Letter from Copan: The COVID crisis in Honduras

Casita Copan kids making puzzles during my 2016 visit

My partner and I lived and worked in Central America for the better part of five years, and I visited many development projects in Honduras and Nicaragua as part of our work with Cuso International in those years. But few projects have stuck with me like Casita Copan, in our old home town of Copan Ruinas, Honduras.

Started by a young American woman, Emily Monroe, Casita Copan began as a way of helping abandoned children in Emily's adopted home of Copan Ruinas. I've watched her lead that marvelous project for seven years now, and see it as a gold standard for addressing poverty and need not just for children removed from their families, but to prevent child abandonment. There's nothing like it in the country - or in Canada, for that matter.

As you can imagine, the spectre of COVID-19 is terrifying in a country like Honduras. BC has half the population of Honduras but more than seven times the number of ventilators in our hospitals: 732 compared to a paltry 102, and all but 12 of those 102 in private hospitals where poor people can't seek care. Because of the dire shortage of equipment, the country is on restrictive shelter-in-place rules enforced by police and the military. People aren't allowed to leave their homes.

This letter I've just received from Emily - who continues to live in Copan with her husband and young son - is a startling reminder of situations in low-income countries that have virtually no ability to deal with a pandemic. If you can, please send a donation her way. Money isn't going to get Casita Copan out of this pandemic, but it will help get things back on track more quickly when restrictions lift.

The sawdust alfombras depicting Easter

scenes that normally decorate Copan Ruinas

streets at this time of year.

***

First, I would like to send my very best to you and your loved ones during this difficult time, especially those who are working on the front lines, risking their lives to protect the most vulnerable. I wanted to share with you what is happening here in Honduras and at Casita Copán, as we face the unprecedented challenge of navigating a global pandemic.

I’m writing this from Copán Ruinas, Honduras, my home for the last ten years. This week is Semana Santa, “Holy Week,” traditionally a culturally rich time that draws tourists from around Honduras and the world to our little town. It’s the hottest time of the year, and in other years, we’d be taking the kids for a picnic by the river to cool off and share watermelon. Then we’d go into town to see the alfombras, brightly colored “carpets” of dyed sawdust painstakingly arranged by local artisans to create stunning designs in celebration of the holidays. 

Instead, we are inside, respecting the government’s mandatory shelter-in-place order, now in week four.

It was necessary for Honduras to take strict preventative measures in response to COVID-19 because the country’s healthcare system is the weakest in the region. The public hospital system for the entire country only has 12 ventilators; the private hospitals report approximately another 90. Because of the high rate of poverty, many people in Honduras suffer from preexisting conditions caused by poor nutrition and are particularly vulnerable. Weak infrastructure also means that many affected will be unable to access the care they need, especially those in rural communities like ours.

Here in Copán, we are currently in the eye of the storm. Safe for now, but preparing and waiting for what’s to come. We had to close our Children’s Center, the major source of food, education, recreation, and community for our children and families. We are still sending out packets of food since the majority of our moms are unable to work because of the government restrictions. While all of the kids in our Children’s Center are safe at home with their families, they are still lacking the daily support, education, and loving care that our center provides.

Here in Copán, we are not allowed to go out for a walk. Adults have one day a week (assigned by the last digit of our identification number) where we are allowed to go to the grocery store or pharmacy. Temperatures right now are in the 90s, and the majority of our Casita Copan Children’s Center families live in cramped one-room homes, often with only one bed for everyone. Mothers are unable to work because nearly all businesses are closed and movement is restricted, and if they don’t work, they don’t get paid. If you are caught outside past 6 pm, you can be arrested and forced to spend the night in jail. Rates of domestic violence have always been high in this area, and I am afraid of what the anxiety caused by this situation will provoke.

The children in our foster care program are safe and will still receive food, shelter, love, medical care, educational programs, and attention just as before, even if the routine is a bit different. So far, all of our staff are still receiving their full paycheck and benefits, though their daily responsibilities have changed due to the crisis. We will continue to do everything in our power to provide the maximum number of services possible to our children and families during this time. We don’t know what the future will hold, but we anticipate a serious blow to our local economy that will affect many families, businesses, and organizations. While this crisis will force us to make tough decisions, we will continue to uphold the values that Casita Copán was founded on – solidarity, transparency, responsibility, discipline, respect, and love.

Thank you for taking the time to read about what is going on here in Honduras. I truly hope that you and your loved ones are safe. Please reach out if you would like to hear more details about what is going on. We are busy but happy to get in touch when we can!!

One positive thing I can say that has emerged from this crisis is the realization of how interconnected we truly are. We are all in this together and we truly thank you for your support and compassion during this unprecedented time.

In solidarity,
Emily

A most unsettling story list of this thing we still call farming

Credit: Moscow Ministry of Agriculture and Food

I'm a loyal reader and financial supporter of the British non-profit news outlet The Guardian, and subscribe to its "Animals Farmed" newsletter. Every couple of months or so, the newsletter arrives in my email inbox with news of the wild, weird world of what we still call farming, but that mostly just looks like mass murder at this point.

Even just reading the little summary blurbs about the stories is an excellent reinforcer of my efforts to ramp back my meat consumption to almost nothing. I used to love my farm set when I was a kid, but realistic play with a modern-day "farm set" would require stuffing your cute plastic animals into an overcrowded, hellish stink-barn for a very short life of misery, with not a whiff of green grass or fresh air to be found.

So let's start there with my first link from this morning's newsletter, about how Russian industrial farms are experimenting with virtual reality for dairy cows, to see if tricking them into thinking they see an open meadow will make them happier. And able to produce better milk, of course. Because it's a given that anything we do in industrial farming that outwardly looks like we're being a bit kinder to the animal is in fact just a way to trick them into giving us better, tastier, or more products from their bodies.

Next time you eat a lamb shawarma in the Middle East, think about the 14,346 Romanian sheep that died last week when the cargo ship they were being carried on overturned. Romania is the third biggest exporter of sheep in the European Union, and the sheep were bound for Saudi Arabia. Speculation is that the ship was overloaded, but at any rate, the sheep were trapped in the hold and didn't stand a chance when the ship flipped.

Only 254 sheep ended up rescued. I'm hoping that none of the dead creatures were among these sheep that passed by us when we were visiting Romania this past spring, but the future's not bright for Romanian sheep overall.

The risk of mass sheep death at sea is not just an issue from "over there," either. More than 22,000 lambs a year make the journey from New Zealand to the United States to satisfy hungry consumers, and that number is up 20 per cent from a decade ago.

And how is life going for our pig friends? Not so good. African Swine Fever is in the process of wiping out what's expected to be a quarter of the world's pigs. In China alone, some 100 million infected pigs were killed last year in an attempt to stop the spread of the disease.

But that's great news for "farmers" of non-infected pigs, who are finding surging global demand and increasing sale prices when piggies go to market nowadays. The value of monthly UK pig exports hit £36.4 million - $63 million in Canadian dollars - in September, a 50 per cent increase over a year ago.

In other pig news, Britain's Conservative Party has backed away from a promise to ban farrowing crates, because they go against everything a mother pig would naturally do to prepare for and care for her piglets. But pig producers have worked equally hard to shut down that conversation.

The crates are small cages that pregnant pigs are kept in from before their piglets are born until they are a month old.

Now let's turn to China, the home of my ancestors but also a country that often seems viciously committed to eating every species from the face of the Earth. That includes donkeys, 4.8 million of whom are killed every year just to satisfy China's demand for a gelatinous traditional medicine called ejaio, which is made from the hides of donkeys. If demand continues apace, half of the world's donkey population will be wiped out within five years.

Bummed out yet? We ought to be. I get that humans are omnivores and have a long history of killing animals for food, but we're so far past any kind of hunter-gatherer framework with modern-day industrial farming. One last link before you go, this one to a deadly algae bloom of "red tide" in Florida that wiped out 200 manatees, 127 dolphins, 589 sea turtles and hundreds of tonnes of fish when it hit in 2018, and is now back again.

It's a naturally occurring phenomenon, but you can likely guess what makes it much, much worse. Yup, industrial farming, which in Florida is flooding the sensitive wetlands with agricultural runoff.

I started into "flexitarianism" mostly because there's only so long you can keep telling yourself that your eating habits are harmless, but reducing our meat intake is also a major step toward reducing our individual (and ultimately, global) carbon footprints. The United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization estimates that industrial livestock production is responsible for 14.5 per cent of human-caused carbon emissions.

Do the right thing. Put peas on your fork.

Oh, what are my thoughts on what we need to do to improve social health in BC? Why, thanks so much for asking...

Illustration by Avril Orff for provincial forum

The lines between my professional and personal interests are quite blurred at this stage in my life, as I've had the great privilege of being able to work for many years now on issues that I feel very passionate about personally.

One such issue is social equality - in other words, supports and strategies for better social health that lift us all up, whether we need something relatively mainstream like good childcare and a safe, friendly place to grow old in, or something more intense like trauma counselling, help getting out of a gang, services for mental health, substance use, immigrant settlement and so on. Social health wears many, many hats.

In my role as part-time executive director of a very small umbrella non-profit, the Board Voice Society of BC, I was invited to speak Nov. 15 in Richmond at the Provincial Social Services Forum. I'm part of that forum through my Board Voice role, as there are a number of umbrella organizations sitting at a roundtable with government right now trying to work out a more resilient, mutually agreed upon partnership that will achieve our shared desire to strengthen, organize and sustain good social care in BC.

I was asked to speak on how the work of the roundtable could impact social change in BC. Here's what I had to say:

We do a lot of visioning about social health, in BC and around the world. We do less well at figuring out how to realize that vision. We dream big – ending homelessness, supporting every child, eliminating poverty, creating community well-being. But we rarely have structure in place underneath those dreams to guide us in achieving them.

I like metaphors, so let’s use the roofs on our houses for this one, and start with a suitably sweeping vision: “My family will live under a roof that doesn’t leak.”

It’s a great goal. But what if the reality was that you had leaks all over the place? Buckets overflowing. Bits of weakening tarpaulin pasted over some of the holes. A major reno in one corner that worked for a while but can’t keep up. Leaks patched a couple of years ago that have started dripping again. You’ve spent a fortune in buckets, mops and make-do repairs by this point. But still the roof keeps leaking.

So it is with social care, where we dream big but often struggle to identify and effectively tackle the root causes. The roof leaks until you fix the leak, right? Social care fixes social problems, and supports healthy communities in so many ways.

But just like fixing a roof, the only way to get there is by taking our lofty visions and breaking them all the way down to the strategies that can fix each one. After that, we apply them - in a planned, thoughtful, flexible, routinely updated, client-centred manner that understands that social care is as important as health care and education to all of our futures. Because we know that’s true.

I see the roundtable as a vehicle for getting us there. Nothing about social care is ever simple, but we now have a place to talk about it, one that brings us together as partners with a shared interest in improving social health.

Quality child care. Affordable housing. Interventions for kids with physical, mental or intellectual disabilities. Lifelong supports for people with intellectual disabilities. Services that improve Indigenous people’s lives. Newcomers settled in and helped to find work. Good homes for children in care all the way through to genuine adulthood, not an arbitrary age.

Supported housing for people as they age and lose function. Employment services. Recreational opportunities. Income assistance. Wellness programs. Trauma counselling. Community centres. Good work and fair wages. Clean and green communities.

These are the true determinants of health, and fundamental to the health of a province’s economy and future. Any region, any community, any neighbourhood is only as good as the health and connection of the people who live and work there.

But much like climate change, social health is mired in public opinion, politics, fear, judgment, stigma, and a general tendency in humans to waste a lot of time casting about for someone to blame when people’s lives go sideways.

Do we even think of the same thing when we hear “social services”? I would bet we don’t have consensus even in this room, let alone at a provincial level. I see the roundtable as a means for establishing measurable social goals, so we all know what we’re chasing.

What are the social challenges that are priorities for tackling in BC? We need to agree on that. We need to establish achievable outcomes and then measure them relentlessly, and constantly adjust our approaches and supports to account for emerging issues, changing priorities, unintended consequences.

We need to agree on all these things and then raise that work above the political cycle, as we do with education and health care. Because social care is foundational to a life well-lived, but it can’t be realized in a three- to five-year political cycle.

Emerging social issues are almost always just the visible evidence of problems that began 10 or 20 years earlier, now grown so big that you can’t help but notice them. Homelessness is one such example. If you’re my age, you’ve seen it go from a word that didn’t even exist to a persistent and seemingly intractable problem in every BC community.

There are so many reasons for that. And if you want to vanquish homelessness, you have to do something about every one of them.

Yes, homelessness is about homes, but it’s equally about things like early childhood nutrition and child development, quality education, family supports, mental health, good work, income assistance based on the true cost of living, and the way our justice and foster systems function.

Our governments play a key role in supporting strong foundations for social health. But they can’t stand alone in that important work. This is work for all of us, from the community-based organizations that know this work and how to raise money for it, to the engaged citizens already involved in building well-being in their own communities.

From the BC businesses that get that good social health is fundamental to a strong economy and workforce, to the five million British Columbians who will all benefit when social health is addressed in a planned, strategic, realistic and sustained way in our province.

For me, the roundtable and this forum is a statement that all of that has been recognized – not just by government, but by the community-based organizations that have been doing the work of social care since long before there was government funding for it. I look around at who’s at the provincial roundtable and marvel that we’re finally all there together. And today, here with all of you.

And no, this is not the first time we’ve tried to figure this one out. But it could be the time that changes everything. It could be the time that we actually get this done.

I really appreciate that all of you are here to deepen a conversation that might finally fix that roof, to everyone’s benefit. Thank you.