving, but there appears to be a kind of drawing inward that comes with cultural prosperity. We help each other in truly meaningful ways, like by paying our taxes and demanding accountable government, but on a day to day basis we're not exactly warm and friendly.

     I feel like our lives are so much more isolated here in Canada. Clearly our cultural style works well for creating quality education and health care, a functioning justice system, great roads and economic stability, but I wonder now if one of the costs might be a loss of human connection.

     I particularly feel it now when I’m in the car, having mostly been stuck with bus travel for the last two years. There was a lot about bus travel that I hated, but the one thing it gives you in a country like Honduras is lots of contact with other people. They’re going to be squeezing onto your seat, stumbling over you, bumping into you, spilling a plate of rice on you and trying to sell you things. I wouldn't want to suggest that much about bus travel in a developing country is fun at the time, but you certainly do get your full quota of human contact.

      Transportation here is so much cleaner, quicker and less risky than it was in Honduras, but it feels so much lonelier. With our windows up and ours cars on the move, we zip around in our solitary little bubbles, in the midst of thousands of people and yet alone.

      Of course, my Honduran acquaintances would love to have the problems I’m mentioning. Everyone driving around on beautifully maintained, wide roads in their own comfy cars, which they can afford because they’re paid a decent wage? Bring it on!

     What they don’t yet know, though, is that when the day comes that their schools are good and they’re making a fair wage and their roads don’t suck and almost everybody’s got their own cars, they just might find themselves rushing off to a meeting one day without even thinking twice about helping somebody broken down at the side of the road.

      Win some. Lose some.

Two different worlds, and something to be said for both of them

Thetis Lake

  I've found myself using the phrase, “And the infrastructure here!” a lot since arriving back on the Island from Honduras, so I guess that must be one of the things that has struck me most now that I am back to the life of a Canadian.

    But in truth, there are so many points of comparison, good and bad. I do like sewage pipes big enough to embrace toilet paper, and water that comes straight out of the tap ready to drink. And the green spaces – well, I’m ecstatic about the green spaces. Honduras has the right climate for amazing public boulevards but at the moment there are hardly any, so just walking along the Gorge appreciating Saanich’s free flower and plant display is a rush for me these days.

    On the downside, people are much less friendly here as they pass each other on the street. I’m really struck by how many people go out of their way to not make eye contact with the passing stranger, or even drop their gaze just at the point where a person might otherwise say, “Hello!” Walking in Honduras was a festival of “Holas!” and “Buenas Tardes!” because everybody greets everybody there. I’m missing that.

    As for that infrastructure, there’s just no comparison. Canadians have some amazing infrastructure. The roads! The signal lights! The beautiful public washrooms! Every day since we arrived last Wednesday, I’ve found myself appreciating some aspect of good old Canadian infrastructure while reflecting on the lack of it in the country I just came from. Not only are the sidewalks wide enough to accommodate walking abreast or even the occasional errant cyclist, they’re even level and well-maintained, and none of them ends in a leg-busting dropoff.

Riverside in a San Pedro slum

     On the downside, I wonder increasingly whether having everything just so nice makes us a bit  tense and cranky as a society. There is a certain tendency here to look for reasons to get angry at people for breaking the rules, and I don’t just mean the tenant in my mom’s apartment building who is currently harassing Mom’s 83-year-old sister and her husband for making too much noise.
    The noise went on and on in Honduras, and I do admit that sometimes I was not happy at all to hear it. There were times where Paul and I couldn’t hear each other inside the house mere metres apart, because there was some car blasting up the street right outside the front of our house.

    But you know, life’s too short for feeling mad at people. Something’s gained and something’s lost when we create a society as controlled as Canada’s. I've learned in this time away that there’s a strange freedom to just giving into the noises of the world around you and letting go of that strange bitterness that can manifest in developed cultures when other people won’t do what we say. At any rate, isn't that why they invented ear plugs?

     My friends and co-workers from Honduras would be awed by this place. Three of them went to Wisconsin for a week during my time there, and they came raving about the highway rest stops and the autumn leaves. Imagine if they saw B.C. I feel like being away for more than two years is letting me see this place of ours through Honduran eyes, and it is a knockout.

    As much as we like to gripe about our governments and our taxes here in Canada, we have been blessed with decades and decades of governments and citizens who have given us the gifts of unbelievable infrastructure, parkland, well-educated children, Medicare, well-paid jobs, old-age security, social support. I have never appreciated Canadian-style government more than during these two years of living in a country that virtually didn’t have a government in any kind of meaningful way. Thank your lucky stars, people.

    We are much older here. I see that in all the faces that look like mine, whereas half of Honduras’s population is under 25. I was always so much older than anyone else in the room when I was meeting with my co-workers or doing just about anything in a group in Honduras; all my co-workers, even my boss in Copan, were young enough to be my kids. Here, people in their 50s and up are the majority. It’s neither good nor bad, just different. Definitely a different energy.

     We have much more money, of course. And much, much more stuff. But I wouldn’t level that as a criticism against Canadians, because I think everyone in Honduras would love to have a life like so many of ours, full of things to buy and money to buy them. (I’m convinced Honduras is ripe for a chain of good second-hand furniture stores with really fair prices, because you would not believe how fast our furniture sold in the days before we left Copan Ruinas last week. I even sold my potted plants.)

    I miss the heat of Honduras. But I love the long days of Victoria. I miss all the dogs that used to ramble around the streets. But it’s nice now to see nothing but fat and happy dogs with healthy fur.

    I don't think I ever would have considered that having dogs rambling around free was fun. But in fact, the practice let me get to know some really special dogs, including the one we brought home with us. Sure, sure, I dream of a world where every dog is a wanted dog. But that’s not to say there isn't a lot of pleasure in just developing relationships with strays and hungry canine neighbours who show up at your door for food and affection.

    People have told me that some of my posts remind them of all the things we have to be grateful of as Canadians. That is so true. Anyone who thinks that less government would be good for the country really ought to get on down to Honduras and just take a look at how that’s going for them. I know more than ever now that good governance and responsible, organized use of public money are absolutely critical to everything. 

    But at the same time, I’d caution against believing that everything is better in Canada.

    Ultimately, Canada is probably the country I would wish for on behalf of my friends in Honduras, because they would love to live like this. They want jobs that pay what they’re worth, health benefits, good schools and opportunities for their kids. They would like to have a 65-kilometre drive on a great road that takes 40 minutes, rather than a bumpy, dangerous and slow weaving trip that takes an hour and three quarters. Just like us, they want their kids to be well-schooled and well set up for a good life. They would go crazy for potable water and incredible internet speeds.

    But now I feel a new connection to another kind of life, too. It’s messy and uncertain, but also compelling and warm, in every sense. It’s a life that reminds you of the sheer persistence of the human race, in the face of all kinds of weirdness and unfortunate developments. There are Hondurans who are actually 100% self-sustaining, and with none of the hullabaloo and fanfare that greet such rare practices in our over-served land.

    On the one hand, I am glad to be from a country that doesn’t let strangers just wander on up to an orphanage and start hanging out with the kids, even taking them to the pool unescorted. On the other, that aspect of our lives in Copan Ruinas, hanging out with the Angelitos Felices children, was an amazing part of our two years there.

    In Honduras, there is no real option except to trust that someone means you no harm, because no one's going to do anything about it anyway. There might be laws or a regulation, but no one is enforcing them. Here, we leave nothing to chance. Those have been two interesting extremes to contemplate.

    So. Get on out there and enjoy a green space you especially like, and think about all those generations before you who did their part to leave you that gift. Take along a water bottle filled straight out of the tap. If you’re a cyclist, look down at that bike lane you’re riding in and think about how something like that didn't just happen. 

    Then put your head up and say hi to whoever passes. We've got a lot of things to be happy for in this country. Smile.

White Dog: The rest of the story

 

White Dog in my stepson's Vancouver apartment

I've been posting a lot of White Dog updates on Facebook but realized that not everyone who saw my first blog post on her is my Facebook friend and might be wondering how the story ended.
    It ended well. White Dog is now settled in her new home in Cumberland, and judging by the little video I saw yesterday of her bouncing around with my daughter and her family on a Comox Valley beach, settling in quite nicely. And just like childbirth, all the hassle has been forgotten just seeing how happy she is to be here and how happy my family is to have her as their newest addition.
    But that's not to say that anything about the process was easy or cheap. When last I posted, White Dog's tab was at around $1000, which included vet bills to get her ready to come, shipping and pet brokerage fees (expensive!). We got hit with an additional $90 after we arrived in Canada - $30 to the Canada Border Agency and $60 to the company that handles cargo at the Vancouver Airport.

WD in her kennel at the San Pedro cargo area

    We would have incurred even more costs for transport were it not for having good friends with big vehicles. A Kennel 500 is one honking piece of furniture, and we had four seriously big suitcases and an accordion to transport as well because we were leaving the country and packing up what little household goods we had. There were four legs of land transport that would have been difficult and costly had friends not stepped forward to help us out.
     My Honduran boss Merlin Fuentes transported all of us and our luggage to San Pedro Sula from Copan Ruinas, saving us money but more importantly, an unbelievably difficult four-hour bus ride. Another co-worker in San Pedro took us to the airport on the morning of our flight, and patiently drove us around the airport as we looked for the cargo place where we could drop off the dog (which nobody informed us of until the night before).
    While we'd initially thought White Dog would be flown into Victoria along with us, her flight in fact ended in Vancouver, which is apparently as far as the company will take the dog. So then we needed my partner's son Sam to step up and come and get us at the Vancouver Airport at midnight. We didn't get out of there until after 2 a.m. due to an enormous final hassle they saddle you with in which you have to drive back and forth between the cargo area and the airport to get papers stamped by customs and fees paid.

First daffodil experience during a morning walk in Vancouver

    Then we were in Vancouver with no way to get to Victoria. Happily, another friend who happened to be returning to Victoria from the mainland on Wednesday and had a big vehicle stuffed the dog and I in and we came on the ferry. Paul had taken a couple of the bigger bags earlier that morning and made use of one of those two flights we'd paid for to Victoria; we had no choice but to forfeit the other one.  But then my daughter met us at my mom's place in Victoria and White Dog stepped out into her new life, and all was well.  
    She seems invigorated by the cooler temperatures, and I'm sure will be forever grateful that the ticks aren't nearly so relentless in Canada and the municipality doesn't poison dogs on a regular basis. She has a new pal, Angus - my daughter's other dog - and a family with a nice yard and a lot of chicken gizzards to share.
     And it's great to have her here. She's the ultimate Honduran souvenir. I still blush when I think of just how much money we ended up spending to bring her, but let's just consider that water under the bridge. 

Sometimes a girl just needs to shop

 I went shopping today, and it made me really happy. Is that wrong? I wouldn't care anyway, that was how good it felt.
   As much as I tried to pretend it wasn't so, Honduras was not a shopping mecca. I struggled with both the styles and the fabrics, and the shape of the clothes just isn't cut for broad-backed, big-shouldered Canadian girls. So when I pulled my bike up to Value Village this afternoon and walked through those familiar glass doors with money in my pocket, I felt something close to euphoria.
   It was one of those days where I had the used-clothing-store golden touch. I even found jeans and shorts. I got 13 stamps on my Value Village card, a promotion I hadn't known existed but was happy to take advantage of. I am no longer feeling completely discouraged by my clothing, and finally threw out the strange red hoodie shirt that always makes me feel depressed when I wear it.
    I rediscovered my silver shoes in the storage locker today, too. I loved digging some of my favourite clothes out of the storage tote, their warm fabrics and funky styles once again important to me in these chillier surroundings. During my Honduras time I was pretty much always overheated and sweaty, so "funky style" hasn't been something I've paid much attention to these past two years. It's good to be considering it again.
    The moral? Don't take easy shopping for granted. There are countries in the world where the fabrics are scratchy, the colours are all wrong, and you forever feel like the friendly giant shopping at the petite store. Today was the best $56 I've spent in a while.

It's all about the little things. Or so I tell myself

  “Turn a bit more this way,” my co-worker advised Friday as he arranged a couple of us for a photo while we gathered for a goodbye cappuccino. “I want to make sure the light is behind me.”

    Music to my ears, my Copan friend. As I bid farewell to Honduras after more than two years of trying to help my workmates get the hang of good communications, I don’t want to just hear that they’ll miss me. I want to hear that they won’t forget all the things we’ve been working on this whole time.

    Better photos was a biggie. All the funders want their projects well-documented through photos, but my workmates are renowned for taking atrociously bad photos. So hearing Edy talking about repositioning himself to get a better photo – well, I feel really good about that, what with all the talks and training around photos during which I was never sure whether any of them were very into it.

    We did a lot of work around Facebook, too.  I think it could be an incredible tool for small development organizations in terms of sharing knowledge and information about their projects, and Facebook’s extroverted nature is a good match for Hondurans, most of whom who are exceedingly extroverted.

    I guess we’ll have to see whether any of that training sticks, though. While I’ve tried to keep the regions’ Facebook pages lively, there’s not much evidence to this point that anyone is going to pick such things up after I’m gone. But hey, hope springs eternal.

    Looking back on things, I really had no idea when we started in February 2012 what I and the Comision de Accion Social Menonita might accomplish by the end of our time together. There were times in the first year when I thought it was all going to be hopeless. But something started to click around the nine-month mark. I began letting go of my expectations, and they began thinking that maybe I could actually be helpful.     And away we went.

    The goal of Cuso International’s work is largely around building capacity – in other words, help people develop some new ways of doing things that they can continue doing after the volunteer goes home. Sounds good, but what I’ve found when it comes to communications – in Honduras and in Canada – is that it’s not just a task of teaching eager people how to tell their stories better, it’s about convincing them that they should even be interested in that.

    So any capacity-building work thus involves a good deal of salesmanship in the early stages, at least when the subject is communications. In fact I’ve had to remain a salesperson right through these two years, grabbing every chance to jump into a conversation with some cheery advice about turning a particular moment or bit of news into a communications opportunity. But in the end we got a lot done, from videos and web sites to easy-to-use guides on growing better cocoa, not to mention about a million photos.

    As I’ve discovered about development work, there comes a time when you look at the little thing you’re trying to do in the midst of profound, complex problems like widespread poverty, staggering levels of violence and murder, a completely inadequate education system and babies dying for want of basic, cheap medical care, and you think, Really? Getting these guys to post photos on Facebook more often is going to change the future for this beleaguered country?

    But on my better days I see that you can’t change the big stuff without changing the small stuff first. If CASM can talk more effectively about the work it does, it can attract more funding, which in turn creates projects but also jobs, something that Honduras needs most to start to turn things around. If CASM can document its work in videos, it can demonstrate conditions in its communities – the impossible roads, the lack of infrastructure, the challenges in getting goods to market - that might lead to more realistic interventions by funders rather than quite so much pie-in-the-sky projects that don’t take into account the reality of life here.

    If NGOs were to share the findings of their projects more widely, other NGOs could replicate the successes and avoid the failures, and together they could strengthen the social fabric and build economic networks rather than just do the same survival-based projects over and over again in isolation. (As one funder acquaintance noted, “We can’t just keep on doing beans and corn.”)

    But while I’d be happy to claim a tiny speck of credit for perhaps improving organizational communications in Honduras, one thing I became more convinced of the longer I was here was that it will take a lot more than cheery development work to turn things around here. This place needs an uprising. Were it up to me, I’d be fomenting revolution.

    There’s a lot of money at the top in Honduras, but most of it never makes it down to where it counts. It’s nice that the international community is here with all our dreams of helping Hondurans be less poor, but at what point do wealthy Hondurans and the government start assuming more responsibility for that? And what’s it going to take to get all the mistreated and neglected people down below to start making more noise about all of that?

    When the revolution does come, it’s nice to think that at least a few more of them now know to turn their backs to the sun when documenting it all in photos. When they’re ready to foment, I hope they call me – I've got all kinds of communications tips on that front.

Bringing a dog home from Honduras: Hard lessons learned

 

  Maybe one day you’re going to find yourself somewhere in Honduras thinking, hey, here I am in a country with way too many sick, underfed dogs, and I’d like to find at least one of them a great new home in Canada.

    And with that one little thought, the grand and costly adventure will have begun.

    I must admit, bringing White Dog home seemed destined. We've been feeding a variety of dogs during our two-plus years in Copan Ruinas, but White Dog appeared out of nowhere for the first time a couple of days before one of my daughters and her husband arrived for a visit in January, and the three of them instantly hit it off. Unlike a lot of the other street dogs here, who really love their wandering lives, White Dog seemed done with the entire business and eager to shift into a more domesticated life. Why not, we all said.

   So I went on-line and started looking for information on airline web sites. United is the airline we’ve used the most for flights back and forth to Canada since we came here, and information on the United site about the company’s PetSafe program seemed pretty thorough. It looked like the rate for a dog of White Dog’s size in the (giant) kennel required by the airline would be around $289 – pricey, I thought, but not impossible. United also got back to my email requests for more information, unlike Delta and American Airlines.

   United’s initial information was wrong, mind you, and I would eventually come to see that what was on their site wasn't even remotely thorough and in fact was downright misleading. But in those halcyon days of January when I did not yet know just how little I knew, choosing United seemed logical.

   I quickly learned that while there was quite a bit of information about PetSafe on the site, getting particulars for booking a specific dog on a specific plane was like pulling teeth. I didn’t really get why it was going so badly until I got in touch with a Facebook acquaintance who’d been through the experience of shipping a dog from Honduras to Canada, who told me Honduras requires the use of animal brokers. He sent me a contact for Rex Internacional, which United uses.

   In hindsight, I should have paid more attention to the teeny notice on the United PetSafe rate page that says “Note: Additional fees may apply in countries that require the use of animal brokers.” But isn’t that just always the way with hindsight? At any rate, never in my wildest imaginings would a passing aside about “additional fees” lead me to think that it would increase the rate quoted on the United site by 140%.

   But I’m getting ahead of myself. While waiting for more information on how to ship White Dog, I got started on the veterinary processes. We live in Copan Ruinas, which has no veterinarian, so the first step was an eight-hour return bus ride for me and White Dog to San Pedro Sula to visit a vet who knew all the steps to meet airline requirements. Canada’s requirements turned out to be surprisingly simple - a current rabies vaccination – but the airline needed things like a health certificate dated within 10 days of your flight and an export permit (really?) from the Honduran government.

   Price for vet services, export permit, and one month of antibiotic treatment for a tick disease we discovered White Dog had: $250. Add another $28 for the round trip bus ride to and from San Pedro, as I had to buy White Dog her own bus ticket. But hey, I was still thinking that the airfare was $289, so I remained calm.

   Now, the kennel. The airline wants the dog to be comfortable, so you need to pick a kennel according to a set of measurements based on the dog’s size. I thought we could save $200 for a new kennel by having my youngest daughter bring a used kennel with her when she came to visit us this month, not fully understanding just how big and awkward a Kennel 500 can be. We could have gotten away with the smaller Kennel 400, as it turned out, but at least White Dog now has a doggie condo to relax in for her flight.

   As things went, that too was a much more hassle-filled endeavor than I had anticipated, and Houston airport actually threatened my daughter with having to pay $200 to ship the kennel here because it was oversize (a kinder agent stepped in and resolved the crisis). I make a point of not saying “You would think” anymore, because that’s a very clear sign that a person is not adjusting to Honduran culture, but really, wouldn’t you think United might consider renting the damn kennels?

   Anyway. So early March comes and I'd now been in email correspondence for six weeks with the Rex Internacional and United folk, and had had the dog vaccinated, treated for her tick disease, organized the kennel journey and booked our own flights back to Canada. I send another email to Rex Internacional confirming that all is a go, and they finally tell me the total price: $805. It is not overly dramatic to say that I thought I was going to throw up. I mean, not only is that way, way higher than my daughter or I were planning for, it is a truly embarrassing amount for two volunteers to pay to bring a dog home from an impoverished country where $805 is many people’s annual income. It is almost $200 more than our own tickets cost us.
   Not only that, but they would only fly her to Vancouver, not Victoria. So we would now be arriving at midnight in Vancouver with a dog, unable to use our tickets to Victoria and with no transport to get the three of us to Victoria. 

   But by this time, almost 2 months had passed since White Dog started hanging around. We had moved into full-on domestication. This dog was a pet, pure and simple. I couldn't have lived with myself if we’d just abandoned her to her Copan fate at that point. We were totally over a barrel.

   I did my best, sending Rex Internacional a note that made it very clear that we were devastated and angry. I CC’d high-ups in United. It helped a little: Rex acknowledged they’d made an error of $110 by charging us for 2 dogs in the kennel (even though I’d filled out a form stating there was only one). But United didn’t budge. I sulked for a few days, but then confirmed with my daughter that we were all still committed, and booked the flight for $695. Which is still more than our own tickets.

   Add it all up and we’re basically at $1,000. The kennel ended up costing $40 for my daughter to bring as a second piece of baggage. Plus it got cracked somewhere along the way, so add in maybe another $30 to fix it. And then there will be the cost of private transport for getting the dog and her condo-kennel to San Pedro, as not even the most tender-hearted bus driver is going to let us lug that huge thing onto a crowded local bus. I’m not even sure it would fit through the door.

   Call me suspicious, but I have a strong feeling that the costs aren't fully tallied yet. I've been joking with my daughter that we should rename the new family member Golden Dog. Thanks to Facebook, though, we do now have transport to Victoria after a kind-hearted person who I don't even know that well said she was going to be in Vancouver on April 2 and would come pick us up. 

    But it’s all just money, isn’t it? White Dog only has to make that little extended-paw gesture of hers that always makes me smile, and all is forgiven. As for Rex Internacional and United Airlines – well, that might take a little longer.