Dear world: Send money

This is "home" for one ill, impoverished woman in my community

Every day brings new revelations when you live in a foreign culture. And when it's a developing country, the learning curve is just that much steeper. 

Even calling Honduras a developing country  is something of a misnomer, seeing as the country has actually lost ground in recent years. Perhaps a more apt name is an “unravelling country.” But at any rate, I had a certain expectation of what it was going to feel like to live in such a place, and I was wrong.

Back in my Canada days, I would have presumed all impoverished countries needed stuff. Indeed, stuff is what countries with money most like to send to impoverished countries: Notebooks and pens for youngsters; clothing; medicines; school desks; blankets.

And in times of natural disaster - when access is severely limited or there’s a need for huge quantities of certain things all at once - I’m sure such donations are very useful. But having wandered through some of the giant superstores and high-end malls of San Pedro Sula and Tegucigalpa, I now understand that in the day-to-day lives of impoverished Hondurans, it isn’t really stuff from developed nations that they're lacking – it’s money to buy the stuff that’s already here.

I imagined that poor countries were places without the capacity to make their own stuff. Wrong. Honduras has lots of capacity, because it’s got a significant population of wealthy, very comfortable citizens who have created a market for all the same things that Canadians are accustomed to having access to. You can go to a department store in one of the major centres of Honduras and find pretty much everything you’d find in any Canadian department store. There's an Ikea-size prescription drug warehouse in San Pedro with every type of medicine you'd need to fix all the sick, suffering people of Honduras. 

So the stuff is here. The problem is that most of the population can't afford it. 

This is a country where some people live like kings and the majority live in abject poverty. I sense there has to be a better way to help that segment of the population that doesn't involve incurring massive shipping costs to send things that are already available right here.

An example: my boss at the Comisión de Acción Social Menonita asked me to look around for help for a school that’s having a heck of a time providing desks and basic materials for its 160 students. So I put out an exploratory email to one of the B.C. groups that specialize in shipping such things to poor countries, only to discover that to get a container’s worth of school furniture to Honduras I'd first have to raise $6,000 to cover the shipping costs. 

That is a phenomenal amount of money in Honduras. The woman in B.C. said the shipping costs pale in comparison to the value of the goods, but I suspect that’s true only if you calculate the costs of such things in Canada. Here in Honduras, $6,000 would go a very long way if used to buy locally made desks, and would create jobs right here in the country for a significant number of carpenters as well.

I get why people like to ship stuff rather than send money. It feels more real. It feels more certain. There was a story in the Honduran papers a while back about a maternity ward that was wrapping newborn babies in paper for wont of sheets, and a few weeks later down came a big load of little baby blankets from the U.S. No worries about someone misusing your donation if you send desks and baby blankets instead of money.

But that’s really about the needs of the donor. If you’re looking at it from the perspective of the receiver, money makes a lot more sense. It wasn’t a chronic shortage of baby blankets in Honduras that led to those newborns being wrapped in paper, it was a lack of money for public hospitals.

Outside my workplace, six giant barrels of notebooks and pens shipped from the United States sit waiting to be distributed to young Hondurans. It must have cost a lot to send them here. I can’t help but wonder how much further those dollars would have stretched if those good-hearted donors had sent a cheque instead and the supplies had come from the well-stocked stationery store down the road from my house.

What this country needs – what every country needs – is a better way of assuring donors that their donations are being used wisely. We need more strategic responses that get beyond a feel-good moment of charitable giving and down to the brass tacks of economic development. I'd also like to see democratic countries that trade with developing countries turning up the heat a little to encourage more civic-mindedness in countries like this one, which appear to take so little responsibility for their citizens' well-being.

Until we figure that out, we’re just nice folks with too much stuff feeling good about sending our surplus somewhere. It’s a kind but inefficient gesture that skirts the bigger problems.  Struggling countries like this one need so much more than that.

The Kids of Angelitos Felices

In my next life I hope I get to make movie soundtracks, because there are few things I like better than finding the perfect song to fit with images. I have a little hobby of putting some of my photos to music - here's my latest work, which combines photos from the orphanage/foster home I'm helping out at with a fine tune from U.S. singer-songwriter extraordinaire Mary Gauthier. 

Hope it breaks your heart just a little, like that sad place breaks mine every time I go there. No happy endings in Angelitos Felices, I fear, but there are more smiles and love radiating from those little faces than you'd ever think possible in a life that difficult. They hope, and I hope with them. 

Access to morning-after pill hardly biggest issue for Honduran women

I want to stress right off the hop here that I am not, in any way, in support of a law that would prohibit the morning-after pill in Honduras. But if almost 700,000 people around the world are ready to help Honduran women, they could do a lot better than just to sign a petition protesting something that's not even close to the most pressing problem facing women here.
I wouldn't want to speak on behalf of the women of Honduras, but I suspect a sizeable majority of them would be delighted if the biggest thing they had to worry about was the legality of the morning-after pill. I think they've got bigger things on their mind.
Poverty, for one thing. Almost two-thirds of Hondurans live in poverty, but the level of poverty for women and their children when a husband abandons his family or gets killed  (which happens a striking amount in Honduras) is profound.
Here in Copan Ruinas, I know a number of women who've had to hand off one or more of their children into a kind of indentured servitude with another family just to be able to survive the financial devastation. They scratch by on almost nothing, living in shacks without doors and selling bags of homemade horchata by the roadside. Three of the four staff working at the local orphanage would be on the streets if it weren't for being able to live at the orphanage with their children in exchange for looking after the 30 children in care there.
Then there's the issue of violence. A woman is murdered in Honduras every 48 hours. More than 2,400 women have been murdered in the country in the last eight years, with women ages 20 to 24 at the greatest risk.
And that's just the ones who get killed. Domestic violence is still a routine occurrence in Honduras, and in the poorest communities women are so controlled and isolated by their husbands that they don't even feel able to seek medical care for basic health needs.
How about maternal care? Barely a third of impoverished Honduran women who give birth have somebody with any kind of skill alongside them to help, compared to 99 per cent of the richest Honduran women. One in 240 women die during childbirth, 10  times the rate of countries like Canada. Lack of access to standard, inexpensive preventive care like Pap tests - or HPV vaccinations - has resulted in cervical cancer becoming the most common fatal cancer in the country for women.
Education: Just 36 per cent of young women of secondary-school age are attending school. Why? Probably because a lot of them are working to help support their families, something that many Honduran children have to start doing when they're as young as five.
So yes, it's outrageous for a democratic country in this day and age to be prohibiting access to the morning-after pill. Let's hope the petition is a success and the government backs down, not that there would likely be much enforcement of such a law anyway based on the vast number of unsolved and unpunished murders, assaults and robberies in Honduras.
And seeing as so many of us seem ready to be up in arms, how about we do something about the real problems here? It'll take more effort than signing a petition, but anything worthwhile does.

I'm talking - but is anyone listening?

Communications was a tough sell in Canada, but at least the organizations I worked with had a general sense of it being a good thing for them to be doing more of.

Not so in Honduras. There must be some kind of communications industry somewhere in this country, but it’s pretty clear at this point that the work isn’t even on the radar of any of the non-profits that are on the ground doing virtually all of the social-service work in Honduras.

As I’m sure I mentioned before, my title for the purposes of this Cuso International posting is “communications and knowledge management facilitator.” The idea is that I will help the Comisión de Acción Social Menonita here in Copan Ruinas develop fabulous communication skills over the next two years, which will then be put to use in the other five offices of CASM around the country.

But as I learned the hard way in my own country, there’s no way to develop fabulous communication skills if you’ve yet to acknowledge that talking about your work and sharing your successes, your challenges and your frustrations are desirable things. I’m not at all convinced that CASM was clamoring for a Canadian volunteer with communication skills, although I do think that whether the organization knows it or not, they really need one.

 One of the Cuso reps here in Honduras told me when I arrived that people here followed an “oral culture” and my challenge would be to help them understand the value of putting things in writing. But the truth is that Honduran NGOs – non-profits for those of you still getting the hang of “non-governmental organizations” -  are really just accustomed to getting their work done and not talking about it at all, orally or otherwise. My challenge isn’t just to teach them about the tools of communication, it’s to convince them that it’s something worth thinking about in the first place.

In a different age, just doing good work was enough. But these little Honduran NGOs are heavily reliant on funding from the big faith-based development organizations of Europe – Christian Aid, Diakonia,  Holland’s ICCO.  The goal of those organizations is to plant seeds, to fund good works that model a new way of doing things: Better agricultural processes; more preparedness for floods, hurricanes and all the other weird weather that happens down here; greater awareness of human rights; more diversity for subsistence farmers so they don’t starve to death in a year when the corn crop fails. They don’t want to be on the hook for solving every problem in Honduras, they just want to pony up in a few key areas and let the country take it from there.

But you can’t model anything if communications isn’t part of the plan. It’s the thing that cranks up the volume on whatever an organization is doing.  Just like NGOs in Canada, Honduran organizations need to figure out ways to share stories about the impact they’re having or risk starving to death themselves when the big funders go looking for louder voices.

It’s hard to separate the personal from the professional when you’ve been living and breathing communications for as long as I have, so I’m acutely aware that everything I post on my own Facebook site or my blog is another facet of my role with Cuso International.  I’m trying not to become acutely self-conscious of every post – sometimes a picture of a corn field is just a picture of a corn field – but I do feel something of a responsibility to show a different side of Honduras. The country has the worst PR in the world outside of North Korea, and I figure that as long as I’m here I might as well try to highlight through my own experiences that there’s more to Honduras than just murder and mayhem.

As for the impact I’ll have with CASM, I guess we’ll see. I just finished a PowerPoint – “Por Qué Comunicar?” – that I’ll be presenting to the management staff of the organization at the end of the month. Between my mediocre grasp of Spanish and their indifference toward this thing called communications, I’ll count myself lucky if they adopt even a couple of the ideas I’m throwing out there.

But hey, that’s communications for you. You just have to keep talking and hope that somebody listens.

One night in Copan

A little story from last night, which nicely sums up the Honduran experience.
A couple weeks ago, I was playing accordion in the central park here in Copan Ruinas as part of a little "feria gastronomica" that was showcasing the foods that some of the women sell in the streets around here. A young teacher happened by and asked if I would play accordion at the Mother's Day festivities at his school on May 13. Sure, I told him, giving him my phone number so he could call with the details.
I didn't hear anything more until the night of May 12, when the teacher showed up at my door at 7 p.m. and asked if I could catch a moto-taxi - a three-wheeled golf-cart-like thing that they use for cabs here in Copan - to his school the following night. I have no idea how he knew where I lived.
Anyway, he scribbled down the name of the school and the community it was in. The name didn't ring any bells, but that wasn't surprising - there are dozens of teeny-tiny communities in the hills around Copan, each with their own teeny-tiny one-room schools, and at this point I might know the names of maybe six of them. I gave him my phone number again, even though no one I have given my number to in Honduras has ever called me back, and agreed to come just before 7 p.m.
It all seemed like a good idea in the moment, of course. But then reality hit at about 6:30 p.m. last night, as I stood in the rain and the pitch-black with my accordion on my back and a music stand and folding stool clutched in my hands, trying to hail a moto-taxi to a town I'd never heard of.
When I finally got one of the cabs to stop, the driver looked blank initially when I told him the name of the place, and then told me he thought he knew where it was but that the trip would cost 100 lempiras each way. That's $10 all in, a significant sum that indicated just how far out of town this place was.
I'm no shrinking violet when it comes to risk, but I admit to feeling dread as I reluctantly got into the moto-taxi. Hadn't all we Cuso International volunteers been cautioned against this very thing - getting into taxis hailed on the street headed for places we weren't familiar with? In the pitch black, after having confirmed to the stranger behind the wheel that I had at least 200 lempiras in my bag and quite a nice accordion on my back?
Still, what were the options at that point? I'd told the teacher I'd be there, and figured I couldn't just "pull a gringo" and not show up. So off we went, driving up and up and up into the hills above Copan.
The town lights disappeared from sight, and we drove 20 long minutes along a completely dark, isolated road so terrible that in Canada we would probably call it a wilderness trail and caution users to bring water and an emergency blanket before embarking on it. I didn't see a single vehicle or pedestrian as we bumped along. I did my best to keep up a small conversation (I like to think that somebody's less likely to kill you if you engage them in friendly conversation, although I've never had to put that theory to the test) as I desperately clung to my accordion to keep it from bouncing out of the side of the moto-taxi.
And all of a sudden, we arrived - pueblo Carrizalito Uno, home of Escuela Jose Ernesto Castejon. The moto-taxi pulled up to a one-room school so lit up that you had to know there was a party going on inside, and within seconds a little girl dressed in the typical navy skirt and white blouse that all the students wear here came bursting out to welcome me. People were everywhere, spilling out of the school house and jostling for a spot outside near an open window now that the place was too full to pack in even one more person.
The girl ushered me into a room decked out in hearts, balloons and declarations of love for Mother, with pine needles strewn across the floor to give the place kind of a country-dance feel. I was led to a wooden stage at the front of the room that looked out on rows of chairs packed with  smiling parents. A clutch of young students beamed at me from one side of the stage, completely excited to have me there. On the other side stood the young teacher, looking relieved to see me.
I hadn't known the plan, but it turned out to involve me playing songs on the accordion in between various groupings of students performing recitations, songs and dances. It was like every school recital I've ever been to - sweetly heartwarming with occasional moments of chaos and misunderstanding that just added to the fun. I don't know if the big gringa in the corner with the accordion added much to the event, but the kids sure did seem to like having me there.
And then my new buddy Pablo returned in his moto-taxi to take me back to town, and we slammed down that terrible road one more time, me trying to balance a plate of food that the teacher gave me to take home.
This time Pablo brought his girlfriend along for the ride, who perched up front with him on a seat built for one. This time I relaxed and just tried to enjoy the trip, or as much as was possible while still fearing for my life with each glimpse of a new pothole or boulder looming out of the dark. Pablo took me right to my door.
There's Honduras for you. Confusing, unnerving, a place that feels like anything could happen, and yet for the most part what actually happens is that people are kind, kids are happy to see you, and all is well. I guess it's a country for optimists. 

A lament from the land of limited choices

Something I like - the thin slices of deep-fried green bananas  known as tajaditas

Honduras has its charms, but food isn't one of them. I've never been more appreciative of the variety of flavours that immigrants have brought to Canada than during these four months of living in what's essentially a culinary monoculture.
A true foodie would go mad here, I think. I'm a completely ordinary eater who tends to view food as fuel, but the sameness of the diet even makes me a little crazy.I'm sure you could track down a decent deli and a little more exotic fare in one of the big cities here, as long as you didn't mind giving up personal security in exchange. But in a country with so few immigrants to liven up the national palate, even the major centres are missing those marvelous food choices that are staples in the smallest of towns in Canada.
Good Chinese food, for instance. Gyros and falafels. Korean barbecue. A cheesy, spicy lasagne. Sushi. A bento box for lunch. An olive bar in your local supermarket. A thousand varieties of cheeses,  a hundred different types of breads and buns. Cookies, cakes, tarts, pies, neopolitans, baklava, cream puffs.  My mouth is watering just writing this.
Here in Copan, there's a Chinese restaurant but it serves only "chap suey," which in fact looks more like some type of very dark chow mein with way more vegetables than is the norm. I suspect that the Honduran owners have a limited knowledge of actual Chinese food.
There's a pizza place and a deep-fried chicken takeout that I completely rely on to pull me out of a food funk, and a nice little cafe down the road that makes crispy tacos and baleadas (but only crispy tacos and baleadas). Virtually all the other restaurants serve variations on the Honduran tipico meal: Beans, tortillas, a little rice, a splotch of cream and maybe some kind of meat cooked on a grill.
There are street vendors cooking every Friday and Saturday night, but they too stick close to the tipico. The breads and baked goods are generally tasteless, dry and lardy, with the exception of a few cakes you can buy by the slice at a couple of the tourist-style coffee shops.
Of course, nothing's stopping us from cooking more exotically at home. Nothing except the lack of ingredients, that is, and the heat that lasts long into the night. Life in a tropical country is teaching me that a lot of the foods I craved in Canada must have been because I was cold all the time. And let me tell you, anything that involves turning on the oven just isn't going to happen.
I consider myself  an enthusiastic carnivore, but you just don't feel like tucking into a steak when it's 34 degrees outside. It's not like there's a decent meat shop in town anyway, let alone one of those block-long refrigerated displays I'd grown so accustomed to in Victoria, with every possible cut and variety beckoning to you from their cheerful styrofoam trays. I've never been much of a salad eater, but now it's almost all we eat.
On that front, Honduras shines. The fruits and vegetables here are incredible. If you've ever passed through the Okanagan during a time when the fruit was ripe and ready for eating, or stuffed yourself on Saanich Peninsula strawberries during those exquisite three or four weeks when they're in season, you'll be familiar with the experience of eating fruit and vegetables in season that have been grown right in the 'hood. There's nothing like it.
The mangos are on right now here. Steps from my house, a giant truck loaded with mangos is parked in the street selling them three for $1. Before that it was watermelon and canteloupe, sweeter than any melons I'd ever tasted. The bananas come in five or six different varieties. Sometime in October the oranges, mandarins and grapefruit are going to come on.
The Roma tomatoes are exquisite. The cucumbers are crisp and sweet. The avocados are so creamy and delicious that they almost make up for the lack of fat in the rest of this new diet of ours. We're coming back to Victoria for a week in June and I already have a list of foods that I plan on consuming while there, but I know I won't find any comparable fruits and vegetables in a land that relies so heavily on imports.
I hope I don't come across as a whiner. I've been reading the blogs of some of my Cuso International counterparts in Mozambique and Cameroon, and their diets of fufu and little else make me feel like I'm living in Jamie Oliver's kitchen. I've had fufu - a kind of a dough made from starchy vegetables like cassava and plantains. It was interesting, but once was enough.
I guess what I'm really saying is that while there are many reasons for appreciating immigrants, I currently have a heightened sense of gratitude for the food they bring with them to their new countries. People in Honduras ask me what the tipico food is in Canada, and I feel a surge of nationalistic pride in being able to tell them that we don't have such a thing.
The next time you're eating any of a thousand dishes that make up the "typical" Canadian diet, spare a kind thought for the immigrant who first introduced it and helped make our country such a culinary pleasure. And have a shawarma for me, would you?

On the model farm of Don Humberto Mejia

The view from Don Humberto's kitchen

One of the areas that my organization focuses on is “secure livelihoods.” This was something of a baffling term for me when I first started communications work with the Comision de Accion Social Menonita, but three months on I now have a clear understanding of what it means - and just how important the work is in the context of Honduras.

We visited a small farm last week in Las Flores that epitomized what CASM is trying to do on this front. The farmer, Don Humberto Mejia, had a little bit of everything going on: Coffee, corn, beans, sugar cane, some livestock, a tilapia pond. He’s also an enthusiastic adopter of some of the environmental practices that CASM encourages in the 20 or so tiny communities where it works around Copan Ruinas, like tapping off the methane from manure to power your kitchen stove.

CASM recognizes good practices

Honduras is essentially a country of teeny-tiny pueblos in isolated mountain locations, where individual farmers try to eke out both a living and their daily bread on small, often impossibly steep plots of land. (I saw a corn crop the other day growing on what had to be a 60-degree slope.) Coffee is virtually the only cash crop for these families. In a good year a producer might have a little excess corn and beans to sell as well if the hurdles of irrigation, transportation and worn-out soil can be overcome, but for the most part it’s subsistence farming.

The poorest families subsist on nothing but the corn and beans they grow, with barely a lempira in their pockets to cover any of the other costs of living. No small wonder deforestation is such a problem in Honduras – if the beautiful tropical forest isn’t being cleared for another marginal corn crop, it’s being hacked down for firewood that can be sold for at least a little cash.

Livestock adds diversity

So diversification is a big theme at CASM. Global coffee prices are notoriously unstable, and a failed crop in a year when the rains don’t come on time has devastating implications. A smart producer is well-advised to have his or her eggs in many baskets, both for a healthier diet for the family and as insurance against whatever might go wrong that year in the notoriously unpredictable world of subsistence farming.

As well, small producers have to worry about contamination of their water supply from animal waste and the toxic coffee pulp that is a byproduct  of stripping coffee beans from the plant’s “cherries.” They need a safe solution for dealing with the waste of their operation.

We approach Don Humberto’s driveway after a one-hour drive on one of the many crazy, skinny and steep roads that lead into the mountains above the three main municipalities in the Copan region.  He has proudly posted the “Hogar Modelo” sign that CASM gave him in recognition of the work he has put in to make his farm more sustainable, and today we are here with one of the major funders of CASM – the British charity Christian Aid – to see what sustainability looks like on the ground.

Compost on the right, biodigester on the left

His three cows are the first thing we see. Cows provide milk and cheese for the family and for sale, and the liquid byproduct from the cheese-making process is excellent for the biodigester, Don Humberto tells me (more on that biodigester in a minute). There's a tilapia pond and a few pigs out back as well – we’ll enjoy some fine pork sausage later that morning with our breakfast – and a small flock of chickens that produce eggs, meat and a natural way of tilling garden soil and coffee harvest residue. 

Animals also produce waste, which Don Humberto uses in his compost pile but also in his biodigester, which CASM helped him build. Waste ferments inside the biodigester and produces methane gas, which the family taps off to power a gas burner in the kitchen. Wood is still the primary cooking fuel in rural Honduras, but only because propane gas is so expensive. The methane from the biodigester provides three to four hours a day of gas for the family at a cost of $225 all in; the gas savings alone cover the cost of the system in about two years.

Don Humberto in his sugar cane field

The family also has a fuel-efficient fogon – a wood cooking stove – that CASM helped them build. It’s a basic brick structure that burns 45 per cent less wood than the conventional stoves in use in much of Central America. And it’s got a chimney that vents smoke outside, a basic adaptation for us Canadians but still something of a rarity in impoverished Central American villages, where smoke inhalation and burns remain major killers of children.

Out back, Don Humberto has a pile of coffee-bean waste that he uses in his compost pile. He bought lombriz from another producer – worms that look to me like the familiar “red wigglers” of a Canadian compost pile – and they’re hard at work turning that waste into new, rich soil for a coming year’s coffee crop.

Lombriz hard at work

His sugar cane crop is thriving and will be ready for harvest in October. There's a towering tree in the back yard producing all kinds of sweet red, bell-shaped fruit right now, and bushes covered in delicious dark raspberry-like berries along the fence. His wife feeds us a breakfast of eggs, sausage, tortillas, beans, cream and coffee, all of it produced and processed right there on the farm. It’s the ultimate in food sustainability – the One Mile Diet.

As the Christian Aid rep points out, Honduras’s small producers can’t do it alone. Without CASM’s help and resources to build fuel-efficient stoves and biodigesters, to teach the lessons and methods of sustainability – without the support of organizations like Christian Aid to fund the work – poor farmers can't get past subsistence. But when you see what’s possible, it gives you real hope.

It's not easy being green

(James Rielly watercolour - 2009)

As any kid who has ever bumped through a bunch of different schools knows, there's an art to knowing how to fit in with a new group. My school years were in fact singularly stable, but the ever-changing work situations I experienced in later years definitely put my blending skills to the test.
Settling into my volunteer placement in Honduras has probably been the biggest test I've had, what with being up against both language and culture barriers. My co-workers are really only now starting to relax with me, three months in. And who can blame them? I was the much-older mute gringa tucked away in the corner.
But there have been other challenging transitions. I definitely felt like the outsider when I first started training for Tour de Rock, the bike ride for cancer that I did in 2001 with  Victoria area police officers. An uneasy relationship exists between police and media at the best of times, and it was pretty clear in the early days of the training that many of them were not particularly comfortable with the concept of a journalist in their midst.
One of the guys got a good laugh later when I told him I approached the problem by thinking of my teammates as cats. You don't try to make a cat come to you; you just wait until it chooses to come around. Being pleasant and friendly is all well and good, but sometimes it just takes time. (It also took a lot of hard training on the bike outside of the  regular training regimen, to make sure nobody would end up thinking of me as the rider at the back of the pack that they all had to wait for.)
PEERS was another challenge, and probably the most comparable to Honduras because of the difference in culture I was up against. It's a grassroots organization run by and for sex workers, and I was a non-sex-worker who was now the new boss.
I wasn't a complete unknown, because at least a few of the participants knew of me through my media work. But that's a bit of a double-edged sword in itself, given that there's always someone in any crowd who sees you as The Enemy when you're a journalist due to a story that offended them or a friend or family member you unintentionally maligned.
In my first weeks at PEERS, I felt that the most important thing for me to do was to stay downstairs in the main area mixing and mingling as much as possible, taking my turn with whatever menial task was going on and working as hard as I could to memorize people's names very quickly. For a population so tragically accustomed to being at the bottom of the social hierarchy, having the executive director greet you  by name when you walk in the door turned out to really, really matter.
I like to think I'm not the kind of person who judges others, but I still had to work conscientiously not to allow even a shadow of anything that might be perceived as disapproval or distaste flash across my features, no matter what scene was playing out in front of me. The last thing sex workers need is to feel any kind of judgment coming from anyone working or volunteering at the only real refuge they've got.
Here at the Comision de Accion Social Menonita, my tactic has been to make myself useful.
 It's a strange thing to be trying to do communications work in a country, culture and language you barely understand, but I can type fast in any language and that skill won me some Brownie points early on. Everybody can use a good typist now and then. I can also lug big heavy things around (helping poor communities in Honduras involves a striking amount of lugging big heavy things around, whether it's tins of food or bricks for a new cooking stove). And I can take photos. Lots and lots of photos. My little camera has been an amazing ice-breaker both at work and in the streets, as people just don't get much opportunity to have their photo taken here.
I've put major effort into improving my Spanish, too. When we did our Cuso International training back in Ottawa last December, the Cuso reps rightly told us that just because you speak the language doesn't mean you understand a country's culture. True enough, but you can't possibly access the culture without the language. Without a shared language, you're always going to be standing outside the group wondering what the heck they're all talking about, and the last one anyone wants to try to strike up a conversation with.
But the real breakthrough came last week, when I complained to one of my young co-workers that my name didn't have the same musical flow that all of their names had, and that I needed a Spanish name. She decided I would be Yolanda Macarena Rosa de Fuentes from that point on.
Within what seemed like minutes, everyone in the office was joking around with me about my new name. Someone just has to call out "Yolanda!" and the whole group starts laughing - with me, not at me, I'm happy to say.
We went on a group outing to nearby hot springs last night and the same co-worker decided my spouse needed a Spanish name, too. So he's Mr. Pancho now.
We laughed and laughed. I think it means we've arrived.

I'll fight, but will I win?

A long, long time ago, I thought of myself as shy. But I left that behind many years ago when I took a job that required asking bold questions of strangers, and it was onward into bigger and bolder from that point on.

Forthright and informed with a touch of indignation can be a very effective strategy for making things happen in Canada. Using the ability to find information that I’d picked up as a journalist and the copy-the-boss-and-the-boss’s-boss strategy that I’d honed in my work with non-profits, I became  quite adept at resolving problems in my work and in my personal life. I even got a cell phone company to back down on a $150 “early cancellation” fee, and I’m sure you can appreciate how challenging that was.

But I’ve met my match in Honduras.   In Canada, I know how to play the role of a polite but clearly unhappy customer prepared to take it up the chain until she gets satisfaction. But I’m lost here, where they just pat your hand and assure you they’re working on your problem even though they’re not.

You keep coming back at them, of course, because your complaint doesn’t get resolved. But the process just repeats – so sorry, we’re looking into that, try again next week, we’ll call you Thursday. And repeats.

Two recent examples, both having to do with Honduran banks.  In the first instance, I waited two long months for a debit card so I could access the stipend that Cuso International pays, as there’s no branch of that particular bank in Copan Ruinas.

If I didn’t want to take an eight-hour return bus ride to San Pedro Sula whenever I needed money, getting my hands on that debit card was essential. But all my Jody powers were useless in the face of a friendly, do-nothing string of nameless bank employees who said all the right soothing things in the moment and then just left me to do it all over again with whoever I ended up dealing with the next time.

I lost track of how many times I heard that my card was on its way – sometimes to Copan, (until the bank quit pretending that it had been mailed to Copan), sometimes to a mysterious shipping agent who took care of such things, sometimes to the bank branch in San Pedro Sula.  I ended up making two trips to San Pedro Sula before the problem was resolved, and a long series of calls and emails to various young dependientes and their bosses as I desperately tried to grasp how it could be this difficult just to get a lousy debit card.

I got it eventually, and for maybe a month all was well. But on Friday I used my card at the ATM I always go to and ran straight into a new banking nightmare.

I knew to be worried when the machine made more grinding noises than usual, and didn’t dish out my cash at the usual speed.  Then it spit out less money than what I’d requested – 3,000 lempiras instead of 4,000, a $50 difference. And no receipt.

Uh-oh, I thought. The bank hadn’t opened yet, so I trotted home to log into my account on-line to see what I could see. It was worse than I expected – the ATM had dinged me for 4,000 lemps that it never gave me, and then another 3,000. That’s a $200 hit, significant money on a volunteer stipend.

I returned to the bank the minute the doors opened, but I pretty much knew how things were going to go. The nice young man at the desk where they send unhappy customers told me that the machine always corrected itself at 3 p.m. every day, so I should just check my bank balance after 3 p.m. and probably everything would be fine. And if it wasn’t, I could come back.

It wasn’t. I came back. And this time I talked to the woman who looks after the ATM, who promptly went into some back room to check and emerged to tell me that everything seemed to be fine with the ATM. Did I have a receipt, she asked? No. Did I have any way of proving that I hadn’t just pocketed those other 4,000 lempiras? No.  With a pleasant smile, she advised me to check my account balance again in a couple days and maybe things would have straightened out– and if not, I could come on back to talk to her.

My partner says the way they do conflict in Honduras is kind of like Muhammad Ali in his prime, all rope-a-dope. You can throw all the punches you like, but the only one who’s going to be worn down by the end of the fight is you.

Today I’ll send an email to my bank in Tegucigalpa, and copy the other bank here in Copan that owns the ATM. I’ll ask to see some kind of documentation that shows the exact timing of those two transactions, in hopes of demonstrating  that it wouldn’t have been possible for me to withdraw two batches of money in what must have been a mere three or four seconds, let alone in a single transaction. The ATMs here only allow you to withdraw 4,000 lempiras at a time, so I plan to make the argument that I couldn’t have withdrawn 7,000 given that I inserted my card only once.

But I’m doing all that only because I can’t bear to give up a fight that easily. I’m betting I’ll never see that $200 again. It infuriates me, but I just know how this is going to go. I guess it’s better that I take the hit and not a hungry Honduran for whom $200 is serious money, although who knows how many of them have had this same frustrating experience?

Then again, even the master of rope-a-dope didn’t win every match.  I just have to learn to fight like Joe Frazier.

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.