Honduran upper class has a role to play

The more a government does, the less its citizens have to do. Garbage in the street, bruised child in the house next door, stray dog barking all night long - in a well-developed democracy like Canada, there's some government body or another to turn to for any of those problems, and an MLA or city councillor to yell at if nothing happens.
Honduras is the other side of the coin. It's a country where there's nobody but you to take responsibility for anything. If somebody's old wreck of a couch turns up outside your door, if the neighbour's child is clearly neglected and possibly abused, if a pack of starving dogs is howling and fighting every night around 2 a.m. just down the road, you've basically got two choices: Take things into your own hands or shut up and live with it.
I don't know what conditions have to be in place before communities unable to rely on government inrtervention come together to launch citizens' initiatives to deal with shared problems. What are the factors that give rise to service clubs, for instance, or Neighbourhood Watch programs? What prompts churches to lift their vision beyond the needs of their congregation and reach out to the broader community?
Those are questions that Honduras communities would do well to ponder. The 3.5 million Hondurans who live in extreme poverty can be excused for not being able to summon the resources for anything beyond keeping their family alive, but what's stopping the other four million from doing more? Why do they tolerate such massive problems in their communities, such ineffective governance?
If you're poor in Honduras, life can be pretty damn miserable. But it can be pretty damn miserable if you're rich, too. All the money in the world won't save you from the country's car-eating potholes, random violence, garbage-strewn and contaminated rivers, and starving feral dogs that bark all night long.
Even if they were acting solely out of self-interest, I'd have expected to see more community initiatives underway at the hands of middle-class and wealthy Hondurans, if only because they were good and fed up with having to build higher and higher walls around their houses and hire more and more security guards to accompany their families on virtually every outing. Wouldn't they, too, like a clean lake and a green park for their kids to play in? (A writer for Honduras Weekly also wonders why the rich aren't doing more.)
The general explanation given for why so little happens here is that narco-trafficantes control everything. But that explains nothing to me, because surely narco-trafficantes want better roads and more security in their daily lives as much as anybody. Why would working in an illegal industry automatically exclude you from wanting better for your country?
Honduras feels like a country that's waiting for change. Unfortunately, that comes from within. Some of the most important work I see my organization and other NGOs doing is educating young people on the rights and responsibilities of living in a democracy, and how change starts with one person choosing to do things differently.
But somebody's got to get some action going among the rich Hondurans, too. With significant homegrown wealth here, it's not right to leave the mess for coming generations and other countries to solve.

A fine line between cautious and boring

My partner and I have heard all the cautions about not taking buses like the one we took today, and we take them seriously. But if you’ve travelled much, you know how it can be sometimes. Just because you know you shouldn't doesn't mean you won't. 

Honduras has a reputation for bus robberies in areas close to the big cities. The bus stops, a bad man with a gun gets on, and suddenly everybody’s getting robbed. Or a gang sets up a roadblock and demands that everybody on the bus pay a “war tax” before the bus can pass through.

It was one such robbery that prompted the Peace Corps to pull all 158 of its volunteers out of the country late last year. One of their volunteers accidentally got shot in the leg when a passenger on the bus she was on started shooting it out with a robber who had boarded the bus.

Those kinds of stories have given rise to bus companies like Hedman Alas, which for $17 a person will take you from Copan Ruinas to San Pedro Sula in a big, comfy high-end bus with an armed guard on board and no stops anywhere along the route. Free pop and a bag of chips, too.

I like a safe, comfortable bus ride as much as the next person, so that was the bus we took today to San Pedro Sula. But we’d also planned to spend the weekend at  Lake Yojoa en route to Tegucigalpa, our ultimate destination. Lake Yojoa is about midway between the two cities, but Hedman Alas doesn’t stop. And that’s how we ended up on the El Mochito bus, two aging gringos looking hopelessly out of place, shoving big backpacks into overhead bins that weren’t built for backpacks and stretching our feet into the aisle to give aching knees a break from leg room suited to people at least six inches shorter.

We’ve ridden a lot of those kinds of buses in Mexico, and I’ve always liked them. The guy who drives the bus is usually the owner, so the dashboard and windshield is typically decorated with various figurines, stickers, prayers and memorabilia of significance to the driver. And there’s always some young kid standing in the door well, whose job it is to hustle up and down the aisle collecting fares and also to get you and your luggage on and off the bus as quickly as possible so the driver can cram more pickups into the day.

The windows have to be open because there’s no air-conditioning, which suits me just fine. And there’s always something going on to take your mind off the long trip: people getting on and off with bulky packages; children dripping their ice-cream cones on your foot; vendors riding for a stop or two in hopes of selling you whatever food or drink they’ve got going on. (Today it was horchatas – sweetened soy milk served in little bags with straws – and big cookies sprinkled with a burnt sugar-cinnamon topping.)

Another big upside to this kind of bus is that it’s really cheap. While the Hedman Alas ride cost us $17 each for a three-hour trip, we were on the El Mochito for almost as long and paid $2.

But of course, there are stops galore, each one an opportunity for armed robbery or some other malfeasance. On the outskirts of San Pedro in particular – it is, after all, the murder capital of the world – I felt a small clutch of anxiety whenever the bus was approaching a young man in the middle of the road waving his arms around, at least until we got close enough to see that it was just somebody selling slushy drinks, a bag of oranges, tortillas.

Happily, we arrived quite safely in Lake Yojoa. And I was reminded again of how very hard it is to find the balance between caution and denying yourself interesting experiences while travelling. Bad things can happen, but mostly they don’t.

Your tax dollars at work

Ah, Victoria - I'd almost forgotten what a crazy little city you are. But here's a story to remind me. The City of Victoria and an aboriginal woman who does housecleaning are headed for a court battle over the little posters she'd put up on a few telephone poles to advertise her services.
Slippery-slope arguments are big in Victoria, I do remember that. So I'm sure the City is worried that if you let one person looking for work tack up a little poster with some of those tear-off phone numbers at the bottom, pretty soon you'll have a thousand people looking for work doing the same thing. And you sure can't have that.
I don't know if the City has encountered Meaghan Walker before, but I hope they're ready for one heck of a fight. She's from the Cowichan Tribes and knows how to do battle.
 Her position is that she's an aboriginal and has the right to do what she wants on aboriginal land, which is a pretty big hammer to have to use when the issue is 8x11 pieces of paper stuck on telephone poles. But it's potentially effective, as the City already knows from having had to concede the rights of aboriginal craftspeople to sell their wares along the causeway without adhering to the rules that non-aboriginal sellers are bound by.
The City loves a legal fight, whatever the costs. I've always been puzzled by why city taxpayers tolerate the costly court cases, especially when the City loses so often. But I've never lived in Victoria proper and so was always just an amused observer of whatever war was being fought.
They seemed petty and poorly considered when I lived there, and from my viewpoint here in Honduras they now just seem so very small and sad.People, there are bigger things to worry about than posters on telephone poles. Meaghan - you go, girl. 

Un dia, todo sera claro

Really, debería escribir esto en español. But then you’d have to use Google Translate to read it, and who knows how that would turn out?

It was a scarce five months ago that I got serious about learning Spanish. I’m not there yet, but just this week I’ve started to feel like I might actually be able to do this. It’s been a humbling and frustrating experience, but knowing that one day soon I might actually be conversant in this language that I’ve always loved completely thrills me.

When we first arrived in Honduras, one of the other Cuso International volunteers here told me there would be a moment when it would all become clear. I’m still waiting, but I did notice that this week at the Monday morning devotional at my workplace, I understood almost all of what was being said. I even felt sufficiently emboldened to pipe up with a sentence or two.

Sure, it’s the cumulative effect of Spanish classes and the Spanish novels and newspapers I’m making myself read, and the all-Spanish work environment that includes the rather terrifying challenge of writing funding proposals in Spanish. But I also think Spanish television has a lot to do with it, being as we just got a TV and cable a couple weeks ago. There’s nothing like struggling to understand what the heck they’re saying in the movie you’re trying to watch to really sharpen your listening skills.

Probably 10 years ago when I first tried to learn Spanish, I read an article in a Mexican magazine that talked about how anyone older than 14 or so had to learn a new language in a different part of the brain. When you’re a kid, you learn language just by hearing it spoken around you, without having to attach any logical explanation to any of it. But once you get past a certain age the learning moves to a part of your  brain that demands to know why you have to do things a certain way.

It was strangely comforting to discover that, because I’d already noticed by then that I was constantly looking for an understanding of why you used a certain tense, a certain structure, a certain turn of phrase. Unfortunately, what that other-part-of-the-brain business really means is that you have to understand Spanish grammar if you’re ever going to get the language down.

I grew up in B.C., which has been home to a lot of flaky learning strategies over the years (remember classrooms without walls?). My graduating class of 1974 had the distinction of being the cohort that never learned grammar. So there’s a certain irony in learning the rules of grammar for the first time some 40 years after finishing school. But what the heck.

The best thing I did was to pick teachers whose first language was Spanish (Jose Bermudez Cuadros in Victoria is great for one-on-one classes). There’s no way you’re going to grasp pronunciation if you’re learning from a non-native speaker with their own foreign accent, and the worst of it is you’ll never even know that their pronunciation is off.

And the other best thing I did was pick teachers who were fussy about grammar. It was boring sometimes and I hated having to internalize all the rules, but what it has meant is that I now know how to create a sentence even if I don’t always have all the necessary words at my command. Vocabulary comes with time, but you’re lost if you don’t know how to put the words together.

As I’ve learned the hard way, sentence structure is virtually as important as vocabulary for understanding (and being understood in) a new language. All those hours of drilling pronouns and verb tenses are starting to pay off. I still write Spanish like an English speaker, but at least I’m getting the hang of where to put all those se’s and lo’s that are thrown around like confetti in Spanish.

I used to wonder what it would be like to be a dog. I empathized with our late dog Jack as he got thrown into the car or the motor home with no idea of where he was going or when he’d be back. And now I know, having passed many puzzling work days with no real idea of what’s happening around me or why they’re telling me to get in the back of the truck.

But one bonus of not speaking the language is that you pay much more attention to non-verbal cues. I first noticed that phenomenon in my sister-in-law Grace, a relatively new transplant from China who I soon realized could “read” things in our family interactions that I had completely missed. I get that now, having seen how a lack of language skills prompts you to watch people much more acutely as you desperately try to get a read on a situation. It’s a good reminder to shut your ears off once in a while.

Ya bastante, as they say in Spanish – enough already. When I’m dreaming in Spanish, I’ll know I’ve arrived. 

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.