Same life - but different

When I was first contemplating what life would be like as a Cuso International volunteer in Honduras, I really wanted to read a blog post from someone in the country who could explain the day-to-day stuff of the place - not so much the big cultural issues, because Cuso does a pretty good job of preparing you for that, but things like buying groceries, disposing of garbage, staying healthy. What would it feel like to live in this new place?
Unfortunately, that information has to be really specific, because it's different for every country, every region, every town. I did talk to a couple volunteers in Honduras who were very helpful in getting a broad sense of the place, but one lived in a big city and the other lives in a town three hours away in the mountains, which might as well be a foreign land when you're talking about the need for highly specific local intel.
So for all the future volunteers who might one day be contemplating a placement in Copan Ruinas, Honduras, here's the kind of post I was looking for last fall - a little practical information on daily life in a new land.
Clean water: That's a big one. We buy purified water sold in those big blue office-water-cooler size bottles, for a buck a bottle. We pick ours up at the store next door, but there's a constant stream of guys in pickup trucks driving around the neighbourhood selling the same bottles if there's no store nearby.
Fruits and veggies: Forget those well-stocked supermarkets you're accustomed to in Canada. You can find them in the big cities in Honduras, but here in Copan you'll probably want to buy in the public market. Don't expect the same variety - the market generally sells only the produce that grows nearby -  but you can count on it being much fresher and tastier than back home.
Garbage collection: Three times a week! How's that for service? If you're an enthusiastic recycler, it's going to be painful to adjust to throwing everything in the garbage again, because there's no "blue boxes" down here. But take comfort from knowing that some recycling does go on in Honduras, it's just done by people who work at the dump. And they need the job.
Paying bills: Well, here's the really good news - you won't have many. Household water tends to be included in the rent in Copan, so all you're looking at is electricity and maybe an $8-a-month cable bill if you want TV. The hydro-meter man comes by once a month and sticks a bill on your door, and you pay it at the bank. So far, it's looking like our electrical bill will be about $10 a month, which covers the costs of our lighting and a fridge. Our stove is gas, our clothes dryer is the great outdoors, and the temperatures are so pleasant here that you don't need heat or air-conditioning.
Laundry: You can get a washing machine if you really want one, but why not hire somebody who needs the work and get your clothes done by hand? We've hired a very nice single mom who does a couple hours of cleaning and laundry once a week for $6, a decent wage in a country where a lot of people are trying to get by on a buck a day.
Eating out: Copan sees about 120,000 visitors a year, so there are probably a dozen quite nice restaurants in town where you can get a  meal for under $10. But volunteers live on fairly tight budgets, so these kinds of places will probably be occasional treats. There are some comidas serving cheap lunches in the public market, and lots of smaller Honduran eateries where you can get traditional fare like pupusas, baleadas and tacos for $3 or less. And you can buy a great piece of fried chicken at Super Pollo Express for a buck.
Staying healthy: Drink purified water, of course. We're also following the advice of a Honduran doctor who Cuso introduced us to and are soaking most of our fruits and veggies (unless you can peel them) for 15 minutes in a litre of water with 10 drops of bleach, then in purified water. And even the locals have advised us to stay away from the cabbage - all those tight layers, trapping who knows what. So we do.
There's a general lack of snack foods here, so I'm probably eating healthier than I ever have. That and a lot of walking have trimmed me down since I arrived, and the quiet life of a small town is also conducive to getting more rest. It's all good.
Bugs: Get used to them. I actually entertained the notion before I got here that I could avoid being bitten by mosquitoes, but that was a pipe dream. Watkins insect repellent that I brought from home is now my daily skin cream, and we're taking chloroquine every week just in case any of those mosquitoes are packing malaria. As for the cockroaches, they don't bite and they keep a low profile. Wear good shoes if you go out hiking - I stepped in an ants' nest in my first few days here while hiking through a coffee field in thongs (!) and the stinging sensation was damn unpleasant.
Entertainment: Not much going on here. La ViaVia, a local bar/hotel run by an intense Belgian guy, shows movies for a buck every Sunday, Monday and Tuesday night, and has a nightly happy hour from 5-7 p.m. If you like the nightclub scene, there's a disco that I'm told is fun for the young folks. There are two or three other bars where you'll mostly find tourists, including a German place that makes its own beer, and a few seedy cantinas where a handful of hard-drinking Honduran men hole up.
Recreation: Lots of dirt roads to wander along, but be prepared for hills in every direction. Horse-riding is cheap - hook up with the locals and $35 will get you and a friend three or four hours of trail riding. There's also a pool where you can pay $3.50 and spend the day lounging around like you're at a resort - very nice on a hot Saturday.
Transportation: We've gone carless, and it's great. There's a good bus service should you find yourself going stir-crazy in a small town, and a lot of tourist "shuttles" to various destinations. But the roads are universally in terrible condition with a million curves, so best to bring Gravol and a strong constitution if you're planning to spend a lot of time on the road. There's also an informal "car-share" system in Copan and you can often catch a ride with a local if you need to go to the city.
Banking: Good luck with this one. I had Cuso's help to set up an account at the bank they use, and it still took me almost two months to get a bank card - quite a problem when the bank doesn't have a branch anywhere near Copan. In theory, you should be able to open an account here with two letters of recommendation, but be prepared to be extremely patient through what will likely be a baffling and frustrating process, and to have an alternative source of funds to get you through. We were grateful for our Canadian accounts in the period when we had no money, but keep in mind that your bank back home charges $5 every time you do a withdrawal.
I think the most important advice for anybody contemplating international volunteer work is to find another volunteer still living in the same place they're headed -  ideally working with the same organization that's sending them, as that's a whole other set of surprises -  and then ask a thousand questions. Things are still going to catch you by surprise even then, but maybe there will be a few less bumps in the road.

Cocaine: Running all round my brain

You find yourself thinking about cocaine a lot in a place like this. Blame it on the daily murder reports in the Honduran papers, not to mention the abundance of high-end, shiny new four-by-fours in little towns with no obvious avenues of work that would provide for such vehicular splendor.
While searching for greater understanding about the business end of things I came across a 2009 report from the UN with some excellent information about how the cocaine industry works. (And wouldn't you know it, the farmers get stiffed in this business too!)
U.S. vice-president Joe Biden has been splashing around Honduras in the last few days, and the newspapers have been full of his comments urging Honduras not to listen to Guatemala's talk about decriminalizing illicit drugs like cocaine. Rather than have a real plan for easing the tremendous violence going on in the countries that supply the vast cocaine markets in the U.S. and Europe, Biden is promising to fix things by reducing reduce the demand for cocaine in the U.S.
Sure, Joe. Except that Western countries have been trying to do that for, oh, 30 years now, and it hasn't shown much promise as an intervention. Meanwhile, the cocaine industry in Honduras claims the life of an average 13 people a day, murdered in a business that is vicious, unregulated and beyond anyone's ability to control.
Too often, people think that if you support decriminalization, you must be in favour of  illicit drug use. We've got to get past that. You can hate drug use yet still recognize the complete folly of trying to stop a massive industry just by lecturing our youngsters to just say no.
I think it's unethical for countries whose citizens are responsible for the demand to be leaving the countries that do the work to shoot it out in the streets for a bigger share of this lucrative industry. Illicit cocaine use can be lethal, but what's so evident when you spend time south of the border is that the work of producing and distributing the drug is the real killer. 

If only Copan had a Foo franchise....

Downtown Copan Ruinas, blessedly siren-free

I’ve now been away from B.C. for longer than any period of my life. OK, it’s only been eight weeks, but surely that’s enough time to muse on what I miss and don’t miss about the place.

The last time I was away for (almost) this long – two years ago when we travelled to Vietnam and Thailand for six weeks - the thing I missed the most was not having access to a musical instrument. Fortunately, I brought my accordion with me for this journey, so no worries there.  Overall, I think I’m adjusting nicely to life in a tropical country, something I suspect I’ve been hankering for since I was six and first discovered the glorious feeling of hot sun on my skin while on a family vacation in Penticton.

I do miss some things. But not everything. Let’s start with what I miss:

My family. I’ve never lived further than a few hours from all my immediate family members, and even though I grumbled now and again that I wished it was otherwise, the truth is that I liked it that way.  I think I’ve only missed one Chow family reunion – they’re held every two or three years - since I was 14. But I’ll be missing one this summer, which will also be the first summer in seven years that my partner and I haven’t taken a two-week vacation somewhere in the motor home with our big pack of grandsons. I also miss making music with my youngest daughter Rachelle; I really loved our little gigs at old folks’ homes around Victoria. I hope my kids mean it about coming to visit us in Honduras.

Takeout from Foo Asian Street Food. Man, I love the food at that place. The pad thai, the caramel chicken, the papaya salad. We’re coming home for a week in June, and Foo takeout is definitely on my list of must-haves. So is a big, barely cooked T-bone steak. We’re practically vegetarians in Honduras what with the scarcity of meats in the market.

Sewage pipes capable of handling toilet paper. Down here, you have to put your toilet paper into a garbage bin to avoid plugging the pipes. Yuck. Still, at least they’ve got Western-style toilets that flush and no squats, which I became intimately (and unhappily) familiar with when my mom and I travelled in China last fall.

Healthy, happy dogs.  I don’t think I’ll ever get used to the sight of the sick, sad creatures that pass as “pets” here in Copan. The cats do OK with neglect – you know how cats are – but the dogs just wander around looking like they’re desperate for a good meal and a hearth to curl up on. Please, somebody, come down here and launch a dog-rescue project.

My bird walks through Panama Flats. There are lots of rural roads around here, but there’s no walk that lets you escape the trucks and noisy moto-taxis that tear past on any skinny, potholed dirt road you’ve managed to find. Plus anyone staring intently into the bushes with gigantic binoculars around her neck looks just plain weird down here.

And what I don’t miss:

The constant whine of sirens. I swear, you can’t go 30 minutes without hearing a siren in Victoria. I have a theory – baseless, I admit – that being exposed to so many sirens leaves a person in a chronic state of alarm. Sure, the odds are 54 times higher that you’ll get murdered in Honduras than in Canada, and nobody in their right mind would want to know how the odds of getting assaulted or robbed down here compare. But at least there are no sirens.

Conversations about new furniture and kitchen renovations. One time in Victoria, we had dinner with two other couples and for an hour and a half, they talked about their new mattresses – how thick they were, how much they cost, the pros and cons of a pillow-top. That painful dinner party was a life-changer. Now I live in a house without a sofa (confession: I’d actually like a sofa) in a country where a good mattress for a lot of people is anything that eases the discomfort of sleeping on the dirt floor of their tin-roof shack in the hills.

B.C. politics.  I wouldn’t want to suggest governance is better in Honduras, but at least it’s more honest about its obsessive self-interest and complete disregard for people who are struggling. It was killing me to live in a province and country with so much potential, so much wealth, yet so complacent that one destructive government after another has felt free to come in and loot the place.

Cold, dreary weather. Many people have told me over the years that I’d miss the change of seasons if I lived in a hot country. I always thought they were dead wrong about that. Maybe I’ll miss the long days of spring/summer in Canada – here, it gets dark shortly after 6 p.m. year-round due to the proximity of the Equator – but I do not miss the greyness, the drizzle, the chill in the air or the thought of “hot” summer days that top out at 22 degrees. I love walking out the door every morning knowing I won’t even need a sweater, let alone a warm jacket and a scarf.

So there you go. Some good, some bad, just as you might expect.  But hey, I’m loving the adventure.

Hungry kids today, leaders tomorrow

Children head home after a day harvesting coffee

Whether you’re a kid in Canada or Honduras, your school is going to try to convince you to eat better. I attended a workshop for teachers this week here in Copan Ruinas that was introducing a seven-series program for primary kids that was all about food.

But that’s where the similarities end. While the Canadian efforts are aimed at stopping our kids from getting any fatter, the Honduran course is trying to stave off malnutrition. Listening to the Honduran group outlining the themes of the nutrition course was yet another reminder of just how tough things are in this struggling country.

Like so many other countries, Honduras is a signatory on at least a dozen big international agreements guaranteeing this or that right for the children of the country. But it’s all just words on paper. In the second-poorest country in the Americas, bad things happen to kids every day, and going hungry isn’t even the worst of it.

Honduras has laws prohibiting children from working until they’re 14. But in reality, kids from poor families typically start harvesting coffee when they’re seven.  Every day on my way home from work, a giant truck absolutely jammed with 50 or 60 indigenous kids from the poor communities around Copan trundles by, taking the children home after a day cutting coffee. You just need a glimpse of those tiny little faces peering out from what looks like a cattle carrier to have a new understanding of child slavery.

But what’s to be done about that? Some 65 per cent of Hondurans live in extreme or relative poverty – and relative poverty in Honduras is damn poor, that’s for sure. Families send their kids off to the coffee fields because they’re desperate for the money and the seasonal work pays comparatively well. 

If the country ever did get its act together enough to enforce its own laws around child labour, it would be devastating to families. We in the western world could launch a boycott of coffee harvested by children, but it would be like signing those kids’ death sentence in a country without a shred of social support to break a family’s fall.  One recent international study identified 123,000 Honduran children ages 5 to 14 who were working, including in the deadly lobster-diving industry that claims hundreds of lives a year in this country.   

The school nutrition course delves into subjects that Canadian kids never have to think about. Why your mom and dad feed you only beans and corn. Why a body needs more than that to live on. Where to find wild plants and fruits to bulk up your subsistence diet. Why a household needs money as well as land, because it’s just not possible to grow everything you need (especially on the sides of mountains with 50-70 per cent slopes, which is where the poorest families in Copan live). No surprise that almost a third of children under age five in Honduras suffer stunted growth from poor nutrition.

What’s to be done about all of this? I wish I knew. I’m learning a little more every day about a new, complicated reality, and every day I’m a little less sure what the answer is. I’ve heard that old adage about “planting seeds” a thousand times, and yes, I get it. But when you watch those big trucks rolling by with their cargo of children - or hear about teachers trying to manage classes of 50 or 60 children without desks, school supplies or bathrooms - it’s pretty hard to feel good about planting seeds.

Still, I watch the organization I’m volunteering with working hard with children and young people to create a new generation of leaders in Honduras. I take great heart from the young faces - some no more than nine or 10 years old – sitting at the various planning tables of CASM as genuine participants. Real leaders grow out of a process like that, and this country desperately needs them. 

Type A in a Type B Land

The view from my desk

This period in Honduras is a first in so many ways. First extended period outside of Canada. First time as an international volunteer. First time I've stayed put in my travels for more than a few days.
It's also the first time I've worked in another culture, let alone another language. Barely into my second week in my new job with the Comision de Accion Social Menonita, I can see quite clearly that this aspect of life in Honduras might just be my biggest adjustment.
People back home have asked me to write more on what kind of work I'll be doing on behalf of Cuso International here in Honduras. I wish I could tell them more. But the truth is, the job description was vague - deliberately so, I suspect, as Cuso warned us all along that everything was likely to change once we actually started our placements. And the reality is in many ways even vaguer, and immensely complicated by a different language and culture.
The rough goal of my time here is to create some written history of CASM, and document the work the agency does in ways that will be useful for funding, Web site upgrades, or just general promotions the non-profit might need to do in other countries. Unlike Canada, non-profits are completely on their own in Honduras, without a scrap of government funding or the deep pockets of some benevolent foundation. Churches do most of the social work in Honduras, and rely on out-of-country funds from specific denominations or international aid organizations.
To achieve that goal, however, I can tell I'm going to have to be pushy. No problem normally, but tough when you don't yet speak the language competently. People in my workplace have no doubt concluded that I'm a quiet type who keeps to herself - far from the truth, but who can blame them when I spend so much of my time sitting mute, desperately trying to comprehend what's being said?
Pushy also isn't easy in a hierarchical work culture where perky suggestions from the floor aren't necessarily  welcomed. I'm a strategic type, and that part of me is going to be tested as never before if I hope to convince my bosses to clear a path for me to talk to the people I'll need to talk to in order to gather the stories of the organization. I know that's what they want me to do, but that doesn't mean it will be easy to make it happen.
Then there's the challenges of a very different work ethic. Hot countries are laid back. I'm no Torontonian, but I'm used to a fast-paced workplace and the pressure of endless deadlines. This land just doesn't do its work like that. This afternoon, my co-workers spent a good deal of time in the parking lot trying on jeans that somebody brought over, while I sat alone in the office looking like the workplace nerd.
I can't bear to take a two-hour lunch break and lose valuable work time, so I've had to make up an excuse that eating lunch makes me sleepy (it's true, mind you). I had to force myself into the coffee room today with everybody else for a long, chatty break over cake, just so I wouldn't come across as aloof.
But aside from looking like I'm not a team player, the other problem  is that I end up completing my work too fast.
Two days into the work week, I've already  finished a 5,000-word document for an upcoming workshop on women's and children's rights, despite all the Internet searches, translating back and forth and protracted periods of flipping through my Spanish-English dictionary required to make that happen.
 I reviewed the CASM Web site and sent a document to my boss suggesting changes I could work on. I took information on an upcoming Honduras-Canada student exchange and  rewrote it in English and Spanish. (Although there now appears to be no easy way of distributing the damn thing. Most of the people in my workplace don't even have email. How do they function??)
What I should have done was stretched that work out for at least a week, because tomorrow will be here soon and I don't have a clue what I'll do with my time.
Maybe I'll have to take a nice, long lunch break. Or maybe the jeans truck will be back.

No way to hide it - I'm not from around here

I’m realizing that you never see your own culture and privilege more clearly than when it’s juxtaposed on another. Take running, for example.

I’ve never thought of running as a cultural thing. Back in Canada, I just slapped on my runners and headed out the door, figuring I looked no more or less out of place than anyone else out for a run that morning.

But in Honduras, going out for a run marks you instantly as a gringo - a person from “away,” and one with the leisure time and energy to need exercise. A hard-working Honduran never thinks about such things, because a typical day’s long labour is quite sufficient.

“Le gusta caminar?” asked a friendly young fellow as I slowed my pace at the end of my run this morning. Curious about the sweaty older woman making her way up one of the many steep hills in Copan, he asked me how much I walked in a day. Maybe an hour, I said, and then asked him the same. “All day - I have to for my work,” he answered. We left it at that.

The baseball hat I wear on my run is culturally distinctive. Women don’t wear hats here, and definitely not baseball hats. My size, my shape, my short hair - all culturally distinctive. I tan up easily and am already blending in quite nicely in terms of skin colour, but my height and habits will always distinguish me as a privileged foreigner.

Today I passed a foursome from the American bilingual school here in Copan, and they might as well have had signs taped on their backs declaring their heritage. They stood out with their Tilly hats, hiking boots and expensive day packs in a country where most people count themselves lucky to own one of those little packs made out of string and that weird grocery-bag material. I regularly see whole families of tiny people staggering down from the mountainsides with giant bundles of firewood digging into their skinny shoulders; I can’t imagine what they think of us big, fussy foreigners with our water bottles and light lunches carefully nestled in padded packs, heading out for an easy stroll.

I’m not suggesting there’s anything shameful in being a Westerner. I’ve got no urge to carry prickly, heavy bundles of firewood on my back, or work hard all day for almost no money. I wouldn’t change my lot for that of one of the tough, hungry-looking campesinos who I see in town every Sunday buying cheap pieces of foam to soften the hard dirt floor they’re sleeping on. 

But it’s just striking to see how very different we are, forever more. I can come to Honduras as a Cuso International volunteer and congratulate myself for being willing to live on a tenth of the income I could earn back home, but the truth is I’m still remarkably comfortable. I’ve got a hot shower whenever I want one and a fridge full of food, not to mention money in the bank, a partner with money in the bank, and many different options to fall back on in a pinch.

Even my Honduran home, at $325 a month, is twice as expensive as what a typical Honduran family can afford in Copan Ruinas -  and completely out of reach for those poor sods from the countryside who I see selling firewood door to door to all the people who cook their frijoles and tortillas on outdoor stoves. I have the healthy bones, the good clothes, the solid education and the nutritionally alert brain of someone who has spent their life benefiting from Western privilege.

I try to remember that when I’m out there running down a dirt road and wondering why the Chorti people aren’t returning my friendly Canadian smile as they pass by me with babies on their backs and a stack of tortillas they desperately need to sell. I’m playing at living like a poor person. For them,  it’s no game.

The slow awakening

Workshop participants discuss citizens' rights

I'm with a roomful of people at a conference centre atop one of the crazy, skinny mountain roads they have around Copan. They call this kind of meeting a taller here in Honduras - a workshop. But the term that comes to my mind is “consciousness-raising.”

The people in the room are all too familiar with the many problems facing Honduran families and communities. But they obviously don't get mad easily, and the facilitator is gently nudging them toward a little more indignation.

Honduras has a constitution, he reminds them. The country’s leaders have signed numerous international agreements recognizing human rights, gender equity, fair processes for its citizens.  But that's on paper, not in the way daily life unfolds for most Hondurans.

Today was my first full day on the job with the Comision de Accion Social Menonita, and the first chance I’ve had to see my new boss, Merlin Fuentes, in action. It turns out he’s an excellent facilitator. And any Canadian old enough to remember the ‘60s - or the women’s rights movement - would have recognized what he was trying to do at the workshop. He was waking people up to their own power.

The problems in Honduras are much more extreme than in Canada, but not totally unfamiliar. People feel disconnected from their government and powerless to effect change. They see money flowing among those who have plenty, but almost none of it trickling down to those on the ground.  

Their children receive little or no education. Their unemployment rate is closing in on 40 per cent. Their murder rate is staggering - 54 times the Canadian rate, and No. 1 in the world right now. Their access to health care ranges from minimal to non-existent, and for the most part people rely on folk cures and luck.

Unbelievably terrible things happen every day in Honduras. In the last week alone, a devastating prison fire killed more than 350 people and an equally devastating fire in a market district near the country’s capital destroyed the workplaces and the inventory of more than 800 vendors. With not even a shred of a social net to break the fall, those affected will plunge to new lows of poverty that will virtually ensure their children and their children’s children remain in a lifelong state of deprivation.

The country’s media deliver a new outrage every day - 200 sick babies baking in an non-air-conditioned pediatric emergency ward in San Pedro Sula; a government worker shot to death while riding his motorcycle to work at 5 a.m.; yet another public school trying to get by with no desks, no school supplies and far too few teachers.

You’d think Hondurans would have no need for consciousness-raising at this point, or for anyone to awaken their sense of outrage. But when generation after generation grows up in poverty and deprivation, it can start to feel like the norm. It’s not that people have given up - it’s that they’ve lost sight of there even being an alternative.

What can be done? Aid, sure, and all those nice things that Western countries like to do. But real change always has to come from within. One taller at a time, more people will find their voice. For the sake of this lovely but bedeviled country and its people, I will hope for that.

Day 1: The initial panic recedes

Scene from my morning walk to work

Admittedly, I didn't understand much of the things said at this morning's devotional, a regular Monday-morning feature at my new workplace, the Comision de Accion Social Menonita. But I can't help but think that Truman Capote and Oscar Wilde would have been pleased to know that they were quoted at a gathering of devout Mennonites in Honduras.
Three groups work out of the CASM office, and each of the 15 employees in the building take a turn at preparing a theme for the Monday devotional. Today's theme was about work, with the group invited to reflect on how they define "work" and who they work for (and no, just saying that you worked for God was not sufficient).
I was a quiet observer this time out, but I liked the idea of a set time for employees to reflect on something bigger than just getting that day's job done. And I did manage to sing along with a few stanzas of a song that sounded very much like "Red River Valley." I got the gist of the session - I'm using that expression a lot these days - including the mentions of Capote and Wilde during a reading of various quotes about work.
The person who prepares the theme for the week is also responsible for bringing in food to share after the devotional. Today it was chepas (spelling, anyone?) - frijoles wrapped in a corn mash and steamed in corn husks. Now that I know there's food every Monday, I won't bother eating breakfast at home next time.
As for my actual work today - well, the boss wasn't in and the other staff members didn't know what to do with me.
But they were cheerful about it, and in the end invited me along to a meeting at Copan city hall of local Mayans, who are very upset that some of the artifacts at the famous Mayan ruins in Copan are about to be shipped off to the University of Pennsylvania. The plan is to replace the artifacts on site with reproductions. You can imagine that the idea of losing precious relics to a U.S. university might trouble the Mayan descendants who live here, a population that CASM works with extensively.
Alas, that meeting fell victim to one of the strange circumstances that just seem to happen in Honduras. It turns out that CASM and one of the other organizations it works with, the Organismo Cristiano de Desarrollo Integral de Honduras, had a falling out with someone at city hall last year over something that, when explained to me in rapid Spanish, was beyond my ability to understand. At any rate, both organizations have now been prohibited from entering city hall. I sense that democracy is a bit of a loose concept in Honduras, among all levels of government.
We sat outside city hall for more than an hour, waiting to talk to the Mayan contingent after the meeting. But we eventually gave up. I'm hoping I'll find out more tomorrow when I arrive for Day 2, and at least know now that it's a very pleasant 15-minute stroll to get to work.
The route along the Copan River took me past several flocks of oropendolas, a flashy crow-sized bird with a distinctive ululating song and an intriguing tendency to sing the song while falling forward on its perch. Throw in a few orioles, great-tailed grackles and flocks of little green parrots, and it's a perfect morning walk for a bird enthusiast like myself.
Better still, I heard today there's a women's-rights project at CASM due in June that sounds like a potential fit for my skill set. It may not go smoothly - that doesn't seem to be the way down here. But hey, no problema.

Here goes nothing

Tomorrow is the first day of my new job. I'm nervous, perhaps not surprising given that none of the people I'll be working with speak the same language as me and I don't really know what I'll be doing.
In theory, I'm here in Honduras to help the Comision de Accion Social Menonita get better at communicating. The non-profit is a Cuso International partner, and communications is what I do.
In reality, I suspect I'm in for one of the most challenging job experiences of my life. And that's saying a lot, what with me being the type to jump into the deep end fairly regularly when it comes to work. It's just sinking in tonight - with mere hours to go before I show up for the Monday-morning devotional tomorrow at 8 a.m. - that this is going to be one heck of a ride.
CASM has been doing good work with impoverished and vulnerable populations in Honduras for more than 40 years, first with El Salvadorean refugees flooding into Honduras during and more recently with indigenous \women and children. But non-governmental organizations - in Honduras and Canada alike - tend to put their heads down and work, without spending too much time documenting either the work or the results.
My role in the next year or two is to help CASM get better at that, using its small Copan Ruinas office as a pilot that could eventually be expanded to its six other office in Honduras.
How will that play out? I have no idea. The language challenges are the most immediate, but it's much bigger than that. I've been to the office twice now, and both times the staff was very welcoming but clearly puzzled at who I was and why I was there. That's a tough opening position.
I'm quite sure my new boss will have plenty of work for me once I settle in - there are only five employees, after all, and dozens of dead-poor Chorti villages in this region alone in need of help. And for at least a couple months, I'll need to follow behind the CASM staff and do what they do anyway, because there's no figuring out communications until you know exactly what it is that needs to be communicated.
But sooner or later things will have to get around to communications, because that's the whole point of the Cuso project. In an organization that has never had time for communications, however, that's a tall order. As I've already learned from various non-profit projects in Canada, it's not just about me coming in with my skill set and voila, we're all communicating. It's actually about going up against a culture of non-communication and trying to convince people that it's important.
And when it's a Spanish-speaking organization in a foreign country that values hierarchical structure and male leadership - well, you can imagine why I might be a tad nervous. I am, after all, an older Canadian woman with a pierced nose, a tattoo, a tentative grasp of Spanish and a lot of years of not having to prove myself to doubtful strangers.
But I will get up tomorrow and walk the half-hour to my new workplace in what will probably be sunshine, and I guess we'll just see. CASM starts every work week with an hour of prayer, and right now that sounds like exactly what I need to be doing. 

If Only Corn-Husk Dolls Were All It Took

We took a horseback ride yesterday up to a little Chorti village not far from Copan, La Pintada. Before any of us got a foot on the ground, children started running toward us from all directions, clutching the corn-husk dolls that are a common sight for any tourist visiting Copan. In seconds they had us surrounded.

Once upon a time, somebody with the best of intentions introduced to this tiny, impoverished community the concept of making and selling corn-husk dolls to tourists. I recall reading about the project somewhere in the various bits and pieces of literature I took in during the run-up to moving to Honduras. On paper, it sounded like a great idea for social enterprise.

But of course, reality is something different. The corn-husk dolls are charming enough - bright-coloured trinkets that I can imagine a few tourists might buy, albeit with some concern as to whether they will be able to clear customs without getting hassled about the dusty corn cob at the centre of each doll. Unfortunately, there aren’t a heck of a lot of tourists coming to Honduras these days, and the percentage who want a corn-husk doll is considerably smaller than the vast numbers of Chorti children really hoping someone will buy.

So the whole thing has taken on an air of desperation. Children as young as two or three now wander the streets of Copan trying to hawk corn-husk dolls. The older ones follow the gringos around with sad eyes and urgent pleas, as if their very lives depended on you buying a corn-husk doll. I fear that in some cases, that might even be true.

I’m presuming the project was intended as community development, something that tapped into a “traditional” skill to bring money to an impoverished village. But how many corn-husk dolls does it take to lift a struggling community out of poverty? If you saw the shoeless, hungry-looking kids who sell these things - the rough-looking houses that their families live in, without running water and for the most part without electricity -  it’s pretty obvious that all the tourists in Honduras couldn’t buy enough corn-husk dolls to turn these people’s lives around.

We took a short walk through the handful of dusty little trails that constitute streets in La Pintada and came across another good idea gone wrong. The women in the village do some beautiful weaving - placemats, table runners, scarves and the like, in dazzling colours. There’s a sign outside the tiny building where they’re sold that proudly points to the “micro enterprise” inside.

Alas, you have to come to La Pintada to buy the weaving, because it isn’t sold anywhere else. There are at least a half-dozen tourist-oriented stores in Copan Ruinas hawking goods from China, India and elsewhere, but you won’t find the local weaving anywhere other than at the top of a mountain that most tourists will never visit unless they happen to like riding horses. 

It smacks of one of those projects that kind-hearted people from elsewhere conceive of, but then leave to die on the vine in the hands of locals who have no idea how to market the goods or get them to town. Everybody presumes somebody else will take the project to the next level, but no one ever does.

We have to continue to work toward eradicating poverty.  I admire the Westerners who come with their big hearts and novel projects to underdeveloped countries and try to make a difference. But unless local people have the capacity, cultural understanding and means to sustain and nurture such projects, generations of Chorti children will have little but handfuls of corn-husk dolls and disappointment to show for their efforts.

Even shopping shakes your self-confidence

It has been a humbling experience to be a stranger in a strange land. As I posted earlier, the search for housing earlier this month reduced my partner and I to a pair of puzzled children following behind the various kind-hearted souls who were willing to help us. This week’s search for housewares to go in our new casa has been equally baffling.

We are veterans of the Canadian shopping experience - which is to say, we know how to go into some big mall or gigantic store-with-everything and load up our cart with the things we need. If I were looking to outfit a house in Victoria with cutlery, towels, pots and pans, a coffee maker and so on, I’d have my choice of many stores where I could get everything I needed in one swoop.

Not so in Copan Ruinas. For starters, there’s no mall here. There are no big stores, either, or even very many small ones.

Nor is there a single store that specializes in housewares - or anything else for that matter. For the most part, they all sell a little of this and a little of that. You really just have to poke your head in the door and see what’s on the shelves, which often turns out to be a random assortment of office supplies, brassieres, motorcycles, shoes, used clothing and kitchenware.

I did my first reconnaissance by myself on Thursday and concluded that much of what we needed wasn’t going to be available in Copan. But then our Spanish teachers kindly took Paul and I on a walkabout the next day and I realized that I simply hadn’t understood how to look for what we needed.

For instance, I’d walked right by Zapatos Faby the previous day, having presumed that a shoe store wouldn’t have housewares. But in fact, the store’s name turned out to be just a lingering remnant from a previous incarnation. It actually sold an eclectic mix of toaster ovens, dish sets, dressers, file cabinets and more. I’d also walked past the intimate-apparel store, Lovables, but a closer look in the company of our teachers revealed shower curtains, cutlery and coffee pots.

The main furniture store in town has a row of shiny new motorcycles out front that it also sells. I hear the store sells bicycles, too, something I’m considering for my daily commute to the Comision de Accion Social Menonita. We asked about buying cylinders for our gas stove and it turned out that every day on our way to Spanish school we’d walked blithely past the unassuming house where the canisters are sold (and fresh tortillas).

I bought a quilt for our bed through the woman who runs our homestay, who knew somebody who knew somebody who happened to have a very nice one. We’re shopping for a sofa using the same technique - word of mouth, which appears to be how virtually everything gets done in this little town.

We’d have never found the cable company office if our teachers hadn’t walked us down a skinny little dead-end street and a dusty construction site to find the entrance. Nor would we have known that the meter man would read our hydro meter a couple times a month, stick a bill on our door, and then we’d go pay it at the bank. The teachers also took us into the mercado and introduced us to their favourite vendor, a religious woman known for having quality fruits and vegetables at fair prices.

Our supply of purified water? We’ll buy it off trucks that drive around the neighbourhood every day. Our garbage pickup? We’ve been advised to ask our neighbours about when the garbage truck comes - not just the day but the exact hour, because garbage left at the curb for any length of time is quickly ripped apart by the hungry, sick dogs that are  everywhere in Copan.

Give us six months or so and we’ll be old hands at all of this (maybe). And if learning new things really is the ticket for preventing Alzheimer’s, we’re going to have brains of steel.

Just because they call it a homestay doesn't make it homey

The primary focus for much of the screening, assessments and training my partner and I went through during our Cuso International preparations was whether we were flexible and adaptable enough for this work.

I felt certain then and now that we would be well-suited to being thrust into unfamiliar settings and largely left to our own devices to figure things out. But this homestay business is definitely proving to be an early test of our abilities to go with the flow.

The warm and friendly sound of a homestay never did tempt me. I don’t like the idea of staying with a houseful of strangers in my own culture, let alone in a foreign country with a considerably lower standard of living. But a nice hotel with a pool wasn’t an option when Cuso booked us in for a month-long homestay in Copan Ruinas while we attend a Spanish-language school that’s preparing us for placements here in Honduras.

We’re now in Week 3, and eagerly - maybe even desperately - counting down the days until we move into our own place next week. I’ve never looked for housing with such fervor. My instinctive wariness of homestays has now been confirmed, and I plan to do anything in my power from this point on to avoid ever staying in one again.

I get the concept: That if you’re fully immersed into the culture, language and family life of your new country, you’ll have no choice but to adapt rapidly and start picking up the language. In a romantic (but misguided) moment, you might even picture how nice it’s going to be sitting down for traditional meals with a friendly family who will gently ask you about your day and encourage you to test your fragile language skills.

But I’m just too freakin’ old to get stuffed into a run-down little back bedroom in a house overrun by what seems to be a thousand small children and assorted passers-by. As for those family meals, they don’t seem to have such a thing in this house; dinner last night, for instance, consisted of the two of us gulping down our beans and tortillas at the plastic table while a baby bumped into our legs in his walker, the TV blared a bad action movie dubbed in Spanish, and a man we’d never seen before sat on the couch with another baby while his wife got her hair tinted next door.

There’s not a sound we could make in this 10x10-foot space that wouldn’t be completely audible to everyone just outside our (screen) door. And I can assure you that there isn’t a sound they make that isn’t completely audible to us. At least I’ve learned to fall asleep to the sound of water running, running, running into the seemingly bottomless stone pila just outside our (screen) window. The five-year-olds who chase each other around and around, the three-year-old diva who spends most of her days here, the dyspeptic baby and the endless teenage girls who lug him around - all of it was charming for a week or so, but how much flexibility can one person muster? One night of that is an amusing travel anecdote. Seventeen nights and counting is an endurance test.

Still, the days tick by. And there are warm and fuzzy moments when we find ourselves having fun with the family, like last week when I played accordion at 5 a.m. for the man of the house so he could mark his birthday in typical Honduran fashion with a firecracker-and-music wakeup call. The family is endearing in its own way and I expect we’ll stay connected during our time here. I just don’t want to live with them.

Of course, Cuso’s emphasis on flexibility and adaptability is actually about doing well in my placement with the Comision de Social Accion Menonita, which I don’t even start until Feb. 20. But I’ve got no worries about that. After this homestay, it’s going to be a piece of cake. Six more sleeps....

The view from here

Chorti woman in her very rough kitchen - no electricity

Three weeks into our new life in Honduras, I’d be a fool to declare myself an expert on the place. Still, I’ve learned some things. So I offer up a few observations from the field, in no particular order:

The headlines are scary, but out of context. Yes, the murder rate in Honduras is the highest in the world, and the incidents of violence are so common in the big cities that one of the country’s papers now features a map of assaults, robberies and shootings in San Pedro Sula, the craziest city of the lot. But everyday life for most Honduran people is full of the ordinary activities of life: Feed the family; raise the kids; get the laundry done; go to work. If you removed the violence of the drug trade from Honduran life - violence that is primarily directed at other people in the drug trade - the picture would change significantly.

That said, I have met an astounding number of “regular folks” who have had someone murdered in their family. Partly that’s because poverty breeds violent robberies here, and partly that’s because....

The drug trade is fully integrated into the Honduran economy. If you needed one more reason for why the “war on drugs” is pointless, harmful and doomed to fail, come to Honduras. As long as demand for cocaine continues in the wealthy countries of the world, there will be a major industry in Latin American countries affecting every public institution, every town on the route that cocaine travels, every brash young man and impoverished family tempted by all that money.

Here in tiny Copan Ruinas, you need only stand on a street corner counting late-model deluxe trucks with windows tinted black to realize that no town on a major transportation route is immune. It’s not something that people here talk about, but it’s certainly a reality they all live with.  

Stone pilas really get your clothes clean. My light-coloured clothing has never looked better now that my clothes are being washed on a big block of stone out back. Sure, an automatic washer is quick and easy, but it’s no match for a straight-up scrubbing by hand and a sunny afternoon of drying on the criss-cross of clothes lines up on the terrazza.

The woman who runs our homestay where we’re living right now does our washing as part of the deal, but I rolled up my sleeves today and did a few items myself, not wanting to look like some pampered gringa. We’ll be moving into our own place in mid-February and I’m looking forward to testing out my own pila.

You can live without a hot shower. I never would have thought this to be true back in Canada, where a long hot shower was one of the highlights of my day. But I’ve quickly become accustomed to a much shorter rinse in much cooler water that is all you get when using the funny little shower heads-cum-hot water heaters that are the mainstays in Honduran homes.

The dogs lead desperate lives. A dog’s life is rough in any poor country, but I’ve never seen so many sick, disease-ridden, crippled, neglected creatures as live here in Honduras. Unlike cats, dogs don’t seem to be able to undomesticated easily, so these poor things continue to breed but are left to scrounge for scraps - which aren’t easy to find in a poor country where most people subsist on a scant diet of beans and corn, with few leftovers. The dogs' sad, sad eyes break my heart. If ever there was a place that needed a good spay/neuter program and a rescue group, this is it.

Hondurans work hard, and the poorest ones work even harder. Walk through any of the little indigenous communities surrounding Copan Ruinas and you quickly see how hard it is to be poor in a country with zero social supports. We visited a Chorti household where the woman divides her day between making clay pots (no kiln, no pottery wheel, just her and her strong arms) for $2.50 a pop and grinding corn for the tortillas that feed her family. She’s got running water but no electricity; her kitchen was a pitch-black cave with a dirt floor, with nothing for light but the fire in the big clay stove where she cooked her tortillas.

Honduran popcorn balls are amazing. Corn and beans are the staples here, so no surprise that popcorn balls are sold on the street as a cheap treat. Who knew that scruffier, smaller corn kernels and lots of molasses would yield even tastier popcorn balls than the ones I remember from Halloweens past? (Ah, those were the days, when nobody freaked out if the neighbour handed out something homemade.)

 I try not to think too much about the provenance of my new favourite treats, mind you, Food Safe kitchens being something of a rarity here in Honduras. And I definitely don’t want to know what they use to get the pink versions quite so electric-pink. Some things are best left unexplored.

But what if I never understand this language??

La ViaVia, Copan Ruinas. Great place to drink!

I met my new boss on Wednesday. He doesn’t speak any English. Yikes.

I believe I have the heart for the work I’m about to do in Honduras, which involves helping a very good Mennonite organization do its very good work. But what I don’t have is the language skills.

That fact hit home with a whump Wednesday as I sat in my new workplace, straining to understand what the heck the kind-faced man who heads up Copan’s Comision de Social Accion Menonita was telling me.

My Spanish has improved significantly in the past four months, thanks to private lessons, many hours of devoted study, and more immediately a 20-hour-a-week immersion in Spanish at the Ixbalanque Language School here in Copan. But comprehending the spoken language - especially at the speed it’s spoken around these parts - remains a major challenge.

That’s natural, I’m told. But let me tell you, “natural” is of little comfort when you’ve got a scant two weeks before starting your new job in a workplace that’s all Spanish, all the time. More alarming still, the work of CASM involves the issues of human development, rights, gender equity, poverty - fascinating and important stuff, but not exactly easy subjects to talk about when your language skills are maybe (maybe) at a Grade 3 or 4 level.

Spanish is a beautiful language, and it’s a total thrill for me to find myself able now to have some conversations with people about their lives, their country, their culture. I’ve been able to conduct halting exchanges in markets, banks and the like for about 10 years now after much travel in Mexico and a year or so of lessons some time ago, but the inner journalist in me has longed to be able to engage in more meaningful conversation. It’s all well and good to be able to ask how much the avocados cost or whether there’s a bathroom nearby, but what I really want when travelling is to talk to people about what their lives are like, how their school and health-care systems work,  how their governments function and their countries survive.

Unfortunately, there’s no simple way to get to that point. Big Pharma has yet to come up with a language-acquisition pill (but damn it, sign me up when they do). Having accepted this Cuso International placement in Honduras, I want to be fluent in Spanish RIGHT NOW, but the truth is that all I can do is keep studying, keep talking, keep straining to understand those rapid-fire Spanish conversations all around me while the learning process inches along at a much too stately pace.

Me parece it will be a tough slog. But my boss gave me an encouraging smile after our talk, and told me that I seemed to comprehend quite a bit. If only he knew that we journalists are schooled at looking fully engaged even while our baffled brains are saying What? What? (or in this case, Que? Que?)

At least I won’t be like the California guy we met today, eight years in Honduras and not a word of Spanish to show for it. He’s still doing this crazy mime thing to try to communicate with people. Me, I want to use my words. 

In search of a place to call our own

We started looking for a place to rent in Copan Ruinas this week. Our homestay ends when we finish our language classes in mid-February, and we’ll need somewhere to live after that.

I’ve been a tenant for a long time, but finding rental housing in this little Honduran town is a whole new thing.  For starters, there’s no local newspaper, or any version of craigslist Copan. There isn’t even a local laundromat with one of those message boards covered in homemade ads with little tear-off phone numbers at the bottom.

So how does it work? Well, it’s basically a door-to-door kind of thing. We’ve mentioned our need for housing to the handful of people we’ve met in town so far, but their advice has essentially been to go into random corner stores - pulperias, as they’re known here - and start asking people whether they know of any place to rent.

That would be a daunting process in our native language, but you ought to try it in halting Spanish. But I guess it really must be the way it’s done, because the strangers we’ve approached so far have been surprisingly willing to put some thought into possible options.

We wandered into a high-end hotel and asked the clerk whether he knew of any rentals. He called out to his supervisor, who told us she’d ask her mother whether her house might be suitable. We went into a local restaurant/bar and asked the owner to keep us in mind should she hear of anything, then spent a good half an hour sitting with one of the patrons - who I’d briefly met when he dropped off his laundry with the woman who runs our homestay - mapping out possible leads.

One of the teachers from the language school was kind enough to meet us at our homestay yesterday afternoon and take us walking through some neighbourhoods where she’d seen “Se Renta” signs. We were very grateful, but it was a peculiar experience to be hanging behind her like hulking kids while she knocked boldly on doors and inquired on our behalf. One vacant house had a “Se Renta” sign but no contact information, so the teacher popped into the ubiquitous pulperia next door and arranged for the store owner to track down the house owner and give us a call later this week.

As for what we’ll actually end up living in, I guess we’ll see. A couple of the places we toured through yesterday were pretty dumpy - but then again, what can you expect for $150 a month? Some come furnished -  if you can count a plastic table and chairs and somebody else’s old bed as furnished - while others don’t even have a fridge or stove.

Some have water all the time. Most have it only every three days, but with a big stone pila out back that you fill up to get you through the no-water days. Electricity is extra, but they tell us the costs are minuscule. With no heating systems, clothes dryers, air conditioners or hot-water tanks to suck up the juice, you just don’t need that much power.

Tomorrow, we’re going to hit up the bilingual school that some of the kids in town go to, maybe a few more pulperias, and check back in with that hotel supervisor to see what her mother said. Home sweet home, here we come. 

Life in the loud zone

Once upon a time - was it really just two weeks ago? - my partner and I were private people who lived a contained and quiet existence in a little house tucked into a quiet little corner of Esquimalt. We weren’t exactly trapped in our routines, but we certainly had plenty of them, and several centred around plenty of quiet hours to pursue our various quiet interests.

No more. On this particular night, which is not so different from any other night since we arrived in our Honduran homestay a week ago, I’m sitting on the couch under the glare of those nasty (but efficient) twisty light bulbs that are so common in Latin American countries, struggling to write a blog entry amid the many high-speed Spanish conversations going on all around me.

Where once we had a whole house to ourselves, now we have a spare bedroom in Esmeralda’s house. She tells us she lives alone - her husband works out of town and is here only intermittently - but in fact there’s an ever-changing cast of characters who are in and out of this place from morning to night.

Two of Esmeralda’s daughters live with their own families on either side, and for all intents and purposes this is their house, too. Right now, one of the daughters and her husband are sitting on the porch talking, the other daughter is in the kitchen, three small boys are running in and out while throwing balls at each other, and the neighbour just wandered in. Aaron, Esmeralda’s youngest grandson, is six months old and spends more time here than in his mother’s house, and has taken a particular shine to my partner.

There’s also a niece - I think she’s related to the husband of Esmeralda’s oldest daughters and two other girls of about 15, who appear to share the bedroom across the hall from us. Esmeralda’s youngest daughter lives about a block away and is a regular at the house as well, along with her husband and a sweet three-year-old girl named Nimsi.

Every night around 7 p.m., a young man arrives to eat at the kitchen counter. I wondered if he was a relative, or maybe a boyfriend of one of the teenage girls. But no, he rents a room in one of the houses and likes Esmeralda’s cooking. Minutes ago, another couple who I’ve never seen before passed through the house with a small child; earlier today, a different couple was sitting on the couch when we came back from a walk.

Like I said, we’ve got our own bedroom, and it’s got a locking door. But a small bedroom in an uninsulated house, with slat windows that are virtually always open, is not exactly what you’d call private. Like it or not, we wake up whenever the first member of this three-house complex wakes up, and many nights drift to sleep to the sounds of one woman or another scrubbing clothes or washing dishes just outside our window at the stone pila that’s a fixture of every Honduran household. And did I mention the many, many barking dogs that wander the streets at night? I can't even be angry at them, poor sick, skinny, pathetic things that they are.

Don’t get me wrong - I’m not complaining. We were due for a change, and damn it, we got one. I can’t think of a better way to get the hang of Honduran culture than to be thrown into it like startled babies into the deep end of the swimming pool.

The kids on the street are already calling out our names as we pass now. Our Spanish is improving by leaps and bounds, as you’d expect when fragments of it are being called out from one end of the house to the other on a more or less constant basis. By the time we move into our own place in three or four weeks, we’re going to have this thing down.

No, Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore. But what the heck.

This is why people pray

I went to church last night - not my usual Friday night activity by a long shot. But when in Honduras, why not do as the Hondurans do? Besides, it just didn’t seem right to turn down the invitation of Esmeralda, the bon vivant who owns the house where we’re staying.

Honduras is predominantly Catholic, but evangelical faiths are on the rise. Charismatic churches like the one we attended - the tin-roofed Renovacion Cristiana, filled on this night with a congregation so young as to be the envy of any traditional church in Canada - are catching on with a population that has clearly taken to the warmth of the evangelical movement.

My fragile grasp of Spanish was no match for the fire-and-brimstone style of the pastor. The overheads featuring biblical quotes in Spanish taxed my reading skills to the max. I was baptised in the United Church but never did see much church-going in my childhood and beyond, so no surprise that a high-speed Spanish sermon from the Book of Apocalypse (I don’t think I even knew there WAS a Book of Apocalypse) turned out to be virtually incomprehensible to me.

But I had no problem feeling the mood in the room. It was church Honduran-style - babies wriggling in their mothers’ arms, children wandering about, a rapturous woman up front dancing in that limby, freestyle way that I’ve come to associate with music festivals.

Young women knelt with their foreheads on the floor, eyes clenched shut in surrender to whatever private pain gripped them. Muscled young men raised their hands in the air in supplication. The songs were melodic and joyous, with none of that Gregorian chant feel of the standard hymn.  When the time came for the collection, people with nothing to give dug lempiras out of their pockets all the same.

Life and death is anything but theoretical in Honduras. Poverty, sorrow and loss are regular visitors at most Honduran homes, a reality that has shaped the culture into one that lives for the moment.

 It would be naive of me to romanticize this life, or say something trite about how Hondurans being poor but happy. Basics like public education, public health care and even consistently clean and available water are certainties only for Hondurans with money, of which there are precious few.

Civic infrastructure is hodge-podge and in many cases absent. Car-eating potholes are common on even the largest of freeways. Books for children are a rare treat, and routine dental care is still a dream. Distributing cocaine coming in from South America is a major economic driver, and the violence the industry brings with it has left Hondurans with few certainties around personal security. 

Yet there’s something vibrant here. This is a country where people grab life by both hands and hold on tight, because there’s just no saying how long any of it is going to last.

They praise the Lord because He’s all they’ve got, and it moves me.

No easy education for Honduran children

No school for these Copan Ruinas kids

Wouldn’t you know it, a cold followed me down to Honduras. Or was it that sniffly little five-year-old who spends most of his days here at our homestay with his abuela - his grandma? So it goes. It’s always the kids that get you.

Speaking of which, I now see an area where we might be able to do something significant in Honduras. The public education system here is ludicrous; my teacher at the Spanish school, whose husband teaches in the public system, tells me he has 90 students in his class (whoa, how would the BC Teachers Federation react to THAT??), ranging in age from 5 to 11. No wonder the country has got serious problems.

There are private schools here, but it costs $100 to $150 a month to send your child to one. If you’re a minimum-wage-earner ($200 a month), obviously that’s not even in the zone. But what if I could help connect a few decently heeled British Columbians to families in Honduras with school-age children? For less than what it costs to pay for cable and Internet for a month in our land, they could support a Honduran child to get a decent education.

I’ll be working with Cuso International and the Comision deAccion Social Menonita here in Copan Ruinas. Educating youngsters isn’t part of the plan for my placement - my work with that organization will be around communications, as they’re a 30-year-old agency with a ton of good work under their belt but little written history to show for it.

But as long as I’m here, I sense an opportunity to get involved in  other interesting projects. And what could be better than trying to help educate the next generation of Hondurans? Educated people earn more, demand more from their governments, and are better able to prepare their own children for more of the same. If my partner and I can play any role in that, I’d count this year or two in Honduras as a major success.

My partner and I had already been talking about what we might do on that front when we met a young Honduran at the fiesta the other night who has the same idea. He’s an archaeologist with six years of study in the U.S. under his belt, and a native of Copan Ruinas who really wants to help the children of his home town get a better education. With his knowledge of the families in this small town and our connection to people in B.C. who might love the chance to contribute to good works in a very direct way, what’s to lose?

At the homestay where we’re camped out in a spare bedroom for the next month, the nine-year-old grandson of the owner is already speaking pretty good English as a result of being sponsored to attend the Mayatan private school, which we passed yesterday morning on our visit to one of the fincas - coffee plantations - that dot the mountainsides around here. His family could never have afforded that school if it weren’t for a wealthier family that stepped up to help young Carlos, whose father was killed in San Pedro Sula two years ago.

But that school is populated by Canadian and American teachers. The archaeologist we spoke with sees an opportunity to create similar sponsorship programs at some of the other private schools, creating more stable employment for Honduran teachers as well as better education for the students.

We’re going to talk with him more about that in the weeks to come, so stay tuned. Maybe you, too, will see a role for yourself in this project.

At the Fiesta

Esmeralda, our host

I had a moment last night. A young woman who is part of this big Honduran family we now find ourselves enfolded in was having her birthday, and I was asked to play my accordion as part of the celebration.

Truth be known, people don’t ask me to play my accordion too often. But the 20 or so family members stuffed into the little place next door turned out to be absolutely delighted to hear me play, especially the six or seven children who gathered close to stare at the accordion like a creature from space.

Having read nothing but scary stories about crime and violence in Honduras in the weeks before our departure, I’d picked up several music books of Latin-American popular music for the accordion, telling myself that surely even a tough-guy narco-traficante wouldn’t want to kill a nice Canadian girl playing Sin Ti or some other tune that his old mama knew.

So there I was last night, surrounded by happy Latin Americans and my music stand groaning under a load of Latin American tunes that they actually knew. I played for at least an hour, before and after the cake festivities, before and after the beautiful birthday girl got her face gently stuffed into the middle of the cake as she blew out the candles and an endless stream of cousins, amigos, grandchildren, aunts and uncles arrived to join in the festivities. Man, it was magic.

Through all those terrifying Honduran headlines leading up to our departure, I tried to hang onto what I feel certain to be true: That people are just people, all over the world. Cultures vary, but we have so much in common. We love our children, seek meaning and purpose, treasure our families, share meals, invent wacky but endearing customs that bond us to each other. Honduras seemed like a dark, murderous place based on the news stories that made it up to Canada, but I clung to the belief that what we’d mostly find when we got here was people going about their lives.

And now that we have arrived, I’m so happy to see that it’s true. You can’t soft-pedal the problems of a country that has one of the highest homicide rates in the world outside of war-torn countries, but Honduras also has strong, vibrant families who want better for their children. I hope I can play a part in that, doing more than just playing the accordion (not that music doesn’t have its own power to transform, of course).

Just before the party last night, I read a chapter of El Leon, La Bruja y El Ropero to five-year-old Carlos Alberto. He was transfixed, and never mind my halting Spanish. Later today we’re going to the Copan library to get him some books. One boy, one book, one small act that could someday link to other people’s small acts, in ways that change everything.

And until then, there’s always the accordion.

Jan 24 - First day at Spanish school

For my pal Mr. Pacific Gazetteer! Not quite a video, but soon.

OK, it’s real now. That theoretical day when we would live in Honduras has arrived - we’re here in Copan Ruinas, settling into the home stay that we’ll be living in for the next month while we immerse ourselves in Spanish at the Ixbalanque Language School.

It’s all one gigantic new experience, from this tiny town of cobblestone streets to this rooming at a sprawling Honduran family’s home. The matriarch is Esmeralda, a friendly and outgoing woman who has put us up in a bedroom in the big house where she lives with her husband (when he’s not out of town working) and what seems like a couple dozen grandchildren, nieces and various other family members who live in the houses adjacent to this one.

Language school promises to be intense: Four hours a day of one-to-one immersion, and then home to a household that speaks only Spanish. It really sunk in for the first time today, as we sat drinking two-for-one pina coladas at Twisted Tanya’s, the bar on our route home: We live here now. How the heck did that happen??

The town itself is the smallest I’ve ever lived in, some 7,000 residents in all. There are world-class Mayan ruins about a kilometre down the road, and steep hillsides all round. On our way into town yesterday, we passed house after house with blankets of coffee beans drying in the sun in the front yard, but tourism is also a big economic driver, and treasured in a country that has very little.

I expect this year or two in Honduras to be very surprising. Without exception, the people we have met so far have been warm and welcoming. But we saw a dead body at the side of the road yesterday just outside of Santa Rosa de Copan, presumably a victim of some narco-traficante mayhem. I’ve lived a lifetime in Canada with barely a thought for murder, but in this country it’s an all too real risk for the young men and women looking for a quick way out of poverty.

I couldn’t understand everything said by the man who drove us from Santa Rosa to Copan Ruinas yesterday - he speaks only Spanish, and at this stage I’m perhaps grasping maybe two-thirds of what people say. But I did understand his point about the irony of the drug trade: That Honduras has few users - they’re too poor to buy the cocaine coming up from South America to markets in the U.S. and Canada - but nonetheless bears the brunt of the hazards resulting from the distribution end of the business.

Que lastima, as the Hondurans would say. And indeed, it is a shame, and a great sorrow for the Honduran people. 

But I smell something delicious frying in Esmeralda’s cocina, and it’s bringing me back to the now - the place where Hondurans live almost exclusively. Tomorrow is another day. 

Jan 23 - The big adventure begins

We’re on the move again, headed toward the town where we’ll be living during our time in Honduras, Copan Ruinas. Alas, it looks like Internet access could be more challenging from this point on - we’re at a hotel in Santa Rosa de Copan that in theory has wifi, but it’s not working out that way so far.

Beautiful drive yesterday, up into mountains that looked like they were lifted straight out of one of those Juan Valdez coffee ads from way back when. I’m well-familiar with that term about “shade-grown coffee” from all the politically correct bags of fair-trade coffee beans I’ve bought over the years, but the reality was still surprising. The small coffee plants are dark, dark green and buried deep in the shade of the forests. There are probably giant plantations somewhere with row upon row of plants growing, but the ones along our route grew in small patches that looked like backyard gardens.

The towns are small and scattered now that we’re outside of the city. But the difficulties of the 21^st century in Honduras still find them. We passed through a charming little town, La Entrada, that I’m told is full of crime due to its key placement on one of the routes that the narco-traficantes use for smuggling cocaine and other drugs north from South America.

I’d heard that the food was bland in Honduras, but obviously those people don’t like the same kind of food that I do. I’ve enjoyed everything so far - the feta-like cheese, the dark frijoles, the crispy plantain that seems to be more of a staple here than tortillas. And the meat! I’ve never understood why meat in poorer countries is always so much tastier than the meat we get in Canada, but it is. I had a little barbecued chicken last night that was amazing.

Today we make our way to Copan Ruinas, a couple hours’ drive from here. My partner and I will be in a language school there for the next month, getting our Spanish skills down and using that time in a home stay to look for a more permanent place to live in the little town. Cuso International covers the cost of housing for its volunteers, up to $400 Cdn a month.

That’s a generous allowance in a country where minimum-wage earners make just half of that in a month, and where most people live on less than $1.50 a day. So while we’re looking forward to living more simply in our new land, we’re well aware that we remain in a position of significant privilege.

Worn out from all the learning

A corner store in Tegucigalpa, where robberies are just how it is

They say that babies need to sleep a lot because their poor little brains are overwhelmed by their new world. I know the feeling.
We've just finished four days of orientation with the Cuso International team in Honduras, and have found ourselves staggering back to our little hotel each day worn out from paying attention to all the new things we need to know. New culture, new reality, new language, new way of operating - much, much slower than we're used to, but that can be surprisingly exhausting in these early days.
I catch myself trying to will people to hurry up. I'm not particularly punctual, but I'm positively on time by the standards of our new land. Can't imagine how I will get used to Canadian culture again once I finally succumb to the laid-back pace of Latin America.
Emergency preparedness takes on much more immediacy in a country that really does have emergencies. Cuso program director Cecilia Sanchez noted that during the military coup in Honduras in 2009, people were ordered to remain in their houses for two days, and water and power were cut in some areas. When the devastating Hurricane Mitch hit Honduras in 1998, more than 10,000 people died and almost 80 per cent of Honduras' infrastructure was wiped out, setting the country back 50 years in the opinion of the leaders of the day.
So while I never quite got around to taking emergency preparedness seriously in Victoria, where the threat of the Big Earthquake always seemed theoretical, I feel quite sure I'll be stashing canned goods and water for just such emergencies once we settle into our new home in Copan Ruinas in another month or so.