Learning to love in the absence of hope

 I've been hanging out pretty much one day a week for the last three months at Angelitos Felices, the big foster home here in Copan Ruinas that I've written about a few times. It has been one heck of an experience.
At first glance, the place is awful. It's dark and strangely damp, a big empty space stuffed with children and smelling like a mix of musty clothes, garbage and a whiff of excrement. I've started dabbing patchouli oil under my nose to help me hang in through a couple hours of being inside the place.
The room where the kids sleep would be ridiculously overcrowded even if the bunks were all functional and there were enough mattresses for every bed. But that's not the case, and I have to presume a lot of them sleep on the floor in the dank and empty space on the second floor adjacent to the bedroom.
I was there at lunch time on Sunday and it was an unbelievable scene. Every child set their butt down in short order on the little plastic chairs they all grabbed when they heard it was lunch time. The older kids hauled out three of the low, long tables that are kept in the back of the gloomy main room, and everybody tucked silently into their bowls of rice, spaghetti and tortillas that the older girls were distributing. No fussy eaters in that crowd.
Each got a glass of milk as well but there weren't enough glasses to go around, so they had to drink in shifts. Little ones barely a year old learn quickly at Angelitos that there's no point in throwing a big fit to get your glass of milk quicker, so they were soberly waiting their turn just like everyone else. The babies trail around without diapers, often falling asleep wherever they drop; one of the smaller ones fell asleep in a big pile of hair cuttings on a previous weekend when the barber was there, and this Sunday fell asleep on one of the filthy concrete stairs in the main room.
I'd have freaked out about such a place back in Canada. I'd have been turning it into a series, a major investigation, a humiliation for whatever branch of government was supposed to be overseeing the place - hell, maybe we'd even get a Royal Commission out of it.
But there's no place to exercise your freak-out rights in Honduras, and nobody to do anything different for these kids even if you could. Angelitos is a long, long way from perfect, but the woman who runs the place has essentially been left on her own to figure out how to care for 40 or so kids (some living there, others in day care). How good a job could any of us do in that situation?
Two staff work night and day at the home, in theory for $75 a month but often for no pay at all. I admire them immensely. As grim as the place is, the children look adequately fed and are consistently cheerful. We've taken some of them to the swimming pool and they're well-behaved, well-socialized children, albeit with the worst teeth you've ever seen and worn, dirty clothes that never quite fit right. Every now and then a little scrap breaks out between some of the younger children over some pathetic excuse for a toy that somebody isn't sharing (it was a broken part from a wind-up car the other day), but mostly the kids get along and are surprisingly patient with each other.  I have to conclude there's love in that place, as unlikely as that seems.
Figuring out my role there has been kind of like being back at PEERS, where I learned that sometimes all you can do is just be there for people. I show up at the foster home with the fixings for whatever the day's craft will be and aim to give the kids a nice couple of hours. It can be frustrating and depressing, and I really don't like being in that dank, smelly place. But what can you do?  Just don't ask me if the experience is "rewarding," because it's anything but.
And all if it has to be put in the context of the Honduran childhood experience overall. One day when a bunch of the coloured strips we were using to make paper chains fell off the upstairs balcony into the road, I watched children that were every bit as poor and hard-done-by as the Angelitos kids come running out of their one-room mud houses to gather up the strips for themselves. This is not a country full of sheltered, well-fed children enjoying their comfy private bedrooms stuffed with toys, that's for sure.
My partner and I are trying to get a routine going of taking the older kids to the pool, owned by one of the local hotels and open to anyone who can afford the $5 to get in. I worked a deal for the first kid swim - $25 for 10 of us - but I'm hoping to work an even better one so we can take a few kids every couple of weeks and still manage it on a volunteer stipend.
It was lovely to see them all acting like happy, regular kids for a few hours, jumping in and out of the water and smiling, smiling, smiling in all that sunshine. (OK, it's pretty unpleasant to have to see the other kids crying as you leave with the lucky few who get to go to the pool that day - I make the woman who owns the place do the selection -  but I tell myself that they're all going to get their turn.) A teacher from Stockton, California showed up in town last week and I learned that he also helps out at Angelitos during his annual visit to Copan, so he's going to be taking a bunch of the children to the pool this week as well.
It's not like you have to harden your heart to spend time at a place like Angelitos Felices. But you do have to manage your emotions and tap into the most practical, in-the-moment version of yourself. You have to convince yourself there's no such thing as wasted effort, and that there's truth to that old saying about "planting seeds."
As I've said before, I don't think too many happy endings will be coming out of there. Still, when the oh-so-damaged 12-year-old who I'm particularly fond of cracks up laughing as she clings to my neck for a swim into the deep end of the pool, or when I hear that one of the eight-year-olds has now memorized the words to The Hokey Pokey and is teaching the other kids - well, I tell myself that you just never know.

Spinning gold, or at least a few lempiras, from garbage

Workshop leader Sandra Sosa and avid students

Making art with garbage isn't a new thing, but I hadn't really grasped the potential of it for poor countries until I watched a roomful of young Hondurans last week transform aluminum cans into pretty little sepia-coloured etchings.
One of the things that really stands out here in Copan, and I suspect in Honduras overall, is the absence of local crafts. The goods available for tourists are the garden-variety woven bracelets and leather-thong necklaces found in tourist markets around the world, and few are made here.
At the workshop in La Cumbre last week, the 40 or so people who had crowded into the one-room school for the two-day event were carefully pressing designs into empty beer cans to make picture frames and folding little pieces of old chip bags into lovely earrings. I could really see that with a little marketing advice, these guys could get something going on. 

Chip bag earrings

There's a rather anemic tourist market in one of the streets downtown that desperately needs some local artisan work. I went looking for souvenirs to take back to Canada earlier this month and La Pintada's ubiquitous cornhusk dolls turned out to be the only option (I bought eight, which made two Maya-Chorti families quite ecstatic that day).
The workshop - put on by the organization I work for, Comision Accion de Social Menonita - was intended both as a way of teaching people how to create saleable products out of garbage, and getting them to rethink the way they throw their garbage everywhere. Having been personally shaped by the 1960s-era Litter Bug campaign in Canada, I'd say Hondurans are about 60 years behind developed countries in how they manage their garbage. 
But what's really great about making art from garbage in a country like Honduras is that the supplies are free. People are so poor in towns like La Cumbre that there's no way they could scratch together even $20 (about 400 lempiras) to get themselves started on a craft venture. But out there on the roadsides, in the rivers, piled up in some empty lot that everyone has designated the dump of the moment - art supplies are waiting.  
The teacher at the workshop, Sandra Sosa, had people working on four different crafts that day: aluminum cans toasted to a golden colour on a wood stove and then etched into pieces for picture frames or decorations; an  elaborate folding/weaving process that turns chip bags and old paper into earrings and other jewelry; key chains and jewelry made from the puckered bottoms of plastic pop bottles; and sparkly window hangings using the thick plastic that surrounds much of the world's goods these days. 
There's a shortage of fun activities for poor people in Honduras, who have neither leisure time nor money to pursue such things. They totally enjoyed the luxury of two days of doing nothing but concentrating on crafts, and were completely engrossed in the work on the day I was there. You could practically see the wheels turning in some of their heads at the possibility of having something to sell, money being a rare commodity in the subsistence communities where CASM works.

Beer-can art

Tourism has been a bit slack in Copan Ruinas lately, what with the coup in 2009 and the relentlessly negative media stories about Honduras that stream around the world. But it's still a major part of the local economy, and I'm quite sure that almost all of the 50,000 tourists who visit the city in any given year are prepared to drop a few bucks on a souvenir. I think there'd be a market for cleverly repurposed garbage art, especially if the local artists were on site demonstrating their work. Think of it: Buyers, sellers, money exchanging hands - it'd all be good.
But. (Hey, there's always a but.) The people we're talking about here are so poor that they're still going to need a little money from somewhere to get going, because they can't even afford the glitter, the earring backs and the tools to etch aluminum cans they need to get started.
Then they're going to need a way to get their goods to market in Copan, because La Cumbre is a hard hour away up a road that falls apart in the rainy season and almost nobody has a vehicle anyway. People living in the isolated little pueblos around Copan gets around by standing at the side of the road waiting for someone going by in a truck to let them jump in the back, making it pretty tough to keep predictable hours at your little craft table in town.
Honduras also has a lot to learn about marketing, and that's especially true at the subsistence end of things. Whether it's a thousand small banana-growers all coming to market at once and pushing down the price they'll get, or the beautiful table linens that no tourist would ever find in a million years unless they happened to ride a horse to La Pintada and were led there by the guide - the country just doesn't have it going on around marketing.
So that's another challenge. People making art from garbage not only need seed money, secure transportation and better roads, they need a basic understanding of how to develop a niche - as a group but also as individuals. As the workshop leader Sandra Sosa noted in La Cumbre, sales of cornhusk dolls would probably pick up if each doll didn't look quite so much like all the other ones.

Still, this is how things start. First, you open people to possibilities - especially the kids - and then you start picking off the hurdles one by one. And if all you've got at the start is one table staffed by a rotating group of budding artisans from La Cumbre who make it down to Copan whenever they can, that's an improvement. Inch by inch.
My time here has really got me reflecting on how I've spent my souvenir dollars during my many travels, and how I'll spend them from now on. That whole debate in wealthier countries about whether buying from children in the street "encourages" their families to exploit them - I'm throwing that one right out the window. The kids work because everybody in the family works, and if they didn't they'd starve to death.
If you're ever in Copan, please buy at least one cornhusk doll from some little girl in the square, because that's a buck that's going to go directly to a family that really, really needs it. And if you ever see a pair of chip-bag earrings or a clearly handmade sparkly seahorse light-catcher, buy them too.  

Absence makes the eyes grow sharper

Eight fairly chaotic days on Vancouver Island, and now I'm back in Honduras reflecting on how it feels to be taking holidays in the opposite direction.
They say you can never go home again. I don't know who "they" are or what sparked them to say such things, but it does seem that the things you remember fondly about a place don't hold up well when you go back for a second look.
I did take much pleasure from seeing my family and a few close friends while on the Island. It's top of my list to figure out ways to see them more often, whether by luring them south or doing more of those meet-you-in-the-middle holidays that my cousin in Darwin is so good at making happen with her family. And of course, receiving an honourary doctorate of laws from the University of Victoria was an amazing experience.
But the food and the chocolate and the nature walks I'd been fantasizing about weren't nearly so enticing as I'd remembered. The meals were too rich for my system. The chocolate was tasty, but I really only needed a couple of bites to set things right. I felt like I spent way too much time in cars, houses and restaurants, and missed the hours of outdoor time that comes with the tropical (and carless) life.
The pace was brutal after five months of the mellow life here in Copan. The B.C. government is still doing stupid, stupid things that set my teeth on edge. Victoria is still a little too precious, and I hated being cold all the time. By the time we got on the plane early Monday, I was ready to go "home."
Getting away from the place where you come from is a clarifying experience. I've realized, for instance, that while I treasure time with my family, I've also inherited a healthy dose of my father's anti-social genes. I wondered if I'd be lonely with just my partner for a friend here in Honduras. I'm not.
Others look at Honduras from afar and presume visitors like me would feel a newly heightened sense of gratitude for what we have as Canadians. But what I really see now is how much we've got to lose. Honduras is poor and its systems are almost universally corrupt or broken, but there's a certain honesty here about such things that's missing in Canada, where we're still in denial.
I don't mean to trivialize the differences,  mind you. I doubt Victorians will ever have garbage strewn everywhere, giant holes in the road that never get fixed, and millions of one-room shacks made of mud and corrugated tin - common sights in Honduras. The B.C. education system is taxed but still functional, and nobody is selling teachers' licences or creating fictional jobs so they can get paid twice.
You can still go to a public hospital and get good medical care, and can safely presume that most of the drivers you encounter on your various travels are both licensed and insured. The average Canadian is not going to return home from a holiday - as we just did -  to discover that their phone and Internet provider has vanished and there's absolutely no one to take that problem up with.
But Victoria still has hundreds of people living in the streets, and millions of Canadians - more each year - are living in poverty. Our governments' tendency to sneak in higher wages and sweeter contracts for a favoured few while denying more and more services to people in real need  - well, what other word is there for that except corruption? Honduras does have an excessive number of laws and policies that sound good on paper but are ignored in real life, and  is a signatory on any number of international agreements that it makes little effort to live up to. But that's all true in Canada, too.
And while much is made about the staggeringly high rates of violent crime here in Honduras, the first crime we experienced this year was when we arrived back on the Island to find our storage locker in the "24/7 secure" facility in Saanich that we pay more than $100 a month for had been broken into. While we would have expected to be on our own in dealing with a problem like that in Honduras, it turned out we were on our own in Canada as well.
Lessons learned? The things you remember fondly are perhaps sweeter when kept as memories. The line between a developing country and a developed one is finer than you might think. Corruption comes in varying strengths, but it's still corruption. The risk of being a victim of crime is much higher in Honduras, but that's not to say it won't happen to you right there in your quaint little Canadian town.
I'll always have a heart for Canada. But we're not nearly as worlds apart from Honduras as we ought to be given the depth of our wealth, education and knowledge. Get out of town for a while and I think you'll see what I mean.
Postscript June 21: Woke up this morning and thought gee, I hope I don't sound ungrateful for all the things Canada has done for me. I owe my education, health, career and good salary to Canada, and I wouldn't even be here in Honduras were it not for a Canadian organization, Cuso International. If I didn't care about Canada, I wouldn't worry about it nearly so much.

Social justice doesn't need heroes

Early morning in good old YVR, where we arrived at 6 a.m. today to settle in for our five-hour wait until the next leg of the flight kicks in. Bad connection, but so it goes with points flights.

Had a wonderful but insanely busy eight days on the Island. Great to be back, but I'm still looking forward to the return to Honduras, and not just because it's about 15 degrees warmer than the Island right now. More on that later, but right now I'm posting (most) of the speech I gave at UVic on Friday as I accepted my honourary doctorate, which was a total thrill.

Speech at UVic, June 15:

They say that the thing that guides a life passion has its roots in your teen years, and certainly that was the case for me. While I wouldn’t have known to call it social justice at the time, I was 14 when a group of us at Lake Trail Junior High in Courtenay stood up for a young classmate – a girl we didn’t know at the time - who was being unfairly judged. I not only got a lifelong friendship out of that, I learned that even when you feel you’ve got zero  power to affect change in any grand kind of way, you always have power over your own actions and choices. The world will go the way the world goes, but you don’t have to go along.

All the twists and turns of a life are preparation for the person you end up being. But some things do shape your path more than others.

For me, one was becoming a mother while I was still a child myself, which means that at the relatively young age of 55 I’ve now had 38 years to experience all the amazing things that motherhood teaches you - to love unconditionally, to be fair, to be respectful without being a complete pushover, to stand up for those who have yet to grow into their power.

Another was becoming a journalist, a perfect prep course for anyone who might someday be given to social activism. You can’t help but know this world is an unfair place when your job is to listen to what’s going on for people, across every possible spectrum.

I feel very lucky to have stumbled onto a profession that not only gave me the privilege to ask anybody questions about anything – and for some reason they would feel beholden to answer - but helped me develop the practical skills I needed to help people fight back.

And for 14 years, through six corporate owners and five managing editors, the Times Colonist gave me the freedom to write a column about whatever the heck I wanted, including one year – 2008 – when every column I wrote profiled the people living homeless in Victoria. It’s popular to say mean things about mainstream media, but much of the work I’ve done as a social activist would not have been possible were it not for the wonderful pulpit the so-called corporate media allowed me for all those years.

It took me a while to accept that I was becoming a social activist. Journalists are supposed to be dispassionate observers of the world, after all. But life just kept on pushing me in that direction, until one day I realized that I didn’t just want to write about the things that were going wrong for people, I wanted to do something about them. The shift came in 1996, the year I met an intense young woman named Cherry Kingsley who made me realize I had much to learn about the maligned, mistreated and profoundly judged people who work in the sex trade.

A year later, I spent an amazing two weeks travelling down the Island with the Tribal Journeys/Vision Quest paddlers and experienced an emotional transformation in my view of aboriginal culture.

In 2001, a group of impoverished people with severe addictions who called the Holiday Court Motel home welcomed me into their lives, and suddenly I started seeing human beings instead of “junkies.” In 2002, a two-month strike at the Times Colonist pushed me as close as I’ve ever come to a nervous breakdown, but at the same time showed me that I could live very comfortably on much less money - something that would ultimately free me up to make some very different decisions in my life.

 In 2004, I came up to UVic on a whim to hear Stephen Lewis speak, and he asked the audience what WE were doing to make a difference. I thought, “What AM I doing?”

A few months later I quit my very comfortable, well-paid job as a full-time columnist and started work with PEERS Victoria, which led to three of the most powerful, enlightening, demanding, heartbreaking, character-building, hope-inducing, world-view-changing years of my life.

In 2007, I had the opportunity to work alongside people living on the edges of homelessness, and got to know some of the committed activists fighting to right one of the most shameful and unnecessary social wrongs in our country. This year, I finally made good on at least a decade of talking about cutting loose to wander the world, and moved to Honduras to experience a whole new set of profound social wrongs in need of righting. The gift of social justice work is that it opens your eyes, and once they’re open you’re going to experience life in any country in a very different way.

Every now and then people will kind of pat the back of my hand and say something along the lines of, “I could never do what you do.” They intend it as a compliment, but I have to tell you, I hear it as a copout. There’s nothing saintly or special about social justice – it’s just work. It’s just rolling up your sleeves and taking a little bit of the time you spend on your own pursuits to put toward the interests of somebody who needs an ally.

You don’t need any special training. So many of us underestimate the tremendous skill set we have just by way of growing up middle-class Canadians in loving families. You don’t need to be a miracle-worker. You just need to be the kind of person who shows up.

Social justice is the work of the collective – of hundreds, of thousands, of millions of people pushing a cause along in what might be heartbreakingly small increments over their lifetimes, recognizing that they could come to the end of their lives without ever knowing how the story ends. It’s not about heroes and saints, it’s about worker bees. 

 Change doesn’t come easily. Prejudice and judgment are quick to develop but incredibly difficult to eradicate. And nothing is harder than confronting your own stereotypes and prejudice, which is where it all begins.

Thank you to all the resisters out there who not only see a better way, but get that it’s up to us to help make it happen. Thank you so much for this tremendous honour. And now, back to work, because there’s still so much to do.

Fun to be home, but harried

I'm feeling like the blog's just a little too much "all about me" lately, but hey, it's a big week. The Times Colonist team I was part of won the Michener Award on Wednesday for its coverage over two years of the plight of families dealing with Community Living B.C., and today's my big day at the University of Victoria, when I receive an honourary doctorate of laws.
So allow me one more indulgence: A link to Jack Knox's very kind column on me in the TC this morning. Nice thing to wake up to in this rushed and harried week back home, and such things certainly do make my mother happy.
We'll be returning to Copan Ruinas bright and early Monday. I'm enjoying all the food and friends here in Victoria but I have to admit, it's a bit of a culture shock coming back and I'm looking forward to our rather quiet, simple life in Honduras. But first, a big party and lots of great, greasy snacks.