One night in Copan

A little story from last night, which nicely sums up the Honduran experience.
A couple weeks ago, I was playing accordion in the central park here in Copan Ruinas as part of a little "feria gastronomica" that was showcasing the foods that some of the women sell in the streets around here. A young teacher happened by and asked if I would play accordion at the Mother's Day festivities at his school on May 13. Sure, I told him, giving him my phone number so he could call with the details.
I didn't hear anything more until the night of May 12, when the teacher showed up at my door at 7 p.m. and asked if I could catch a moto-taxi - a three-wheeled golf-cart-like thing that they use for cabs here in Copan - to his school the following night. I have no idea how he knew where I lived.
Anyway, he scribbled down the name of the school and the community it was in. The name didn't ring any bells, but that wasn't surprising - there are dozens of teeny-tiny communities in the hills around Copan, each with their own teeny-tiny one-room schools, and at this point I might know the names of maybe six of them. I gave him my phone number again, even though no one I have given my number to in Honduras has ever called me back, and agreed to come just before 7 p.m.
It all seemed like a good idea in the moment, of course. But then reality hit at about 6:30 p.m. last night, as I stood in the rain and the pitch-black with my accordion on my back and a music stand and folding stool clutched in my hands, trying to hail a moto-taxi to a town I'd never heard of.
When I finally got one of the cabs to stop, the driver looked blank initially when I told him the name of the place, and then told me he thought he knew where it was but that the trip would cost 100 lempiras each way. That's $10 all in, a significant sum that indicated just how far out of town this place was.
I'm no shrinking violet when it comes to risk, but I admit to feeling dread as I reluctantly got into the moto-taxi. Hadn't all we Cuso International volunteers been cautioned against this very thing - getting into taxis hailed on the street headed for places we weren't familiar with? In the pitch black, after having confirmed to the stranger behind the wheel that I had at least 200 lempiras in my bag and quite a nice accordion on my back?
Still, what were the options at that point? I'd told the teacher I'd be there, and figured I couldn't just "pull a gringo" and not show up. So off we went, driving up and up and up into the hills above Copan.
The town lights disappeared from sight, and we drove 20 long minutes along a completely dark, isolated road so terrible that in Canada we would probably call it a wilderness trail and caution users to bring water and an emergency blanket before embarking on it. I didn't see a single vehicle or pedestrian as we bumped along. I did my best to keep up a small conversation (I like to think that somebody's less likely to kill you if you engage them in friendly conversation, although I've never had to put that theory to the test) as I desperately clung to my accordion to keep it from bouncing out of the side of the moto-taxi.
And all of a sudden, we arrived - pueblo Carrizalito Uno, home of Escuela Jose Ernesto Castejon. The moto-taxi pulled up to a one-room school so lit up that you had to know there was a party going on inside, and within seconds a little girl dressed in the typical navy skirt and white blouse that all the students wear here came bursting out to welcome me. People were everywhere, spilling out of the school house and jostling for a spot outside near an open window now that the place was too full to pack in even one more person.
The girl ushered me into a room decked out in hearts, balloons and declarations of love for Mother, with pine needles strewn across the floor to give the place kind of a country-dance feel. I was led to a wooden stage at the front of the room that looked out on rows of chairs packed with  smiling parents. A clutch of young students beamed at me from one side of the stage, completely excited to have me there. On the other side stood the young teacher, looking relieved to see me.
I hadn't known the plan, but it turned out to involve me playing songs on the accordion in between various groupings of students performing recitations, songs and dances. It was like every school recital I've ever been to - sweetly heartwarming with occasional moments of chaos and misunderstanding that just added to the fun. I don't know if the big gringa in the corner with the accordion added much to the event, but the kids sure did seem to like having me there.
And then my new buddy Pablo returned in his moto-taxi to take me back to town, and we slammed down that terrible road one more time, me trying to balance a plate of food that the teacher gave me to take home.
This time Pablo brought his girlfriend along for the ride, who perched up front with him on a seat built for one. This time I relaxed and just tried to enjoy the trip, or as much as was possible while still fearing for my life with each glimpse of a new pothole or boulder looming out of the dark. Pablo took me right to my door.
There's Honduras for you. Confusing, unnerving, a place that feels like anything could happen, and yet for the most part what actually happens is that people are kind, kids are happy to see you, and all is well. I guess it's a country for optimists. 

A lament from the land of limited choices

Something I like - the thin slices of deep-fried green bananas  known as tajaditas

Honduras has its charms, but food isn't one of them. I've never been more appreciative of the variety of flavours that immigrants have brought to Canada than during these four months of living in what's essentially a culinary monoculture.
A true foodie would go mad here, I think. I'm a completely ordinary eater who tends to view food as fuel, but the sameness of the diet even makes me a little crazy.I'm sure you could track down a decent deli and a little more exotic fare in one of the big cities here, as long as you didn't mind giving up personal security in exchange. But in a country with so few immigrants to liven up the national palate, even the major centres are missing those marvelous food choices that are staples in the smallest of towns in Canada.
Good Chinese food, for instance. Gyros and falafels. Korean barbecue. A cheesy, spicy lasagne. Sushi. A bento box for lunch. An olive bar in your local supermarket. A thousand varieties of cheeses,  a hundred different types of breads and buns. Cookies, cakes, tarts, pies, neopolitans, baklava, cream puffs.  My mouth is watering just writing this.
Here in Copan, there's a Chinese restaurant but it serves only "chap suey," which in fact looks more like some type of very dark chow mein with way more vegetables than is the norm. I suspect that the Honduran owners have a limited knowledge of actual Chinese food.
There's a pizza place and a deep-fried chicken takeout that I completely rely on to pull me out of a food funk, and a nice little cafe down the road that makes crispy tacos and baleadas (but only crispy tacos and baleadas). Virtually all the other restaurants serve variations on the Honduran tipico meal: Beans, tortillas, a little rice, a splotch of cream and maybe some kind of meat cooked on a grill.
There are street vendors cooking every Friday and Saturday night, but they too stick close to the tipico. The breads and baked goods are generally tasteless, dry and lardy, with the exception of a few cakes you can buy by the slice at a couple of the tourist-style coffee shops.
Of course, nothing's stopping us from cooking more exotically at home. Nothing except the lack of ingredients, that is, and the heat that lasts long into the night. Life in a tropical country is teaching me that a lot of the foods I craved in Canada must have been because I was cold all the time. And let me tell you, anything that involves turning on the oven just isn't going to happen.
I consider myself  an enthusiastic carnivore, but you just don't feel like tucking into a steak when it's 34 degrees outside. It's not like there's a decent meat shop in town anyway, let alone one of those block-long refrigerated displays I'd grown so accustomed to in Victoria, with every possible cut and variety beckoning to you from their cheerful styrofoam trays. I've never been much of a salad eater, but now it's almost all we eat.
On that front, Honduras shines. The fruits and vegetables here are incredible. If you've ever passed through the Okanagan during a time when the fruit was ripe and ready for eating, or stuffed yourself on Saanich Peninsula strawberries during those exquisite three or four weeks when they're in season, you'll be familiar with the experience of eating fruit and vegetables in season that have been grown right in the 'hood. There's nothing like it.
The mangos are on right now here. Steps from my house, a giant truck loaded with mangos is parked in the street selling them three for $1. Before that it was watermelon and canteloupe, sweeter than any melons I'd ever tasted. The bananas come in five or six different varieties. Sometime in October the oranges, mandarins and grapefruit are going to come on.
The Roma tomatoes are exquisite. The cucumbers are crisp and sweet. The avocados are so creamy and delicious that they almost make up for the lack of fat in the rest of this new diet of ours. We're coming back to Victoria for a week in June and I already have a list of foods that I plan on consuming while there, but I know I won't find any comparable fruits and vegetables in a land that relies so heavily on imports.
I hope I don't come across as a whiner. I've been reading the blogs of some of my Cuso International counterparts in Mozambique and Cameroon, and their diets of fufu and little else make me feel like I'm living in Jamie Oliver's kitchen. I've had fufu - a kind of a dough made from starchy vegetables like cassava and plantains. It was interesting, but once was enough.
I guess what I'm really saying is that while there are many reasons for appreciating immigrants, I currently have a heightened sense of gratitude for the food they bring with them to their new countries. People in Honduras ask me what the tipico food is in Canada, and I feel a surge of nationalistic pride in being able to tell them that we don't have such a thing.
The next time you're eating any of a thousand dishes that make up the "typical" Canadian diet, spare a kind thought for the immigrant who first introduced it and helped make our country such a culinary pleasure. And have a shawarma for me, would you?

On the model farm of Don Humberto Mejia

The view from Don Humberto's kitchen

One of the areas that my organization focuses on is “secure livelihoods.” This was something of a baffling term for me when I first started communications work with the Comision de Accion Social Menonita, but three months on I now have a clear understanding of what it means - and just how important the work is in the context of Honduras.

We visited a small farm last week in Las Flores that epitomized what CASM is trying to do on this front. The farmer, Don Humberto Mejia, had a little bit of everything going on: Coffee, corn, beans, sugar cane, some livestock, a tilapia pond. He’s also an enthusiastic adopter of some of the environmental practices that CASM encourages in the 20 or so tiny communities where it works around Copan Ruinas, like tapping off the methane from manure to power your kitchen stove.

CASM recognizes good practices

Honduras is essentially a country of teeny-tiny pueblos in isolated mountain locations, where individual farmers try to eke out both a living and their daily bread on small, often impossibly steep plots of land. (I saw a corn crop the other day growing on what had to be a 60-degree slope.) Coffee is virtually the only cash crop for these families. In a good year a producer might have a little excess corn and beans to sell as well if the hurdles of irrigation, transportation and worn-out soil can be overcome, but for the most part it’s subsistence farming.

The poorest families subsist on nothing but the corn and beans they grow, with barely a lempira in their pockets to cover any of the other costs of living. No small wonder deforestation is such a problem in Honduras – if the beautiful tropical forest isn’t being cleared for another marginal corn crop, it’s being hacked down for firewood that can be sold for at least a little cash.

Livestock adds diversity

So diversification is a big theme at CASM. Global coffee prices are notoriously unstable, and a failed crop in a year when the rains don’t come on time has devastating implications. A smart producer is well-advised to have his or her eggs in many baskets, both for a healthier diet for the family and as insurance against whatever might go wrong that year in the notoriously unpredictable world of subsistence farming.

As well, small producers have to worry about contamination of their water supply from animal waste and the toxic coffee pulp that is a byproduct  of stripping coffee beans from the plant’s “cherries.” They need a safe solution for dealing with the waste of their operation.

We approach Don Humberto’s driveway after a one-hour drive on one of the many crazy, skinny and steep roads that lead into the mountains above the three main municipalities in the Copan region.  He has proudly posted the “Hogar Modelo” sign that CASM gave him in recognition of the work he has put in to make his farm more sustainable, and today we are here with one of the major funders of CASM – the British charity Christian Aid – to see what sustainability looks like on the ground.

Compost on the right, biodigester on the left

His three cows are the first thing we see. Cows provide milk and cheese for the family and for sale, and the liquid byproduct from the cheese-making process is excellent for the biodigester, Don Humberto tells me (more on that biodigester in a minute). There's a tilapia pond and a few pigs out back as well – we’ll enjoy some fine pork sausage later that morning with our breakfast – and a small flock of chickens that produce eggs, meat and a natural way of tilling garden soil and coffee harvest residue. 

Animals also produce waste, which Don Humberto uses in his compost pile but also in his biodigester, which CASM helped him build. Waste ferments inside the biodigester and produces methane gas, which the family taps off to power a gas burner in the kitchen. Wood is still the primary cooking fuel in rural Honduras, but only because propane gas is so expensive. The methane from the biodigester provides three to four hours a day of gas for the family at a cost of $225 all in; the gas savings alone cover the cost of the system in about two years.

Don Humberto in his sugar cane field

The family also has a fuel-efficient fogon – a wood cooking stove – that CASM helped them build. It’s a basic brick structure that burns 45 per cent less wood than the conventional stoves in use in much of Central America. And it’s got a chimney that vents smoke outside, a basic adaptation for us Canadians but still something of a rarity in impoverished Central American villages, where smoke inhalation and burns remain major killers of children.

Out back, Don Humberto has a pile of coffee-bean waste that he uses in his compost pile. He bought lombriz from another producer – worms that look to me like the familiar “red wigglers” of a Canadian compost pile – and they’re hard at work turning that waste into new, rich soil for a coming year’s coffee crop.

Lombriz hard at work

His sugar cane crop is thriving and will be ready for harvest in October. There's a towering tree in the back yard producing all kinds of sweet red, bell-shaped fruit right now, and bushes covered in delicious dark raspberry-like berries along the fence. His wife feeds us a breakfast of eggs, sausage, tortillas, beans, cream and coffee, all of it produced and processed right there on the farm. It’s the ultimate in food sustainability – the One Mile Diet.

As the Christian Aid rep points out, Honduras’s small producers can’t do it alone. Without CASM’s help and resources to build fuel-efficient stoves and biodigesters, to teach the lessons and methods of sustainability – without the support of organizations like Christian Aid to fund the work – poor farmers can't get past subsistence. But when you see what’s possible, it gives you real hope.

It's not easy being green

(James Rielly watercolour - 2009)

As any kid who has ever bumped through a bunch of different schools knows, there's an art to knowing how to fit in with a new group. My school years were in fact singularly stable, but the ever-changing work situations I experienced in later years definitely put my blending skills to the test.
Settling into my volunteer placement in Honduras has probably been the biggest test I've had, what with being up against both language and culture barriers. My co-workers are really only now starting to relax with me, three months in. And who can blame them? I was the much-older mute gringa tucked away in the corner.
But there have been other challenging transitions. I definitely felt like the outsider when I first started training for Tour de Rock, the bike ride for cancer that I did in 2001 with  Victoria area police officers. An uneasy relationship exists between police and media at the best of times, and it was pretty clear in the early days of the training that many of them were not particularly comfortable with the concept of a journalist in their midst.
One of the guys got a good laugh later when I told him I approached the problem by thinking of my teammates as cats. You don't try to make a cat come to you; you just wait until it chooses to come around. Being pleasant and friendly is all well and good, but sometimes it just takes time. (It also took a lot of hard training on the bike outside of the  regular training regimen, to make sure nobody would end up thinking of me as the rider at the back of the pack that they all had to wait for.)
PEERS was another challenge, and probably the most comparable to Honduras because of the difference in culture I was up against. It's a grassroots organization run by and for sex workers, and I was a non-sex-worker who was now the new boss.
I wasn't a complete unknown, because at least a few of the participants knew of me through my media work. But that's a bit of a double-edged sword in itself, given that there's always someone in any crowd who sees you as The Enemy when you're a journalist due to a story that offended them or a friend or family member you unintentionally maligned.
In my first weeks at PEERS, I felt that the most important thing for me to do was to stay downstairs in the main area mixing and mingling as much as possible, taking my turn with whatever menial task was going on and working as hard as I could to memorize people's names very quickly. For a population so tragically accustomed to being at the bottom of the social hierarchy, having the executive director greet you  by name when you walk in the door turned out to really, really matter.
I like to think I'm not the kind of person who judges others, but I still had to work conscientiously not to allow even a shadow of anything that might be perceived as disapproval or distaste flash across my features, no matter what scene was playing out in front of me. The last thing sex workers need is to feel any kind of judgment coming from anyone working or volunteering at the only real refuge they've got.
Here at the Comision de Accion Social Menonita, my tactic has been to make myself useful.
 It's a strange thing to be trying to do communications work in a country, culture and language you barely understand, but I can type fast in any language and that skill won me some Brownie points early on. Everybody can use a good typist now and then. I can also lug big heavy things around (helping poor communities in Honduras involves a striking amount of lugging big heavy things around, whether it's tins of food or bricks for a new cooking stove). And I can take photos. Lots and lots of photos. My little camera has been an amazing ice-breaker both at work and in the streets, as people just don't get much opportunity to have their photo taken here.
I've put major effort into improving my Spanish, too. When we did our Cuso International training back in Ottawa last December, the Cuso reps rightly told us that just because you speak the language doesn't mean you understand a country's culture. True enough, but you can't possibly access the culture without the language. Without a shared language, you're always going to be standing outside the group wondering what the heck they're all talking about, and the last one anyone wants to try to strike up a conversation with.
But the real breakthrough came last week, when I complained to one of my young co-workers that my name didn't have the same musical flow that all of their names had, and that I needed a Spanish name. She decided I would be Yolanda Macarena Rosa de Fuentes from that point on.
Within what seemed like minutes, everyone in the office was joking around with me about my new name. Someone just has to call out "Yolanda!" and the whole group starts laughing - with me, not at me, I'm happy to say.
We went on a group outing to nearby hot springs last night and the same co-worker decided my spouse needed a Spanish name, too. So he's Mr. Pancho now.
We laughed and laughed. I think it means we've arrived.

I'll fight, but will I win?

A long, long time ago, I thought of myself as shy. But I left that behind many years ago when I took a job that required asking bold questions of strangers, and it was onward into bigger and bolder from that point on.

Forthright and informed with a touch of indignation can be a very effective strategy for making things happen in Canada. Using the ability to find information that I’d picked up as a journalist and the copy-the-boss-and-the-boss’s-boss strategy that I’d honed in my work with non-profits, I became  quite adept at resolving problems in my work and in my personal life. I even got a cell phone company to back down on a $150 “early cancellation” fee, and I’m sure you can appreciate how challenging that was.

But I’ve met my match in Honduras.   In Canada, I know how to play the role of a polite but clearly unhappy customer prepared to take it up the chain until she gets satisfaction. But I’m lost here, where they just pat your hand and assure you they’re working on your problem even though they’re not.

You keep coming back at them, of course, because your complaint doesn’t get resolved. But the process just repeats – so sorry, we’re looking into that, try again next week, we’ll call you Thursday. And repeats.

Two recent examples, both having to do with Honduran banks.  In the first instance, I waited two long months for a debit card so I could access the stipend that Cuso International pays, as there’s no branch of that particular bank in Copan Ruinas.

If I didn’t want to take an eight-hour return bus ride to San Pedro Sula whenever I needed money, getting my hands on that debit card was essential. But all my Jody powers were useless in the face of a friendly, do-nothing string of nameless bank employees who said all the right soothing things in the moment and then just left me to do it all over again with whoever I ended up dealing with the next time.

I lost track of how many times I heard that my card was on its way – sometimes to Copan, (until the bank quit pretending that it had been mailed to Copan), sometimes to a mysterious shipping agent who took care of such things, sometimes to the bank branch in San Pedro Sula.  I ended up making two trips to San Pedro Sula before the problem was resolved, and a long series of calls and emails to various young dependientes and their bosses as I desperately tried to grasp how it could be this difficult just to get a lousy debit card.

I got it eventually, and for maybe a month all was well. But on Friday I used my card at the ATM I always go to and ran straight into a new banking nightmare.

I knew to be worried when the machine made more grinding noises than usual, and didn’t dish out my cash at the usual speed.  Then it spit out less money than what I’d requested – 3,000 lempiras instead of 4,000, a $50 difference. And no receipt.

Uh-oh, I thought. The bank hadn’t opened yet, so I trotted home to log into my account on-line to see what I could see. It was worse than I expected – the ATM had dinged me for 4,000 lemps that it never gave me, and then another 3,000. That’s a $200 hit, significant money on a volunteer stipend.

I returned to the bank the minute the doors opened, but I pretty much knew how things were going to go. The nice young man at the desk where they send unhappy customers told me that the machine always corrected itself at 3 p.m. every day, so I should just check my bank balance after 3 p.m. and probably everything would be fine. And if it wasn’t, I could come back.

It wasn’t. I came back. And this time I talked to the woman who looks after the ATM, who promptly went into some back room to check and emerged to tell me that everything seemed to be fine with the ATM. Did I have a receipt, she asked? No. Did I have any way of proving that I hadn’t just pocketed those other 4,000 lempiras? No.  With a pleasant smile, she advised me to check my account balance again in a couple days and maybe things would have straightened out– and if not, I could come on back to talk to her.

My partner says the way they do conflict in Honduras is kind of like Muhammad Ali in his prime, all rope-a-dope. You can throw all the punches you like, but the only one who’s going to be worn down by the end of the fight is you.

Today I’ll send an email to my bank in Tegucigalpa, and copy the other bank here in Copan that owns the ATM. I’ll ask to see some kind of documentation that shows the exact timing of those two transactions, in hopes of demonstrating  that it wouldn’t have been possible for me to withdraw two batches of money in what must have been a mere three or four seconds, let alone in a single transaction. The ATMs here only allow you to withdraw 4,000 lempiras at a time, so I plan to make the argument that I couldn’t have withdrawn 7,000 given that I inserted my card only once.

But I’m doing all that only because I can’t bear to give up a fight that easily. I’m betting I’ll never see that $200 again. It infuriates me, but I just know how this is going to go. I guess it’s better that I take the hit and not a hungry Honduran for whom $200 is serious money, although who knows how many of them have had this same frustrating experience?

Then again, even the master of rope-a-dope didn’t win every match.  I just have to learn to fight like Joe Frazier.