Tough to be a tourist town in Honduras

Good Friday procession

We've made it through our first Semana Santa in a Latin American country, an experience that we’ve been hearing out (and studiously avoiding) for years now. Indeed, things were the busiest we’ve seen them in Copan yesterday since we arrived here, but the hordes of travellers we’d been bracing for never did really materialize.

A few people told us when we got placed here by Cuso International that Copan was a “tourist town” where there was so much English spoken that we might have a hard time learning Spanish. I suspect it must have been quite some time ago when such people last visited Copan, because the reality these days is a very quiet town that I’m sure would love more tourists but in fact doesn't see that many. Copan certainly has a gentler feel, more gringos and nicer restaurants than other Honduran towns of its size, but the tourist business still seems very tough these days. 

There are a couple backpackers’ inns that are very popular with young travellers from Europe, the U.S. and Canada, but they pass through in a couple of days and for the most part don’t wander much farther than the bars closest to the inns. There are a couple of restaurants frequented by the gringos - a term in common use here - but the little street market where the locals try to flog made-in-China jewellery rarely has browsers, let alone buyers. There’s a ridiculously overpriced souvenir shop or two selling made-in-Honduras crafts at prices that I’m sure the artisans would be quite stunned by, but buyers appear scarce in those stores as well.

Horseback rides to La Pintada are popular with tourists

The horseback riding guides seem to do pretty well here. And I imagine everybody pays a visit to the ruins. A couple of the hotels benefit from the two-day excursions to Copan from Guatemala and San Pedro Sula, but for the most part the town looks like it’s in waiting. I’m told that June, July and August are the peak tourist months because Americans take their summer holidays then, smack-dab in the middle of the Honduras rainy season. But you have to hope it’s a real cracker-jack of a tourist season if businesses need to sustain themselves for a year on three months’ worth of tourist dollars.

The travellers here for Semana Santa are almost exclusively other Hondurans, looking much more monied and middle-class than the typical Copan resident. I’m guessing they’re on a break from the big cities, enjoying a small-town weekend and drawn by the Good Friday festivities, which include the creation of a beautiful alfombra – carpet – that volunteers create in the streets using coloured sawdust to depict biblical scenes.  The Catholic church also organizes a big procession that starts at the main church in the city centre and moves through 14 stages of the cross on its way to another church on the hill, returning in the night to walk on (and destroy) the alfombra.

The beautiful alfombra

The local restaurants were busy for the first time ever last night, at least the ones lucky enough to be situated in the two-block zone that tourists visit. A recurrent theme during the Catholic procession yesterday was that Hondurans need to remember that Semana Santa isn’t a “summer holiday,” it’s a time for religious observance. But I’m quite sure Copan merchants are very, very happy this weekend that Hondurans don’t appear to be paying a lot of attention to such admonitions.

Did this place ever bustle with tourists? Maybe, but a coup in 2009 and a constant diet of scary-Honduras stories in the world press have doubtlessly taken their toll. Copan also feels like a town that needs to wake itself up a little and figure out more options for keeping travellers in place for longer than a day or two. A town can only cruise on ancient Mayan ruins for so long.

But the stalled-out work on a city museum is underway again and a few new sculptures have appeared in the town park, which is otherwise just a stretch of concrete with a few food vendors and one of those pan-pipe guys selling CDs. The president was here late last year vowing that Honduras was going capitalize on all the 2012 end-of-the-world hype.

For the sake of all the Copan restaurants that will be sitting largely empty come Monday, I hope he meant it.

Sometimes all you can do is do

My partner Paul, with Emily

So I did end up going to the Angelitos Felices foster home Monday, bearing a watermelon as planned. The director wasn’t in, but I went back the next morning – this time with a couple of bags of little plum-like fruit that’s in season right now. One of the women called the director at home and she came to meet me there.

We spent a couple of hours talking and wandering around the place, my Spanish having improved to the point that I can finally indulge my journalistic curiosities in the native language. And there’s nothing like a home for children without families in a developing country to get the curiosity going, especially one that so many people in Copan seem to have an opinion about.

I don’t know what to make of the place, which I guess is why I’m just going to start volunteering there. Time will tell whether it’s a good place or a bad one, but either way there are 38 kids living there who can use all the help they can get. I know I can make myself useful.

I’ve never been in an orphanage in Canada or anywhere else, so I have little to compare this one to. It’s dark, smelly, devoid of toys and with too few beds for too many children, but that could be said about much of the housing in the impoverished pueblos all around Copan. The food is mostly beans and tortillas, but that, too, is what poor families (and wealthy ones as well) eat in Honduras. 

There’s no outside space suitable for the children to play – not uncommon either in this town without a playground or a green space. But unlike other kids in Copan, these ones have too many developmental problems to just be left to run around in the streets.

The upstairs balcony where the children once got at least a little fresh air is currently off-limits because one of the iron safety bars is missing (I’ve made a note of that one for a quick fix, as soon as I find someone who can do a little welding). So for the most part the children pass the day entertaining themselves in the big, empty room on the main floor, where the gloom is barely broken by the light from a single window at the front of the building.

Any good-hearted Westerner wants to imagine abandoned children living in clean, jolly places full of toys, jungle gyms, gentle caregivers and loads of nutritional food. But that’s not how it is for the majority of children in Honduras even when they’ve got their own families, and I guess it’s not surprising that things would be just that much worse for children who the state has removed from their homes, which is how most of these kids came to be at Angelitos.

In a place like Honduras, where so many kids have it rough at the best of times, you don’t want to think about how dire a family situation would have to be before the Instituto Hondureno de La Ninez y La Familia would remove a child. And that’s all they do – there appears to be no funding or much follow-up after that.

It can’t be easy for a child to end up without family in Honduras. The norm here is sprawling extended families that all live near each other – there are whole pueblos where everybody is related. Any child that doesn’t get taken in by another family member when their own parents die or fall apart must be a very isolated child indeed, or one with more problems than struggling family members can handle. Several of the children at Angelitos appear to have Fetal Alcohol Syndrome; others have physical disabilities.

I asked the woman at the home where the children would live if not there. They’d either be on the streets or dead, she told me. I’m sure those grim fates await many of them even so, seeing as they can only stay at the orphanage until they’re 14. She wants to do better, and talks of a separate facility for the older kids where they could learn a trade. But most of her energy goes to looking for the day-to-day money to keep the doors open at the site she’s got, a problem that anyone who has ever run a non-profit can relate to. Operating costs just aren’t sexy.

Others in Copan have dreams of a better orphanage, and I’ve connected with them to see where I can help. But in the meantime, I’ll just keep showing up at this place and do what’s within my reach. I’m a doer more than a dreamer, and I know that there’s always room in any project for two more hands and a heart. Tomorrow, we’ll start with finger-painting.

Knock on enough doors and one will open

I’m not one who handles inactivity well, and I find myself looking around for more projects in Copan.

My Cuso placement is a project, of course. But at the moment that one is still taking shape and I don’t yet have enough to do at work.

That will change over time, especially if the funding comes through next month for a public-awareness campaign for young people that the Comision de Accion Social Menonita hopes to do in the runup to the 2013 Honduran national elections.

But in this moment I have time on my hands, and am casting about for constructive ways to rectify that.  It’s much more of a challenge in a new community, especially one so tightly tied to church and family.

That last phrase sounds a bit ridiculous even as I write it, seeing as a community tightly tied to church and family should be exactly the kind of place suited to the work I most like to do. But I am the outsider in this instance – the foreigner without either church or family in Honduras, and with all the baggage that any do-gooder foreigner brings in a country that hasn’t exactly had a history of successful encounters with outside interests.

It’s certainly not a question of who needs help here. As far as I can tell, almost everybody does.  The dogs are starving. The kids don’t have playgrounds, let alone toys, books or anything resembling a “green space” where they might go to blow off a little steam or release the darker energies that can develop in adolescents with absolutely nothing to do. Fun for teenagers in Copan is the local billiard hall.

Their parents need work. The streets need cleaned. Even the local businesses could use help, most having a rather limited sense of how to market themselves or the specialties of Honduras to the busloads of tourists who blast into town for a day or two. (The classic example of that is the Chorti women who make quite beautiful table linens that they sell in a virtually invisible location in the impoverished pueblo of La Pintada, where the only buyers are occasional groups of dusty tourists led up there on horseback.)

Every afternoon I walk past the string of rough little cantinas along my route to work and see the local sex workers dancing with the drunken men who frequent the tiny bars. Sex workers will always have my heart, but I sense it’s too soon for that one.  The intentions of the gringa would likely be  misunderstood at this point. For now I’ll just make a point of saying hello every time I pass by, and we’ll see where that leads.

I’d like to make music with local children, and have put that offer out there to a few Copanecans. We could start with clapping and singing and work up to the kazoos that one of my daughters has offered to ship down here. I sense the kids could use a little more joy in their lives, and making music is such a joyful act.

But people are busy with their own stuff, and I can’t fault the locals I’ve talked to for not getting back to me yet with suggestions on how I can make this happen. I’m generally a self-sufficient type happy to take responsibility for making my own projects happen, but that’s a tall order in a new country and culture with none of the organizational mechanisms I’m used to.

Even trying to organize the purchase of 70 big water bottles for a village that needs them to access treated water has turned out to be a frustrating exercise in waiting for others to open doors for me. It isn’t an option here to just phone up the water-bottle company and say, “Hey, how much?” because there are mysterious channels to go through first and no simple way for my partner and I – in our new carless state – to get the bottles from Point A to Point B even then.

I visited a foster home the other day, Angelitos Felices, and it was every bit the dark, sad place that you might expect of such a place in a developing country. I laid awake last night thinking: Could I start here? There are lots of rumours in town about the place but they don’t appear to have led to much change to this point. Meanwhile, more than 30 children are passing their young lives in conditions that can only be preparing them for a life of poverty and crime as adults.

Today I’m going to show up at the door with a watermelon and just see what happens. Maybe they’ll let me in.

My debut in Tyler, Texas

This is going to be a year of firsts for me - like this one, getting my first story published in a Texas newspaper.  While my role with the Comision de Accion Social Menonita is primarily to help them with communications here in Honduras, I figure it can't hurt to put those English-language skills of mine to work sometimes to spread the word about CASM a little farther afield.
I'm posting the story below, just in case you don't like links. It's one more piece in the puzzle of what I actually do down here in Honduras, which I admit I'm still working on understanding myself. I do like the chance to jump into plain old reporting once in a while.

Copan Ruinas, Honduras-The big hole in the ground was two feet deep and nothing but dirt when the volunteers from First Christian Church in Tyler got their first look at it March 10.

By the time they headed home to Texas on March 18, it was three feet deeper and ready for concrete to be poured. And the 900 people living in the isolated mountain pueblo of La Cumbre were significantly closer to having the badly needed new reservoir that would ensure every household in the village had water. 

“Every year I ask the Lord to give me a vision, a purpose for the trip, and this year I asked to be blessed with a feeling of Christianity coming back to me from Honduras,” volunteer Joe Gonzalez said Saturday at his hotel as his team prepared for the trip home. “Up on that mountain, every time I pushed the wheelbarrow with another load of dirt and saw that view all around us, I felt like that was happening.”

First Christian congregation member Larry Gilliam has been organizing the annual week-long volunteer missions for 12 years now, and most of the group of 14 volunteers on the Honduras missions are veterans of many such trips. “I hear that once you go on one of these, you get hooked,” said first-timer Larry Davis, who was on the trip with his wife Linda.

This year’s team was a mix of people from Tyler, Houston and Austin that included several married couples and a mother and daughter – Leslie and Kelsey Neal, from Flint. The volunteer team works with Church World Service to identify projects and host organizations in Mexico and Central America, and for this trip partnered with the Comisión de Acción Social Menonita, a Christian organization that works in seven regions of Honduras to improve conditions in impoverished communities.

“We don’t go anywhere without a good host group, and we couldn’t have asked for a better one,” said Gilliam, noting that CASM co-ordinator Merlin Fuentes went out of his way to ensure a good experience for the volunteers. “I’ve worked with dozens of host organizations over the years, and this one was as good as any we’ve had.”

Half of the volunteer group worked on the water reservoir in La Cumbre, while the other half worked alongside Honduran doctors and nurses at a health clinic in Santa Rita, about six kilometres outside Copan Ruinas.  The volunteers had raised $2,000 for medications to be distributed during their time at the clinic, a draw that attracted poor families from throughout the region.

A frightening incident in the early days of the clinic ended up creating an enduring bond between the Tyler team and the Honduran medical team, recalled Ruth Gonzalez, one of three Texas nurses who volunteered at the clinic. A patient had a near-fatal allergic reaction to a medication “and we thought we’d lost her,” said Gonzalez. Fortunately, quick intervention by the clinic’s doctor saved the day.

“You never know what’s going to pull you through, teach you,” she added. “What happened that day really brought to light why you’re doing something.”

Each of the volunteer trips costs about $30,000, with money coming from fundraising events in Tyler, First Christian Church and individual volunteers.  This year’s group ended up with $2,000 in surplus funds, which they left behind in Copan Ruinas to help finish off the water reservoir.  After hearing about an orphanage in desperate straits in the community, the team also bought $300 worth of food and dropped it off.

“Most every trip we’ve been on, we look for a little something extra that could use some money,” said Roger Spain of Lufkin, who was on his ninth trip.

Gilliam conceived of the annual forays after several years of leading youth groups on missions around the world. “I grew up in a family that believed in outreach. It just came natural,” he added.

Over the years, projects have run the gamut: Building greenhouses; digging wells; constructing rabbit hutches. Spain says the spur-of-the-moment side projects can be as rewarding as the main projects, recalling a trip to Nicaragua in 2005 in which the group bought and delivered the materials for a half-built community medical clinic that had stalled out seven years earlier.

This past weekend was R&R time for the team before the volunteers returned home. But while Gilliam had sailed through seven consecutive days of two-hour truck rides along a skinny mountain road and more than 40 hours of shovelling dirt, he was shaken by what lay ahead on Saturday.

“The biggest issue for me is I have to ride a horse this morning, and that’s not my deal,” said a nervous Gilliam.  “I don’t do horses.”

Everything strange is a little more familiar

A street market at its most basic - one guy and a few vegetables

Perhaps it's the human condition to seek routine. I've spent much of my life on the run from routines I felt stuck in, yet at the same time I settle quickly and comfortably into new ones.
We've been in Copan for 10 weeks now, not nearly long enough to know much about this complex country. But certain things are at least a little familiar now, and I'm welcoming the small routines that allow the days to pass in slightly more predictable ways rather than as relentless blasts of new and baffling developments.
I have two regular lunch-time "bird walks" now, for instance, and know that one leads to the trio of magnificent crested jays near the Hacienda San Lucas while the other takes me to the arid fields and grosbeaks around the water reservoir for La Laguna. When a shadow passes over me as I walk, I know that it's almost certainly a vulture - possibly a turkey vulture, more likely a black.
Having been here for a change in season, I know that the mosquitoes that plagued me when we first arrived are blessedly scarce now that the days are hotter, and that the lovely din of cicadas in the trees right now is the annual harbinger of Semana Santa. I know which shoes to wear when it pours rain and the cobblestones are as slippery as black ice, and which "summer" clothes from Canada to pack away for later in the season because they're much too hot for a March day in Honduras.
I know which brand of platano chips I prefer, and that local watermelons are best eaten in a single sitting. I know which chicken stand has the best fried chicken and which stores have the cheapest, coldest beer.
We know where to get a good plate of "tipico" Honduran fare, and we even know what "tipico" fare is. We know not to eat the cabbage, something that virtually every Honduran has cautioned us about as a sure ticket to stomach upset (all those tight leaves trap bacteria). We know that tacos are served crispy and rolled in Honduras, and that empanadas and pupusas are the same thing.
But we also know where to get the best pizza, the best hamburger, and even a half-decent piece of German chocolate cake if we're desperate for  a good bakery treat - something which this country is lamentably short of. We know to stock up on yogurt when it shows up in the grocery store, because you just never know when the next delivery will be.
I sense that we're still unusual sights on our street, my gringo partner and I, but our neighbours now greet us with familiarity, and the armed security guards outside the bank know we're there for the ATM and not to cash travellers' cheques. When I go to the hardware store, the woman behind the counter tells other customers that I play the accordion, because she lives across the street and has heard me.
I know how to turn the shower tap just so to make the water hotter or cooler, that having been a mystery to me initially when faced with a single tap for controlling the tiny little hot-water heater built directly into the shower head. (I try not to dwell on the fact that directly above my head, water and electricity are making contact with each other.)
I know that the water is cooler on days when the tank on the roof is full and the pressure is higher, and almost too hot to bear on days when the city water isn't running. I know to scrub my lower legs extra-hard when showering to remove the significant layer of dust that builds up after a day of walking on dirt roads, and that it's possible to wash a greasy pan in cold water if you use the strange paste detergent that they sell down here.
I've got a preferred route for getting to work, one that takes me past cows and farm fields instead of through the centre of town. I no longer feel any trace of alarm when passing by men carrying gigantic machetes - which is to say, almost every man I pass on my walk to and from work. I have a pharmacy I like and a store where I buy my weekly cellphone minutes, and I can find my way with my eyes closed to the little place that sells frozen bananas dipped in chocolate.
I will soon have first-hand knowledge of Semana Santa in a Latin American country, an experience that up until now I've always taken care to avoid. Who knows, maybe I'll discover that it's fun to have thousands of Hondurans flock to town for a crazy, chaotic week-long party, and at the very least I think I'll enjoy the renderings of Jesus that will be created in the streets using coloured sawdust.
In another couple of months, I'll know what a "rainy season" feels like, and whether the brand-new rain coat I brought from Canada is useful or woefully inadequate. I might just have a new routine of indulging in a moto-taxi ride to work on days when it's pouring, or perhaps I'll just have new knowledge of the right times of day to be walking to avoid short but intense periods of rain.
And one day, it could be that these little routines I'm enjoying might be so familiar that they start to feel like ruts, and I'll be bridling at having to eat fresh vegetables every night for dinner and see the same old tropical birds in the trees every day. But that's one day.