All the news that's negative and scary

As part of my communications work for the Comision de Accion Social Menonita, I decided I'd do an English-language Facebook page for CASM. I figured I could highlight some of the work of the organization as well as share stories about Honduras that offered an alternative to the endless murder-and-mayhem headlines that come out of this country.
Alas, it is unbelievably hard to find stories about Honduras that are even neutral, let alone positive. I've never seen a country in more dire need of good PR than this place. I mean, there are definitely problems here, but the single story line coming out of Honduras really does a disservice to this poor country.
As if it wasn't bad enough to be branded the "murder capital of the world" due to all the violence in the drug trade here, it seems that barely a month can go by without some other totally weird tragedy putting Honduras into the world's headlines.
Since we arrived in January, there has been a massive prison fire that burned up 365 inmates, a massive fire that wiped out a huge public market in Tegucigalpa, at least two really ugly prison riots, and that nasty business with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency in which four apparently innocent people were gunned down. And this past week brings news that 21 people in Siguatepeque have died from drinking tainted alcohol.
Horrible things do happen more often in poor countries, of course. But the problem for Honduras is that the only stories that make it into the media are the horrible ones. It gives such a distorted view of the country, not to mention scares the hell out of my family. It even scares away aid agencies - like the Peace Corps, which cited security concerns in its decision to withdraw more than 150 volunteers from Honduras a few weeks before we arrived.
And what must it do to the people of Honduras? As this study notes, 25 per cent of Hondurans surveyed about strategies that might bring about positive change in governance in their country believed that nothing could change the situation. Surely that's the gravest impact of all of relentlessly negative news: People lose hope that anything will ever improve.
The poor country has taken quite a hit in tourism ever since the 2009 coup (yeah, that didn't help the image either). Walk around Copan Ruinas and you can see that the town has all the infrastructure for a much bigger tourism economy than actually exists now. Ever since we got here we've been hearing from local merchants that things were slow but maybe that would change in June. But June came and went without much of a bump in tourism.
And who can blame the tourists if they do pick a different destination? If all you know about Honduras is what you hear in the news, Hawaii starts to look pretty good.
All I can tell you is that there's much more to the story of Honduras. It's not Canada, but it's not the Killing Fields either. I wouldn't be here if it was, wandering freely and comfortably hither and yon and even inviting my kids and grandkids down for a visit.
I'll keep looking for the stories that tell another side to this beleaguered country. In the meantime, keep an open mind.

So you want to be an international volunteer...

Not surprisingly, the number of acquaintances commenting to me that they, too, have been thinking of international volunteering has been rising with each grey, cold summer day everybody seems to be experiencing back in B.C. right now. 

I highly recommend it, and not just because I'm sitting here right now with the warm Honduran breeze blowing in on me from the wide open door and my memories of being cold and bummed out by the Victoria weather fading fast. If you like to shake things up in your life, experience a whole new way of doing things and put your skills to work in places where they’re really, really needed, this is the ticket.

But before you send your application off to Cuso International or whatever organization has caught your eye, I’d recommend an honest self-assessment to make sure you really do have that “flexibility and adaptability” that any international volunteer agency worth its salt is looking for in its long-term volunteers. Be sure  you’re doing it for the right reasons, too -  I’ve been struck by how many volunteers and ex-pats (women especially) I’ve met here in Honduras who came here on the run from some disappointing aspect of their life back home only to discover that a challenging new culture and  language only deepens feelings of uncertainty and insecurity.

So my first tip: Think about international volunteering at a point in your life when you’re happy and fulfilled, not when you’re looking to fill a hole in your life. Life as an outsider can get pretty lonely, and that’s from the perspective of someone who’s a loner by nature and has her spouse along with her. If you’re unhappy at home, I suspect you’ll be even unhappier living in a challenging new culture where few people speak your language and the lifestyle bears little resemblance to the comfy, secure and dependable life of a middle-class Canadian.

Cuso really pressed the point about flexibility and adaptability in the various interviews and training we went through before coming here, and now that I’m here I think they probably could have pressed it even more. I mean, we’re talking flexible like a yoga master. We’re talking adaptable like those tough little creatures that first emerged from the muck and grew legs and lungs.

You want to be one of those people who can flow under, over and around barriers.  And if you don’t already know how to shrug your shoulders helplessly and let things go, you’ll want to learn. Once you're in your placement, you're going to want someone from your homeland you can have a good rant with as needed and will want to master this chant, spoken 10 times in a slow and steady voice: “Water off a duck’s back.” Relish the opportunity to solve your own problems, because you’re going to be doing a lot of that.

Can you live simply? Cuso pays a generous stipend by the standards of the countries where you’ll be working; here, it’s roughly equivalent to that of a mid-level manager at a Honduran non-profit. But that still means that a $20 dinner out is pretty splurgy and best viewed as a rare treat. And you’re definitely not going to be indulging in shopping therapy. I’d recommend you have at least $2,000 in savings earmarked for settling-in costs, and ideally a couple thousand more if you want to do some travelling while you’re away.

Presumably you’re the kind of person who enjoys travel if you’re even contemplating being an international volunteer, but it’s actually nothing like travelling. Living and working in one place is very, very different from skimming over the surface of a country in a holiday mood. No tourist hotels. No cheery bilingual clerk who helps you find a place to rent or make the bad bank give you your money back. No hopping on the bus for a new town if it turns out you don’t much like the one you’re in.

In fairness to everyone, it’s best you think hard about things like that before you make a commitment. And it is a commitment. Yes, a good placement will have an escape clause, but Cuso spent a lot of money on Paul and me before sending us here, and the organization I’m working with in Honduras is counting on me to complete my project. I like this gig, but even if I didn’t I’d stick it out.

If you hate being sweaty, are fussy about what you eat, like a quiet neighbourhood and get squeamish at the thought of bugs wandering freely around your house, perhaps volunteering closer to home is a better option. If you’re opposed to vaccinations and aren’t willing to swallow two bitter anti-malaria pills every week, at least make such decisions fully understanding the risks of refusing.  

One last tip: While your accomplishments in Canada will stand you in good stead in terms of preparing you for whatever work you’ll be doing, they won’t mean much to the people in your new community. Trot out your carefully translated resume if you like, but what you consider major achievements may mean nothing to your new workmates. (In Honduras, ambición is a bad word.) In a new land, people will know you only for who they perceive you to be in the moment they meet you – exciting for those of us who like the challenge of starting from scratch, soul-destroying for those who need more assurance of status.

But if you’re someone who embraces change, wants to draw on skills you don’t even know you have, fancies new experiences, is not prone to saying things like “Back home, we do it this way...”and bends like Gumby – well, pack up the house and prepare for the adventure of a lifetime.  You’re going to love life outside the comfort zone.

The real story in behind the pretty pictures

Basilica at Esquipulas as a storm brews

 Photos can be deceptive. They're like a little slice of the good life, with the unpleasant bits that surrounded the moment unrepresented. You take the shot of the beautiful basilica glowing white against a storm-darkened sky, for instance, not the one of you looking slightly green after being jammed into a truck for hours and hours questioning why you even came on this crazy outing. 
Earlier today I posted several cheery photos on Facebook of my day trip to Guatemala yesterday with my workmates. The photos elicited the usual "Wow!"s and "Lucky you!"s that travel photos inspire, and of course I do acknowledge that living and working somewhere that allows me to take a free day trip to Guatemala is pretty damn lucky. And that basilica did look amazing.
But now I want to give you the rest of the story - not to elicit sympathy, but just so you know how the day actually played out.
My workmates do something fun together every three months or so, and the plan this time was to go to Chiquimula - a Guatemalan city about two hours away from here that everyone in Copan frequents regularly. I went to bed Wednesday night with many misgivings about saying I'd go, as I'd had a lingering case of Honduran Belly for a couple of days and knew from past experience that any foray with my workmates always involves at least four hours in the car. But I really wanted to go to Guatemala, so I hauled myself out of bed the next morning, gulped down a Gastro-Lyte and an Advil, and headed to the town square for my 7 a.m. pickup.
Off we went, seven of us in a five-seater truck. I was in the back with two of my colleagues and the nine-year-old son of my boss, who sat between the legs of one of the guys. The border process went smoothly, and we arrived in the first town, Jocotan, just in time for breakfast. That put us in good shape to be arriving in Chiquimula by 10 a.m.

Traffic jam from the teachers' strike

Alas, there was a teachers' strike right at the point where the road turns toward Chiquimula. The teachers had put rocks and tree branches across the road and were having what we would have called a "sit-in" back in the day. Traffic was backed up for miles. Word was that nobody was going anywhere until later in the afternoon, if at all.
In a land like Canada, the intrepid travellers would have turned back in disappointment, perhaps cursing the teachers softly (but not too much, because they work for peanuts down here and often go months without pay) and arguing over where to go instead. Here, my workmates decided to take a back road to Esquipulas instead, and never mind that it meant two slow, twisting and turning hours along a dirt road through the mountains.
So that's what we did. I kept my eyes closed for much of it to keep down the waves of nausea  from the motion sickness, which I didn't know I was prone to until I started travelling in Honduras. We got into Esquipulas at noon, but my heart leaped as my workmates pointed out the glorious basilica outside the truck window and I thought about how I'd soon be wandering those pretty little streets.
Unfortunately, I had missed the part about how we were going to a water park. I didn't even have my bathing suit. We shot right past that basilica and headed straight for Chatun Water Park, which looks exactly like every water park you've ever been to. I staggered from the car and trailed the gang as they headed into the park and ordered up big, greasy lunches of deep-fried shrimp and chicken nuggets. Nothing for me, thanks, I said politely.

How can you resist these happy faces?

As out of sorts as I felt at that point, my workmates were so happy to be playing in the water that I couldn't help but cheer up. They got into this crazy pyramid/circus act kind of thing, standing on each other's shoulders and soliciting the help of other pool-goers to build the pyramid higher. I swam in my clothes and then climbed out to dry off and take photos, chatting with the curious Guatemalans who swam up wanting to know what was up with the gringa at the pool's edge. At any rate, I just can't stay unhappy when the sun's shining on me.
We stayed for four hours or so, then bundled back into the car for a quick pass through Esquipulas and maybe something to eat (they are BIG on eating here). We drove past the basilica and I whined to be let out to take a photo; we pulled over for five minutes and I got the shot. Then the storm that had been threatening for an hour or so unleashed with full fury - pounding rain, crazy winds, hail, and what must have been a 20-degree drop in the temperature. I was freezing in my damp clothes and had goosebumps for the first time since we got here in January.
Happily, the teachers' sit-in had ended and we were able to take the regular highway back toward the border. The road was almost invisible in the downpour, but at least the road was paved and relatively straight. The rain stopped and somebody up front finally killed the air conditioning, and I warmed up.
The border process didn't go quite as smoothly as it had on the way down. The customs guy was baffled by the script in my passport that says I've got a one-year residency permit and kept telling me that I could only stay in Honduras for 90 days. My workmates looked worried but helpless. You don't want to mess with anyone in authority in Honduras, because you just don't know where things might end up. I finally just agreed that I'd leave after 90 days and paid him the $3 he wanted me to pay.
Then we were back in Copan, 12 hours after we'd left. The power went out about 10 minutes after I got home, because that kind of thing happens all the time here in the rainy season, but then it came back on in time for me to have a hot shower (no hot water tank, so you're toast if the power's out). Another Gastro-Lyte, another Advil, and then to bed with the sounds of a storm much like the one in Esquipulas pounding down outside.
And now you know the rest of the story. Sure, a picture says a thousand words, but it leaves another thousand out.

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.