What's a nice girl like me doing pricing out urinals?

My new best friends: Nelson Rodriguez, right, the man doing
the work at Angelitos; and Ovidio Mayorga of Casa
Constructor, where I just bought $2500 worth of materials

Sometimes you just have to sit back and wonder how the heck you got yourself into something. I had one such moment at about 8 p.m. last night, shortly after a halting phone conversation in Spanish with a plumbing contractor trying to sort out how and when I would be paying for the materials he needed to build new bathrooms and replace the water system at a rundown children's home here in Copan.
I've lived a fine, long life without ever feeling the need to do home renovations. I know nothing about plumbing, water systems, urinal sturdiness or bombas, the mysterious and apparently pricey pumps that shoot water from cistern to holding tank to bathroom in countries like this one.
I've never considered what kind of ceramic tile I like in a bathroom, or whether the grout should be white or black. Up until four hours ago, I hadn't thought about the benefits of a press-button tap over a faucet-style one, or whether a two-foot-long trough urinal was sufficiently long enough for three small boys to use at the same time.
So how has it come to be that  I'm overseeing a fairly complex renovation project in a foreign land, in a language that I've been speaking for all of seven months? I don't shy away from taking on the "guy" role when it suits me (as my partner regularly points out), but I'm sure the men I'm working with must also find it at least a little strange that the jefa for the project is an older woman from Canada with inadequate Spanish and no clue about construction.
I blame Emily Monroe, the young American who introduced me to Angelitos Felices children's home in the first place.
First she made me see what a hovel the place was, then she pointed out the disastrous bathrooms. Up until then I'd just been contemplating stuffing new foam mattresses into plastic for the 30 or so children who live there, maybe doing a few crafts with them once in a while. But once I walked into those bathrooms and took a good look, there was no turning back.
So here we go. It's both thrilling and terrifying to be here, knowing how much of an improvement the project will make to the daily comfort of the children, yet at the same time having heard way too many nightmare-renovation stories to believe that we're just going to get this started and roll on smoothly all the way to the end. I'm still getting over the jitters from a couple weeks ago after one of the local fellows who has been very, very helpful with this project raised the spectre of the 2,500-litre water tank we're putting in crashing through the floor and killing the children as they lay sleeping in their beds below. (Hopefully we've got that one under control now with a new plan to reinforce the floor.)
As for Emily, I guess I'll forgive her for sucking me into all this, seeing as her own big dreams started moving forward this week when she received permission from Copan city hall to open a new daycare centre for impoverished working mothers.
That's probably going to move several children right out of Angelitos, where they won't  need to be once there's a better daycare option. While most of the Angelitos kids are wards of the state and have no other place they can go, a few are dropped off for the day by their moms simply because 100 lempiras ($5) a month is all the family can afford to pay for daycare. Everyone associated with the place wants a better environment for the children of Angelitos, including new bathrooms, but not having to be there in the first place would be the best solution of all for those kids.
Emily and her friend Charrissa Taylor - a special-ed teacher from New Zealand - are doing some excellent work with the kids at Angelitos already. It's very good news that they'll soon be providing a healthier, better-supported option for families in Copan. Check out the details of Emily's project here.
In the meantime, bathrooms ho.

Girl, you won't be forgotten

I'm saying goodbye to a dear old friend tonight, who died in the early hours of the morning in Victoria.  I went looking just now for some photos of Dyhan from the summer of 2007, the year a group of us had a magical four-day camping trip at Cowichan Lake, and was instantly reminded of why I liked her so much.

We met in the mid-2000s, when I first started to get to know some of the people living in the margins in Victoria. We stayed in touch right up until I left for Honduras in January - not in any kind of organized fashion, but bumping into each other at least three or four times a year for long enough to do a quick catch-up and share some  laughs. 

Dyhan was what you'd call "larger than life." The photos from Cowichan Lake show her lounging by the campfire in an evening gown, a scene I remember from that summer with much fondness. Such style -  perched on a log in her gown and her heels, flicking her boa at the smoke. Man, that was a good camping trip.

I know some things about Dyhan, but she's still very much a mystery to me overall. She was a great story-teller, and at times it might have been that the line between truth and fiction got blurred in the telling. One thing you always knew when you talked to Dyhan was that you weren't going to be bored, but it did make it hard to know for sure who she was.

She had one of those bodies that could really make you feel hugged when she greeted you. She was voluptuous, not a word I use often but a perfect fit for Dyhan. She talked fast, laughed a lot, and could almost knock you over with her wildly gesticulating hands when she got into a particularly enthusiastic story-telling. 

Everyone's got their own definition of what constitutes a "good" person, but Dyhan fit mine. She had a kind heart. She loved her children. She looked out for herself. She wanted to do right. I don't know if everybody saw that in her right away, but sooner or later Dyhan would prevail. I saw her win a lot of skeptics over. You just had to like the woman. 

And every time she came into a room it was like watching Mae West arrive. Oh, those boas weren't just for camping. The makeup, the hair, the drama - Dyhan knew how to put it all together.

Dyhan's life had its challenges. She'd been sick many times with various health problems, and money was always an issue in the years when I knew her. But she had a remarkable ability to bounce back. She seemed like one of those people who would always be around. 

Whatever took her in the end, I just hope she got to die peacefully, and that she was wearing a pair of leopard-skin silk pyjamas or a really exotic negligee that I feel certain she would have had in her collection. I know she would have wanted to look good right to the end. 

Rest in peace, dear Dyhan. I'm imagining you right now in whatever world you've moved onto, twirling that boa and telling a funny story about times gone by. Wish we could have had one last hug. 

No answers without questions

A Tegucigalpa activist at a protest against the rising number
of murders of Honduran women. Photo: Reuters

Almost 2,300 women have been murdered in Honduras in the last eight years, a fairly clear signal that the country has a problem. But the statistics from the last four years are the most alarming.

Murders of women skyrocketed in 2008, from 176 the year before to 569. Up until that point, roughly 200 Honduran women were murdered every year. But ever since that jump four years ago, the annual rates have doubled to around 400.

What’s going on? As with so many other things in Honduras, it’s impossible to tell. Murder is disturbingly common in the country – just to put the femicide rate into perspective, the murder rates for men in Honduras are more than 18 times higher. But with 90 per cent of the murders are unsolved, so there’s no way to draw any conclusion other than that the country really needs to get a grip.

Nor is there sufficient public information to help a worried population understand the risks. It’s obvious from the statistics that San Pedro Sula deserves its infamy as the murder capital of the world, and that Tegucigalpa is a close second (of the 222 Honduran women murdered so far this year, 183 were committed in those two cities).

But were the victims working in the drug trade? In the sex trade? Living in particularly violent neighbourhoods? Randomly chosen? Out late getting drunk? Victims of jealous spouses, or murdered in the course of robberies? Killed by police? Such details are rarely reported, and it’s not like there are any criminal trials the public can follow for greater insight.

I wouldn’t want to suggest that any behaviour justifies murder. But there’s no way to make sense of any of this insanity without more information. Without that, there’s no way to spot patterns that could be useful for strategizing how to reduce the murder rate, or targeting scarce police resources at problem areas. Hondurans are reduced to helpless acceptance of horrifying statistics.

While the victims of murders in Honduras are overwhelmingly Honduran, I know from my own family’s worried reaction to the headlines coming out of this country that such details make little difference when travellers are considering whether to visit. If you decided to holiday in a Central American country, would you pick Honduras with a murder rate of 88 per 100,000 people, or Costa Rica with a rate of 11.3? (And just to put some added perspective to those figures, Canada’s rate is 1.6, the U.S. is 4.2, and Afghanistan is 2.4.)

I regularly walk the country roads all around Copan and in seven months have encountered only friendly, curious people happy to exchange a few words with a passing stranger. But what I hear from the few travellers I’ve encountered here is much concern about whether it’s safe to walk anywhere. No small wonder that even the popular tourist haunts in Copan are reporting a drop of 15 per cent or more in business this summer.

One young fellow from the U.S. asked my spouse and I whether he could safely walk to the Mayan ruins, a very pleasant two-kilometre stroll from the town centre along the main road into town. It’s the kind of question you might expect from a Tilley-hatted senior on a carefully arranged private tour of the tourist highlights. The fact that we regularly hear such questions from seasoned backpackers who aren’t easily intimidated demonstrates the extent of the damage being done to Honduras’ tourism economy by the relentlessly grim news of a country wracked by murder and drug trafficking.

There’s so much more to Honduras than that.  I keep saying that, but who can blame my acquaintances from drawing their own conclusions?

I always presumed that were I ever to be living in a tropical country, I could expect a flood of eager friends from the cold North happy for a cheap holiday in the sun. I can’t say that the visitors have been knocking down our door so far, though. With all the countries of the world on offer, a place largely noted internationally for its staggering murder rates just isn’t that appealing.

Could there be a clearer sign of a country in real trouble than one where citizens are murdering citizens at ever-accelerating rates? But you can’t solve a problem without understanding it. Sadly, so little goes into investigation, prosecution, crime analysis and prevention in Honduras that people can only give that little hopeless shrug I’ve seen so often since coming here and hope that God protects them.

Turn around and there's another worthy project

Classroom windows at Copan's largest school

Want a project? I've got a thousand of them. Something about being a gringa in a country for whom gringo-ness summons images of money just seems to bring people running with ideas for how you can help.
And they're great ideas. I visited Escuela Juan Ramon Cueva in Copan Ruinas the other day and had to agree with the teacher that the place really could use a little gringo attention. A thousand students attend the school every day, and all that wear and tear is taking its toll. The roof is falling in on a couple of classrooms, and the big tin techo that shelters the courtyard where the kids play is riddled with holes and broken bits.
It would cost about $1,500 to put a new roof over the courtyard. That's nothing for a visiting group of Americans or Canadians looking to do a good deed, which is how much of the school got built in the first place. (A Rotary Club plaque hangs outside the bathrooms.)

Not long before this classroom ceiling collapses

But for the school, $1,500 is completely out of reach. There's just no place to get that money in Honduras - no government grants, no foundations, no culture of hitting up the wealthy for a big donation. I guess that's why a gringa can't go anywhere without someone hauling her off to see something in a terrible state of disrepair and then mentioning hey, if she knows anybody who might like to help....
After visiting the school I had this brilliant idea about a matchmaking service that connected volunteers from developed countries to small projects in places like Honduras. But then I went on Google and discovered that there are already several dozen such services, pitching equally worthy projects in all the hungry countries of the world.
Still, there's clearly more matchmaking to be done. If the biggest school in this region is reduced to pitching a passing stranger who's just there to admire the concrete work in the bathrooms, there still must be a lot of gaps in the process of connecting willing volunteers from developed countries with worthy projects in distant lands.
A striking number of  volunteer missions come to Honduras from the U.S. and Canada. The "Missions Calendar" featured by Honduras Weekly lists 26 groups from the U.S. alone that are coming to the country to do various good deeds between now and the end of the year. Some will provide medical and dental care; others will build things or share the word of God.
And those are just the missions that got it together to submit their listings to the on-line newspaper. The little non-profit I work for has already had two teams of U.S. volunteers come down for projects since I arrived in January, and another one is coming in November.
The first mission kicked off a major water project in La Cumbre. The second provided desperately needed veterinarian services for the livestock of subsistence farmers. The third will build 50 fuel-efficient wood cooking stoves for some of the poorest families in the country.
Great projects. But could there ever be enough international missions for all the things that need done? My sense is that there's a whole lot of untapped individual goodness in wealthy countries that could be directed toward small projects in the developing world with just a little more coordination. A little bit of time and money from comparatively affluent volunteers  goes a long, long way in poor countries.
And variety? I suspect that whatever strikes your fancy, there's a project that fits.
I've had people pitch me on reroofing a school; sponsoring their child to attend private school;  finding desks; installing bathrooms; redoing a classroom floor; organizing a water project for families in an isolated Copan barrio; building a new house for a hard-scrabble family of five; and buying $5 water jugs so villagers had something to fetch clean water in.
The woman next door is counting on me to buy  more of her handmade jewelry so her family can replace the house that the bank took. Another acquaintance just cut to the chase and asked if I'd give her family $60 every month so life wouldn't be so hard.
As the new gringa in town, all I can do is hear people out and pick the projects most likely to have impact while also being manageable for me and my supporters back home. But I still feel bad every time I see the guy who pitched me on the water project for his barrio. And I would love to be able to hook up the director of Escuela Juan Ramon Cueva with someone who could get her roof project done.
Maybe you? Call me.

Yo entiendo! Yo entiendo!

A Czech proverb: You live a new life for every new language you speak. Now that I'm finally getting a handle on this business of learning Spanish, I couldn't agree more.

Cuso International really took a chance on me when they brought me to Honduras with what can only be described as seriously rudimentary Spanish skills. And for that I will always be in their debt. Of all the things I appreciate about this interesting new life, what I love the most is the worlds that are opening up to me because I'm learning another language.

It hasn't been easy. Despite being immersed in an all-Spanish environment for the last six months, I still need a Spanish-English dictionary close at hand at all times. I have to spend at least 10 minutes a day reading out loud from the San Pedro newspaper or a Spanish novel to sharpen my ear and my pronunciation. 

I still flip through the absolutely essential Barron's 501 Spanish Verbs daily, checking up on some of the trickier conjugations and sorting out the more idiosyncratic rules. I still make mistakes all the time when I speak. I don't understand everything that's being said to me, and group conversations continue to give me headaches.

But it's coming. I've learned a lot of new things in my lifetime and have always noticed that things start falling into place at the six-month mark. And I'm greatly relieved to discover that's true in language acquisition as well. 

Yesterday I managed a long conversation with a man I'd never met before (new people are always the biggest challenge, because everybody has their own way of speaking) that covered topics ranging from the kinds of vegetables they grow in Guatemala, why the water tastes funny there, the murder of some of his family members last year at the hands of a jealous ex, and the dangers of a prickly looking green caterpillar that fell from a tree overhead as we stood talking. 

Just to be chatting like that, with a guy who I would have struggled to exchange simple pleasantries with just a few months ago - that's a wonderful thing. I've been able to manage basic tourist-level queries in Spanish for a while now because of our travels in Mexico, but to be able to share the stories of people's daily lives changes everything about the travel experience.

The compulsory French I took in school probably helped to prepare my brain for learning a new language, and I know that my many years of studying music was good for that as well. I don't think I have a natural aptitude for new languages, however, and am pretty old to be trying to learn one. So consider me heartening proof that it can be done at any age.

I put in some serious study time in the three months before we left Canada and then a month in language school once we arrived. Still, I struggled to understand most of what my co-workers said to me for the first couple of months of my placement. 

I suspect I came across as a pleasant but possibly stupid new volunteer. I never knew what the heck was going on in the staff meetings, and routinely misunderstood what my co-workers at the Comision de Accion Social Menonita were trying to say to me. And how kind of them to keep straight faces when they learned I was there to help with communications. 

But now I've got a Spanish Facebook page going on for CASM. I can go out on field trips and talk to the people we work with. I can even talk to children, whose squeaky little voices and rapid cadence were like Martian-speak to me in the early weeks. I'm able to show my personality more, and no longer feel like the smiling, silent cypher sidelined from the office banter.

I still use Google Translate frequently, but now it's for checking my Spanish rather than translating my English. I still find myself going blank in the middle of a conversation as I grasp for a word that I just haven't learned yet, but am much better at quickly finding an alternate way to say the same thing. 

I would never suggest that I'm fluent yet, of course. But at least I now believe that day will come.

When it's all up to you

One of the things I don’t expect to get used to about life in a poor country is witnessing suffering without being able to do much about it.

No country is free of suffering, of course. Abuse, isolation, cruelty, hunger – there’s nowhere in the world that gets a free pass on such things.

But at least in countries like Canada and the U.S., there’s some organization or government body that you can protest to, some cage to rattle on behalf of whatever suffering person or animal has got your attention. Not here.

Yesterday morning, for instance, I came across a bony, sick horse while on one of my bird rambles in the hills. She had several festering sores on her back that were covered in flies, which she couldn’t even brush away because her tail was snarled around a big thorny stick she’d picked up while wandering through the bushes.

Back in the city where I came from, I can think of five or six different groups I could phone to do something about a sick, abandoned horse. Victoria responds to suffering animals with significantly more compassion than it does to suffering people, so with only a couple of phone calls I could probably get a poor old horse like that a front-page media story, immediate veterinary care and a happy new home before day’s end.

Here, the best I could do was approach the wary horse gently from behind and pull the thorn stick out of her tail. Even if I’d had a halter at the ready and a place to lead her, chances are she has an owner – a lot of the pathetic, starved looking livestock and pets around Copan have owners, many of them rather pathetic and starved-looking themselves – who wouldn’t take kindly to me leading his horse away. And it’s not like there’s an SPCA to lodge a complaint with or to step up with a home for an underfed horse.

I saw a skinny pig a couple weeks ago on one of the subsistence farms I visited through my work, drained by the eight piglets it was nursing. Trust me, you never want to see a skinny pig. Any creature that has just given birth around here – pig, dog, cow or impoverished villager – tends to look pretty skeletal. Virtually every day I see hungry-looking people and animals that could really use a good meal, a hot bath and a few kind words.

But there’s nobody to come to their rescue. There’s me and whatever resources I might be able to bring to a situation in the moment, and any other passing strangers who react in similar ways. I’m certainly not alone in trying to step up to alleviate some of the unnecessary suffering that goes on here, but it still comes down to one person and whatever they're able to do.

There’s no organized animal rescue. No real children’s welfare organization. No shelters or food programs, no rights organizations battling on behalf of neglected horses, exploited women, hungry children, desperate families. In truth, there’s no one to go to battle with anyway, because the Honduras government really doesn’t have much interest in any of this stuff and can handle public shaming with barely a blink.
 My socially minded acquaintances would probably tell me that all anyone can do in this world is “plant seeds” and do the best they can. I’m there philosophically, but such sentiments aren’t much comfort in the moment, when you’re looking at a horse facing death from starvation and infection and all you can do is pull a stick out of its tail. Or press 20 lempiras into the hand of the old, old woman with the arthritic knees. Or take young orphans to a swimming pool every couple of weeks, as if that alone could ever change the course of their sad, challenged lives.

A person has to try, of course. It’s you or nothing, after all. You quickly feel the weight of personal responsibility here in Honduras.

On the upside, it’s always good to know what you’re capable of. In my old life, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have stood within easy kicking distance of a strange horse and pulled on its tail. I doubt I would have pulled five ticks off a neighbourhood dog that paused on our patio for food. I certainly wouldn’t have spent hours in a pool entertaining young children I’m not related to.

Last summer, I came across a wounded seagull lying on a lawn near my house in Victoria. I carried him home in complete confidence that I would find some animal-welfare organization to collect the gull and look after it until it healed, because that’s how it is in the land where I come from. And of course, that’s exactly what happened (thank you, Wild ARC).

I bet the hungry families and neglected animals of Honduras would get quite a rueful laugh out of that story. Pick-up vet service for a dime-a-dozen gull, and they can’t even count on their next meal. I’m grateful for how much we care for our own in Canada, but sometimes it just makes you more aware of how little there is for the rest of the world. 

Finally made the acquaintance of an albanil

It's a happy, happy day - not only did I just meet with a real live albanil just now, but we went up to the Angelitos Felices children's home and actually did a tour of the disastrous bathrooms I'm hoping to fix up.
I was griping rather heavily in my last post about the impossibility of finding an albanil - a mason, the trade that does bathroom work here in Honduras because everything's made out of concrete. But a North Carolina fellow who is with Paramedics for Children and his Copan-connected employee Marco Tulios came through today, introducing me to Nelson Rodriguez.
The four of us went up to Angelitos to take a look at what's needed, which turns out to be total renos in the two bathrooms and a big new water tank on the roof so that the home has an adequate supply. Nelson supervised the bathroom renos at one of the big schools in Copan with 1,000 students, and vows he knows how to build a bathroom that's built to last. And that's exactly what Angelitos needs, what with 30 or 40 kids (some living there permanently, others attending day care) giving those two shabby, inadequate bathrooms a workout every single day.
I'm bracing for the estimate, but am really looking forward to seeing that project underway. Trust me, it only takes one peek into the filthy, broken, waterless "bathroom" that the children use the most to keep a person motivated, whatever the price. At least I'm able to put off my original mattress project for a bit seeing as somebody else stepped up on that front and put in some skinny, plastic-wrapped colchones that will do for now.
Life does indeed take a person in unexpected directions. Here I am, getting ready to supervise bathroom renovations at a foster home in Honduras. Who'd have thought?

And to think I thought it was about the money

Everyone who has lived in a foreign country warns you of the challenges of adjusting to a different culture. I'm living that right now, stuck in the incomprehensible process of looking for someone to do repairs at the children's home I'm involved with.
I know things get done here in Honduras, because I see them happening. But how you make them happen - ah, now there's the question.
At least a dozen men have been occupied for weeks building a massive and intricate rock wall around a house near my workplace. They look like they know what they're doing. Every day I see a constant flurry of construction activity in the centre of Copan Ruinas - buildings coming down, new ones going up, renovations all over the place. And virtually any male Copaneco I've met in my six months here knows how to do basic home repairs or even fix his own vehicle.
So yes, this place has skilled workers. But can I get any of them to call me? Can I get anyone even just to tell me the name of someone who knows how to renovate a bathroom or hang a new door? Nope.
Silly me, I thought the challenge was going to be finding the money for a few badly needed fixups at the Angelitos Felices guardaria . That turned out to be the easy part. What's much, much harder is identifying who will do the work.
Back in Canada, I'd be flipping through the Yellow Pages or talking to friends who'd had work done. Make a couple phone calls, agree on a price, off we'd go. But there's no handy listing of qualified contractors anywhere here in Copan, and nobody in my small circle of acquaintances who appears to be in any hurry to share the secrets of securing a contractor.
Sure, they all tell me they know somebody. But that's part of the culture, too - say what you need to say in the moment to get the person asking you questions to go away. I've learned that in Honduras, just because a person tells you they know somebody who can help doesn't mean they actually do, and it definitely doesn't mean they're going to get that person to call you anytime soon.
So far I've tried my boss, a co-worker, my otherwise-helpful neighbour, my landlord, a Texan who has lived here for 15 years, and a local who the Texan recommended as a trustworthy, get-'er-done kind of guy. Every one of them said they knew somebody, and that they'd get the person to call me.
But the days and weeks pass, and nobody ever calls.
Today, I went to the hardware store and in desperation asked the woman who owns the place - another neighbour of mine - if she knew of anyone who does plumbing work or can hang a door. No, she said. Nothing more than that, just "no." I heard the clerk beside her whisper something into her ear about somebody named Eddie being a possibility, but my neighbour just turned away to serve another customer.
I mean, every day they must have tradespeople coming into that store for supplies. Why can't I have one? How can it be this hard, in a poor country with scary unemployment rates, to find somebody who wants a job?
I remember visiting the zocalo in Mexico City years ago and spotting a huge line of  day labourers along one of the fences, each with a big sign saying what type of work they were good at. I have a new appreciation for such a system. I fear I'm heading for a repeat of how it went when we needed a place to live in Copan, a process that turned out to involve wandering through small convenience stores asking random strangers if they knew of any houses for rent.
And this is just to get somebody to go to the children's home and give me a quote for the work. I shudder to think what challenges might await once the work is actually underway. Another Texan who has been in Copan for 15 years (there appears to be a few of those here) cautioned me to not only get everything in writing but to make the contractor repeat aloud, at least twice, all my instructions for the project. And not to pay for anything in advance.
But I've always said I like a challenge, so best to quit whinging and just get on with it. Flow like water, I keep telling myself: Hit a barrier, flow around it. Maybe I'll stop by the rock-wall project tomorrow and see if anyone knows a plumber. 

Young people step up for Honduran children

Lunch at the pool yesterday, courtesy of Charrissa

I've always known there were exceptional young people doing volunteer work in the challenged countries of the world, but it's been heartening to see so many of them in action here in Copan Ruinas.
Like me, a lot of them have ended up helping out at the children's guardaria here in Copan, where about 40 children are cared for in rough conditions (some live there, others are in day care).
I recently met three young Americans who stumbled upon Angelitos Felices last year when they were on holiday here and then came back this summer for several weeks specifically to volunteer their time at the home every day. Another fellow from Stockton, Calif. was here in early June doing the same thing, overseeing a small construction project at Angelitos in an attempt to rectify at least some of the many structural problems the place has.
The young woman who introduced me to Angelitos four months ago, Emily Monroe, is a particular force for good at Angelitos. She's a go-getter from Pittsburgh who has been in Copan almost two years teaching English at the American-run Mayatan Bilingual School.
She has finished that work but is staying on in the community for another year or so to realize a really big dream of hers: To build a bigger, better home in Copan for children like the kids at Angelitos, one that not only provides food and shelter but more support in all the areas children need help with to grow into healthy, happy and productive adults. (Read more about her project and how you can support her here.)
Emily has played a major role in introducing other travellers to Angelitos and helping them find ways to use their skills to support the children. I've started to think of her as the "hub" for all of us - the one who knows everything that's going on at the place and puts in time to help us connect our collective efforts for maximum impact.
A young woman from New Zealand, Charrissa Taylor, arrived in town recently to spend five months volunteering four days a week at Angelitos, doing child-development activities with the children under five. There'd be no such thing at the home if it weren't for her.
She and Emily are regulars at the every-other-Sunday swims that Paul and I are doing with the kids. And they often bring along other young travellers who don't hesitate to jump into the pool to lead a game of Simon Says with the children, or to swim back and forth with various young ones hanging from their necks (a favourite activity).

Today Emily shared the blog of Kristen Pierce, a young woman from South Carolina who has returned home after a month at Angelitos and is now doing her best to get back here as soon as she can to do more with the children.

 "If an animal craves attention, how much more so a human being?" writes Kristen. "This is what I find to be the most necessary element missing from the children’s lives: love. Everything is a competition, everything a struggle, because there are not enough people to go around to love them all. Each is precious, special, individual, but who is there to find out about it, to really see them?"

It's an honour to meet these young people. They're down here spending their money and their time on challenges that I imagine are far-removed from their own childhood experiences. Some come because their personal faith compels them, but many come simply because they see the vast needs of these children and just can't turn away.

Nobody arranges to bring these young volunteers here. Nobody gives them a handbook on what to do once they arrive. They just listen to their hearts, and lovely things happen.

(Find Emily on Facebook here. And as long as you're there, why not "like" her Casitas Copan page?)

The hard work of being poor

The young woman walks this dirt road twice a day, 90 minutes each way. She carries her nine-month-old baby in her arms while her two other children - seven and four - follow behind. Seven days a week, they walk from their mud house in La Pintada to the park in Copan Ruinas, where they sell corn husk dolls to tourists  for a dollar apiece.
It's a tough way to make a living. On a really good day, the family might sell 10 dolls. But the woman says there are many days when she doesn't sell any. She not only has to contend with the struggling tourist economy in Copan, but compete with all the other women and children from her village who walk to the park every day as well to sell their own corn husk dolls.
Life is hard for the poor in any developing country. But in the second-poorest country in the Western hemisphere, it's brutal. People work long hours for little money, and in many cases start and end each day with walks of two hours or more just to get to their work site.
I regularly run into Rumilda on my bird walks in the hills, a Maya-Chorti woman in her 70s whose daily round-trip journey to sell tortillas or corn in the Copan public market takes her five or six hours. It didn't used to take that long, but her knees are bad now and she has to take a lot of rests along the way.
She's got family in the aldea where she lives, but they're no better off than she is. Everybody has to work, and every precious lempira gets spent. Some development agencies working in Honduras like to talk about the need to encourage a "saving culture" in the country, but I wouldn't count on that idea taking hold anytime soon. People don't have enough money for today, let alone tomorrow.
The per-capita gross domestic product in Honduras is $3,448. Mexicans look rich by comparison at $12,429, and wealthy countries like the U.S. and Canada have rates that are more than 10 times higher than Honduras.
But that $3,400 figure is just what comes out when you add everything up and divide by eight million people. There are many, many Hondurans who earn much less than $3,400 a year. That's particularly true in rural areas, where three-quarters of the country's poorest citizens live. One in four households in Honduras has to get by on the equivalent of $1.25 US a day - less than $500 a year.
I suspect the corn husk doll vendors of La Pintada are in that category. Could there ever be enough tourists to buy all those corn husk dolls clutched in the hands of sad-eyed children dogging the heels of every gringo who passes through the park?
I'm pretty sure the elderly Nueva Esperanza man who walks countless kilometres every day to find firewood to sell is also in that category. His poor old neck is so bent from his heavy load that he can't even look straight ahead anymore - just down to those dirt roads beneath his feet. It's not uncommon to see whole families emerging from narrow trails through the forest with big bundles of wood on their shoulders, scavenged from the increasingly bare-looking hillsides around here to be sold in the street.
A half a block away from our house in Copan, I'm getting to know Doris, the cheerful native of San Pedro Sula who makes the best baleadas in town. She has been in Copan for a year now, and does well enough in her little restaurant to afford the $100 rent for the commercial space and another $100 for her home. But that's only because she works seven days a week, 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. She's been doing that for 30 years.
Stories of deprivation from poor countries are nothing new, of course. But here's what's unsettling about the situation in Honduras: Poverty is worsening. In the last 20 years, the country has seen a 15 per cent increase in the number of people living below the national poverty line. More than two-thirds of Hondurans are now below that line.
That news probably wouldn't come as much of a surprise to the people who live here. They're well aware of how poor they are. But where exactly is this struggling country going? While other Latin American slowly make progress, Honduras is losing ground.

Sources for the statistics in this post: International Human Development Index; U.S.Congressional Research Service; World Vision; International Fund forAgricultural Development; Index Mundi (various sources)

A Question of Faith

"To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible."

So said Thomas Aquinas, a 13^th-century Catholic theologian.  The longer I spend in this very religious country, the more I realize I’m in the latter group, something that’s sinking in even while my respect deepens for the work that people of faith do in struggling countries like Honduras.

I think of myself as an agnostic on all fronts – religion, politics, economic theories, health trends, social practices, you name it. I’ve got beliefs, of course, but a surprising number have changed over my lifetime after I gained more insight into a particular issue and realized I’d been wrong. So I try to keep an open mind about everything now just in case a compelling new argument surfaces that requires me to rethink what I thought I knew.

Religion has been one of the more complicated subjects for me. I was baptised in the United Church as a baby but essentially grew up secular, saying the Lord’s Prayer every day with all the other kids in my class but never really taking much in. At age 14 I had a brief flirtation with a charismatic Four Square movement targeted at young teens, and diligently read my gold Gideon’s Bible cover to cover.  But I stalked out of my first Four Square service in a rage after taking offence when the minister invited us “non-Christians” to come forward to accept God.

I got married in the United Church, as did everybody in Courtenay, B.C. back in the 1970s. But faith never called to me.  Outside of weddings, funerals and my travels in Europe, it’s been a rare thing for me to spend any time in a church.

Still, I never quite closed the door. Some of the purest, best people I’ve ever met have had faith, and witnessing them putting their faith into action filled me with admiration. My years at PEERS Victoria, which at that time was intensely influenced by the philosophies of Alcoholics/Narcotics Anonymous, taught me that faith is sometimes all a person has to hang onto, and is a powerful force for good in terms of motivating others to go above and beyond their job description to help someone.

But always, I was an observer. I liked what I saw, but I didn’t feel personally touched by any of it. I internalized the values at the heart of most faiths, but I just couldn’t buy into the concept of a divine presence watching over us, let alone that crazy story about a virgin birth.

That said, I do think that the world would be a much better place if more of us asked “What would Jesus do?” and acted accordingly. And in the last few years, I’ve had some of my best work/volunteer experiences working alongside people of faith, to the point that I now prefer to work with faith-based organizations. The social sciences have gone a long way toward creating smarter interventions for people in need, but you can’t beat love.

Here in Honduras, religion is just part of life (except in government, where Honduras actually scores lower on the scale of religious influence than Canada). Every Honduran I’ve met attends church, and sprinkles even the most casual conversation with several  “Gracias a Dios” comments. Impoverished Hondurans struggling with unbelievable life challenges still thank God for keeping them alive to fight another day.

Faith also brings a striking number of young Americans to Hondurans, where they give up the comforts of home in the name of doing God’s work. I have to say, I haven’t run into a heck of a lot of committed atheists taking on similar commitments to make the world a better place.

So I’ve been trying to open myself up again, just in case I’ve been wrong about me and faith.  My workplace does an hour-long devotional every Monday morning, and I dutifully reflect on the thoughts about God that my colleagues present. I’ve even hosted a devotional – on faith in action, of course! – and spent much time thumbing through my Spanish-English bible to find the right verses for sharing.

But the more I participate, the more certain I become that I just don’t have the faith gene. Is it because I’m a relentlessly practical person who wastes not a moment dreaming about how things “should” be? Is it because my years in journalism just confirmed to me that there is no plan, simply a rather random series of blunders, brilliance, and plain dumb luck? Maybe all of the above.

Here in Honduras, I see people spending hours attending church every week while their country falls apart for lack of civic engagement and social care. And yet I've also met so many who truly live their faith. In getting to know the poorest people I've ever known, I've also come to understand that when everything about a life is sad, hard and desperate, all you've really got is faith that something better awaits after death. 

A lack of faith is often viewed as akin to losing hope. I disagree. I might not believe in divinity, but I’ve seen what hard work can accomplish. I’ll put my faith in the human spirit.

Where disaster is just a matter of time

Workshop in Guaramal II

The 14 students of Escuela Anardo Napoleon Mata listen attentively as the woman at the front of the one-room school quizzes them about how they'll respond in an emergency.
Will they jostle each other on the way out the door if an earthquake is shaking the mud walls of the school down? "No!" Will they exaggerate how badly injured somebody is should they need to go looking for help? "No!" Do they know who heads up the Comité Emergencia Escolar in their tiny village? "La maestra!"
We're in Guaramal II, one of 20 isolated villages around Copan Ruinas where my organization works. Emergency preparedness is a significant part of the work done by the Comision de Accion Social Menonita, and on this day CASM is here giving workshops to the 15 families who live in Guaramal II on managing risk during a natural disaster.
That there will be a natural disaster sooner or later is a given. This is the rainy season in Honduras, and rain can be torrential in the hills. Villagers are at constant risk of roads, houses, livestock and crops being washed away when the rains come pounding down on the steep slopes where they live, a problem they've inadvertently worsened by cutting down the forests on those slopes to make way for their subsistence corn crops.

Earthquake evacuation practice

And while North Americans can generally assume that somebody will come to save them in the event of a natural disaster, the villagers of Honduras know otherwise. The residents of Guaramal II and several other villages regularly lose contact with the rest of the world whenever the Rio Negro is running high and the makeshift road that cuts across the river bed is impassable. The village is only 25 kilometres away from touristy Copan Ruinas, but it's a long, hard hour to cover that distance, and it might as well be a thousand miles away given that few of the villagers have vehicles anyway.
There's electricity here, but the power failures are frequent in Honduras at the best of times and a certainty in periods of heavy rain. If you're lucky, you might get a weak cell phone signal in Guaramal. But don't count on it.
Through projects funded by Diakonia and Christian Aid - two of the European faith-based organizations that fund a significant amount of the development work in Honduras - CASM has been working to get communities better prepared for when disaster strikes. Hurricane Mitch killed almost 15,000 Hondurans in 1998, and nobody in the country will forget that anytime soon.
In the schools, the preparation takes the form of Comites Emergencias Escolares, headed by the teacher at each village school and focused on getting students to safety as quickly as possible. In the communities, CASM has developed Comites de Emergencia Local (CODEL). Hondurans like acronyms, and so the CODEL committee members focus on the details of EDAN - evaluating damages, analysing needs.
At the workshop this week, CASM employee Carmen Elisa Recarte encouraged people to think about how they'd priorize their response in the event of a disaster.
Would it be more urgent to replace the roof of the school or the roof of the community health centre, for instance? People in the room were slow to respond, but perhaps it was something of a theoretical question in a village that has neither of those things. The "school" is in fact just an out-building that a resident is allowing to be used for classes, and the nearest health centre is a 40-minute drive away.
The group gets the hang of things after a while, though. They agree they'd priorize rescue services for elderly residents and anyone who is incapacitated. They're not sure what they'd do about contaminated water; that's an ongoing problem in the village at the best of times. But they do know the name of the community leader charged with heading up evacuation and rescue, and they've got a plan for getting villagers to safety. That's more than they had before.
Like every village workshop I've been to in Honduras, this one is interrupted regularly by restless toddlers, crying babies and many chickens and dogs wandering through. But the audience seems to have better attention skills than I do, and by the end of the afternoon they are very clear on why they need a disaster-management plan: To save lives.
In a country where so many lives hang on the thinnest of threads, that's challenge enough.

It's Hokey Pokey Time

Fellow blogger, activist and musician Ross K - better known to his many blog fans as The Gazetteer - asked me to post a video of me and the kids from Angelitos Felices doing the Hokey Pokey.
Ross has been a great supporter of Paul and I on our adventures in Honduras, and just the fact that he puts my blog on his blog list brings a lot more readers to my site. I've been promising him a video of me playing the accordion here in Honduras that I've yet to make good on, so I felt a responsibility to get Hokey Pokeying without too much delay.
So here it is, Ross, from me to you: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDZJwNOKMB8. And thanks again for being such a good blog buddy. 

Development aid for the wealthy

 Development dollars understandably target the poorest people in countries like Honduras. It's human instinct to want to provide help where the need is most intense.
But the more I get to know the scene here, the more I think the country needs a project that targets wealthy Hondurans. I just don't see how there will ever be enough development dollars to lift this country out of its problems unless the rich people and the government here shift their thinking.

What do rich Honduras...

What makes the rich people of the world assume some responsibility for helping the less fortunate? Some just have big hearts, sure. But mostly they pony up either because they're taxed as a condition of living and working in a particular country, or because they see a benefit from donating.
In Honduras, there's little evidence that eitherof those motivations exist. In a country that essentially operates as an aristocracy, rich Hondurans tend to be connected people who are much less likely to have to pay taxes than their impoverished counterparts. There's no system for charitable tax receipts; even the system for ascertaining charitable status for an organization seems a bit suspect.

...owe to the poor?

And if there's peer pressure among rich Hondurans to give to the less fortunate - or even fund community projects - it's low-profile to the point of invisibility. Every now and then you read of somebody forking over a donation to a hospital, but you don't see the big gifts of parkland, theatres, memorial classrooms or grand bequests like you do in the U.S. and Canada.
So what you end up with is the rich living up there in the creamy layer, with their mansions and their Hummers and their armed guards, while down below the big aid organizations from developed countries in lands far away dole out hundreds of millions of dollars a year so that the nearly 70 per cent of Hondurans living in poverty can eke out the most pathetic of livings.
Something's really wrong with that picture. Thank God for development dollars - in many cases literally, seeing as much of the development work in Honduras is done by faith-based non-profits operating on funds from Christian aid organizations in Europe. But surely foreign aid is meant to be an add-on to a country's own efforts to set itself right, not the sole source of development funds.
 How can more rich Hondurans be encouraged to engage in the work of bringing Honduras out of  chronic poverty? It's galling to see foreign countries doing all the heavy lifting with so little help from the people who have done very well in Honduras.
I think it's best if rich people talk to rich people about things like this, so in my dream project I'd gather the wealthy philanthropists from other countries to create a strategy for engaging the big earners in Honduras. Let's start with a committee made up of a few of the people that Barron's lists as the 25 most effective givers. They've clearly got it going on.
Of course, you can't just show up in a foreign country demanding that rich people give more money to charity. The plan will need to be highly strategic and long-term. But wealthy philanthropists are all about strategic and long-term. I'm sure they've all thought long and hard about their own motivations for giving, and could be invaluable in crafting messages and incentives that might pry some lempiras out of the hands of Honduras's millionaires.
Meanwhile, democratic governments in Canada,  the U.S. and Europe can do their part by applying a little friendly government-to-government pressure.
They do it all  the time when the mood suits them, sometimes by threatening to withhold aid money (not that I'm in favour of that, seeing as the only ones who get hurt are the poor sods at the bottom of the economy), sometimes by making noises about emerging markets and the need to have exemplary partners. What would be so wrong with using a little international bullying to get the Honduran government to tax its wealthy citizens as well as its poor ones, and to ease up on the free ride it gives to the country's most powerful corporations?
For one thing, it's only fair. No country should get away with heavy reliance on development dollars from other countries while its richest citizens are free to pocket enormous wealth without so much as a guilty second thought.
For another, a country trying to climb out of the hole solely based on project dollars from foreign donors is doomed to failure. Short of revolution - and we all know how touch-and-go that can be - how can a country ever stabilize its economy and build a better future without engaging the people with all the power and money?
A development project for the rich and powerful. Now there's an idea whose time has come.

On-line donations for Angelitos now possible - and thanks for asking!

Thank you to all the people who have been asking me how they could help with the work Paul and I are doing to try to support the 40 children being cared for at the Angelitos Felices foster home here in Copan Ruinas. I've now set up a page through gofundme.com that sets out our specific fundraising goals and allows people to donate on-line. Sorry I can't offer a tax receipt, though - that's solely an option for registered charities in Canada and the U.S. (and if you'd prefer that route, please check out our Cuso fundraising page).
The gofundme site takes an admin fee of about 8.5 per cent on donations - 5 per cent off the top, 3.5 per cent through PayPal for the service of being able to collect and withdraw on-line donations. If  you don't like the idea of that, you can always send a cheque to my mother's house and save the admin fee - just drop me a line at jodypatersonmobile@gmail.com and I'll send you her address!
I'm new at this and very conscious that accountability is a big issue when I'm taking other people's money. You have my promise that every penny beyond the site admin fees will go to the children of Angelitos Felices. There's now a big button up there on the right-hand side of my blog that connects to the new site - I'll be posting lots of photos and updates to keep people informed and connected. 

I can see (slightly) more clearly now

How can I help? Such a big question. Still puzzling over that one as we head into our seventh month in this challenged country, but today I finally felt like some of the pieces might be starting to come together. 

We came down here with Cuso International, which emphasizes "capacity-building" when placing volunteers. In other words, you're not here to do the day-to-day work of the organization you're placed with, but to put your skills to work helping them do their work more effectively. The goal is to leave the organization you work with in a stronger position than before you came. 

I think that same approach is going to stand me in good stead for my projects on the side in Copan. There are always going to be times when what's needed is simply an extra pair of hands, but if I can tackle some of the bigger stuff with an eye to the long-term benefits that will last after I'm gone, I think that would be the best use of my two years here. 

I've spent many hours puzzling over how I was going to do that for the foster home I was introduced to back in April, Angelitos Felices. I go there pretty much every Sunday and have some fun with the kids, and I recognize that counts for something. But when you're standing in the midst of children living in a place like that - no beds, rag-tag clothes that never fit, barely enough food - you can't help but want to do better than just popping around once a week to sing several rounds of the Hokey Pokey and hand out crayons. 

The bed thing really bothers me, and I had a big plan to find hospital mattresses that would be durable, easy to clean and a better alternative than the poor little guys sleeping on the dirty concrete floor like they do now.  That seemed like something I could do that would make a lasting difference in the lives of these kids.

But I haven't gotten anywhere on my inquiries. So I've now moved on to Plan B, which involves buying regular foam mattresses that are available here in Copan and wrapping them in this super-durable plastic they sell in San Pedro Sula for making biodigestors. I figure if there's a plastic that can withstand intense Honduran sunlight and the constant heat of fermenting cow manure - the sausage-shaped biodigestors are used on small farms here to transform manure into methane gas for cooking - it should be tough enough to handle 30 kids and all the urine, poo, vomit and fidgety hands they can muster for several years. 

On the up side, I can probably do the project for less than $1,000 if I do it this way, compared to $1,000 for each hospital mattress even if I did get so lucky as to get even one mattress company to reply to my inquiries. On the down side, I am imagining how it's going to go when the time comes for me and my partner to wrestle 30 foam mattresses into heavy-duty plastic (which handily comes in tube form) and seal the ends using a candle. Not pretty. 

I think I can also scrounge around for money for a ceramic-tile floor for the big, empty room where the kids spend 90 per cent of their time. Right now it's dirty, painted concrete - hard to clean, scabby-looking, and definitely worsening the general grimness of the place. It's not like a new floor will turn anybody's lives around, but a better living environment for kids that spend so many hours trapped inside seems like a good investment. 

Perhaps there's also an opportunity to do some relationship-building between Angelitos and the international medical community that runs clinics here, because there sure are a lot of  medical needs among the kids at the home. The public health care here is scant and somewhat sketchy, and chronic health conditions go untreated all the time because nobody has the money for medications.

And then there's short-term stuff I can help with: Swims at the pool every couple of weeks; crafts and songs; help with staples like eggs, cheese, laundry soap, disposable diapers. That's not really capacity-building, because the goods stop coming as soon as I'm no longer here. But I have a secret hope that I can rebuild some of the broken connections between the home and the Copan community along the way that will carry on once my Honduran adventure wraps up. When people see you doing good deeds, sometimes it puts them in more of a mood for such things as well. 

Then there's corporate sponsors. After my lack of progress on finding a mattress company that would even send me so much as a thanks-for-your-inquiry email - and all I wanted was a chance to buy their product -  - I'm keeping my expectations in check on this front. But still, you'd think that a company like Nestle's or Kimberley Clark (respective makers of Nido milk products and Huggies diapers, dominant brands here) might have a heart for kids with absolutely nothing. At any rate, it never hurts to ask. 

I'm looking into on-line fundraising options, like gofundme.com, in order to have a slightly more professional donating option for some of my friends who want to help. Right now all I can do is suggest they send a cheque made out to me to my mother's address in Victoria, which seems quite lame. It's nice people trust me to do the right thing, but I'd really like to be able to demonstrate more accountability and get more specific about the projects that are catching my eye. 

Thank you to the readers with experience in some of this work, who've been very generous with their advice.  Little by little, a plan is taking shape.

 

Seasons change but the warm days never end

There is something of an eternal summer feeling to life in Honduras, which suits me just fine. I spent much of my Canadian summers in a state of mild anxiety, trying to pack as much outdoor time as possible into the scant weekends when the days were warm enough for the beach. No more.

But while the warm days are virtually a constant here in Copan, the seasons do change. They bring different birds, different bugs, more or less leaves on the trees, a different feel to the day. 

Copanecos consider this time of year to be "winter," because it rains more. But whatever they want to call it, it's summer.  The flowering trees are in full bloom, the vegetation is lush and green. Young birds are everywhere, having hatched in the last couple of months and grown big enough to be testing out their wings and making those distinct and somewhat abrasive feed-me calls common to young birds the world over. 

The lizards clearly come into their own in the rainy season as well. The little barking geckos that hang around in the rafters of our house appear to be year-round residents, but since May I've seen and heard a lot more of the larger varieties skittering around in the gravel and dead leaves at the edges of the dirt roads I walk. But the dinosaur-like crested fellows that occasionally darted across the road on their hind legs have vanished, so I'll have to presume they prefer the dry months of February, March and April.

There is a particular type of cicada that sings in the trees in the runup to Semana Santa in March or April, and another kind that heralds the start of the rainy season in mid-May. Lately I've been hearing another kind with a higher pitch to its song, perhaps a variety that ushers in this pleasant period during July and August  that the Copanecos call "summer in the middle of winter." 

The days leading up to the rainy season also brought out an extraordinary number of small black and tan beetles, which I enjoyed until their numbers grew so large that I couldn't put a foot down near my desk at work without crushing one. They're gone now, as are the the leafcutter ants that a month ago were diligently carting bits of leaves past our front door every night. 

We arrived here in January, and I briefly thought Copan was going to be a place with cooler temperatures and more drizzle, because that was what that time of year tends to bring. But then the heat hit in mid-February and we went weeks without rain, and April brought a dry, intense heat that had us sweating through long, restless nights and rushing out to buy fans for our house and our overheated computers.

The rainy season arrived in mid-May and the brown hills were suddenly lush and green. I'd almost convinced myself that Copan was a place without many mosquitoes, but soon learned that's only true in the dry months. It has motivated me to keep taking those nasty, bitter malaria pills, and to hope that the locals are right in their assurances that dengue fever is a problem only on the coast.

If you're a birder like me, you also mark the changing seasons by what you see through your binoculars. The Montezuma oropendolas were splendid when we first got here, making their crazy yodelling calls and building magnificent dangling nests at the tops of the tallest trees. They've since moved on to wherever oropendolas go in July, but now the corn fields are full of white-collared seed eaters,  lesser goldfinches and grosbeaks, and the trees along the river are full of kiskadees and flycatchers.

May and June were fine months to see turquoise-browed motmots, exotic fellows with tails like cuckoo clocks. Copanecos know them as guardabarrancos for their habit of nesting in dirt cliffs. I spent several happy weeks seeing them on almost every bird walk. 

The sightings have become rarer in recent days, but in the last month I've seen collared aracaris twice. This place used to be thick with black vultures, but their ranks seem to have thinned lately. As for green herons, I need only walk a short distance to the sewage settling ponds, where they appear to be year-round residents.

Nobody seems to have a name for the season that starts around October, so I guess we'll see what that brings. People here in Copan consider that time of year to be frio, but that just means temperatures in the mid-20s. Hurricane season will be wrapping up right around then on the coast - could be the perfect time for that trip to Roatan we've been talking about. 

Fall will be settling in around Victoria about that time, and I will think fondly of that nice sharpness that the mornings get as a Canadian autumn takes hold.  But then I'll remember how Novembers tend to play out. I suspect a change of insects and another warm day will look pretty good at that point. 

Ignorance persists in absence of options

I knew I wasn't in Kansas anymore when I read a story not too long ago in one of the Honduran papers in which the leading medical expert on mental illness in the country described bipolar disorder as a "split personality," with one personality prone to committing violent acts. 

Yesterday, there was a column in La Prensa defending the government's 2005 decision to prohibit gay people from adopting children. The writer noted it was a well-known fact that if gay people raise children, the children often turn gay themselves.

Uh-huh. Such blatant falsehoods have started me reflecting on how other countries managed to grow past similarly uninformed and harmful points of view. You need the will, of course, but you also need the mechanisms for combating ignorance. Honduras is really lacking on that front. 

In Canada, we like to gripe about our governments and their lack of attention to the things we care about. Admittedly, virtually any social progress requires much pressuring of the government of the day and a dogged determination to keep an eye on them forever lest they backtrack as soon as you're not looking. But at least it's possible in Canada. In Honduras, not so much. 

Take the examples of mental illness or gay rights, for instance. It wasn't so long ago in Canada that many people thought about those issues with the same level of ignorance that's common in Honduras. 

So how did that change? As representatives of those groups can attest, it's a long, slow process that is at constant risk of being subverted by even a single high-profile event that sidetracks a nervous public (the tragic beheading committed by a mentally ill man on a Greyhound bus a couple years ago comes to mind ). Eradicating stereotypes and prejudice even in progressive countries like Canada will always be something of a work in progress.

 But having governments that are at least a little susceptible to voter pressure and persuasion is critical to such efforts, as are public forums where you can safely raise a contrary opinion. Here in Honduras, you won't even find a letters-to-the-editor section in the newspapers, let alone anything resembling a responsive government. How do you get traction for social change in the absence of mechanisms for broadening the public conversation and ultimately turning up the heat on government?

I don't know where things like mental-health awareness and gay rights fall on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, but almost 70 per cent of Hondurans exist at the bottom of that hierarchy. It could be that the struggle for survival simply doesn't leave enough time in the day for worrying about human rights and seriously flawed views on mental illness. And like I say, there's nobody to complain to anyway.

But if life is incredibly difficult for the average Honduran, I can't even imagine what it must be like for those living with mental illness. The death rates must be phenomenal. 

 I'm told there's a big asylum in San Pedro Sula where people are locked up for what is often probably a lifetime. What must conditions be like inside there? That comment about split personality made by the Honduran bipolar expert was in reference to a story about a mentally ill man who had killed his father and was about to be jailed for life in an iron cage so small he couldn't even stand up in it. 

As for being openly gay in Honduras, forget it. People live deep in the closet,  rightly fearing the violence and public vilification they'd endure otherwise. In 2005, Honduras even went so far as to amend its constitution to ban gay marriage and specifically prohibit gay people from adopting or having custody of a child. 

I wish I was naive enough to still believe that international sanctions on things like this would be enough to bring a country around. 

But such fights are never won from the top down. Canada recognizes gay rights because thousands of brave Canadians risked it all over many decades to speak out, and an independent judiciary and eventually a reluctant government pulled alongside. Canada has (mostly) humane and research-based strategies for the treatment of mental illness because millions of families endured and endured and endured, and courageously told their stories so that others would understand.

Maybe the day will come for Honduras, too. Until then, it's the dark ages. 

All the news that's negative and scary

As part of my communications work for the Comision de Accion Social Menonita, I decided I'd do an English-language Facebook page for CASM. I figured I could highlight some of the work of the organization as well as share stories about Honduras that offered an alternative to the endless murder-and-mayhem headlines that come out of this country.
Alas, it is unbelievably hard to find stories about Honduras that are even neutral, let alone positive. I've never seen a country in more dire need of good PR than this place. I mean, there are definitely problems here, but the single story line coming out of Honduras really does a disservice to this poor country.
As if it wasn't bad enough to be branded the "murder capital of the world" due to all the violence in the drug trade here, it seems that barely a month can go by without some other totally weird tragedy putting Honduras into the world's headlines.
Since we arrived in January, there has been a massive prison fire that burned up 365 inmates, a massive fire that wiped out a huge public market in Tegucigalpa, at least two really ugly prison riots, and that nasty business with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency in which four apparently innocent people were gunned down. And this past week brings news that 21 people in Siguatepeque have died from drinking tainted alcohol.
Horrible things do happen more often in poor countries, of course. But the problem for Honduras is that the only stories that make it into the media are the horrible ones. It gives such a distorted view of the country, not to mention scares the hell out of my family. It even scares away aid agencies - like the Peace Corps, which cited security concerns in its decision to withdraw more than 150 volunteers from Honduras a few weeks before we arrived.
And what must it do to the people of Honduras? As this study notes, 25 per cent of Hondurans surveyed about strategies that might bring about positive change in governance in their country believed that nothing could change the situation. Surely that's the gravest impact of all of relentlessly negative news: People lose hope that anything will ever improve.
The poor country has taken quite a hit in tourism ever since the 2009 coup (yeah, that didn't help the image either). Walk around Copan Ruinas and you can see that the town has all the infrastructure for a much bigger tourism economy than actually exists now. Ever since we got here we've been hearing from local merchants that things were slow but maybe that would change in June. But June came and went without much of a bump in tourism.
And who can blame the tourists if they do pick a different destination? If all you know about Honduras is what you hear in the news, Hawaii starts to look pretty good.
All I can tell you is that there's much more to the story of Honduras. It's not Canada, but it's not the Killing Fields either. I wouldn't be here if it was, wandering freely and comfortably hither and yon and even inviting my kids and grandkids down for a visit.
I'll keep looking for the stories that tell another side to this beleaguered country. In the meantime, keep an open mind.