Advice for the Moskitia: Be careful. Very, very careful

June 12, 2013

Sure, it's pretty here, but not yet ready for tourists

   Day 6 here in the Moskitia, and I’m bored dead. You don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone, as good old Joni once sang, and what I miss the most right now is freedom.

   One of my co-workers describes Palacios as a “beautiful prison.” That sums up the place nicely. The little town is a short boat ride away from Batalla, the Garifuna community where road access ends. But the two villages feel completely different.

   There's a gorgeous lagoon just steps away from the main road through Palacios – which is to say, the dirt path that passes for a road because it's just large enough for the handful of locals who have motorcycles or quads – and all kinds of palm-tree wilderness and rivers to explore behind the town. Were this any other land, I’d be rustling up a kayak to explore the lagoon, or happily walking for hours to look for birds, butterflies, and maybe a monkey if I was lucky.

   But this is Honduras, and the Moskitia is where much of the cocaine from Colombia arrives to begin its journey north. I don’t know if I’d really be taking my life in my hands by going out for a ramble, but everybody who lives here seems to think I would be. I’m going to take their word for it.

   And so I stay put, doing the five-minute walk between the hotel and my organization’s little office twice a day and nothing more. Today I stood on the tiny office lawn and looked longingly out across the lagoon. Tonight I stood on the hotel balcony and did the same. That’s about as adventurous as it gets here.

   There’s much talk about reigniting tourism in the area, which apparently disappeared after the 2009 coup. It could be a beautiful thing for everyone, given that there’s so much nature to enjoy here and so many locals who need jobs.

   But somebody’s going to have to bring the region’s narco-traficantes to the table for a discussion before that could ever happen. It simply isn’t safe to invite tourists into this part of the country right now. In my opinion the security warnings for travel in Honduras are ridiculously overblown for much of the country, but even I think it would be a big mistake to have tourists rambling around at will in the Moskitia these days.

    One recent afternoon, my co-workers and I nervously boarded our little boat after a visit to one of the villages while scary men carrying giant guns unloaded boxes at the same tiny dock. I don't know what was in the boxes, but I could take a reasonable guess. As for police presence, there are 25,500 people living in the massive region that makes up the municipalities of Juan Francisco Bulnes and Brus Laguna, and just five police. 

   It’s not that the narco-traficantes are gunning for tourists, of course. They’ve got way bigger things on their mind. From what I know of them, which is not much, they keep very much to themselves and have no obvious desire to kill a passing stranger.

    But they don’t like surprises. I have a feeling that a bunch of happy gringos stumbling into the wrong place at the wrong time would not end happily. All it would have taken in that situation at the dock would have been one crazy tourist to try to sneak in a photo, and you'd be reading in the papers the next day about the boatload of travellers gunned down in broad daylight. The men who work in the Moskitia have big, big guns, no fear of the police, and are no shrinking violets when it comes to resolving a problem through violence.

   Narco-traficantes have been active in this region for a long time, but the locals say they’ve really come to own the place in the last three or four years.  The dreamers among us might still think the day is coming when we’ll win the “war on drugs” and that will be that for the industry, but I’m of a more pragmatic nature and suspect that cocaine trafficking is not only here to stay, but in fact is creating a new social class in Honduras. All those glitzy, pricey malls in Tegucigalpa can’t just be for the old money in the country.

   That's not to say that tourism development in the Moskitia is out of the question. It just can’t be done without the cooperation of the narco-traficantes. If it’s possible to strike deals between rival Latin American gangs to reduce violence, as has happened in El Salvador, then it’s possible to imagine cartel leaders being invited to share their thoughts on how tourism and their own industry might co-exist in the Moskitia. The handful of hardy tour groups still operating down here would also have a lot of insight on a problem that has to be worrying for them, too. 

   It really is a wondrous region: three strong indigenous cultures; a biosphere reserve that’s on the UNESCO World Heritage list; birds and animals galore; miles and miles of sandy Caribbean beach without a soul in sight. I wouldn’t call it untouched – too much illegal tree-cutting, trafficking in wildlife, and garbage lying around to earn that description – but it certainly is authentic. And such potential.

   But first things first. Truce first, tourism to follow. Until then, be very, very careful about where you point that camera.

Dangerous and underpaid: Working in the Moskitia

   I’m sitting at this moment in a Moskitia hotel frequented almost exclusively by scary, armed men in the cocaine-distribution business, in a town that even the more adventurous guide books tell you to avoid. The bar downstairs is blasting narco-ballads, the deceptively cheery music that relates hair-raising stories of life in the illegal-drug trade.

   The presence of scary, armed men is great fodder for blog posts for travelers who live elsewhere, but it’s fairly unsettling for the 67,000 people who live and work in Gracias a Dios, the watery, wondrous Honduras state that borders Nicaragua. And the cocaine traffickers are by no means the only difficulty here.

  There’s no electricity anywhere in the Moskitia, so keeping the generator running (or accessing medical care, going to the bank, buying clothes or any other creature comfort) means a boat ride of anywhere from 25 minutes to five hours, depending how deep into the region’s many lagoons you happen to be, and an eight-hour round trip on a rough and dangerous road that’s in constant risk of washing out in the heavy rains.

   There’s food, but you’d better like fish, chicken, yucca and coconut. There are amazing birds, but an equally impressive number of mosquitos and other biting bugs, especially in the June-July rainy season. (Damn.)

   In short, the Moskitia is a beautiful, complicated, challenging place, with an air of menace overlying everything now that the narco-traficantes have claimed the region as their own.

   One of the towns where my organization works has recently fallen under the control of a Nicaraguan heavyweight, who apparently has ordered the village to observe a 6 p.m. curfew and surrounded the town with armed men. People learn quickly around these parts not to ask questions about who owns the beautiful new mansion on the lagoon, or the boat with two gigantic outboard motors. Best not to know.

   This is my second time here, and once again I’m feeling a mix of exhilaration at the natural beauty and a sense of constant alertness lest I get on the wrong side of the wrong person, or inadvertently turn my birding binoculars or camera in a direction I shouldn’t be looking.

   And I’m just passing through. My co-workers live and work here, in circumstances that are way less comfortable than anything I’ll experience during my nine-day visit. I’ve got a king-size bed in a roomy if somewhat unnerving hotel; they’ve got a foam mattress on the floor of their tiny office, where four of them live communally for at least three weeks of every month. I don’t mind working through the occasional weekend, but they do it all the time, saving up days off so they’ve got enough time to make the long journey out to visit their families.

   I’ve got considerably more appreciation for Canadian work practices and labour law since coming to Honduras. Low pay, exploitive practices, no job security, armed people who just might shoot you, a constant risk of not getting paid – these are regular experiences for the majority of workers. The situation in the Moskitia does kick things up a notch, mind you.

   The work that my Honduran compañeros are doing in this wild and woolly region would likely come with big pay and great benefits back in my homeland, what with all the risks it entails. One woman working with a government forestry organization here recently had the trauma of a drunk narco-traficante putting a gun to her head, and then the additional trauma of watching the two military guards she travels with kill the guy.

    But despite considerable dangers and deprivations, my co-workers make $1,000 or so a month. They’re also on the hook for the considerable transport costs to get in and out of the Moskitia, which are at least $50 every time. 

   As for benefits, I’m sure it would be like telling a fairy tale if I ever described a typical Canadian benefits package to any Honduran. I remember griping when I was back in my journalism days at the shrinking amount available for massages. Man, that seems petty now. The fellow who runs the swimming pool in Copan Ruinas where Paul and I go for a leisurely day sometimes hasn’t had a day off – not one – in the last two years. He’d like to quit, but is scared he’ll end up with no job at all.

   So the lesson is: Thank your lucky stars that for whatever reason, you’re living and working in a wealthy country where you might feel hard done by from time to time, but you’re not. Hug your boss and your union leader, and think good thoughts about whoever it was who lobbied for employment standards. Reflect on your grandparents and great-grandparents, and all the sacrifices they made to ensure future generations of Canadian workers could feel miffed when their company-funded massages cost more than they’d expected.

    Turn your lights on and off and marvel at how easy it is. Sit in your big, comfy car and feel that smooth asphalt below your tires. Celebrate that the gun culture has never really caught on in Canada.

   And if you’re using cocaine, why not switch to something homegrown and save some lives? You’re making things crazy down here.

Satiric commentary on Honduras news

   Very amusing and pointed commentary here about how Honduras tends to get written about. I particularly like the suggested tags. I think I fall into some of this myself sometimes, although I'm really trying not to.
   The national press here in Honduras doesn't deliver much better than the international media - at least two pages at the back of virtually every print edition of La Prensa is devoted to the previous day's body count, all of it presented with zero context and no follow-up. And man, can somebody teach those people how to ask (and answer) the question, "Why?" in their coverage?

Love hurts

   

http://www.artbywicks.com/poetry%20page%203.htm

Something I hadn't anticipated happening quite so quickly in this new international life was feeling passionate about Honduras. 

   Oh, it sounds like a good thing. Doesn't the world need more people who arrive in a strange land and really connect?

   But what it actually means is that I now feel invested in the future of the country. I'm not just thinking warm thoughts about Hondurans and hoping things work out. I'm worrying about the place.

  Again, that probably sounds OK on the surface. Honduras certainly needs more people to worry about its future. The trouble is, I feel like I'm worrying more than Hondurans are. And THAT is a bad thing.

    When I was working with sex workers in Victoria, I learned through hard experience that this is called "wanting more for someone than they want for themselves." It tended to happen as I got to know some of the clients a little better and became attached. I would see such potential in them, and would end up trying to solve their problems for them or spending too much time coming up with strategies that might improve their situation. 

   And if someone's right there with you, ready for all the things you want them to be ready for - hey, it's pretty great to have somebody on your side. But it's not healthy for either party when one person wants more than the other person is ready for. 

   In the case of Honduras, this state manifests for me as near-unbearable frustration.

   Now when I pass a line of people all selling exactly the same things, I'm no longer reaching for my camera to capture the charming scene. I'm stifling an urge to regale them with marketing ideas that might help them distinguish themselves and their products, or lecture them about the futility of trying to make a decent living  when the only thing you've got for sale is the same thing that everyone else has. 

    I observe my co-workers reporting out on their projects and find myself wanting to shriek, "No! No! We have to do more than just count the number of gardens we planted, the number of people who took a course on holding government accountable! This country needs real change!"  

    I continue to listen with interest and sympathy to people's sad stories about villages without water, without road access, where the forests are being lost and the animals are getting sick - villages where children are doomed to spend their lives on the brink of severe malnutrition and in the same poverty that their parents and grandparents struggle with. But more and more I have to swallow hard to avoid crying out, "Run, you people! Can't you see there's no future here?"

   I'm sure there have been many books written on this phenonmenon, where the gringos show up and set about trying to change everything in ways that conform to their own view of a "good life." From such world views have come truly horrible things: Residential schools; colonization; forced assimilation; broken cultures.

    So until Hondurans are demanding these kinds of change, it's really none of my business. If Hondurans are happy enough living hard, short lives existing on beans, tortillas and shockingly small incomes, who am I to want more for them? If people want to leave it to God to sort things out rather than start a revolution, why should that matter to me? If generations of Honduran children never reach their full potential because they're underfed, under-educated, deprived of opportunity and trapped in tiny, isolated villages, is that my problem?

   But what I'm saying is that once you feel passion for a country, it starts to feel like your problem. It gets harder to contrast life in your country with theirs and just shrug it all off as cultural differences. I look at the children of my co-workers and feel enormous sadness that they are being short-changed in every way, and that their families most likely don't even know it because that has been their life, too. 

   In my time with the sex workers, I learned to have patience. I learned to just shut up and wait, to align myself with the ones who were ready and leave the other ones be.

 But it never got any easier. I got better at hiding my feelings, but I never got past them. Honduras, I'm ready when you are. 

Fun with OECD indicators

Hours of fun to be had with this cool graphic from the Organization for Economic Development. The OECD has put together a comparison of 36 countries based on 11 indicators associated with a better life, and a person could pass a lot of time clicking around the site and watching all the pretty flowers move up and down the scale of liveability.
The indicators used by the OECD include housing, income, jobs, civic engagement, health, security and such - standard fare when talking about a country's liveability, but much easier to grasp in this highly visual presentation as opposed to the long lists of numbers that other reports tend to give you.
Once you get finished with increasing and decreasing the indicators to see what happens to the "flowers," click on individual countries for loads more information, from the rich-poor gap to how their children are scoring on international tests. You can compare two countries as well.
 Fascinating to contemplate the differences in personal satisfaction between the countries - like, for instance, why Portugal is way out in front of Mexico in all the indicators for a good life, yet Mexicans report being eight times more satisfied with their lives.