On the road....again??

Food vendors selling to a second-class bus in La Ceiba

I've been on a heck of a lot of buses lately. With a new commitment to visit the more distant regions of my organization this year, I'm fast becoming an expert on the good, the bad and the ugly of Honduran bus travel. So here's a little primer that might serve you well should you ever be down this way, or in any of the other developing countries that I've been to with remarkably similar transportation options.

First-class bus: If money's no object and you can fit your travel to the bus company's schedule, this is certainly the most comfortable way to go. In Honduras, the main first-class service is run by Hedman Alas. You get clean, comfy seats, air conditioning, non-stop travel, movies, and even a little snack. Your bags are tagged and stored in orderly fashion below, and they even do security checks before you get on so that nobody gets on with a gun (in theory, anyway). But the tickets are at least twice as expensive as other forms of travel, and trips are only at set times to specific destinations. For a lot of the travel I'm doing for my work, Hedman Alas isn't an option because the buses go only to the big tourist destinations, with no stops in between.

Second-class bus: You still get fairly comfy seats, but the air conditioning is more likely to be via an open window and there will probably be people standing in the aisles for at least part of the trip, as these buses do pickups at all towns along their route. This is called "direct service," but don't confuse that with "non-stop." No snacks, but vendors get on the bus at every stop and offer you everything from fried chicken to bags of cut-up fruit, pop, baked goods, watches and deodorant. Depending on the bus line and whether there's a designated terminal for that company in the town you're in, you may have to walk up to the nearest main road and flag the bus down as it passes. Pee breaks aren't guaranteed, so think about that before guzzling down a big bottle of water.

Third-class bus: Very cheap - maybe a third of the cost of the first-class buses. But you get what you pay for, so be prepared for constant stops, much longer travel times, and buses crammed with as many passengers as the driver can pack in. A lot of these buses are retired school buses from the U.S., so for maximum comfort try to check the functionality of your window, the amount of leg room (it varies), and the springs in your seat before sitting down. Your bags will likely be carried on top of the bus, and may or may not be tarped in the event of rain. Still, I'm very fond of these kinds of buses. They take forever to get where they're going, but the trip is never dull. There are also enough of them that you'll have a lot of flexibility around travel times, presuming you can find someone who can give you an honest answer as to where and when they leave.

Shuttles: From outward appearances, these vans look like palatable options for doing long trips, as the price is right and the vans are generally well-maintained and air-conditioned. Many a Copan Ruinas tourist jumps into a $20 shuttle for what is ostensibly a seven-hour trip to El Salvador or Guatemala City. But be warned that just because you have your own seat when you first board does NOT mean that two more people won't be squeezed into the same row a little later in the trip. The leg room is brutal for anyone over 5'6". The air conditioning is usually insufficient for the size of the vehicle, but the windows are jammed shut so you have no option. The trips always take longer than what you've been told, and the motion of the vehicles on Honduras's bad roads will induce car sickness even in the most durable traveller. I steer clear of shuttles.

Rapiditos: If I never had to ride in a rapidito again, I would be a happy person. Unfortunately, there's often no choice. These are vans, too, but generally in a state of serious disrepair and with far too many seats jammed into a tattered, filthy interior space. I use the term "seat" loosely, because mostly you'll just be perched in a space that's way too small for your butt, often with strangers virtually sitting on your lap and others looming over you in a half-stooped position as they struggle to balance themselves in a standing position as the van clunks along, usually making worrying noises down below that will have you thinking a great deal about what would happen if, say, the axle broke or the rear tires fell off. In theory, rapiditos are supposed to carry no more than 16-18 travellers, but I've frequently been in vans with 23 people. Horrible, horrible way to travel, even for short distances.

The kind of vehicle you'll be in should you need road
transportation into the Moskita

Private vehicle: Another option that sounds better than it usually is. Perhaps you're picturing a ride in a private vehicle as being more or less like it would be in Canada or the U.S., where a five-passenger car has five passengers, five working seatbelts, and a roomy trunk for all the luggage. Ah, but in Honduras, anyone lucky enough to have their own vehicle is going to pack that thing with as many people and as much stuff as possible in order to justify the gas costs of any major trip. I've had my boss come pick me up for a five-hour trip only to discover that there are eight passengers for five seats, which means three people have to ride in the back of the truck. Even if it's not you who gets stuck back there, you can't help but feel guilty. My spouse and I recently paid $25 apiece - a small fortune - for a four-hour ride in a private vehicle into the Moskitia, and in both directions one of us was left to jounce along the terrible dirt roads in the back of the truck along with six or seven other travellers and a vast array of cargo, including several propane tanks. And that was almost preferable to being stuffed into the unbearably claustrophobic interior of the truck.

So there you have it - travel Honduras-style. I found the road travel here quite unbearable initially, but I've gotten used to it over this past year. Now I catch glimpses of myself reflected in a bus window and see that same stoic, flat look that I've come to think of as the trademark of a Honduran traveller. It's that or stay home. 

An Easter to remember

This is a nice time of year in Copan Ruinas. Semana Santa - the week leading into Easter - is a crazy-big holiday in Honduras, with hundreds of thousands of local travellers on the move. But Copan gets just enough of that scene to make the town feel energized without crossing into insanity.

Tonight, the main street will be full of volunteers building the two-block-long alfombras made from coloured sawdust. Using giant stencils to create beautiful sawdust art in a rainbow of colours, the volunteers will work into the wee hours tonight making a street mural that celebrates Jesus and tells the story of these very special holy days for Christians. 

All day tomorrow, people will make their way carefully past the stretch of sawdust paintings, and perhaps climb a big ladder at one end of the street that lets you take in all of that creativity at once. In cities like Comayagua, where they're marking 50 years of alfombras, the art works just keep getting more intricate and amazing.

The beautiful sight isn't meant to last, which is perhaps what makes the alfombras seem so special. Mere hours after their creation, they are destroyed underfoot as a Catholic procession walks down them on their way to the main church. Last year, reverent locals followed behind the procession, gathering up small containers of the coloured sawdust as a keepsake of the moment. 

The weather has been cooler than usual this week, which I'm sure will be a relief to those who participate in the reenactment of the Stations of the Cross. It's quite a trek for the crowd, which numbered in the thousands last year. 

The main Catholic church is in the little valley where the town centre is, but the procession makes its way up and down some of the town's steep little hills leading out of the centre. Some people in the procession are carrying almost life-size statues of Jesus and Mary the whole time so they can reenact the last time Mary kissed her son before his death. Last year, the heat was relentless on the poor sods sweating under their

heavy cargo. 

Today, the street where jewellery sellers set up their stalls was strewn with pine needles, a fragrant carpet that  is a tradition here anytime someone throws a celebration. Birthday parties, special days, religious holidays - all are a reason to break out the pine needles.

 The jewellry street in Copan tends to look a little half-baked for much of the year, but the pine needles and the tents that some of the vendors put up this week have it looking like a happening place. I saw all kinds of new faces making their way down the street today, and the vendors looked happy to be busy. 

A lot of stores closed today and will stay that way through Sunday. My office takes the whole week off, as do many organizations and government bodies. Everybody's on the move, travelling here and there to spend the holiday with their families. More than 150,000 people a day will pass through San Pedro Sula's big bus terminal this week. 

So we have made it a point to stay put these past two Semana Santas. We travel in place, watching this little town change and be changed by the influx of Honduran tourists who are on the move at this time of year. The tilapia seller was set up on the sidewalk yesterday with her giant garbage cans full of gasping fish for sale, and I expect the budgie seller (five lempiras apiece) and the coloured-chick vendors will be showing up soon. There's probably three or four times as many food vendors on the streets as is the norm, and the entire downtown smells rather lusciously of  meat skewers grilling over charcoal.

Whatever your religious beliefs, may this weekend bring you peace and pleasant times with friends and family. At this time of year in a predominantly Catholic country, you feel how special the week is regardless of whether you believe.

Lord, give me the grace to celebrate this occasion. Palm Sunday did not last - what does? But while we dance together, it is a foretaste of heaven. - Philippines 2:6-11.

So much farmland, so little food

Photo: Rainforest Rescue 

I came home from our recent trip to the Moskitia feeling unsettled by the vast, eerie mono-cultures of African palm trees that dominate the coastal landscape of Honduras as you move east toward the Nicaraguan border. A Google search on the phenomenon provided me with this 2013 quote about the plantations from a web site that tracks Central American business trends:

“Investments of $35 million allowed an increase in planted areas of 17,000 hectares, which are added to the 135,000 already cultivated with oil palm," notes the Business to Business site. "Crude palm oil has been increasing steadily, influenced by an increase in prices in response to increased global demand for the oil from the bio-diesel industry.”

We're all familiar by now with the global dream to create a sustainable plant-based fuel that might end our dependency on dwindling fossil fuels. Honduras even has a law around bio-fuel production, which allows the country's big palm-oil producers to enjoy tax holidays, special treatment and all kinds of international financial support to encourage them in their work.

Ah, but palm oil is more like snake oil when you dig into just how much of the crop in Honduras is actually being used for bio-fuel. Efforts to use Honduras's massive palm plantations for that purpose have stalled out. Companies simply make a lot more money selling palm oil for use in snack foods and cosmetics than they do producing bio-fuel.

Five of Honduras's 11 palm oil-processing plants have the ability to convert the oil into bio-fuel, and could be producing 66,100 gallons of it every day.

“However, the plants are currently not producing bio-fuel,” notes the United States Department of Agriculture in a 2012 report. “The cost of bio-fuel production in Honduras is affected by a higher international price obtained with the sale of African palm oil. The main obstacle for the industry is deciding what is more profitable: to sell the oil for food and other types of processing, or to make bio-fuel``

Not that there's anything wrong with companies opting to sell their goods into whatever market looks the most promising. That's what companies do.

But African palm plantations are now spread out over almost 152,000 hectares of prime growing land along the Caribbean coast of Honduras, with plans to increase that to 200,000. It's time to get honest about what those palm trees are being used for. “Bio-fuel” has the ring of something that's saving the planet, but the global growth in African palm oil is in fact just more evidence of the developed world's insatiable appetite for processed food.

Palm oil is an ingredient in a long, long list of foods and cosmetics ranging from power bars and instant noodles to mouth wash, soap and anti-ageing cream. I'll leave it to others to posit on the health hazards of palm-oil consumption, which is high in saturated fats. What bothered me as we drove through a massive plantation east of Tocoa was just seeing all those palms stretching out as far as the eye could see, producing non-essential ingredient for the developed world without adding so much as a bean to poor Hondurans' plates.

Well, that's an exaggeration – a hectare of African palms creates one direct job and two indirect ones, says the USDA. The country needs those jobs, even if they don't pay well. (Pickers account for the bulk of the 152,000 direct jobs and earn about $7 a day during harvest.)

But even so, we're still talking about good land in a country where the malnutrition rate is above 50 per cent in some regions - land being put to use to produce something unnecessary for overfed people in the lands of plenty. There's just something wrong about that.

The only way to get from Tocoa into the Moskitia by land is to stuff yourself into a private truck crammed with people and goods, fork over $25, and tough it out for four or five long, crazy hours. It was during one such trip earlier this month that our driver took a detour through a big palm plantation, giving me my first glimpse from within of these silent, unnatural forests. (The bloody Bajo Aguan land conflict is also taking place on these lands.)

The land was once used to grow bananas. But the money is in palm oil now. Honduras produces almost 400,000 metric tonnes of it a year. And unlike the country's coffee industry, which remains largely in the hands of small producers, palm oil belongs to the big guys – the ones with plenty of money for acquiring huge tracts of land.

You'd think that any forest would be visually appealing, because green is green. But somehow, the big palm plantations feel devoid of life. I was puzzled by the number of dying trees we saw, their big palm fronds a sickly grey and their shrivelled trunks drooping from the top. I later learned that the trees are poisoned by the companies when they get too tall for easy harvest. You could almost feel the sorrow in those woods.

As noted, there's good and bad to all of it. The industry produces jobs, and it could produce significant tax revenue as well for the country if it wasn't getting quite so many breaks. If the oil really was being used for bio-fuel, that would take the discussion to a whole other level.

But it's not. There's no saving of the planet going on in those big plantations. Don’t bother to cue the angel choir for these spooky forests, because the only thing you hear amid the palms is the sound of money being made. 

The other Honduras: Garifuna culture on the coast

Mirna Ruiz cooks a yucca torta.

It’s crazy-hot in the little casita where the Garifuna woman is cooking. It’s even hotter over by the wood cooking stove, where she’s grilling ground yucca into the giant wafer-like tortas that are a mainstay of the Garifuna diet.

Mirna Ruiz is chief cook and president of the Binadu Uwenedu women’s cooperative in Ciriboya, Colon. The little co-op produces 2,000 of the crisp wafers every month, most to be packaged for sale in the cities of Honduras to Garifuna people far away from their home communities on the Caribbean coast.

In Honduras, Garifuna coastal communities run from Puerto Cortes in the north to the sleepy little village of Plaplaya, in the Moskitia region not far from the Nicaraguan border. We spent a week travelling through coastal Colon and the Moskitia earlier this month; where our first up-close glimpse of Garifuna culture was one of the many pleasures of the trip.

The Garifuna are descendants of Caribs, indigenous Arawaks from South America, and West Africans initially brought to North America in the 17^th century as slaves. They have their own language, their own religious beliefs (Catholicism with a twist), a collective sense of how their communities should function and a laid-back way of living that gets the job done without expending unnecessary energy.

And they’ve got yucca, which they call kasabe. Yucca grows easily and well in the sandy coastal soils that generations of Garifuna have called home in Honduras and in other Central American countries. Tear a chunk of yucca root straight out of your garden and it’s all set to add to the garden of a neighbour ensuring that no one ever runs out of yucca.

The Garifuna cook the potato-like tuber in various ways: Fried; grilled; stewed; used in soup. But they also like yucca when it’s ground, dried and grilled into thin, crispy wafers, which are as popular an accompaniment to a Garifuna meal as corn tortillas are elsewhere in Honduras.

Grinding goes faster for Digna Bernardez
and other members now that the co-op
has a motorized grinder. 

The women’s cooperative in Ciriboya got its start 12 years ago, first to sell tortas in the neighbourhood and eventually developing into a small export business aimed at Garifuna who have left their coastal communities but don't want to give up a favourite food. Some 15 women now belong to the co-op, and all participate directly in some aspect of the torta-making process.

The grinding stage is fast now that the group has a motorized grinder, acquired a couple years ago as part of an internationally funded project to help the co-op develop. The machine grinds in 10 minutes the same quantity of yucca that it used to take the women 14 hours to do back when the work had to be done by hand. The pulped yucca is then put into a press to squeeze out excess moisture, and ends up as a kind of coarse flour ready for grilling.

That’s the job of Mirna Ruiz, who spends her work days grilling the big tortas for the co-op over a wood fire. They burn easily, so it’s a process of constantly whisking the bits of flour around to make an even wafer, smoothing the edges into a perfect circle, and then flipping the whole thing over at just the right time. Mirna's tortas are straight-up yucca and nothing more, but one of my co-workers later tells us that some people add flavouring to the yucca before it’s cooked – cocoa, garlic, butter, other spices.

It’d be a stretch to suggest that the mere act of grilling kasabe over a hot wood fire means Garifuna culture is unchanged. Cell phones, propane stoves, fashion-conscious clothes, beer and even shiny Nissan 4x4 trucks (in a community with no road access) were all in evidence in our brief travels through communities in the Moskitia.

But the fundamentals of the culture – the language, the way the community functions, the lifestyle, the food – continue as they have for centuries. The men fish, the women do the rest of the household functions. The communities are still matriarchies. Children, chickens and dogs of the village roam free.

Not that life is easy, mind you. It’s difficult and expensive in the Moskitia to travel to the nearest urban centre – Tocoa – for goods. And it’s hard to buy goods unless you have money, which is also in short supply in the isolated communities. Jobs are hard to come by, and it’s not easy to resist the temptations of the lucrative cocaine industry in the area (the waters of the Moskitia are the first landing point for cocaine coming out of Colombia).

But all the things that make the region difficult have perhaps also made it a little harder for traditional cultures to fade away. Step into a Garifuna village in the Moskitia and you know immediately that you’re somewhere else – mere kilometres away from a neighbouring town with a more traditional Honduras feel, perhaps, yet so very different.

Stack of freshly cooked tortas ready for
packaging (or eating).

Those differences are one of the reasons the Ciriboya women’s co-op believes there’s a lot of market potential for their tortas. The home-grown yucca, the grinding, the specially designed wood stoves for cooking the yucca tortas – well, they just don’t have all of that elsewhere in the world. What better way to reconnect with migrant Garifunas in other cities and countries than to provide them with a taste of home?

They’ve got a distributor in La Ceiba now, and the country’s Pizza Huts have begun buying the tortas to use in the chain’s salad bar. But the co-op is currently producing more tortas than there is market, and they need more buyers. They’re also in competition with four other Garifuna women’s co-ops in the same region, all counting on new markets outside of Honduras.

Mirna pulls a fresh torta off the wood stove and breaks it apart for us to try. It reminds me of a rice cake, or maybe those big discs of “hard tack” that the family of a Finnish high-school friend of mine always had around.

I feel my own West Coast cultural conditioning kicking in, and imagine the fresh yucca wafer with a nice bit of smoked salmon on top. Perfect.

Few chances to fly, but they bounce

My boss was telling me on the long drive back from San Pedro Sula yesterday that there was some funding coming available soon out of Europe for projects targeted at building resilience.
I got a (quiet) chuckle out of that, because Hondurans could write the book on resilience. Like the song says: They get knocked down, but they get up again.
Resilience has been a popular topic among socially aware types for many years. I think it's a fascinating subject, and applaud all efforts to understand the intangible things that permit one person to hang in despite horrible life circumstance while another in a similar situation is totally destroyed.
But a lack of resilience is not the problem in Honduras. Life is incredibly hard here for the majority of people,  and it's true that poverty and violence are worsening in Honduras even while neighbouring countries are seeing improvements. Almost 70 per cent of the country lives in poverty, and some 40 per cent live in extreme poverty.
 None of that is because they're lacking in resilience, however.
 In fact, they bounce back like you can't believe - from hurricanes, floods, terrible crop years, crippling accidents, illness, a chronic lack of money, death in the family. Many don't live well but they do live sustainably, feeding their families on corn and beans grown on the craziest of slopes and getting by with virtually no money.
And I've yet to see any of them wringing their hands about their tough lot in life. They just carry on.
So no, Hondurans aren't poor because they're missing what it takes to thrive. They're poor because they live in a country with a negligent and ineffective government, zero social supports, a lack of employment, impossibly low pay scales, and a broken, dysfunctional education system that offers no hope for better jobs and brighter futures for young Hondurans.
In theory, Hondurans are "free" to pursue their dreams. This ain't no Cuba, those who lean to the right are quick to point out. This is a country that has embraced capitalism, and the kind of libertarian freedoms that make the Wild West look tame.
 But in reality, the only dream that's got much money attached to it is the long, hard slog north to try to sneak illegally into the United States. Unless you're a high-status, rich Honduran (and there are a surprising number of those, who really ought to be more worried for the future of their country), the only way you're going to find money for things like a decent house, basic health care or better schooling for your kids is if you work illegally in the States for a few years or get into the cocaine business.
But resilience? Oh, they've got plenty of that. Just to make that incredibly difficult journey into the U.S. takes more resilience than I hope I ever have to summon, and yet an estimated 100,000 Hondurans do it every year.
Those in the struggling "middle class" - my co-workers, for instance, who make $6,000 annually - frequently have to make wrenching decisions to leave their families behind to take jobs in distant towns. They've got the same dreams as any parent does of a better world for their children, but all they see when they look into the future is more of the same. They love their country, but they hate where it's going.
I'm sure my boss will come up with a clever project around resilience, of course. A Honduran non-profit would be crazy not to jump at any opportunity for funding. Maybe some people will get a free cow out of it, or a new vegetable garden.
But let's not go blaming this troubled country on the scrappy, resourceful people living poor in Honduras. They bounce, and it's a lucky thing.