The more things change...

Cuso International brought me to Honduras to do communications work for a Honduran non-profit organization, a job that is both strikingly similar and completely different to communications work in Victoria.

On the one hand, communications is ultimately about finding effective ways to talk to the people you need to talk to, whether you’re in Honduras, Canada, East Timor or Uzbekistan.  But in Canada that largely means focusing your efforts on those with money or influence, whereas in Honduras the whole game changes because the country doesn’t have a responsive government or much of a culture of philanthropy.

One thing that is identical, however, is proposal-writing. That might not be in the job description when you take a communications position, but trust me, you’ll end up doing it sooner or later if you’re working with non-profits. I’m well familiar with that soul-destroying process after seven years of working with Canadian non-profits, and now have enough proposals under my belt here in Honduras to report with confidence that it’s an equally miserable task here.

Non-profit organizations have to submit proposals constantly to try to sustain their funding. They’re essentially sales pitches shaped around some undertaking that a particular funder has in mind. At its essence the practice is like bidding for a building contract, except that non-profits are mostly working on less tangible things, like better societies.

 If you’re smart, you spend a lot of time reading what the funder says in the proposal call before you begin writing, so you can better match your pitch to the things they’re identifying as important.

They all have their areas of interests – youth, women, animals, disease reduction, a thousand themes. But there’s also a kind of flavour-of-the-month practice that’s very common. Whatever subject is globally “in” - human trafficking, literacy, protecting kids from gangs, crystal meth – tends to be a  theme across many different funders, at least until the next new thing comes along.

In Honduras, the big themes right now are around reducing the risks that communities face due to climate change, helping people to be better farmers and stewards of the environment, and developing more active, engaged citizens aware of their rights. My organization is working on all those fronts, as are many of the other non-profits here in the country dependent on international funding.

All noble pursuits, of course.  But none are short-term undertakings. Adapting to climate change in some cases in Honduras will mean convincing people who have farmed the land for centuries to look for new kinds of work. You can’t stop Honduras’s rather horrifying rate of deforestation until you do something about the almost five million people living in poverty who cut down trees because they need the wood to cook with and the space to grow corn. You can’t exercise your rights in a country where government just does what it wants.

Change takes time, yet the bulk of project funding is for a year or two. And while the current themes are important areas to focus on, many other equally important needs are neglected due to the big funders all shopping for the same kinds of projects.

You get tangled in all of that pretty quickly when you’re writing a proposal, in Honduras or anywhere. You know what the real needs are, but you face either having to find a way to squeeze them into the shape of the funding or give up on trying to address them. You know that a project will in fact take a generation to be fully realized, yet you’re writing like you’re going to make it happen in a year.

And the corker: You do all that work – and believe me, every proposal is a lot of work – with no certainty that anything will come of it. You twist yourself into knots trying to come up with something creative that the funder will like, you draw tables and create spreadsheets and fill in the squares of yet another week-by-week work plan, and more often than not you don’t get the money anyway. (Or worse, the funder collects all the submissions and then decides not to go through with the project.)

One particularly rude practice of a few international funders here in Honduras is to issue calls for proposals with a deadline that’s less than a week away.  What do they think, that a scratchy little Honduran non-profit has people just sitting around waiting for a proposal call to fill their day? No, they’re out busting their butts trying to achieve all those other unrealistic goals they had to promise in the last proposal.

Anyway.  Perhaps the whole thing’s just a bit fresh in my mind right now, having just gone through an intense period of proposal madness this very week that involved dreaming up a year’s worth of activities on a ridiculously tight deadline with the knowledge that in all likelihood, the project will do little to solve what ails Honduras . I guess I should just treat it as a valuable cultural learning experience: In any language, in any country, proposal-writing is a total drag.

And while any money is better than nothing to a non-profit, you just can’t solve a complicated country’s problems this way.

Remembering the dead

It’s not often you’d describe a graveyard as a beehive of activity, but the cemetery here in Copan has been these past couple of days as the locals mark Dia de Los Difuntos.

Every Latin American country celebrates the Day of the Dead – or Day of the Deceased, as it’s known here – in their own way.  In Honduras it’s a time for heading down to the cemetery to do a big cleanup of your loved one’s grave. There can’t be much budget in a poor country for maintenance staff at cemeteries, so it’s a chance for family members to spruce things up while honouring the memory of the mothers, fathers, grandparents and children buried there.

The Copan cemetery is a five-minute walk from where I live, and I headed over early yesterday morning to check out the activities. Some 15 families were already hard at work. Many more would come over the course of the next two days.

Some families just needed to freshen up the flowers a little or clear out a few weeds. But others were in the midst of full-on construction projects – putting a new roof on a tomb, repainting, finishing off a monument’s ceramic trim that they hadn’t been able to afford up until now.

I was a bit apprehensive about showing up with my camera like a big, gawky tourist. I contemplated trying to sneak in a few shots, but thought that would be just plain disrespectful. So I asked people if it would be all right if I took a photo of them working. Everybody was completely fine with that – happy, even. 

 I wandered around the small cemetery for longer than I intended, feeling moved by the love and family connections that had brought everybody there.  Whether they were tending to beautifully kept mausoleums or teeny crosses hand-painted with a family member’s name, all of them were there to remember somebody who’d meant a great deal to them. Every culture does that in their own way, but something about seeing a man on his hands and knees pulling long grass away from his wife’s grave really adds to the poignancy of the act.

We tend toward a more sanitized version of remembering in Canada. My father’s ashes are in a beautifully kept cemetery in Victoria marked with a perfectly lettered memorial plaque. I know my mother was hurt that I never wanted to go to the memorial park to “visit” him when we lived in Victoria, but it never felt like he was really there.

But walking past the Copan grave of Fanny Carolina Leonor Garin, dead at the tender age of 28, watching the husband she’d left behind lovingly restoring her grave to a vivid shade of turquoise– well, I felt her there. I could feel Juan Antonio Lopez Jacinto in the scrawl of his name painted on one end of his tomb. The dead were alive again in the faces of their cheerful family members, who were busily scrubbing and sanding and reminiscing about the people buried beneath their feet.

A Canadian memorial park is much, much tidier and greener than the overgrown, dusty plot of land where Copanecos bury their dead. Our dead in Canada exist amid a kind of hushed tranquility that I associate with funeral homes and carefully managed sorrow.

But something about the sheer disorder of the Copan cemetery feels so genuine. Death is messy and sad. All the well-trimmed and verdant landscaping of a typical North American cemetery can’t change that.

It was practically like hearing people’s thoughts as I wandered through the graves in Copan.

My neighbour was there, mopping the floor of the mausoleum where the family had buried their young son after his murder. Two children sat atop their grandfather’s tomb nearby, sorting through the plastic flowers they’d brought to fancy things up. An elderly man bent near his wife’s grave, silently sharpening his machete to take another crack at the saplings pushing through the soil. Their labours seemed like such a wonderful expression of love.

May eternity find me in a similar place one day, asleep among the wild things until the people who love me return to make me real again.

Dog days in Copan

I have a new appreciation for the politics of dogs since moving to Honduras. Our beloved dog Jack taught me a lot about the ways of dogs during 14 years of enjoying his company, but I'm seeing a whole new side to them now that I live in a place where they largely set their own rules.
The most obvious downside to life as a Copan dog is that virtually all of them look like they're starving to death. Whatever traces of wolf remain in the domesticated dog of today, the ability to hunt down food appears to have been reduced to a desperate rooting through garbage in search of  scant leftovers of tortillas and beans. Cats may  turn feral quite easily in the absence of people, but dogs just end up looking sad and hungry.
On the upside, a Copan dog does have its freedom. Street dogs and owned dogs alike wander wherever they like. They roam late into the night, barking and howling whenever the urge strikes them and clearly spending very little time worrying how their human neighbours feel about that.
 They can poo without shame on any surface that strikes their fancy. They can stretch out for a nap on a hot bit of sidewalk with no concern that passers-by will do anything more than perhaps give them a kick to move them out of the way. They can mate with abandon in town and country alike, and have as many litters of puppies as a short street-dog life allows (although all the skin-and-bone pregnant females around here does hint that this pleasure is most enjoyed by the town's abundant population of unneutered males).
Anyone who has a heart for animals will start feeding the dogs of Copan sooner or later. For me, it started with a handful of dog food and a few leftovers set out on the front stoop at night, and has grown to the point where we now go through five pounds of dog food every 10 days.
 One of the dogs actually scratches at the back door now if I don't get the morning rations out on time. Another, who we've affectionately dubbed Black Stink Dog, has the disconcerting habit of just staring pleadingly through the glass until I notice her.
It's through these daily feedings that I'm getting to know how it is for dogs when they make the rules.
 A newcomer to Copan might presume that if somebody is putting food out in a town where virtually every dog is chronically hungry, that would soon attract every dog from miles around. But no. There are dog rules that appear to limit which dogs are allowed to walk unharassed down a specific street, so the Jody Paterson-Paul Willcocks feeding station can be frequented only by those that the Dog Politic allows.
I wouldn't presume to know all the rules of those politics. Certainly the fact that a dog lives on your street appears to be a major factor in whether it can feel free to snack at your door. But I'm noticing that a dog in that position is also able to invite other dogs to participate in the banquet.
The first time I saw this was when the little brown dog we feed all the time brought down the bigger shepherd mix that lives in the same household about half a block away from our house.
One day the little dog had already been by to eat, but ducked through the gate a second time in order to scratch at the back door as notification that her buddy was patiently waiting on the front step. I would have dismissed this event as coincidence had it not started to happen every time Big Black Dog (oh, we're clever with the naming conventions in this household) showed up hungry.
More recently, we started feeding Black Stink Dog, who was ridiculously thin and appeared to be nursing puppies when she first showed up. She was so skittery that at first I could barely touch her ear through the gate without making her jump back, but she's quickly turned into an affectionate and cheerful dog able to make herself impossibly compact for the purposes of squeezing between the lattice of the gate to enjoy a meal in the safety of the enclosed patio.
She put on weight quickly with a regular daily meal. After three weeks of consistent morning meals and a little affection, she brought around a pathetic looking bag-of-bones dog the other day and let him have first crack at the bowl of food. When he was halfway through the bowl, she gave a growl and he skulked off, leaving her to eat the rest. She brought him around again today, but this time let him have as much as he wanted.
A couple of days later, Big Black Dog did the same thing. He showed up with a sorry-looking dog covered in sores and stepped back to let the sick dog eat first.
Just like humans, things go better for the free-range dogs of Copan that understand social interaction. The tourists who feed street dogs in the town park are naturally going to be drawn to the ones wagging their tails and fixing their big, hopeful eyes on the kebab the gringo just purchased at the food kiosk. The dogs too wary to interact comfortably with people - badly abused as puppies, perhaps? - are always the skinniest and most disease-ridden, which no doubt just makes it even less likely that people share food with them.
I could see that a person could get very angry with how it is for the dogs of Copan. The more I see of them, the more I'm convinced that the dream life for most dogs is to have a human who both feeds and loves them.
When it rains, I see the longing in the face of the little brown dog that is our most frequent visitor, who likes nothing better than to take shelter in our house during a downpour and stretch out for a sleep under the kitchen table. Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.
But then the sun comes out, and off she goes to chase down whatever interesting smell has caught her attention out there in the streets. For better or worse, she's free to go wherever her nose leads.
It's a dog's life. But I'm not so sure she'd want to give it up now. 

When the culture no longer serves you well, change it

One of the workshops at the Conference on Honduras last week was on cultural differences, a subject I have much interest in now that I live here. It gave me lots to think about, including if there are times when a country really ought to consider whether certain aspects of its culture are hindering progress.

That probably sounds like a very colonial thing to say. History is littered with countries scarred by invasive cultures that arrived uninvited and proceeded to try to change everything.

I´m not endorsing that practice. But surely there´s no harm in a population checking in with its culture from time to time to see if it´s still serving the country well.

Understanding the less obvious aspects of Honduras culture is still a work in progress for me. I´ve found the country to be surprisingly welcoming and warm to a foreigner who´s only now getting a grip on the language. But I can´t say as I´ve warmed to everything about life in Honduras.

What I heard at the workshop reinforced some of my personal experiences: That the culture hates conflict to the point that lies are acceptable if they´re done to avoid an unpleasant situation; that nothing is a sure thing even if you´ve got a signed document saying that it is (the woman doing the workshop called that a “high context” versus a “high contract” culture); that hierarchies are to be respected even when the actions of the higher-ups in fact ought to land them a smack upside the head.

Experiencing a different culture is one of the things I like most about travel, especially the .  unspoken aspects that aren´t written down anywhere but nonetheless govern the way people in the country live their lives. Travel is an excellent reminder  that there are many ways to live a life.

And if people are for the most part healthy, happy, hopeful and productive in a particular country, then clearly the culture is working. There´s no “right” culture in a world where everybody does things a little differently.

But there´s the rub for Honduras. Almost 70 per cent of the population lives in poverty, and nobody´s happy about that. The rich are stinking rich and reluctant to share. The public school system is plagued by teacher strikes, poorly equipped, and inadequate for preparing young Hondurans for these global times.  The public health-care system is a mess, on every front from the quality of medical care to the timely distribution of medicines.

The roads are disastrous. The murder rate is among the highest in the world. The justice system is almost non-existent. The spectre of widespread hunger and death is never far from view, especially now that climate change is threatening the corn and bean crops that sustain so many rural families. The population is deeply unhappy, their discouragement revealed in national polls that routinely find the vast majority have given up on hoping for a better day.

With the exception of Haiti, Honduras is virtually alone in Latin America in its decline on virtually every front that citizens of the world use to gauge a happy, healthy life – income level, employment, overall health, infant mortality, education, stable and democratic governance. So you´d have to say that things aren´t exactly going well here.

Culture can´t be blamed for all of that, of course. But neither can it be dismissed entirely when thinking about how to improve things in Honduras. You could blame all the country´s problems on the government, or drug trafficking, or the CIA. But you still find yourself back at the same root problem  - that if there are ever going to be improvements, the people who live here are simply going to have to get past some of their cultural tendencies and do things differently.

If you don’t challenge the hierarchy even when it´s doing stupid stuff, for instance, it continues to do stupid stuff. Simmering resentment of poor decisions from on high also breeds  passive-aggressive behavior, in which people agree on the surface but meanwhile register their unhappiness by withdrawing co-operation.

 I see that frequently in my workplace. It´s a huge hindrance to productivity, and shuts out the people whose input could have made all the difference in resolving a problem or building a better widget.  In the big picture, that cultural quirk also means government institutions aren´t held accountable, even while public disillusion grows.

If contracts are viewed as things to be honoured only when you personally know the people involved (that´s what “high context” means), that´s a significant hindrance to doing business with anyone from outside your personal network. Perhaps there was a time when Hondurans could afford to do business only with the people in their personal network, but it´s long passed at this point.

As for the culture of saying whatever comes to mind in the moment to avoid conflict – well, that has to be revealed as the recipe for conflict that it really is. When I had a conflict with a Copan bank a few months back, my happiness with the cheery bank personnel who assured me that I need only  come back tomorrow to have all my problems solved wore thin pretty quickly when I returned the next day to discover that it wasn´t true. I can´t imagine how frustrating that cultural practice must be to people caught up in much grander problems.

There´s much to love about the many cultures of the world. There´s much to love about Honduras, as I´m reminded in this very moment as I hear my neighbours gathering outside for the easy conversations that go on night after night on the street where we live.

But when a country´s culture is hurting its citizens more than it helps, something´s got to give. Sure, the gringos have to adapt, but a country losing ground on all the measures that count needs to consider its own role in perpetuating problems. Some things we call culture are really just bad habits.

So many big hearts, so many starfish

I've spent most of the last three days at the Conference On Honduras, an annual event that has grown into something of a Copan institution after relocating here from Washington, DC a decade ago. It was a heartening reminder of what people can accomplish when they care.
The conferences are  put together by a volunteer board headed up by Marco Caceres, editor of the on-line English-language newspaper Honduras Weekly. The yearly event started out as a way to showcase the many groups and individuals working at the grassroots level to tackle the complex problems of the country, but it works equally well as a forum for sharing stories, miseries and miracles from the front lines.
What brings people to a developing country to try to make a difference? Every person working abroad would have a story for how that came about in their own life,. But I'd guess from the stories I heard at the conference that a striking number involve people who come to Honduras not expecting to stay and then see something that they just can't walk away from.
It was one of those conferences that really summons the starfish story, which is perhaps why a video of that fable opened the event. You know the one, about the child who comes upon the terrible scene of beached and dying starfish stretching far into the distance and sets about throwing one starfish after another back into the sea.
Not everybody has a taste for starfish rescue as a metaphor for social change. Let's face it, we'll be gently returning starfish to the sea forever unless we also put time into figuring out what the heck is depositing them onto the sand.
But that's not to take away anything from the many good projects that smart people with big hearts are introducing to Honduras. Maybe it's only one starfish at a time, but the cumulative effect is impressive.
One of my favourite presentations was from a professor at William Jewell liberal arts college in Kansas, which is doing some amazing work to lift up a little village of 20 households in Honduras. Along the way, the project is also changing the lives of the university students who execute the practical, community-driven projects.
Then there's the engineering consultants with Emergent Engineers, which is working to improve the 50-per-cent failure rate of Honduras water projects through better planning. One project near Copan will now bring water to 900 people instead of 200, just because an engineer who knew about such things took a look at the plan and pointed out that moving the tank to a higher hill would make a huge difference.
And I've always admired Urban Promise, the Copan-based youth organization that is helping create a new generation of engaged Honduran community leaders. If you want to change the future of a country, empower its young people.
The founders of each of those organizations have stories of coming to Honduras for whatever short-term reason  - to help with Hurricane Mitch, to teach English for a year, to volunteer for the Peace Corps - and then seeing an opportunity to do even more.
As the conference highlighted, such people are unbelievably creative when they put their minds to figuring out how to respond to complex problems. They then set about raising an impressive amount of money and human capital to make things happen. This world owes much to people like that.
Of course, challenges persist. While many caring foreigners are working hard for the benefit of Honduras, most of them appear to be in agreement that much work lies ahead to ensure Hondurans eventually have the capacity to be lead that effort on their own behalf.
And as already noted, big-picture problems in Honduras continue to push more starfish onto the sand -  poor governance, a weak economy, climate change, widespread poverty, the pressures of the drug trade. Community initiatives are wonderful, but strong leadership at a national and global level are equally essential components of long-term change.
Until then, it's one starfish at a time. But it does lift me up is just to see how many hands keep reaching across that sand toward a better day.

There's a person in there

This one's for my mom, who at this moment is at home in Victoria crying after they delayed her hip-replacement surgery for two more months this morning because of her low iron count.
I'm sure it seemed like a perfectly logical decision in the mind of hematologist Dr. X, who has never met my mother. And it probably made sense to Dr. Y as well,  the orthopedic surgeon who has also never met my mother.
Unfortunately for her, the news was completely devastating. She was supposed to be having her surgery next week, and on Sunday we'd joked about how she only had 11 more sleeps.
I'm a guilt-ridden daughter at this distance when my 87-year-old  mother has a setback like this and the best I can do is buy more Claro minutes to make sure I can call her regularly. I have to take that into account when reflecting on how angry I am about how things are playing out for my mother, because it could just be that what's really troubling me is that I'm far away and can't really do a damn thing to help her.
Even allowing for that, however, I still think this turn of events highlights the huge divide that separates  people needing integrated medical care and the segmented, depersonalized system we've got that can't possibly provide it.
One of the doctors caring for my mother thinks it might be all the Advil she was taking for the pain that caused her iron to drop to a level that has now increased the risk of excessive bleeding during surgery.
Maybe. But they've known for the last 10 days that her iron levels were  low. Yet nobody did anything to change that, or counsel my mother as to why that might be so. This morning, the specialist's office phoned to cancel her surgery because of her low iron, but even now nobody is telling her anything about how she's supposed to correct that.
I'm a strong supporter of the Canadian public health care system. The fact that my old mom can have publicly funded hip-replacement surgery in her local hospital at her age is a testament to what is right about our system, even allowing for some long (and painful) waits for surgery.
But Mom's latest problem isn't about long wait lists. It's about the way we get divided into parts for the purposes of medical care, to the point that doctors start to forget there's a  human being tucked away in that medical file.
I'd like to meet the doctor who could have told my mom to her face that her surgery was being cancelled. She's been waiting and waiting, and has managed the intensifying pain these past few weeks only by focusing relentlessly on her coming surgery date.
No doctor could have looked into her pain-filled, hopeful eyes and told her sorry, she'd have to wait two more months because the pain-killers she'd been using to be able to hang in through the long wait for surgery had caused her iron levels to drop -  and that even though they'd known about that for 10 days, no one had taken the initiative to do something about that.
Alas, nobody had to look her in the eye and give her the bad news.. Nobody even had to meet her. She just got the news by phone, passed on by an empathetic but powerless woman who works for the surgeon. My mother is essentially a file number sent to various specialists with busy schedules, who have no clue of the impact of their decisions on the lives of those whose lives are hanging in the balance.
Mom told me she'd been crying all day when I called her tonight. But I know her well enough to expect that even by tomorrow, she'll have her chin up and be preparing to soldier through these next two months in whatever way she can. She's just that kind of person.
That doesn't make any of this right, though. Just because she can take it doesn't mean she should have to.
She's put in her time waiting. She did what good Canadians do: She looked after her health for many, many decades, and never complained when she learned she'd have to get in line for her hip surgery.
And this is where it gets her. In her time of greatest medical  need, my mother deserved better than to be shunted aside by strangers for whom she was no more than a set of  lab results.

Hungry for attention

The tortilla masters: Carina and Sofia

Yesterday I climbed up to the smoky little half-kitchen that's tucked into an attic-size space at the Copan guardaria to help a couple of the girls make tortillas.
I'd had visions of everyone being fed and ready for a fast visit to the playground when I first arrived, seeing as I needed to get back to work. But it was soon obvious that wasn't going to happen.
I don't much like the tortilla room, as there's always smoke hanging heavy in the air from the little "eco-friendly" wood stove that I'm sure would be great if it only had a chimney. But it seemed anti-social to say no when invited along.
The girls whipped my butt with their tortilla skills. One, age 10, has been making tortillas for more than six years. She smacked the corn dough quickly between her palms and made perfect, smooth-sided circles every time.
The other, 15, is already assuming a motherly role at the children's home, as do all the older girls. She smiled at me indulgently as I handed over my scruffy looking tortillas for her to cook on the wood stove, lapsing into her teenage self only long enough to remind me that I'd promised to bring her a pair of earrings one day soon.
As we patted out the dough, more children made their way up the dark concrete stairs leading to the tortilla room. We got to talking and joking about this and that, and suddenly I realized that we were having a Kitchen Chat. I remember my own kids loving the relaxed conversations that can happen in kitchens when everybody's preparing food together, and it was revelatory to see this group of kids falling happily into the same kind of easy banter.
I've spent many months now thinking about how I might get more stuff for the 25 children who live at Angelitos Felices - toilets that flushed, showers that worked, diapers for the little ones so there wouldn't always be poo on the floor,  more food, better clothes, shoes that fit.
But the more I get to know the kids, the more I realize that what they want more than anything is my time. They don't pay much mind to their thread-bare clothes, lack of toys, ridiculously wrecked footware or painfully monotonous daily diets. But they sure do like having somebody who hangs out with them.
I've been going up there every Sunday to spend time with them, but I missed two weekends recently when my spouse and I took a small holiday to Guatemala. Man, the kids lambasted me for that when I showed up on Tuesday to say hello, which is how I ended up guilted into a lunch-time play date two days later.
It's hard for a North American parent to conceive of just how little adult attention these kids get. We typically start thinking about our children's well-being before they're even out of the womb, and for the most part will spend several hours a week for many, many years engaged in activities on behalf of our child.
These kids get the basics, but that's about it. They eat, they sleep, and some of them go to school. Sometimes they go outside to play, although not often. At least the water-system renos we did at the home last month has given them functioning bathrooms.
You can't fault the weary caregivers for not spending more time with the children. They're working for slave wages, if they even get paid at all. At any given time there's just one woman on duty in the home, and she doesn't have a moment for anything other than the endless chores that pile up like the mountains of dirty laundry generated by the kids.
Nor can you fault the woman who owns Angelitos (although much of the community would like to). She might not be running the kind of place that any of us would want to imagine a child growing up in, but at least she's putting a roof over these kids' heads in the absence of any consistent operating funds. People in Copan spend a lot of time gossiping about how somebody ought to do something about the home, but only the young American woman who recently opened an alternative day care appears to be actually doing anything significant.
So in the meantime, it's Angelitos or nothing. I have to believe that better days lie ahead for the abandoned and abused children of Honduras, but right now there are more than 20 children and young people living in Angelitos and they're not going anywhere. Whatever might happen in the long-term to improve things for kids like them, these kids are stuck in this moment.
I regularly hear from travellers asking me how they can help the children of Angelitos. People have big hearts and they really do want to make a difference.
There's no end of ways to do that for this gang, who have so little. But as long as you're coming this way, spare a thought for just making time to hang out with them. Somebody with the time to care is the real luxury item in these kids' lives. 

In the land of big cows and gleaming rest stops

Three of my work buddies from the Comision de Accion Social Menonita  just came back from the World Dairy Expo in Madison, Wisconsin - their first trip to the United States.
As you might expect, the trip blew them away. Like all good travellers, they took a ton of photos, and it was great to share their experiences yesterday as they flipped through the large collection of classic tourist shots they took on their journey.
Several of them were of rest stops along the highway. I have to admit, it's been a long time since I've given much consideration to the glory of American rest stops, but the guys were captivated by them and I get that.
"Look at this! They have these all along the roads," exclaimed one of them as he pointed to a particularly clean and tidy example somewhere between Spooner and Madison. "Nobody works there, and anyone can just pull in and use them!"

They'd gone on the trip with the encouragement of a Spooner veterinarian, Dr. Allen Pederson, who comes to Copan Ruinas a couple times a year through the Seattle-based Christian Veterinary Mission. CASM does a lot of work with rural farmers that includes encouraging them to diversify their subsistence livelihoods with a dairy cow or two, and Allen figured the CASM gang would get a lot out of the grand spectacle that is the World Dairy Expo. (That and the fact that a purpose for travel appears to make it much easier for a Honduran trying for a coveted U.S. visitor's visa.)
Sure enough, those U.S. cows made a big impression on the guys, especially the $25,000 Holstein that's capable of producing an astounding 90 litres of milk a day. That's roughly 11 times more than a Honduran dairy cow produces. Even an average dairy cow in the U.S. produces40 litres or more a day.
But that's not really surprising given that a Honduran cow never sees the scientifically designed diet, careful breeding, hormones or vet care that's just part of life for a commercial dairy cow in the U.S. Here, the farmers with more resources might grow "super grass" that the international aid organizations have introduced to the country, but a lot of the tough little mixed-breed cows around Copan just get by on whatever they can scrounge up in the fields.
I asked the guys what they liked best about their visit. The October chill, said one, who admits to never having liked the heat of Honduras despite growing up here. The fall colours in the woods, said another. Trees do lose their leaves in Honduras, but they just kind of shrivel up and turn brown. This fellow was enchanted by the rich oranges, reds and yellows that anyone from a cold country recognizes as a familiar herald to winter.
Did they like the food? Not much. They were travelling on a budget that was well below shoestring, having forked over the equivalent of a month's salary for their $600 airfares that left them with barely any spending money for the actual trip. That meant eating as cheaply as they could - sandwiches at Subway, fast-food burgers.
"Everything was with bread," declared one fellow, who found the diet monotonous. I got a quiet laugh out of that - I guess my buddies are oblivious to the monotony of their own daily diets of beans, tortillas, and those  sweetened hot-dog-style buns that everyone dips in their morning and afternoon coffees.
The cultivated pine forests charmed one of the guys, who sees much potential for similar forests in Honduras. Pine grows well here and is ready for harvest in 10 years because of the warm climate, compared to 40 years in Wisconsin. But I come from a land that's in the process of losing most of its pine forests to the voracious pine beetle, and I suspect the damage being caused by a similar beetle right now in the forests of Honduras will ultimately bring about the same devastation here as climate change alters the environment.
It's too bad the boys had barely a week to enjoy the sights, because there's nothing more valuable than seeing another culture in action when it comes to clarifying what's good and bad about your own culture. Were I a person with the money to invest in a new future for Honduras, I would launch a massive exchange program that sent Hondurans to work and study in developed countries, where they could learn that ambicion isn't always a bad thing and better governance is possible.
But for now, at least the guys know that good roads and rest stops exist. That's a start.

People's hope for prescription drugs goes up in flames

Medicines burn at the dump in Santa Barbara

A tragedy played out late last week at the garbage dump in Santa Barbara, Honduras, where three big truckloads carrying tons of expired pharmaceutical drugs were burned. 

This comes less than a month after another story in the Honduran media about publicly funded prescription drugs valued at almost 13 million lempiras - $660,000 - being thrown out during 2010-11 due to expiration even while countless sick, poor Hondurans waited in vain for the medicines they'd been prescribed but couldn't afford.

You only have to contract dengue fever once to empathize with how miserable life would be if you couldn't afford a few tabs of acetaminophen to get you through the worst of it. And there are a heck of a lot of people in this country who would be in that situation, even though $1.50 will get you 100.

But this is far from being just about pain management after the mosquitoes get you. It's about vast quantities of drugs essential for people's well-being and health - paid for in many cases by international non-profits doing aid work in Honduras - that never make it into the hands of the people they're intended for, or anyone else's hands for that matter. 

You need only spend a few days at the children's home where I help out to get a sense how little access average people have to medicines. There's a public health system of sorts here (although I think it's safe to say that nobody who can afford private care would ever use it) but medicine isn't covered. 

Right now, at least half the kids at the home appear to have impetigo. But even a tube of antibiotic cream to clear up that highly contagious skin condition is a luxury. 

And some of the children clearly have chronic, debilitating health conditions that are much more serious than impetigo. Unfortunately, even if they were ever properly diagnosed - a rare luxury in itself - whatever medications they need wouldn't be available   unless somebody was picking up the bill.

And perhaps the worst of it is that the whole issue of drug expiry is something of a myth. I did a Google search to find out more about drug expiration dates after reading the sad Santa Barbara story this morning, and pulled up no less than a Harvard Medical  School report that puts the lie to this business of expired medicine being ineffective or  dangerous. 

"Most of what is known about drug expiration dates comes from a study conducted by the Food and Drug Administration at the request of the military," notes the 2003 report.  "With a large and expensive stockpile of drugs, the military faced tossing out and replacing its drugs every few years. What they found from the study is 90 per cent of more than 100 drugs, both prescription and over-the-counter, were perfectly good to use even 15 years after the expiration date."

It turns out that a law was passed in the U.S. in 1979 requiring all drug manufacturers to stamp an expiration date on their products, "the date at which the manufacturer can still guarantee the full potency and safety of the drug." And from that rather arbitrary decision, we can trace a line all the way to 2012 and the foolish decision to burn a warehouse full of drugs that many, many people could have used.

The Harvard report says the potency of drugs do diminish over time, but the expiry date stamped on the package has little relation to when that will actually happen. 

"It's true the effectiveness of a drug may decrease over time, but much of the original potency still remains even a decade after the expiration date. Excluding nitroglycerin, insulin, and liquid antibiotics, most medications are as long-lasting as the ones tested by the military."

Alas, nobody in the Honduras health system did the same Google search before calling in the truckers to haul away the "expired" prescription drugs. A tremendous waste of international resources. A tremendous loss to millions of Hondurans who are essentially living without health care. 

It's not always about the money

After eight months in Copan Ruinas, I’m finally getting 10-lempira moto-taxi rides.  It’s a big moment.

Not because of the money, mind you. My experience is that foreigners typically pay two or even three times as much as the locals for a moto-taxi ride here, but we’re still talking a difference of no more than 50 cents or a buck per ride.

But I admit to being bugged by the two-tiered charges these past few months, and am happy for whatever threshold I just crossed that led me to being viewed differently by the moto-taxi guys.  I don’t know what changed, but I’ll take it.

Moto-taxis are the only form of public transportation for getting around Copan Ruinas. They’re small three-wheeled, canvas-topped vehicles that can accommodate two comfortably, but it’s not uncommon to see one labouring up the hills with three adults and a few small children aboard, along with that day’s load of groceries or other supplies from the town centre.

I found the code of the moto-taxis to be something of a mystery when we first moved here. We knew enough from those who had gone before us to ask what the charge would be before we got into the vehicle, but I had no idea how to gauge the prices the drivers gave us. When you come from a place like Canada, a ride from the bus station to your house that costs a couple bucks sounds like a pretty good deal.

So we’d ask, and the drivers would quote us something, but then we’d just get into the taxi and pay whatever the rate was.  Some drivers charged more, some less; if there was a pattern, I couldn’t see it.

But then I started talking to my workmates about what they paid when they took a moto-taxi to work, and realized that I was paying a lot more than the going rate.  I’m no babe in the woods when it comes to being a tourist in a poor country, so I wasn’t exactly surprised by that. Still, it started to grate.

I accepted the two-tiered rates for quite a while as the price for being a comparatively well-off foreigner in an impoverished land.  And fortunately, just as it was really starting to bug me these past few weeks, everything changed and suddenly the drivers were charging me the same rate as everybody else.

I’ve also come to understand that rates are better if you share a ride, as do so many locals. So if you’re willing to stand at the taxi stop for a while and wait for someone else who’s going in your direction, you’ll pay 50 cents instead of a dollar for the ride up the hill. I suspect the drivers didn’t even consider packing other people into the taxi with me in the first few months, so part of the reason I’m getting local rates now could be that the drivers understand that I’m OK with a crowd.

I’ve also learned to refuse rides on occasion, when I know I’m being overcharged. The drivers don’t appear to take it personally – they just don’t give you the ride.  Some will even ask other drivers at the stop if they’re willing to take me for the local rate. Either somebody agrees to and off I go, or I wait for a bit to share a ride with another person going in my direction.

Again, I’m a little embarrassed to be making a fuss over a difference of 50 cents. But I hope at least some of you know how it feels to be indignant over a principle. All I know is that somewhere around the seven-month mark it really started to get to me that I had to pay more solely because I was a gringa.

The drivers charge by the rider, so whenever my partner and I are catching a taxi together I know the rates will be higher.  (I think we also look more gringo-ish when together.) One rainy night when we were returning from San Pedro Sula and the bus got in late, we really wanted to catch a moto-taxi for the short hop home, but ended up walking rather than feel exploited by the record 60-lempira ($3) rate the driver quoted us.  Serves us right for using the bus service frequented by gringos, I guess.

Drivers aren’t getting rich by any means, and only a few of them actually own their own taxis. I think any visitor coming from a country like Canada or the U.S. will find prices extremely reasonable in Copan, and I’m definitely not advocating that tourists start haggling with drivers to drop their rates.

But I’m grateful for whatever made drivers decide I was due for the local rate. It makes me feel like I live here.

One more cup of coffee for the road

The beans are starting to turn red in
La Cuchilla, Santa Rita

This is the time of year when Honduran coffee growers find out what price they can expect for their beans when the harvest starts in November. And right now, the news looks pretty good.

The current international price for Honduran coffee beans is $161 per quintale - 100 pounds.  My co-workers at the Comisión de Acción Social Menonita tell me the make-or-break-it point for the small producers around Copan is $150 a quintale. So getting $11 more is happy news indeed, especially after the bad year local producers had in 2011.

That’s the thing with coffee as your only cash crop: You just never know. There used to be a marketing board of sorts for coffee that kept prices more predictable, but that ended in 2001. Prices now fluctuate from year to year, creating booms and busts for coffee growers.

The big growers ride out the highs and lows. But for small producers a dip in prices makes the difference between eating and going hungry after the harvest ends in February. In three Copan area coffee-growing communities where CASM has a project going on, producers have plots ranging from four to eight acres, and are frighteningly dependent on coffee to cover the year's bills.

A North American might easily drop $2.50 or more on a cup of coffee at any high-end coffee shop in their neighbourhood. Allowing for 40 cups of coffee per pound, the price you pay for the amount of beans used in your cup is about 100 times more than what the grower in Honduras got paid.

Blame some of that on all the middle men that lie between the grower and the consumer. But there’s more to the economics of coffee than that.

World tastes change all the time, swinging from Arabic to Robusta, from mild to dark.  The fate of producers all over the coffee-growing world hangs in the balance, as each country has certain beans that it grows best.

Then there are the many natural disasters that small producers have to worry about, from insects and coffee leaf rust to uncertain weather patterns and poor soil. If there’s plenty of rain in May, that bodes well for a good crop later in the year. But too much rain in September and October can bring all the coffee plants on at once, wreaking havoc on a harvest if pickers end up in short supply.

Even in a just-right year, the small growers around Copan have to rely on pickers from Guatemala, seeing as every Copaneco  with hands – including children as young as seven – has as much work as they can handle during the four busy months of the harvest.  A quarter of the country’s eight million people directly participate in the annual harvest (USDA Foreign Agriculture Service), earning the equivalent of $71 million during those four months.

Honduras was the second-largest exporter of coffee in the world last year, according to last month’s report from the International Coffee Organization. Among the subsistence farmers that CASM works with, coffee is by and large the only crop that generates money.  Even the corn and bean crops they need to feed their families take a back seat to coffee, with many farmers opting to bypass a second planting of vegetables in order to free up time for the hectic coffee harvest.

It’s understandable, but so risky. The project CASM has just launched in the aldeas of La Union II, Guaramal II and Las Flores involves mapping the indicators of when a community is at risk of widespread hunger. It’s clear a mere week into the project that the state of people’s coffee crops is going to be one of the major determinants.

The world drinks an astounding 1.4 billion cups of coffee a day. I’m sure it can’t be good for us. But given the economic disaster that would befall coffee-dependent communities were we to ever shake the habit, just think of it as taking one for the team.

If problems exercise your brain, I'm in a mind marathon

Tearing apart the old bathroom

 I once made the horrible mistake of buying glue traps to deal with a mouse problem. I got up the next morning to the unforgettable sight of a poor dead mouse that had gotten his little paw stuck first, then another paw, then the side of his face.
I'm starting to suspect the water project at the children's home here in Copan might be angry mouse spirits getting back at me for that wrong deed. Every thing I touch up there just seems to stick me tighter into the glue.
The plan was for new bathrooms and a big new water tank so that the Angelitos Felices foster home had decent basic services for the 30 or so children who live there. The mason who took on the project told me he'd have it done in 15 days.
A little over three weeks into the project, the bathrooms are done and the tank's in place, sitting atop a nicely reinforced concrete floor to avoid any risk of 5,000 pounds of water crashing down on sleeping children in the room below. I have to laugh now at how I once thought that would be the most complicated part of the project.

A new front door! Not rotten!

The foster home is a scant four years old, which is unbelievable when you see what a state it's in. Who knew that a door frame could rot out in four short years? Like they say, you get what you pay for, although rumour has it that you can't pin the blame for the shoddy job on the benefactor whose name is on the commemorative plaque outside (like everything else to do with Angelitos, it's complicated).
At any rate, that was the second big surprise once the mason and I got the crushed-children problem sorted out - that virtually every tube, fitting and pipe in the home would need to be replaced. All of them were either undersized, plugged, broken or missing entirely.
There wasn't a single trap on any of the drains or toilets, which certainly went a long way to explaining why the place smelled so bad all the time. The cistern in the street where the city water came in - well, you don't even want to know what that looked like inside, what with a passing dump truck having caved in the metal lid some months before and the hole in the ground catching all kinds of filthy runoff from that point on from the surrounding street.
The cistern had to be drained and rebuilt, as did the water pump that by this point was packed with the mud that had settled a foot deep at the bottom of the cistern. The pipes running from the cistern into the home had to be replaced, as did the pipes in the street connecting the Angelitos water system to the city supply.

Check out that big new water tank and tortilla/beans sink

Weird things kept cropping up. Like the badly built drain pipe above the children's bedroom that poured water into the room whenever it rained. The hole in the floor in the grubby little half-kitchen upstairs, where staff had gotten into the habit of just dumping food waste down onto the property of the increasingly irritated neighbour. The lack of water access in that same cramped attic of a room, which meant staff had to pack dishes and cooking water up and down three steep, dark flights of stairs and through the children's bedroom anytime they were making tortillas and beans (which is to say, daily). That rotting front door, which somehow managed to stick fast at the bottom while dangling loose at the top.
The kitchen water came straight out of the cistern instead of being connected into the rest of the system - a big problem anytime there's insufficient water in the cistern. The outside gutter poured rain water directly onto the ground in front of the home from two stories up, creating a muddy mess and irritating the neighbour on a whole other front.

Renovated downstairs bathroom

Addressing those many issues weren't part of the original plan. But what are you going to do? So we added them in.
This week was supposed to be the week everything came together. Ah, but I should have known better.
The water was supposed to flow into the newly renovated system for the first time on Sunday, but the cistern didn't fill. The work crew had to dig up the street to find the problem.
Then the cistern filled, but the water didn't flow into the home, necessitating a whole other round of digging. On Tuesday, the big tank up top filled for the first time, but a faulty valve that had been overlooked let all the water drain away over night.
Today it almost all came together - the cistern filled, the water flowed into the stone pilas where the clothes are washed. But the staff was so enthusiastic about finally having water to wash the thousand or so pounds of dirty laundry that had built up that they drained the cistern, which meant the tank up top didn't fill and the bathrooms weren't working.
I learned something else today: The pipe that connects the Angelitos system to the city water supply is ridiculously small. So even when the water does flow - every other day in that neighbourhood - it's quite likely not going to be enough for the needs of the home. And wouldn't you know it, using a bigger pipe is prohibited by the municipality.
New project: Get to know the mayor.

I wanna be free - or do I?

I come from a land where you get a parking ticket if your tires are deemed to be too far from the curb. For a while it was illegal to make balloon animals in downtown Victoria, and just this summer the city launched a court battle to stop a woman from taping little posters to telephone poles advertising her cleaning service. 

So it has been very enlightening to move to a place where you are essentially free to do whatever you want. 

The street dogs howl at midnight. The possibly deaf neighbour across the way blasts his radio into the street at 5 a.m.The sidewalk food vendors sell their wares with no fear that a health inspector will ever come by. 

One day I watched a kid digging a huge hole in the asphalt road in front of his house - the main road into town - to get at a broken water pipe. Nobody blinked. You can herd your cattle along the highway, stop your car dead in the middle of a skinny side street to have a conversation with an acquaintance, and make balloon animals until your lungs burst.

There's good and bad to each approach, of course. Victoria often drove me mad with its abundance of rules and vigorous enforcement, but there are times when I do miss the poop-and-scoop bylaw now. I could probably go for a car-idling bylaw in this land where everybody just leaves their trucks to run, or an aggressive anti-litter campaign. And would it be so wrong to have a few ground rules around overly loud car stereos?

 I'm very happy not to be hearing police and fire sirens around the clock anymore, as can happen in a region of 340,000 residents with six police departments, 13 fire departments and an abundance of ambulances.

But I'm sure I'd miss the friendly, competent faces of the Victoria police force in the event that a crime happened to me here. I don't even know how to call the police here in Copan. Based on the stories I've heard about police in Honduras, I'm not even sure I'd want to. (They've started doing lie-detector tests on police in the country to try to root out corruption, and 26 from the first group of 54 failed.)

I think some of us from rule-bound countries find ourselves longing for a land where you'd be free to live the life you choose, for better or worse. But it wasn't until I came to a country where that's essentially true that I started to understand what that really means. 

One thing that’s clear about life without rules is that it's all or nothing. There isn't one set of rules for the "good" people and another for the "bad" - you're all just in there together doing whatever the heck you want. 

In our dreams we might envisage such a world as a place where everybody would simply opt to do the right thing once there was nobody telling them what to do, as if goodness would be a natural fallback position once government got out of the way. In fact, it's everybody for themselves. 

I imagine that any of the 6,000 small businesses in Tegucigalpa that have closed in recent years rather than continue paying costly bribes to scary neighbourhood toughs would be very happy to have their personal freedoms constrained in exchange for proper policing. Extortionists in that city pluck $200 a week out of the hands of hard-working bus drivers on 100 routes, which is quite a price to pay for freedom.

Here in the land of the free, you frequently hear the word impunidad – impunity, used to describe people who do as they please without fear of punishment or consequences. This morning’s newspaper brought the outrageous news of the 60 mayors, 53 vice-mayors, 410 registrars and 17 deputies of the Honduran National Congress who collect their government pay and their share of an additional $90 million a year in salaries for non-existent teaching jobs.

And if you’ve ever doubted that some people will kill with impunity in the land of the free, doubt no more. Honduras has the highest per-capita murder rate in the world, and barely 10 per cent of the crimes are solved.

I’m not saying I want to live where there’s a rule for everything and an official ready to punish you for the slightest deviation from the grid. But time spent in Honduras does tend to take some of the shine off freedom.

A clearcut problem

Corn-field clearcuts around Santa Rita, Copan

What would bring 20 busy coffee producers out to a mid-day meeting on watersheds? The realization that if there's a solution for what's happening to the water supply on their fincas, it will have to come from them.
The meeting was the first in what sounds like a long, slow process to have the Marroquin watershed in the hills above Santa Rita, Copan, declared a protected area.
Some 16,000 families rely on the water that flows from this area. But climate change and the dramatic loss of forest has taken a toll. One producer at the meeting - organized by Honduran NGOs and regional groups working on such problems -  figures his water supply is half of what it was a few years ago. That's a scary development in a country where access to water for crops and consumption is still far from a given in rural communities.
Much has been made in the international press about the loss of forests in Honduras. In the last four years the country has lost more than 33 per cent of its once-abundant forests, triggering problems ranging from mudslides and erosion to flash floods and road washouts.
The effect of deforestation on watersheds is more subtle, yet devastating over the long term. A forested hillside acts like a sponge for absorbing rainwater. Forests not only prevent heavy rains from wreaking havoc as they tear down slopes in a torrent, they retain water long enough that  underground sources can be replenished.
Climate change is already shortening the growing season dramatically in Honduras. Parts of the country lost half their corn and bean crops this summer when the rains didn't come. Old-timers say you used to be able to count on the rainy season arriving like clockwork every May 3; now, it's mid- to late June, and even then farmers can't be sure.
Deforestation is adding to the crisis.
The blame typically gets put on illegal logging, which conjures images of well-organized mahogany thieves smuggling valuable timber out of the country with no thought to the damage they're doing. And yes, that happens.
But the problem is more complicated than that. With almost 70 per cent of the population living in poverty, many of the country's forests are simply being cut down in tiny bits and pieces by millions of people trying to eke out a living.
Look up into the hills from virtually any road in the country and you'll see the endless checkerboard of subsistence corn crops that now grow where trees once stood. Coffee crops prefer shade and in theory are a good fit with forests, but in the higher altitudes where the temperatures are cooler, it's not uncommon to see land clearcut by small producers for coffee as well.
Firewood continues to be a major source of cooking fuel for Hondurans, and not just the poorest families. Propane is expensive when you're going to be slow-cooking beans every few days for hours at a time, so virtually every home has a wood-burning fogon in the kitchen. Poor families from the villages around Copan make the trek into town every day with bundles of firewood scavenged from the hillsides for sale in town.
No doubt each corn farmer, each firewood seller, feels like they're barely making a dent in the forests of Honduras. But the collective damage is significant. Processes like the one to declare the Marroquin watershed a protected area are intended to raise people's awareness of that collective impact, and to make a plan together for what can be done about it.
Nor is logging the only threat. Bathrooms are still something of a luxury in rural Honduras, and sewage collection is even rarer. Coffee growers don't always pay attention to what happens to the toxic runoff from the pulping process. Runoff from animal waste and chemical fertilizers add to the problem.
Honduras has plenty of rules, regulations and laws; what's missing is enforcement. So the mere declaration of a protected zone doesn't mean much on its own. Much of the work at the meeting in Los Planes de La Brea this week involved gathering the names of property owners who have forest land in the watershed, because no solution can come without their co-operation.
The coffee producers agreed on a bigger invitation list for the next meeting later this month, one that includes municipal staff from neighbouring communities as well as public and private landowners in the watershed. With so much at stake, a plan can't come soon enough.

The guns are scary, but it's the roads that'll kill you

The road that convinced me to get out and walk

Before we left Canada in January, Cuso International asked us to watch a 90-minute video presentation on health concerns put together by Dr. Mark Wise, Cuso's doctor in residence.
He listed what seemed like a hundred different health problems to watch out for in our international placements, from malaria and dengue fever to chagas and rabid dogs.
He ended it with a humorous little lecture noting that even if we couldn't be bothered to wear mosquito repellent - even if we insisted on patting stray dogs -  at the very least we should always use a seatbelt when riding in a vehicle, because car accidents are by far the most common bad things to happen to Cuso volunteers.
I think back on his advice with a rueful smile whenever I'm jouncing along any of the truly terrible roads in Honduras. If only it were that easy, Dr. Wise.
Sure, I do up my seatbelt if I happen to be sitting in the front seat of somebody's vehicle. But I don't think I've been in a back seat yet that had a functioning seatbelt. Nor are there seatbelts in the back of a pickup truck, which is where I've ended up sitting a striking number of times when heading off on some adventure with my co-workers at the Comision de Accion Social Menonita.
And a few days ago as we crept over an alarmingly fragile sliver of road, undercut to the point of imminent collapse by the vast quantities of rainwater that had been eating away at it for what must have been a dozen rainy seasons, I wondered whether a seatbelt would actually be a help or a hindrance were the road to give way right at that moment and send us tumbling into the ravine below.
Seatbelts are a good thing in a Canada/U.S. kind of  country, where the most likely thing to happen to you on the road is that you smash into another car.
Ah, but there are many more things besides collisions to worry about on a Honduras road - from car-eating potholes flipping you sideways to giant sinkholes opening under your wheels. There are skinny mountain roads so steep that even a 4x4's tires spin helplessly in the mud when the rains come, and roads that are really just river beds that surge to life in a single downpour.
The dirt roads of Honduras aren't just rutted, they're gouged, two feet deep in places and impossible to negotiate. And it's not like you can just make a point of avoiding the dirt roads: 80 per cent of the country's 13,600 kilometres of roads are unpaved, and for the most part profoundly neglected.
The municipalities have responsibility for maintaining the roads near their towns, but they don't have any money. The national government has responsible for the main roads, but nobody seems to hold them to that.

A rear tire from the CASM truck

We caught a bus to Santa Rosa de Copan recently and came across people who make a living filling in the giant potholes along that route. They come dashing out in between traffic surges and scoop gravel into the holes, then collect lempiras that grateful drivers throw out the window. My co-workers tell  me they remove the gravel every night so they can do it all again the next day.
And then there are the vehicles. People don't have a lot of money here, so vehicle maintenance isn't exactly a priority. If you're a non-profit like CASM, you'll have a heck of a time convincing any of your funders to include vehicle maintenance in your contract, even though virtually all development work is done in isolated villages that are impossible to reach without a vehicle.
Because of that little problem, it's common practice to take a pair of tires down to the steel belts before anyone even thinks about replacing them. I had that unfortunate realization one day a couple of months ago after we'd made our halting way down a typically horrifying mountain road and  then stopped the truck to see what was up with the rear tires. Not only were they completely bald, they were bristling with shredded wire.
I don't like to come across as a chicken, but last week when we had to drive back across that eroded, undercut little strip of road not far from La Cumbre, I lied so that I could get out of the truck. I asked to be let out so I could take a photo of the truck inching its way across. In reality, I just felt a lot safer walking.
So yes, Dr. Wise, I wear my seatbelt when I can. The rest of the time, I pray.