The ingredients of a home

I heard myself saying I was happy to be “home” on Tuesday when we dragged back from eight long days in Tegucigalpa.

Home.  I’ve always known I have quite a fluid definition of that word, having lived in some god-awful places that somehow grew to be “home” very quickly to me nonetheless.  But not every place will do.

It needs, for one thing, a good shower. I’ve been blessed to live for the last 20 years in a series of houses that had good showers – lots of pressure, plenty of hot water, no weird smell (I’m very fussy about smell). It needs to  be a place where I can open the door and walk outside, and not just to stick my head out and catch a breath but with room to pull up a chair and sit in the fresh air. The hotel-room experience in Tegucigalpa was a good reminder that I would almost certainly go mad if I had to live in an apartment with no immediate access to the outdoors, which is where I prefer to spend most of my time.

I don’t need a lot of comforts, but I do need a decent bed and a good pillow. I don’t know if it’s a worrying sign that I’ve started to pack my pillow in my suitcase when we travel, but so it goes. And an Internet connection now means “home” to me, especially when I’m so far away from my family and need the instant connections of Facebook and Skype to keep all my loved ones close.

My partner and I have been together for 15 years now, and he’s “home” to me, too. If he’s with me, I feel like I’m at home.There's an Edward Sharpe and theMagnetic Zeros song about that. I think this Cuso volunteering business could be very, very lonely if you came without a partner to help transform your various travails into a grand adventure. Things go wrong all the time down here, but having someone to laugh it off with changes everything. What great fortune to have stumbled into a relationship in which two people are both up for throwing it all in and moving to Honduras.

We spent six weeks travelling in Vietnam a couple years ago and I realized that “home” also meant being able to make music, because I pined for my accordion while we were away. So bringing it was a priority for me this time, and I’m home every time I strap that flashy red girl on and start playing some tunes. Paul had to leave his guitar behind – hard to pack it into the overhead bin – but today he finally bought a very nice replacement, and I know he’s going to feel a lot more at home now, too.

“Home” is also a place where I can get away from people. I admire the Cuso volunteers who are living in group housing in isolated villages somewhere in Africa, but I would have a very tough time with that. I like people well enough, but my dad’s loner spirit courses through me. I’m not an island, but I’m a very small archipelago.

Home doesn’t necessarily mean having a pet. But I have to admit that I worked very hard to lure a skinny stray dog back to our front stoop tonight. “Venga! Venga!” I kept encouraging him as he looked expectantly up the side streets where he was used to finding food. And it worked. He stayed for a couple of hours, ate a big bowl of dog food and gulped down a lot of water before heading off on whatever rounds the street dogs have here. I’m really hoping he comes back, because there’s just something about animals that tells me I’m home as well.

We have an RV back in Canada, and I am always home when I’m in it. I used to put myself to sleep as a kid imagining that I was in a magic space ship that supplied everything I needed and could travel on land, water or air at the push of a button. The RV comes closest to that fantasy of any “home” I’ve ever had, and one day when this international  travel has run its course I hope to get behind the wheel of the Fleetwood Jamboree and discover home in whatever spot we pull up to for the night.

“I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself,” said Maya Angelou. I think I’m almost there.

Be careful what you wish for

You need lots of razor wire in a country without governance

We were commiserating over breakfast yesterday with the owner of the little hotel in Tegucigalpa where we stay when on Cuso International business. He described Honduras as a capitalist country without the balance of a social structure, which struck me as a near-perfect description of the place.

Honduras is the real-life embodiment of the kind of governance that conservative political forces in Canada, the U.S. and Great Britain think they want for their own countries. It has a free-market economy with very little government interference, a political structure built around the needs of business and the upper-class, and a distinct absence of social supports.

Having lived under governments that could only dream about such things, I'm finding the real deal here in Honduras particularly enlightening. Here you really are free -  free to be as rich as you can possibly be with no worries that anyone will expect you to share even a little of your wealth with the less fortunate, equally free to pass your days in abject poverty with no hope of relief. 

Of course, Western governments shape the dream a little differently when they're trying to sell it to their citizens. British Prime Minister David Cameron came up with that whole "Big Society" business to dress up his government’s massive cuts to social spending.

The theory behind a Big Society – popular with the B.C. and Canadian governments as well – is that when governments withdraw social supports, communities step up to close the gap. Volunteerism increases. Citizens draw closer to their neighbours as each takes more responsibility for helping the other. Everybody lives happily ever after, and pays fewer taxes to boot.

So let’s consider the example of Honduras, then. It’s a Big Society if ever there was one, seeing as government does almost nothing and communities really are on their own. An outsider might presume a deeply ingrained culture of neighbourly support in a country like this.

But what the absence of social supports has actually created is a culture of survival. People are so used to living with the fear that the bottom could drop out of their lives at any moment -  because it so often does – that all their energies go to taking care of their own. From what I've seen, Honduran families watch out for their family members in all kinds of ways, but anything outside of the family is somebody else’s problem.

A story in Sunday’s La Tribuna made this point quite nicely. The rather tragic public school system is on the verge of collapse in Honduras for all kinds of reasons, but this story focused on youngsters at one particular school who have to sit on the floor for their six hours of class because they have no chairs.

It turns out that there are chairs at the school; the parents of the students who come in the morning (schools have two shifts of students a day) fundraised to buy them. But the chairs are locked up after the morning session. A parent spokesman for the morning group said that if the afternoon students wanted chairs, then it was up to their parents to do their own fundraising.

Ah, now there’s community spirit for you. And you can’t even blame the morning parents for having that attitude, because in a culture of scarcity they’re probably right to fear what might happen to those chairs if they start sharing them around.

But it gives the lie to the myth that conservative governments like to feed us, about how we’ll all get more caring and sharing once we’re not so reliant on government.

Another example: Garbage on the streets. Individual Hondurans appear to be tidy people at home, sweeping up their front stoops every day and picking up whatever trash careless passersby have thrown in front of their houses. But as soon as you get to an empty lot or a vacant house, the garbage accumulates at an alarming rate.

People take responsibility for their own tiny piece of the environment. But nobody takes responsibility for the whole. There are no community clean-up crews, nobody doing anything about the de facto dumps that develop along river banks or on quiet back roads.

The rivers and lakes are polluted, because whose job is it to do something about that? The trees fall in the forest – in the last 15 years, Honduras has lost 45 per cent of its trees to illegal logging and fires – but if it’s not your land, it’s not your problem. I suspect Westerners would be no different if there really was no government resources, no authority, no chain of responsibility.

How bad can it get in the land of the “free”? How’s this: A terrible highway collision (common here, because whose going to take responsibility for road improvements if not government?) takes the lives of eight people. Before the ambulances can even retrieve the bodies, passersby have stripped the dead of their wallets, jewelry and other valuables.

Heinous behaviour to cultures that haven’t had to experience life as a survivor. Here in the land of the free, it’s just another day.

Michener nomination for TC writers well-deserved

Very exciting news to discover that Paul and I, riding on the extensive coattails of Times Colonist reporter Lindsay Kines, have been nominated for a Michener Award along with TC columnist Les Leyne. But I wish the nomination also came with the power to roll back all the damage done to B.C. families whose devastating circumstances were the subject of that series of articles.
The Michener Award is given each year to a Canadian newspaper that can demonstrate that its coverage of an important issue in its community or province led to real change. Lindsay's dogged reporting last year on the closure of group homes for people with developmental disabilities did exactly that. By the time the dust settled this past January, the cabinet minister responsible for Community Living B.C. had resigned, the CEO of the agency had been fired, $40 million in new money had been found and the B.C. government had pledged to stop closing group homes.
Happy ending? More or less. But dozens of people lost their group homes before the government backed down, and they're not going to get their placements back. For better or worse, they're in private homes now. Some are no doubt very happy with that, because they didn't need the structure of a group home and will thrive in more of an independent setting. But others had been very happy where they were living, and it's damn cruel that they and their families had to endure the trauma of being wrenched away from familiar places and faces in homes that some of them had lived in for 20 years or more. Here's an archive of my blogs from 2010-2011 on this subject, and you can find Lindsay's stories and more here.
Still, let's celebrate the moment. Lindsay did a heck of a job by staying on this story for more than a year. The Times Colonist was the first B.C. newspaper to give significant publicity to the issue of group-home closures, and the only one that provided prolonged coverage. And the Michener judges noticed. Credit is also due to the plucky activist group MOMS, which worked hard to keep this issue alive and helped identify many families willing to talk to media.
Given the up-and-down history of community living supports in B.C. over the last five decades, I fear this won't be the last time a public campaign will need to be waged on behalf of families and advocates of people with developmental disabilities. But at least the good guys won this time. 

Honduran upper class has a role to play

The more a government does, the less its citizens have to do. Garbage in the street, bruised child in the house next door, stray dog barking all night long - in a well-developed democracy like Canada, there's some government body or another to turn to for any of those problems, and an MLA or city councillor to yell at if nothing happens.
Honduras is the other side of the coin. It's a country where there's nobody but you to take responsibility for anything. If somebody's old wreck of a couch turns up outside your door, if the neighbour's child is clearly neglected and possibly abused, if a pack of starving dogs is howling and fighting every night around 2 a.m. just down the road, you've basically got two choices: Take things into your own hands or shut up and live with it.
I don't know what conditions have to be in place before communities unable to rely on government inrtervention come together to launch citizens' initiatives to deal with shared problems. What are the factors that give rise to service clubs, for instance, or Neighbourhood Watch programs? What prompts churches to lift their vision beyond the needs of their congregation and reach out to the broader community?
Those are questions that Honduras communities would do well to ponder. The 3.5 million Hondurans who live in extreme poverty can be excused for not being able to summon the resources for anything beyond keeping their family alive, but what's stopping the other four million from doing more? Why do they tolerate such massive problems in their communities, such ineffective governance?
If you're poor in Honduras, life can be pretty damn miserable. But it can be pretty damn miserable if you're rich, too. All the money in the world won't save you from the country's car-eating potholes, random violence, garbage-strewn and contaminated rivers, and starving feral dogs that bark all night long.
Even if they were acting solely out of self-interest, I'd have expected to see more community initiatives underway at the hands of middle-class and wealthy Hondurans, if only because they were good and fed up with having to build higher and higher walls around their houses and hire more and more security guards to accompany their families on virtually every outing. Wouldn't they, too, like a clean lake and a green park for their kids to play in? (A writer for Honduras Weekly also wonders why the rich aren't doing more.)
The general explanation given for why so little happens here is that narco-trafficantes control everything. But that explains nothing to me, because surely narco-trafficantes want better roads and more security in their daily lives as much as anybody. Why would working in an illegal industry automatically exclude you from wanting better for your country?
Honduras feels like a country that's waiting for change. Unfortunately, that comes from within. Some of the most important work I see my organization and other NGOs doing is educating young people on the rights and responsibilities of living in a democracy, and how change starts with one person choosing to do things differently.
But somebody's got to get some action going among the rich Hondurans, too. With significant homegrown wealth here, it's not right to leave the mess for coming generations and other countries to solve.

A fine line between cautious and boring

My partner and I have heard all the cautions about not taking buses like the one we took today, and we take them seriously. But if you’ve travelled much, you know how it can be sometimes. Just because you know you shouldn't doesn't mean you won't. 

Honduras has a reputation for bus robberies in areas close to the big cities. The bus stops, a bad man with a gun gets on, and suddenly everybody’s getting robbed. Or a gang sets up a roadblock and demands that everybody on the bus pay a “war tax” before the bus can pass through.

It was one such robbery that prompted the Peace Corps to pull all 158 of its volunteers out of the country late last year. One of their volunteers accidentally got shot in the leg when a passenger on the bus she was on started shooting it out with a robber who had boarded the bus.

Those kinds of stories have given rise to bus companies like Hedman Alas, which for $17 a person will take you from Copan Ruinas to San Pedro Sula in a big, comfy high-end bus with an armed guard on board and no stops anywhere along the route. Free pop and a bag of chips, too.

I like a safe, comfortable bus ride as much as the next person, so that was the bus we took today to San Pedro Sula. But we’d also planned to spend the weekend at  Lake Yojoa en route to Tegucigalpa, our ultimate destination. Lake Yojoa is about midway between the two cities, but Hedman Alas doesn’t stop. And that’s how we ended up on the El Mochito bus, two aging gringos looking hopelessly out of place, shoving big backpacks into overhead bins that weren’t built for backpacks and stretching our feet into the aisle to give aching knees a break from leg room suited to people at least six inches shorter.

We’ve ridden a lot of those kinds of buses in Mexico, and I’ve always liked them. The guy who drives the bus is usually the owner, so the dashboard and windshield is typically decorated with various figurines, stickers, prayers and memorabilia of significance to the driver. And there’s always some young kid standing in the door well, whose job it is to hustle up and down the aisle collecting fares and also to get you and your luggage on and off the bus as quickly as possible so the driver can cram more pickups into the day.

The windows have to be open because there’s no air-conditioning, which suits me just fine. And there’s always something going on to take your mind off the long trip: people getting on and off with bulky packages; children dripping their ice-cream cones on your foot; vendors riding for a stop or two in hopes of selling you whatever food or drink they’ve got going on. (Today it was horchatas – sweetened soy milk served in little bags with straws – and big cookies sprinkled with a burnt sugar-cinnamon topping.)

Another big upside to this kind of bus is that it’s really cheap. While the Hedman Alas ride cost us $17 each for a three-hour trip, we were on the El Mochito for almost as long and paid $2.

But of course, there are stops galore, each one an opportunity for armed robbery or some other malfeasance. On the outskirts of San Pedro in particular – it is, after all, the murder capital of the world – I felt a small clutch of anxiety whenever the bus was approaching a young man in the middle of the road waving his arms around, at least until we got close enough to see that it was just somebody selling slushy drinks, a bag of oranges, tortillas.

Happily, we arrived quite safely in Lake Yojoa. And I was reminded again of how very hard it is to find the balance between caution and denying yourself interesting experiences while travelling. Bad things can happen, but mostly they don’t.

Your tax dollars at work

Ah, Victoria - I'd almost forgotten what a crazy little city you are. But here's a story to remind me. The City of Victoria and an aboriginal woman who does housecleaning are headed for a court battle over the little posters she'd put up on a few telephone poles to advertise her services.
Slippery-slope arguments are big in Victoria, I do remember that. So I'm sure the City is worried that if you let one person looking for work tack up a little poster with some of those tear-off phone numbers at the bottom, pretty soon you'll have a thousand people looking for work doing the same thing. And you sure can't have that.
I don't know if the City has encountered Meaghan Walker before, but I hope they're ready for one heck of a fight. She's from the Cowichan Tribes and knows how to do battle.
 Her position is that she's an aboriginal and has the right to do what she wants on aboriginal land, which is a pretty big hammer to have to use when the issue is 8x11 pieces of paper stuck on telephone poles. But it's potentially effective, as the City already knows from having had to concede the rights of aboriginal craftspeople to sell their wares along the causeway without adhering to the rules that non-aboriginal sellers are bound by.
The City loves a legal fight, whatever the costs. I've always been puzzled by why city taxpayers tolerate the costly court cases, especially when the City loses so often. But I've never lived in Victoria proper and so was always just an amused observer of whatever war was being fought.
They seemed petty and poorly considered when I lived there, and from my viewpoint here in Honduras they now just seem so very small and sad.People, there are bigger things to worry about than posters on telephone poles. Meaghan - you go, girl. 

Un dia, todo sera claro

Really, debería escribir esto en español. But then you’d have to use Google Translate to read it, and who knows how that would turn out?

It was a scarce five months ago that I got serious about learning Spanish. I’m not there yet, but just this week I’ve started to feel like I might actually be able to do this. It’s been a humbling and frustrating experience, but knowing that one day soon I might actually be conversant in this language that I’ve always loved completely thrills me.

When we first arrived in Honduras, one of the other Cuso International volunteers here told me there would be a moment when it would all become clear. I’m still waiting, but I did notice that this week at the Monday morning devotional at my workplace, I understood almost all of what was being said. I even felt sufficiently emboldened to pipe up with a sentence or two.

Sure, it’s the cumulative effect of Spanish classes and the Spanish novels and newspapers I’m making myself read, and the all-Spanish work environment that includes the rather terrifying challenge of writing funding proposals in Spanish. But I also think Spanish television has a lot to do with it, being as we just got a TV and cable a couple weeks ago. There’s nothing like struggling to understand what the heck they’re saying in the movie you’re trying to watch to really sharpen your listening skills.

Probably 10 years ago when I first tried to learn Spanish, I read an article in a Mexican magazine that talked about how anyone older than 14 or so had to learn a new language in a different part of the brain. When you’re a kid, you learn language just by hearing it spoken around you, without having to attach any logical explanation to any of it. But once you get past a certain age the learning moves to a part of your  brain that demands to know why you have to do things a certain way.

It was strangely comforting to discover that, because I’d already noticed by then that I was constantly looking for an understanding of why you used a certain tense, a certain structure, a certain turn of phrase. Unfortunately, what that other-part-of-the-brain business really means is that you have to understand Spanish grammar if you’re ever going to get the language down.

I grew up in B.C., which has been home to a lot of flaky learning strategies over the years (remember classrooms without walls?). My graduating class of 1974 had the distinction of being the cohort that never learned grammar. So there’s a certain irony in learning the rules of grammar for the first time some 40 years after finishing school. But what the heck.

The best thing I did was to pick teachers whose first language was Spanish (Jose Bermudez Cuadros in Victoria is great for one-on-one classes). There’s no way you’re going to grasp pronunciation if you’re learning from a non-native speaker with their own foreign accent, and the worst of it is you’ll never even know that their pronunciation is off.

And the other best thing I did was pick teachers who were fussy about grammar. It was boring sometimes and I hated having to internalize all the rules, but what it has meant is that I now know how to create a sentence even if I don’t always have all the necessary words at my command. Vocabulary comes with time, but you’re lost if you don’t know how to put the words together.

As I’ve learned the hard way, sentence structure is virtually as important as vocabulary for understanding (and being understood in) a new language. All those hours of drilling pronouns and verb tenses are starting to pay off. I still write Spanish like an English speaker, but at least I’m getting the hang of where to put all those se’s and lo’s that are thrown around like confetti in Spanish.

I used to wonder what it would be like to be a dog. I empathized with our late dog Jack as he got thrown into the car or the motor home with no idea of where he was going or when he’d be back. And now I know, having passed many puzzling work days with no real idea of what’s happening around me or why they’re telling me to get in the back of the truck.

But one bonus of not speaking the language is that you pay much more attention to non-verbal cues. I first noticed that phenomenon in my sister-in-law Grace, a relatively new transplant from China who I soon realized could “read” things in our family interactions that I had completely missed. I get that now, having seen how a lack of language skills prompts you to watch people much more acutely as you desperately try to get a read on a situation. It’s a good reminder to shut your ears off once in a while.

Ya bastante, as they say in Spanish – enough already. When I’m dreaming in Spanish, I’ll know I’ve arrived. 

Tough to be a tourist town in Honduras

Good Friday procession

We've made it through our first Semana Santa in a Latin American country, an experience that we’ve been hearing out (and studiously avoiding) for years now. Indeed, things were the busiest we’ve seen them in Copan yesterday since we arrived here, but the hordes of travellers we’d been bracing for never did really materialize.

A few people told us when we got placed here by Cuso International that Copan was a “tourist town” where there was so much English spoken that we might have a hard time learning Spanish. I suspect it must have been quite some time ago when such people last visited Copan, because the reality these days is a very quiet town that I’m sure would love more tourists but in fact doesn't see that many. Copan certainly has a gentler feel, more gringos and nicer restaurants than other Honduran towns of its size, but the tourist business still seems very tough these days. 

There are a couple backpackers’ inns that are very popular with young travellers from Europe, the U.S. and Canada, but they pass through in a couple of days and for the most part don’t wander much farther than the bars closest to the inns. There are a couple of restaurants frequented by the gringos - a term in common use here - but the little street market where the locals try to flog made-in-China jewellery rarely has browsers, let alone buyers. There’s a ridiculously overpriced souvenir shop or two selling made-in-Honduras crafts at prices that I’m sure the artisans would be quite stunned by, but buyers appear scarce in those stores as well.

Horseback rides to La Pintada are popular with tourists

The horseback riding guides seem to do pretty well here. And I imagine everybody pays a visit to the ruins. A couple of the hotels benefit from the two-day excursions to Copan from Guatemala and San Pedro Sula, but for the most part the town looks like it’s in waiting. I’m told that June, July and August are the peak tourist months because Americans take their summer holidays then, smack-dab in the middle of the Honduras rainy season. But you have to hope it’s a real cracker-jack of a tourist season if businesses need to sustain themselves for a year on three months’ worth of tourist dollars.

The travellers here for Semana Santa are almost exclusively other Hondurans, looking much more monied and middle-class than the typical Copan resident. I’m guessing they’re on a break from the big cities, enjoying a small-town weekend and drawn by the Good Friday festivities, which include the creation of a beautiful alfombra – carpet – that volunteers create in the streets using coloured sawdust to depict biblical scenes.  The Catholic church also organizes a big procession that starts at the main church in the city centre and moves through 14 stages of the cross on its way to another church on the hill, returning in the night to walk on (and destroy) the alfombra.

The beautiful alfombra

The local restaurants were busy for the first time ever last night, at least the ones lucky enough to be situated in the two-block zone that tourists visit. A recurrent theme during the Catholic procession yesterday was that Hondurans need to remember that Semana Santa isn’t a “summer holiday,” it’s a time for religious observance. But I’m quite sure Copan merchants are very, very happy this weekend that Hondurans don’t appear to be paying a lot of attention to such admonitions.

Did this place ever bustle with tourists? Maybe, but a coup in 2009 and a constant diet of scary-Honduras stories in the world press have doubtlessly taken their toll. Copan also feels like a town that needs to wake itself up a little and figure out more options for keeping travellers in place for longer than a day or two. A town can only cruise on ancient Mayan ruins for so long.

But the stalled-out work on a city museum is underway again and a few new sculptures have appeared in the town park, which is otherwise just a stretch of concrete with a few food vendors and one of those pan-pipe guys selling CDs. The president was here late last year vowing that Honduras was going capitalize on all the 2012 end-of-the-world hype.

For the sake of all the Copan restaurants that will be sitting largely empty come Monday, I hope he meant it.

Sometimes all you can do is do

My partner Paul, with Emily

So I did end up going to the Angelitos Felices foster home Monday, bearing a watermelon as planned. The director wasn’t in, but I went back the next morning – this time with a couple of bags of little plum-like fruit that’s in season right now. One of the women called the director at home and she came to meet me there.

We spent a couple of hours talking and wandering around the place, my Spanish having improved to the point that I can finally indulge my journalistic curiosities in the native language. And there’s nothing like a home for children without families in a developing country to get the curiosity going, especially one that so many people in Copan seem to have an opinion about.

I don’t know what to make of the place, which I guess is why I’m just going to start volunteering there. Time will tell whether it’s a good place or a bad one, but either way there are 38 kids living there who can use all the help they can get. I know I can make myself useful.

I’ve never been in an orphanage in Canada or anywhere else, so I have little to compare this one to. It’s dark, smelly, devoid of toys and with too few beds for too many children, but that could be said about much of the housing in the impoverished pueblos all around Copan. The food is mostly beans and tortillas, but that, too, is what poor families (and wealthy ones as well) eat in Honduras. 

There’s no outside space suitable for the children to play – not uncommon either in this town without a playground or a green space. But unlike other kids in Copan, these ones have too many developmental problems to just be left to run around in the streets.

The upstairs balcony where the children once got at least a little fresh air is currently off-limits because one of the iron safety bars is missing (I’ve made a note of that one for a quick fix, as soon as I find someone who can do a little welding). So for the most part the children pass the day entertaining themselves in the big, empty room on the main floor, where the gloom is barely broken by the light from a single window at the front of the building.

Any good-hearted Westerner wants to imagine abandoned children living in clean, jolly places full of toys, jungle gyms, gentle caregivers and loads of nutritional food. But that’s not how it is for the majority of children in Honduras even when they’ve got their own families, and I guess it’s not surprising that things would be just that much worse for children who the state has removed from their homes, which is how most of these kids came to be at Angelitos.

In a place like Honduras, where so many kids have it rough at the best of times, you don’t want to think about how dire a family situation would have to be before the Instituto Hondureno de La Ninez y La Familia would remove a child. And that’s all they do – there appears to be no funding or much follow-up after that.

It can’t be easy for a child to end up without family in Honduras. The norm here is sprawling extended families that all live near each other – there are whole pueblos where everybody is related. Any child that doesn’t get taken in by another family member when their own parents die or fall apart must be a very isolated child indeed, or one with more problems than struggling family members can handle. Several of the children at Angelitos appear to have Fetal Alcohol Syndrome; others have physical disabilities.

I asked the woman at the home where the children would live if not there. They’d either be on the streets or dead, she told me. I’m sure those grim fates await many of them even so, seeing as they can only stay at the orphanage until they’re 14. She wants to do better, and talks of a separate facility for the older kids where they could learn a trade. But most of her energy goes to looking for the day-to-day money to keep the doors open at the site she’s got, a problem that anyone who has ever run a non-profit can relate to. Operating costs just aren’t sexy.

Others in Copan have dreams of a better orphanage, and I’ve connected with them to see where I can help. But in the meantime, I’ll just keep showing up at this place and do what’s within my reach. I’m a doer more than a dreamer, and I know that there’s always room in any project for two more hands and a heart. Tomorrow, we’ll start with finger-painting.

Knock on enough doors and one will open

I’m not one who handles inactivity well, and I find myself looking around for more projects in Copan.

My Cuso placement is a project, of course. But at the moment that one is still taking shape and I don’t yet have enough to do at work.

That will change over time, especially if the funding comes through next month for a public-awareness campaign for young people that the Comision de Accion Social Menonita hopes to do in the runup to the 2013 Honduran national elections.

But in this moment I have time on my hands, and am casting about for constructive ways to rectify that.  It’s much more of a challenge in a new community, especially one so tightly tied to church and family.

That last phrase sounds a bit ridiculous even as I write it, seeing as a community tightly tied to church and family should be exactly the kind of place suited to the work I most like to do. But I am the outsider in this instance – the foreigner without either church or family in Honduras, and with all the baggage that any do-gooder foreigner brings in a country that hasn’t exactly had a history of successful encounters with outside interests.

It’s certainly not a question of who needs help here. As far as I can tell, almost everybody does.  The dogs are starving. The kids don’t have playgrounds, let alone toys, books or anything resembling a “green space” where they might go to blow off a little steam or release the darker energies that can develop in adolescents with absolutely nothing to do. Fun for teenagers in Copan is the local billiard hall.

Their parents need work. The streets need cleaned. Even the local businesses could use help, most having a rather limited sense of how to market themselves or the specialties of Honduras to the busloads of tourists who blast into town for a day or two. (The classic example of that is the Chorti women who make quite beautiful table linens that they sell in a virtually invisible location in the impoverished pueblo of La Pintada, where the only buyers are occasional groups of dusty tourists led up there on horseback.)

Every afternoon I walk past the string of rough little cantinas along my route to work and see the local sex workers dancing with the drunken men who frequent the tiny bars. Sex workers will always have my heart, but I sense it’s too soon for that one.  The intentions of the gringa would likely be  misunderstood at this point. For now I’ll just make a point of saying hello every time I pass by, and we’ll see where that leads.

I’d like to make music with local children, and have put that offer out there to a few Copanecans. We could start with clapping and singing and work up to the kazoos that one of my daughters has offered to ship down here. I sense the kids could use a little more joy in their lives, and making music is such a joyful act.

But people are busy with their own stuff, and I can’t fault the locals I’ve talked to for not getting back to me yet with suggestions on how I can make this happen. I’m generally a self-sufficient type happy to take responsibility for making my own projects happen, but that’s a tall order in a new country and culture with none of the organizational mechanisms I’m used to.

Even trying to organize the purchase of 70 big water bottles for a village that needs them to access treated water has turned out to be a frustrating exercise in waiting for others to open doors for me. It isn’t an option here to just phone up the water-bottle company and say, “Hey, how much?” because there are mysterious channels to go through first and no simple way for my partner and I – in our new carless state – to get the bottles from Point A to Point B even then.

I visited a foster home the other day, Angelitos Felices, and it was every bit the dark, sad place that you might expect of such a place in a developing country. I laid awake last night thinking: Could I start here? There are lots of rumours in town about the place but they don’t appear to have led to much change to this point. Meanwhile, more than 30 children are passing their young lives in conditions that can only be preparing them for a life of poverty and crime as adults.

Today I’m going to show up at the door with a watermelon and just see what happens. Maybe they’ll let me in.

My debut in Tyler, Texas

This is going to be a year of firsts for me - like this one, getting my first story published in a Texas newspaper.  While my role with the Comision de Accion Social Menonita is primarily to help them with communications here in Honduras, I figure it can't hurt to put those English-language skills of mine to work sometimes to spread the word about CASM a little farther afield.
I'm posting the story below, just in case you don't like links. It's one more piece in the puzzle of what I actually do down here in Honduras, which I admit I'm still working on understanding myself. I do like the chance to jump into plain old reporting once in a while.

Copan Ruinas, Honduras-The big hole in the ground was two feet deep and nothing but dirt when the volunteers from First Christian Church in Tyler got their first look at it March 10.

By the time they headed home to Texas on March 18, it was three feet deeper and ready for concrete to be poured. And the 900 people living in the isolated mountain pueblo of La Cumbre were significantly closer to having the badly needed new reservoir that would ensure every household in the village had water. 

“Every year I ask the Lord to give me a vision, a purpose for the trip, and this year I asked to be blessed with a feeling of Christianity coming back to me from Honduras,” volunteer Joe Gonzalez said Saturday at his hotel as his team prepared for the trip home. “Up on that mountain, every time I pushed the wheelbarrow with another load of dirt and saw that view all around us, I felt like that was happening.”

First Christian congregation member Larry Gilliam has been organizing the annual week-long volunteer missions for 12 years now, and most of the group of 14 volunteers on the Honduras missions are veterans of many such trips. “I hear that once you go on one of these, you get hooked,” said first-timer Larry Davis, who was on the trip with his wife Linda.

This year’s team was a mix of people from Tyler, Houston and Austin that included several married couples and a mother and daughter – Leslie and Kelsey Neal, from Flint. The volunteer team works with Church World Service to identify projects and host organizations in Mexico and Central America, and for this trip partnered with the Comisión de Acción Social Menonita, a Christian organization that works in seven regions of Honduras to improve conditions in impoverished communities.

“We don’t go anywhere without a good host group, and we couldn’t have asked for a better one,” said Gilliam, noting that CASM co-ordinator Merlin Fuentes went out of his way to ensure a good experience for the volunteers. “I’ve worked with dozens of host organizations over the years, and this one was as good as any we’ve had.”

Half of the volunteer group worked on the water reservoir in La Cumbre, while the other half worked alongside Honduran doctors and nurses at a health clinic in Santa Rita, about six kilometres outside Copan Ruinas.  The volunteers had raised $2,000 for medications to be distributed during their time at the clinic, a draw that attracted poor families from throughout the region.

A frightening incident in the early days of the clinic ended up creating an enduring bond between the Tyler team and the Honduran medical team, recalled Ruth Gonzalez, one of three Texas nurses who volunteered at the clinic. A patient had a near-fatal allergic reaction to a medication “and we thought we’d lost her,” said Gonzalez. Fortunately, quick intervention by the clinic’s doctor saved the day.

“You never know what’s going to pull you through, teach you,” she added. “What happened that day really brought to light why you’re doing something.”

Each of the volunteer trips costs about $30,000, with money coming from fundraising events in Tyler, First Christian Church and individual volunteers.  This year’s group ended up with $2,000 in surplus funds, which they left behind in Copan Ruinas to help finish off the water reservoir.  After hearing about an orphanage in desperate straits in the community, the team also bought $300 worth of food and dropped it off.

“Most every trip we’ve been on, we look for a little something extra that could use some money,” said Roger Spain of Lufkin, who was on his ninth trip.

Gilliam conceived of the annual forays after several years of leading youth groups on missions around the world. “I grew up in a family that believed in outreach. It just came natural,” he added.

Over the years, projects have run the gamut: Building greenhouses; digging wells; constructing rabbit hutches. Spain says the spur-of-the-moment side projects can be as rewarding as the main projects, recalling a trip to Nicaragua in 2005 in which the group bought and delivered the materials for a half-built community medical clinic that had stalled out seven years earlier.

This past weekend was R&R time for the team before the volunteers returned home. But while Gilliam had sailed through seven consecutive days of two-hour truck rides along a skinny mountain road and more than 40 hours of shovelling dirt, he was shaken by what lay ahead on Saturday.

“The biggest issue for me is I have to ride a horse this morning, and that’s not my deal,” said a nervous Gilliam.  “I don’t do horses.”

Everything strange is a little more familiar

A street market at its most basic - one guy and a few vegetables

Perhaps it's the human condition to seek routine. I've spent much of my life on the run from routines I felt stuck in, yet at the same time I settle quickly and comfortably into new ones.
We've been in Copan for 10 weeks now, not nearly long enough to know much about this complex country. But certain things are at least a little familiar now, and I'm welcoming the small routines that allow the days to pass in slightly more predictable ways rather than as relentless blasts of new and baffling developments.
I have two regular lunch-time "bird walks" now, for instance, and know that one leads to the trio of magnificent crested jays near the Hacienda San Lucas while the other takes me to the arid fields and grosbeaks around the water reservoir for La Laguna. When a shadow passes over me as I walk, I know that it's almost certainly a vulture - possibly a turkey vulture, more likely a black.
Having been here for a change in season, I know that the mosquitoes that plagued me when we first arrived are blessedly scarce now that the days are hotter, and that the lovely din of cicadas in the trees right now is the annual harbinger of Semana Santa. I know which shoes to wear when it pours rain and the cobblestones are as slippery as black ice, and which "summer" clothes from Canada to pack away for later in the season because they're much too hot for a March day in Honduras.
I know which brand of platano chips I prefer, and that local watermelons are best eaten in a single sitting. I know which chicken stand has the best fried chicken and which stores have the cheapest, coldest beer.
We know where to get a good plate of "tipico" Honduran fare, and we even know what "tipico" fare is. We know not to eat the cabbage, something that virtually every Honduran has cautioned us about as a sure ticket to stomach upset (all those tight leaves trap bacteria). We know that tacos are served crispy and rolled in Honduras, and that empanadas and pupusas are the same thing.
But we also know where to get the best pizza, the best hamburger, and even a half-decent piece of German chocolate cake if we're desperate for  a good bakery treat - something which this country is lamentably short of. We know to stock up on yogurt when it shows up in the grocery store, because you just never know when the next delivery will be.
I sense that we're still unusual sights on our street, my gringo partner and I, but our neighbours now greet us with familiarity, and the armed security guards outside the bank know we're there for the ATM and not to cash travellers' cheques. When I go to the hardware store, the woman behind the counter tells other customers that I play the accordion, because she lives across the street and has heard me.
I know how to turn the shower tap just so to make the water hotter or cooler, that having been a mystery to me initially when faced with a single tap for controlling the tiny little hot-water heater built directly into the shower head. (I try not to dwell on the fact that directly above my head, water and electricity are making contact with each other.)
I know that the water is cooler on days when the tank on the roof is full and the pressure is higher, and almost too hot to bear on days when the city water isn't running. I know to scrub my lower legs extra-hard when showering to remove the significant layer of dust that builds up after a day of walking on dirt roads, and that it's possible to wash a greasy pan in cold water if you use the strange paste detergent that they sell down here.
I've got a preferred route for getting to work, one that takes me past cows and farm fields instead of through the centre of town. I no longer feel any trace of alarm when passing by men carrying gigantic machetes - which is to say, almost every man I pass on my walk to and from work. I have a pharmacy I like and a store where I buy my weekly cellphone minutes, and I can find my way with my eyes closed to the little place that sells frozen bananas dipped in chocolate.
I will soon have first-hand knowledge of Semana Santa in a Latin American country, an experience that up until now I've always taken care to avoid. Who knows, maybe I'll discover that it's fun to have thousands of Hondurans flock to town for a crazy, chaotic week-long party, and at the very least I think I'll enjoy the renderings of Jesus that will be created in the streets using coloured sawdust.
In another couple of months, I'll know what a "rainy season" feels like, and whether the brand-new rain coat I brought from Canada is useful or woefully inadequate. I might just have a new routine of indulging in a moto-taxi ride to work on days when it's pouring, or perhaps I'll just have new knowledge of the right times of day to be walking to avoid short but intense periods of rain.
And one day, it could be that these little routines I'm enjoying might be so familiar that they start to feel like ruts, and I'll be bridling at having to eat fresh vegetables every night for dinner and see the same old tropical birds in the trees every day. But that's one day.

An historic judgment moves sex workers' rights forward

The issues of Canada have drifted from my mind strikingly fast now that I'm in Honduras, but it all came rushing back to me this morning when I read the judgment handed down by the Court of Appeal in Ontario on Canada's sex work laws.
Here's the link to the decision if you want to read it in full, but I've put the meat of the ruling down below for those who prefer a summary. You can't go around declaring victory too quickly when it comes to court rulings, because this judgment is certainly going to end up in front of the Supreme Court of Canada given the federal government's position on this issue to date. Still, each new court ruling adds weight to the argument for decriminalization, and reminds Canadians again and again that it is against our own Constitution to treat sex workers so disgracefully.
That communication for the purposes of prostitution remains illegal is unfortunate, as that means that it's still illegal for sex workers to advertise their services. But the precedent has been set in Canada to restrict the advertising of other products - tobacco, alcohol, prescription drugs - so I guess the court felt it was reasonable to uphold that law.
What's most unfortunate about that is the communication law is used almost exclusively in Canada to harass and control street sex workers. People don't like it when a stroll develops in their neighbourhood, and criminal sanctions against communicating are a tool for moving sex workers along when the business settles in a particular place. But the big downside of the tense relationship between police and outdoor sex workers that develops as a result means some of the most vulnerable women in the country choose not to seek protection from police.
For those who are opposed to the existence of sex work, the judgment need not be taken as an endorsement of the industry. As this excerpt makes clear, at issue is whether Canada's laws around prostitution are increasing the danger to sex workers. And they are:

"In holding that the negative impact of the legislation on prostitutes is obvious, we do not mean to understate the complexities and difficulties of the social problems associated with prostitution. However, those complexities and the many possible legislative responses to them are not germane to the question at hand. Like the application judge, we are satisfied that the current legal regime, and specifically the challenged Criminal Code provisions, interferes with prostitutes security of the person."

The executive summary of the 148-page decision:

[1] For decades, and even for centuries, governments around the world have
grappled with prostitution and its associated problems. Some have opted for an
outright ban. Others have chosen to decriminalize and regulate certain aspects of
prostitution. Still others have criminalized the purchase, but not the sale, of sex.
[2] In Canada, prostitution itself is legal. There is no law that prohibits a
person from selling sex, and no law that prohibits another from buying it.
Parliament has, however, enacted laws that indirectly restrict the practice of
prostitution by criminalizing various related activities.
[3] At issue in this case is the constitutionality of three provisions of the
Criminal Code, R.S.C. 1985, c. C-46, which form the core of Parliament‟s
response to prostitution:
1. Section 210, which prohibits the operation of common bawdyhouses.
This prevents prostitutes from offering their services out of fixed
indoor locations such as brothels, or even their own homes;
2. Section 212(1)(j), which prohibits living on the avails of prostitution.
This prevents anyone, including but not limited to pimps, from profiting
from another‟s prostitution; and
3. Section 213(1)(c), which prohibits communicating for the purpose of
prostitution in public. This prevents prostitutes from offering their services
in public, and particularly on the streets.
[4] In the court below, the application judge held that these provisions are
unconstitutional and must be struck down because they do not accord with the
Page: 7
principles of fundamental justice enshrined in s. 7 of the Canadian Charter of
Rights and Freedoms. She reasoned that the challenged laws exacerbate the
harm that prostitutes already face by preventing them from taking steps that
could enhance their safety. Those steps include: working indoors, alone or with
other prostitutes (prohibited by s. 210); paying security staff (prohibited by
s. 212(1)(j)); and screening customers encountered on the street to assess the
risk of violence (prohibited by s. 213(1)(c)).
[5] As we will explain, we agree with the application judge that the prohibition
on common bawdy-houses for the purpose of prostitution is unconstitutional and
must be struck down. However, we suspend the declaration of invalidity for 12
months to give Parliament an opportunity to redraft a Charter-compliant
provision.
[6] We also hold that the prohibition on living on the avails of prostitution
infringes s. 7 of the Charter to the extent that it criminalizes non-exploitative
commercial relationships between prostitutes and other people. However, we do
not strike down that prohibition, but rather read in words of limitation so that the
prohibition applies only to those who live on the avails of prostitution in
circumstances of exploitation. This cures the constitutional defect and aligns the
text of the provision with the vital legislative objective that animates it.
Page: 8
[7] We do not agree with the application judge‟s conclusion that the ban on
communicating in public for the purpose of prostitution is unconstitutional, and we
allow the appeal on that issue.
[8] The application judge‟s decision has been subject to a stay pending further
order of this court. As we will explain, we extend the stay for 30 days from the
date of the release of these reasons so that all parties can consider their
positions. The practical effect is:
The declaration of invalidity in respect of the bawdy-house provisions is
suspended for one year from the date of the release of these reasons.
The amended living on the avails provision takes effect 30 days from the
date of the release of these reasons.
The communicating provision remains in full force.
[9] One important point before we begin. Prostitution is a controversial topic,
one that provokes heated and heartfelt debate about morality, equality, personal
autonomy and public safety. It is not the court‟s role to engage in that debate.
Our role is to decide whether or not the challenged laws accord with the
Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land. While we have concluded
that some aspects of the current legislative scheme governing prostitution are
unconstitutional, it remains open to Parliament to respond with new legislation
that complies with the requirements of the Charter.

A load of manure and we're off to San Geronimo

As I've griped probably one too many times (in Spanish, the verb is quejarse), learning about your workplace when nobody speaks the same language as you is really difficult. That's why I like field trips so much - hopping into a vehicle with one of my co-workers with nary a clue as to where we're going or what we'll do when we get there. I just say yes to every opportunity and figure it will all add up to knowledge.
Yesterday, the task was to deliver 25 giant sacks of chicken manure to campesinos in a little pueblo called San Geronimo. There are several dozen little pueblos in the hills around Copan Ruinas, often along roads that you or I would likely consider  rough hiking trails through the bush were we to encounter one in Canada. The road to San Geronimo was definitely in that category, requiring us to drive through a river, negotiate narrow little climbs that almost stalled out a 4x4, and steer around obstacles that included tire-eating ruts, scary dropoffs and herds of cattle.

But first we got to go to the egg farm to get the manure. I'd been curious about the place since I first passed by it a few weeks ago while out for a walk, because the little bit I could see from the road gave the impression that it was a much kinder, gentler type of egg farm than you use in developed countries. but it doesn't welcome visitors. And it was - still a prison of sorts for the chickens, but at least one with fresh air, natural light, lots of room to move and dirt to scratch.
The manure costs 25 lempiras a sack, about $1.25. We loaded 25 bags into the truck - OK, I just stood around like a girl and let the two guys do it, I admit - and off we went to deliver the stuff. My organization works with the poorest of the poor around Copan, almost none of whom have trucks for picking up their own sacks of manure.
One of the big tasks for my organization, the Comision de Accion Social Menonita, is to help local farmers get better yields. Growing beans, corn and coffee on tiny little plots of land is a tough way to make a living, but the use of natural fertilizers and different planting processes helps. So CASM first leads a workshop to demonstrate and encourage better strategies, and then follows up with the farmers who want to give something a try. The farmers can't afford to pay for fertilizers, but they either barter goods in exchange for the manure or volunteer their time and labour for a future project.
The farms of Honduras look nothing like the farms back home. In some cases, the campesinos don't even own the land where they live and work. The production area is typically very small, often on an extreme slope, and either irrigated using rough-hewn systems that channel river water or completely reliant on the rainy season from May to September.
But the people in San Geronimo have a slightly better setup - still crazy slopes and really basic living arrangements, but at least they've got title to their land. And they've got Honduran sunshine, which at this time of year produces a bounty of coffee, tomatoes and watermelon. The next round of crops will be beans and corn, which need the rains to flourish.
Someone from wealthy country like Canada wants to be careful throwing around terms like "poor but happy," but there is a certain ever-present cheerfulness among the people I've met in these little communities. The children work as hard as the adults, and every day must be a slog. But for them it's just the way it is.
I don't doubt they'd give it up in a heartbeat for a hot shower and running water, steady electricity, a flat-screen TV and a vehicle to drive up and down those steep roads they spend so much time walking along. But they don't have much time for pining about what they haven't got.
Truck emptied, we bounced back to town. It was a good day.

Surely God wouldn't want it this way

I don't think I can call this a crisis of faith that I'm having today, because I've never really been one for faith. Maybe there are religious journalists out there somewhere, but for me years of learning about the bad things that happen to good people (and vice versa) shook the faith right out of me.
Still, I have a great appreciation for the good work done by people of faith, and up until today have not felt the urge to cry out, "Oh, come ON!" at the Monday-morning devotionals at my new workplace. In a country this religious, I feel  like I'm participating in the culture by attending the devotionals, and I usually find them quite sweet sessions that bond my co-workers in a much more meaningful way than a garden-variety staff meeting ever could.
But today, something got to me. The topic was harmless enough - a reflection on God as artist - but I found myself squirming at the heartfelt statements of my co-workers as they talked about their faith. Perhaps it's because my cousin died yesterday, too young and too soon. More likely it's because I'm living in a country that has such deep faith in the face of intense problems that are very much man-made.
Moments before the devotional started, I was talking to my boss about a doctor in Santa Rita - a few kilometres down the road from Copan - who was kidnapped last week and hasn't been seen since. Rumour has it that one of his young kidnappers was killed shortly after, as can happen when stupid young boys keep the company of some of the very dangerous men who do dark business in Honduras.
Nobody at my workplace was particularly surprised by either crime. Murder and mayhem is something that touches virtually every Honduran family sooner or later. There's an astounding 19 murders a day here, in a country with a quarter of the population of Canada. And that's not even counting all the robberies, assaults, kidnappings and freaky accidents that routinely happen to Hondurans - from the old guy killed when a load of plastic pipe fell off a truck and knocked him to the ground, to the toddler that drowned in the pila where her mother does the laundry
And yet they have faith. They go to church three or four times a week. They thank God at every opportunity for whatever small thing is going right in their lives. They shrug off the sheer madness of this place as being "God's will," and carry on.
But if this is God's will, how do you explain a place like Canada? I come from a country where churches are closing for lack of a congregation and the number of secular citizens easily outnumbers the religious ones, and yet things are going pretty good there. What kind of God would give a good life to those who don't believe in Him, while endlessly punishing those whose devotion is absolute?
Violent crimes have been decreasing for years in Canada. Murder is a rarity. No Canadian hotel clerk ever has to fear that she will go to a guest's room to shush a noisy party and find so many armed men in the room that all she can do is back out quickly and forget the whole thing, which happened this very weekend here in Copan. (And let me assure you, calling the police is not really an option here.)
I get that faith brings comfort to people living in difficult times. Hondurans need God because life here on Earth is cruel and harsh for so many of them, and if you couldn't believe that things were going to improve in the afterlife you'd probably go crazy.
But maybe a little more crazy is in order right about now. All of this violence isn't God's will, it's just what happens when the rule of law  is completely negated, the tentacles of the massive cocaine industry seep into all facets of life, and a government is too weak and compromised to act. Violence has been normalized in Honduras, and it seems to me that accepting that as God's will is virtually a guarantee that nothing will improve for people here. 
Matthew 18:21-22: Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, "Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother when he sins against me? Up to seven times?" Jesus answered, "I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times."
Even Jesus had a line in the sand. For the sake of this country, I pray for a little fury amid all that faith.

When drive-by sales are all you've got

Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day. Teach him to fish and he’ll eat for a lifetime.

So goes the adage. Spend any time with producers in Honduras, however, and you soon see that if the lesson doesn’t also include helping the guy get his fish to market, he’s still got a big problem.  

Honduras is an agricultural economy. Like farmers everywhere, the average Honduran trying to scratch a living from the earth is beset by all the usual trials and tribulations of farm life:  Not enough rain; too much of it; a hot year; a cold year; insects; tired soil.

 But listening to the 20 or so producers at the two-day workshop we went to this week in Siguatepeque, it became pretty clear that Hondurans also face tremendous problems getting their goods to market. Not only are they unable to afford the costs of moving their goods, there often isn’t a distribution network anyway, let alone a co-ordinated plan for finding markets.

In my past days as a traveller on a two-week vacation, I would have looked out the bus window at all the roadside stands of bananas we saw on the long drive to Siguatepeque and found them charming. I probably would have found it quaint that women and children stand by the highway here waving bags of onions, tortillas, oranges or whatever they’ve got at passing vehicles.

But in fact, that’s the only option most small producers have to market their products. Farm-gate sales for many Honduran growers come down to long, hot days at the side of the highway hoping that some of the vehicles whizzing by at 100 kilometres an hour need a fruit-and-veggie break.

The fish analogy came to mind when we passed the beautiful Lake Yojoa, about an hour outside of San Pedro Sula. All along the highway, local fishermen had their day’s catch hanging on racks at the roadside. They obviously knew how to fish, but what they could have used was some help selling what they caught.

At the workshop – organized by fellow Cuso International volunteers working in Honduras – the plight of the honey producers was particularly enlightening.

Trying to make a living from honey is a challenging undertaking at the best of times. As one of the producers noted ruefully, honey lasts a long time and nobody needs much of it. But the producers in Honduras face the added problem of being unable to afford containers for their honey or transportation to get it to market.

One of the first sights I saw when we came to Copan a couple months ago was a man going door-to-door with wine bottles full of honey.  I took to be an endearing local custom. Nope, just a desperate measure.

Fortunately, the workshop was also heartening affirmation that Hondurans are like that Tubthumper song I like so much: They get knocked down, but they get up again. Far from being discouraged at their lot in life, the producers spent long hours talking about how to improve their sectors.  

The cocoa producers set a date for launching a processing centre where they could all bring dry their beans to dry. The rambutan growers set targets for increasing their yield and expanding into wines and jams. The coffee growers discussed ways to connect directly to markets in the United States and Canada. The honey producers vowed to source out more containers, and more uses for honey.

Teach a man to raise bees and he’ll have honey for a lifetime. But give him a market and he’ll be a whole lot happier. 

This place needs help - but how?

This family relies on pre-schoolers to flog corn-husk dolls to tourists

How do you help a country that has so many problems?
Big, big question. I suspect I'll spend much of my two years here trying to figure that one out. My particular project with the Comision de Accion Social Menonita will probably click along quite nicely, but you can't live in a place with so much poverty and trouble without wishing you could do a whole lot more than that. (Today's headline: Half of the 90 murders a month in San Pedro Sula are committed by kids under 18.)
When I first arrived, I was very enthusiastic about figuring out ways to connect people I know in Canada with Honduran kids who could be sponsored to attend private schools. The public school system is atrocious - giant classes, no supplies, and militant teachers who walk off the job so much (for good reason - some of them haven't been paid in months) that students typically get just 50 days of school in a year. For maybe $100 or $150 a month, it's possible to buy a Honduran youngster a seat in a much better school.
But I'm daunted by the prospect of trying to pick which youngsters would get such a favour, when there's actually millions of them who need the help.
Then there's the added complication of a school system that for most children ends at Grade 6 no matter what, not to mention the pressures that impoverished families put on their kids to quit school and get a job. And as somebody at Cuso International pointed out when I asked about taking on personal projects, what happens to the families when a volunteer inevitably returns home?
In the short term, I'm thinking that the better thing to do might be to focus on a one-off project that helps as many people as possible. For instance, while we were out in the mountain-top pueblo of La Cumbre this weekend helping a group of Texans from First Christian Church dig a new water reservoir for the villagers, I learned that residents actually have a water-treatment plant - a rare thing - but lack the resources to buy the big plastic bottles so that every household can access the treated water.
So for the lack of $5 per household, they don't have clean water. The pueblo is about 70 bottles short - $350 all in. I mean, that's what we'd call a "no-brainer" in Canada. I can make that happen.
My boss tells me there are all kinds of little water projects in the various pueblos that could be done for a few hundred dollars. Access to water is the bane of these villagers' existence - not only do they live largely without vehicles many kilometres away from commercial centres that sell bottled water, they can't afford to buy it anyway.
So maybe I can play a role in matching up a few bucks from my friends and family in Canada with small water projects that will benefit countless Honduran families for years to come. I'd consider that a good use of my time here.
Ultimately, what Honduras could really use is vast international support and pressure on its government from all the "developed" countries and private interests that do business here.
Canada and the U.S. are major trading partners with Honduras. Mining companies from my homeland have shown much enthusiasm for Honduran minerals. If you're taking from a country, don't you have a responsibility to give back?
On paper, Honduras looks like a democratic republic with all kinds of processes, programs and laws in place for the benefit of its citizens. It's a signatory on all the right international agreements guaranteeing equality and happy days for all.
But that's on paper. The reality isn't even close. Why even have all these global conventions and declarations around human rights, universal education, the rights of children and all the other grand-sounding pipe dreams when the international community clearly takes zero responsibility for holding signatories accountable?
I used to find it appalling that the United States was one of the few democracies in the world that refused to sign the Convention on the Rights of the Child, but now I'm  starting to appreciate the honesty. The kids aren't all right in Honduras, Canada, or probably most of the countries that have inked that agreement.
But for now, I guess we'll take things one water bottle at a time.