Gay rights is part of a development plan too

   

   As crazy as this sounds now, I didn’t think about the existence of gay people until I was 24. My high school class at school had a couple of really great teachers who we all knew had been “roommates” for decades, and perhaps I had a few thoughts about such things at that time. But it wasn’t until I walked into a Courtenay bar in 1981 with a very pretty male friend of mine that it sunk in, what with all the male attention he got. |

   It was one of those, “Wow, really?” moments that changes your world view in an instant. I had to rethink everything I thought I knew.  But from the get-go it never occurred to me to judge anyone solely based on the gender of who they choose to love. So after that first jolt of understanding, I never considered it a big deal - or anyone's business - that someone was gay, let alone an excuse for denying people basic rights.

   As a Canadian, I’m very proud to hail from a country that now recognizes that working up a sweat about sexual orientation is not only pointless, but harmful and offensive. I got to thinking about Canada last week while writing a blog for July 1, and realized that the country’s efforts on behalf of gay rights is one of the things that makes me feel proudest about being Canadian.

   But now I live in Honduras, where you’d have to be one brave soul to step out of the closet.  It’s like stepping back into 1950s North America, all repression and denial. While nobody talks about any of it, my impression is that marriages of convenience and extremely low-profile trips to secret gay-friendly enclaves are about as good as it gets for people here, and all of it undertaken at huge personal risk.

   Maybe a month ago at my work, a big stack of 2013 datebooks arrived that had been put together by one of my organization’s major funders, a European NGO. All the big European funders have got it going on around gay rights, so the datebook included a sweet story out of South America about a lesbian couple whose farm was thriving thanks to help from one of the projects the funder supported.

   Well. My co-workers, who are generally lovely, caring people, were completely scandalized by that story. They are very, very Christian, and conservative in their thinking. For that reason I usually steer clear of subjects that I know we’re going to disagree on. I couldn’t let this one go, of course, but I could tell they were just gritting their teeth through my rant and waiting to get back to feeling shocked and disgusted.

  Why, why, would anyone want to make a big deal about something that’s essentially about love? I have no idea. Yet living here has reminded me of just how much hatred and misunderstanding still exist in so many countries. I appreciate the sensitive language that international funders put into their contracts in Honduras to try to bring home the idea of equal treatment for all, but this place needs a lot more than that to get past its deep prejudices on this issue.

   Send down the gay-awareness squad and let's get this thing done. 

O Canada, you'll always be my girl

Dear Canada:

It’s been a year and a half since we parted, and I know I said some mean things in those emotional days toward the end. But I’ve been thinking about you a lot today. I saw a photo of you on Facebook, with that bright blue sky and sharp sunlight that I remember so well from the days when everything was going right. And suddenly I was lost in a thousand memories of the good times we had together.

   Putting some distance between us has been good for me. There were times when I loved your temperate spirit and tidy habits, but I hated that 1000-yard stare you’d get in your eyes when the talk turned to politics. There’s so much about you that’s amazing and good, but sometimes I wonder if you even notice how time has changed you, hardened your heart.

    But today, I’m missing you. I am remembering you on the last July 1 we had together, when I sat on the shores of Esquimalt Lagoon in the familiar chilled sunshine of early summer on the West Coast looking out at all the red and white shirts, umbrellas, flags and beach paraphernalia that people had brought to celebrate your birthday. I couldn’t have loved you more that day. The truth is, I was already thinking about leaving you, but that was the day I knew there were parts of me that would always be yours.

   I’m living with someone else now, as you’ve probably heard. I couldn’t have picked someone less like you if I’d tried. There you are with your squeaky-clean parks, safe roads and campaigns to stop teens from using tanning beds, and he’s chucking his garbage out the window and running around with guns and drugs. You’re stressing out over the FSA scores of your well-educated young people in their fully equipped, competent schools, and my new guy is shoving 90 kids into a dishevelled classroom with an untrained teacher and counting it as a major win if they make it through Grade 6.

    I admit, I do like a bad boy. There’s something thrilling about being with someone who feels a bit dangerous, about finding yourself in situations that are right on the edge of uncomfortable yet at the same time, leave you feeling completely alive. Today, though, I’m missing your moderate ways, and how I always knew where I stood with you. Yes, your predictability and need to control drove me completely mad sometimes, but I knew you’d be there if I needed you.

    This new guy – not so much. I saw a bad bus accident last week and understood in a flash that if I were ever in an accident like that, he’d ditch me in a heartbeat. He’d wish me luck and then throw me bleeding into the back of a passing pickup truck headed toward the nearest broken-down, unfunded public hospital, and that would be the last time I’d cross his mind. It shames me to admit this, Canada, but I’d come limping home to you.

     It’s exhilarating to ride down scary roads in the dark in the back of a truck, with no idea what might happen next. But standing in your ample wilderness, unafraid that the guy coming toward me is eyeing up my camera or that I’m about to stumble upon an illegal dump or cocaine drop zone – well, that’s its own kind of exhilaration.

    Your political correctness got to me sometimes, it’s true. But your heart is just and good, and I love that you were out there with gay rights even while so much of the world continues to drag its feet on such a fundamental fairness. I’ve overheard my new man making homophobic comments, and I know I could never last with someone like that, even if he does embrace life with a vigour and sense of fun that I rarely saw in you.

    O Canada, I wish I could lie down in your cool, green lap right now, enjoying all the silence that coast-to-coast noise bylaws and dedicated parkland can buy. I wish I was sitting down to one of your multicultural buffets, loading my plate with sushi, salt and pepper squid, lasagne, baklava, pho, perogies, blintzes and French pastries.

     My bad boy eats beans and tortillas pretty much every day.  I admire his ability to get by on the things he can actually grow. But today I am dreaming of your wildly ethnic palate and generous food-import budget.

    I’m a wanderer, Canada. I think you always knew that. I don’t imagine you were that surprised when I left, what with the problems we’d been starting to have. There’s part of me that wishes I could tell you that I’m done with my dallying and ready to come home to you, but there’s another part of me that has never felt more alive since I put you behind me.

    But you are in my soul forever. I had to get away from you to appreciate your sheer functionality and all the green, clean spaces and mannered cities you have wrought with your ordered ways. When I think of “civil society,” I think of you. I love your banks, your hospitals, your 7-day return policies. Your internet speeds are amazing.

    Happy birthday, dear one. This new life is changing me, and I don’t know if we’ll ever get back to being a couple again the way we once were. But I’ll always sleep easiest in your arms.  

How good deeds get done

The Louisiana gang, from left: Ronny Sanders, Carl Glover,
Gordon Holley, Jerry Houston, James Davis,
Jeff Hardel and Casey Fair.

The kids at Angelitos Felices children's home will be sleeping comfy tonight on the new beds and mattresses they've now got thanks to some amazing support from a group of Louisiana men.
     Connections are made in strange ways in Honduras, and the connection that brought these men to Angelitos and to me is no exception. The way it came together reminds me that even though I'm a skeptic about stars aligning and God having a plan, some things really do seem to be fated.
    The men belong to the Calvary Baptist Church in Ruston, Louisiana. One of them, Gordon Holley, has been doing projects in Honduras for many years as part of his university work. He came across my blog last year, saw a post I'd written about our work at Angelitos, and sent me an email asking if I'd take him and fellow congregation member James Davis to the home when they visited in December.
     It was James' first visit to Honduras. There's nothing quite like an orphanage in a developing country to open a person's eyes, and he was clearly moved by the rough conditions that the kids lived in. The men had arrived with suitcases full of clothes for the children, but James - a cabinet maker - said he'd be coming back soon to do more.

Jesus, Juan Carlos and Alex moving mattresses

    I figured he meant it at the time, but that wasn't to say he'd actually be back. But sure enough, he sent me an email a couple of months later with a blueprint for beautiful, sturdy bunk beds with cabinets, and asked me to put him in touch with a construction company in Copan so he could organize materials. A couple weeks ago, Gordon and James arrived with five other congregation members and set about building those beds.
     I was away in the Moskitia doing work when they came, so was no help at all for most of the project. But my spouse Paul stepped up to help out with a few roadblocks (like figuring out how to pay the electric bill at Angelitos so that power and water would be reinstated and the men would be
able to use their power tools). The group also drew on support from old friends at Macaw Mountain Bird Park here in Copan to help source and transport more materials after they bought out everything that Copan Ruinas had.
     I returned from my travels in time to meet them for a final breakfast before they headed home to Louisiana last weekend, and to assure them that when the mattresses arrived this week, I'd get them up to Angelitos and onto those beds. The 24 mattresses came in yesterday. My boss Merlin and I hustled them up to the hogar today using a truck from work.

At last - a bed of their own!

   Most of the bigger kids were away at school when we arrived, but three of the younger boys - ages 5, 6 and 8 - rushed out to help us. They diligently dragged one mattress after another upstairs to the sleeping area, and were waiting to help us again when we came back with the second load.
     The mattresses are beauties - six inches thick, covered in plastic to protect them from turning into stinking, filthy things like the bits of worn foam and weary military mattresses that the children have been sleeping on lately. I wouldn't have expected little kids to be quite so excited about a bed, but let me tell you, these guys are pumped. I wish you could see their beaming faces when I ask which bed is theirs and they proudly lead me to their bunk.

    They've never had that before at Angelitos - a bed of their own. A private place for their clothes and personal items, the few that they have. One spot in this impersonal world that is just for them. It's a huge step forward for child dignity.
     So that's how miracles work. It took flesh-and-blood humans to raise the money, build the beds and make this project happen, but there's still something of the divine about how it all came together. Whatever you want to call it, it feels like hope. 

Black, white and the many shades in between

 

  At the risk of starting too many posts with "One thing I've learned from this Cuso volunteer experience...," I have something new to add to the growing list.

    The latest learning is that this work tests your core values, in ways that get right past the pretty words and down to what you can actually live with. What's right? What's wrong? For possibly the first time in my life, I feel like I'm really being tested on the fundamentals of my deep-down self.

   An easy example to start: Child labour. For all my life up until 18 months ago, I was opposed to child labour. I thought it was a good thing to buy more expensive coffee if it meant it had been picked by adults and not little children. 

    Deep down, I remain philosophically opposed to putting children to work. But now I see the issue from a whole other perspective, in which a family could very likely go hungry if their kids aren't allowed to pick coffee during the two-month harvest. What the "fair trade" practice of banning child labour looks like from the point of view of an impoverished coffee-producing country is a system of punishment stacked against the poorest producers, one that forces children to be left at home alone because their parents can no longer take them along when they go out picking coffee. 

   The issue of faith has been a whole other test for me. I've had a complicated relationship for decades with faith, but in Honduras it's something that's so present in my life that I now have no choice but to reflect on what it means to me. 

   The Monday-morning devotionals at my workplace have been a real challenge, early on because I barely understood a word of what was being said and now, because I do. I try to hold my tongue out of respect, but I just couldn't keep my silence when talk turned today to obeying God and ultimately leaving difficult things in His hands to sort out. 

     So what are we to believe, then, in a country where so many unbelievably bad things happen to people all the time - that God has made a decision to really slam it to Honduras? What this country needs is anger, not soothing words about accepting God's plans. I won't pretend to know the ways of God, but I'm pretty sure a person could wait a long time for change if everything was left up to faith.

    But on the same subject, I've also had my secular belief system challenged by seeing just how much good work gets done down here by people motivated by faith. Time and again, the faith community shows up to make things happen in Honduras: Bunk beds for orphans; digging holes and assembling bricks for new water systema; testing children's eyes; providing veterinary care; building schools. As a secular person I want to believe that "doing good" is a universal concept, but what I have seen demonstrated in Honduras is that when push comes to shove, it's mostly the faith community that gets things done.

    Murder. Now there's a topic that I wouldn't have thought I had wiggle room on. But when you live in a country that effectively has no meaningful police or justice system, everything just gets a little greyer. 

    Not that killing another person against their will can ever be justified. But spend time here and you start to see how things might go in a place where there's so little chance that the "bad guy" will ever be arrested, let alone convicted. On a fundamental level I still believe that people taking justice into their own hands is a recipe for disaster. But in the real world I now live in, I get how that could happen. 

    Then there's corruption, a word that you hear virtually every day in Honduras as a way of explaining everything that's wrong with the place. But how do you define "corruption" for the purposes of rooting it out? What are the logical explanations for why it exists, and the logical strategies for dealing with it? How do you get past using it as the catch-all explanation for far more complex problems - a catch-all excuse for why nothing ever changes for the better?

      I'm not even confident you can single out corruption as a bad behaviour in a country where it exists in so many shades of grey (my new colour). Hiring your unqualified cousin for a good job you're fairly certain he can't do, renting the wrong kind of office space for your organization as a favour to your sister's husband - really, doesn't the work have to start there? Or is that just me trying to impose my cultural standards on another country?

    Anyway. All I'm saying is that if you've ever wanted to really test your beliefs and feel out your limits, living and working in a new culture just might be the ticket. I thought I had all the big stuff sorted before I came to Honduras. The longer I stay, the less I'm sure of that. 

     

Scary travel warnings are hurting Honduras

 

One of the papers ran a big feature this week on tourism in Copan Ruinas and what strategies might kickstart the flagging industry. Somebody mentioned that one problem might be that the marketing approach had become too boring.
   Maybe. But I have a feeling that the terrifying travel warnings about Honduras issued by virtually every developed country might be the bigger problem.
   The U.S. State Department issued its scariest warning yet yesterday, raising the spectre of kidnappings, carjackings, "disappearances," rape, and even the possibility that the Honduran police will kill you. The advisory listed 10 of the country's 18 departments as particularly homicide-prone (sorry, Copan, you made the list), but added that no place in the country can be considered safe. If I hadn't been living here long enough to know better, I'd have concluded from the warning that only a reckless, death-wish kind of traveller would ever consider a trip here.
   The advisory is admittedly more extreme than those from other countries, but not by much. Aided by Google Translate, I searched out travel warnings from governments in Germany, Holland, Canada, Britain and Spain, and found a similar alarmed tone running through all of them.
   The German government paints a picture of a country overrun by gangs, crazed drug-using criminals and feuding families, all with "low inhibitions in the use of firearms." Attacks on strangers have been especially notable on the route from San Pedro Sula to Copan Ruinas, notes the advisory, which also inexplicably cautions women travelling alone to be sure to have someone accompany them at security checkpoints.
   Holland concedes that it's still safe to travel to Honduras, but "not without being extra cautious." Tourists are targeted for theft and robbery because Hondurans "see foreigners as millionaires, who have too much money." The advisory lists the top tourist spots of Honduras - Tela, La Ceiba and Roatan - as dangerous for travellers.
   France cautions that bands of young, armed men target people, "even in groups," in low-traffic areas such as beaches. And watch out for the coast overall, where aggressive boaters, pirates and drug traffickers are waiting to get you.
   The Spanish government makes a rather sweeping statement about all public transportation in the cities being unsafe, and advises that it's best if either your family members or a hotel shuttle takes you to and from any airport. Man, that would break the hearts of the many decent, honest, hard-working taxi drivers I've ridden with in my time here.
    Spain recommends daylight road travel only and warns that organized gangs sometimes attack private vehicles. The government also gives some very specific warnings about certain city neighbourhoods and areas that are best to just skip entirely. Unfortunately for my acquaintances in the local tourism business, one of them is the Department of Copan.
   The Canadian government cautions travellers bound for any of the key tourism sites as well, and adds to the scare factor with a warning about people trying to drug your drinks or give you drug-tainted cigarettes or gum so they can rape you.
   "A large percentage of the population is armed," it adds. "Guns and weapons such as machetes are frequently used in robberies. Perpetrators often use violence if the person resists." (OK, you do want to pay attention to that last part  - you'd be crazy to resist if someone tries to rob you here.)

   Britain's advisory is the calmest of the bunch. Yes, Honduras has high levels of crime, it notes. However, "most serious crime doesn't affect tourists, but attacks on foreigners including armed robbery and sexual assaults do sometimes occur." Best to stay off the beaches at night. 

   I found Britain's comparatively mild-mannered warning the only one of the bunch that was fair to this maligned country that has been our home for the last year and a half. 

   Sure, there's probably at least one real-life story to back up each of the warnings in the other countries' travel advisories. Horrible things happen everywhere in the world. But putting together a string of one-offs in the absence of context is just plain irresponsible.

    I take particular exception to the U.S. State Department's declaration that "crimes are committed against expatriates at levels similar to those committed against locals." The statement is intended to convey that U.S. citizens aren't being targeted and that a traveller is at no more risk than the locals, but that is such a load of hooey. Honduras does indeed have a problem with violence, but overwhelmingly the victims are Honduran, at rates that can't even be compared to the occasional robbery or very rare murder of a foreigner. 

   What can I say? We live here. We work here. We travel around the country, and have even been known to hail cabs in the street. We exercise caution, but then again we always have - in our own country or any other. 

   Yes, there's crime in Honduras, and a murder rate that somebody had best get a handle on before the travel advisories get any more inflamed. But still and all, it's a lovely, gentle, beautiful country, full of good-hearted people who want nothing more than to hear that a visitor likes the place. 

   So take those warnings with a cup of salt and come on down. The country needs you.