The happy faces around me

It's not always fun hanging out with the kids at Angelitos children's home. Sometimes it's just a lot of work, and sometimes it's really discouraging. Sometimes they just get on your nerves, the way any kid does.
But yesterday was one of the good days. Not sure if that was due to the sun shining for the first time in a couple of weeks, or if the kids were just ready for a free-for-all at el campo, the empty dirt field above the foster home where they can burn off a little energy from time to time.
It was a good day for getting some new photos of the kids, and I wanted to share them here. They are a remarkable, resilient and ultimately joyful group of children.

Heidi, who is more or less the adopted daughter
of the woman who owns/operates Angelitos.  She mostly lives
in Dona Daisy's house, as do 3-4 of the kids at any given time,
but she comes on all our outings.

The kids cut loose in the sunshine at the dirt field above Angelitos.
Don't know who owns the field, but nobody bothers us.

The kids are all exceptionally good at climbing
trees, Here's Adolfo and Naun. At one point on
our adventure there were six kids up this tree.

The very sweet Jose Manuel, showing off his new shoes. This little guy
has a lot of trouble walking, and is thrilled by these shoes, which were part
of the new outfits everybody got before Christmas thanks to people like you.

The three children who I suspect have some of the most significant
needs in Angelitos - Chola on the left, Fernando, and Elsy, Chola's sister.

The beautiful Carina, 15, who has two sisters
living at the home and has quickly revealed
herself to be an Alpha Female. 

Rosario and Estrella enjoy the colouring books and pencil crayons
that donations from home continue to buy.

The (very) young mom who lives across the street from Angelitos, and
her new as-yet-unnamed daughter. Two sisters share a two-room cement-block
house with a tin roof - it was so hot inside yesterday. Whenever I think
that the kids at Angelitos have it rough, I just walk around that neighbourhood
with my eyes open and see all the other people living in equally
challenged circumstances. 

Measuring progress one pair of shoes at a time

It will soon be a year since I began doing projects at the Angelitos Felices children's home here in Copan. The needs are so vast for children in Honduras that at times it's difficult to gauge whether anything you do is having any impact, but at least I can take in the completed capital projects at Angelitos on days like that and think, yeah, that's a little better.

This photo from one of my first visits to Angelitos
serves to remind me that the walls are now repainted,
the filthy concrete floor is now nice, bright ceramic,
and little Jesus has new clothes and shoes that fit

The kids have hot showers, the place no longer smells like sewage, the water (mostly) flows. The toilets flush, the new ceramic floors at least have the potential of looking clean. OK, the interior walls already look almost as bad as they did before we painted the place just two short months ago, but you can't win 'em all. 

While I was away over Christmas, a U.S. traveller had ceiling fans installed, and that has really improved the air quality in that stale place. 

Other than the twice-monthly swims at the pool with the kids, which I really like, one of the projects I had the most fun with was buying everybody new head-to-toe outfits last month. I swear, some of those kids had never before had a pair of shoes that fit. 

The four-year-old boy who struggles to walk, Jose Manuel, proudly shows me his new shoes every time I go up to Angelitos now. There'd been a time before he got them that he was barely allowed to go outside, let alone on outings, due to not having shoes. 

And the kids' excitement over a new pair of underwear or jeans that don't have to be tied at the waist with string to hold them up was both heart warming and  heartbreaking. The whole thing cost about $600 to outfit 24 children, such a bargain that I think we'll do it all over again in June. Next week, I'm taking the 16 school-age kids downtown to get outfitted for school uniforms before they return to class in February. 

I've been doing fundraising for various causes for almost 10 years and know that people will be generous if a project moves them. But I've still been happily surprised at the amazing support I've had from friends, family and acquaintances back home in B.C. for the projects at Angelitos.
My position with Cuso International has been key to me being able to do this work as well, as the stipend I get for working in communications full-time for the Comision de Accion Social Menonita pays for my new life in Honduras. That means that every cent of the donations for Angelitos can go directly to the work. 

All in, we've raised $16,000 in less than a year and spent about $11,000 of it. That leaves $5,000 for this coming year. And while I'd initially contemplated using it to build an indoor jungle gym at Angelitos, I'm now thinking every kid in Copan would benefit a lot more if I put some of it toward a public playground, something that Copan is decidedly short on. 

There's a scruffy metal playground up at a school on the hill that's locked up tight on weekends and another at the private bilingual school. I know at least a couple other people here in Copan who'd like to be part of a playground project, and hopefully my CASM buddies can give me some ideas around municipal contacts who might have some land to donate. 

There's a lot to be said for the chance to lounge pool-side
when you're living the tough life of an orphan

Travellers continue to visit Angelitos bearing gifts, as the place was renowned as a worrisome, poorly funded, rundown and controversial children's home long before I first laid eyes on it last April. 

The best of those gifts have been things that improve the structure of the place - the ceiling fans, the bed repairs done by a Christian mission out of Illinois in November - or that put better clothes on the backs of those poor, shabbily dressed kids. Gifts of basic medicines are also really helpful.

People have an understandable instinct to want to bring toys for the children. But I've never seen a toy last more than a day or two without somebody either breaking it, hiding it away, or sneaking it out of Angelitos to give to some other child. You can get mad about that latter practice, but the truth is that there are so many Copan children whose lives are no better than the kids at Angelitos. Can you blame somebody for wanting to give them toys too?

I can't even get mad when I hear that some of the older Angelitos girls have taken donated clothing down to the centre to sell. Everybody up there is in survival mode. It's not about being ungrateful, it's about getting by.

I continue to pin a lot of hope on Emily Monroe, the young American woman whose dream to open a better orphanage continues to move forward. Her Casita Copan project has reached a new and exciting stage now that she has taken over a former hostel, fully furnished. 

That gives Emily the ability to expand her daycare into a residence for abandoned or abused children once she jumps through all the legal hoops (and she will). She's determined to start a better children's home, and I continue to be impressed at her commitment and dogged success.

It could be too big a dream to hope that the Angelitos kids will one day be able to move into the series of small family-style group homes that Emily envisages. But at any rate, I believe she's going to pull off her project, and that many other vulnerable Honduran children will benefit from that regardless.

So I'm also looking for ways this year to support her work, while still finding ways to make life a little better for the Angelitos kids. For the moment they don't have the option of relocating to a better children's home. We'll just have to see what we can do to brighten their lives in the meantime. 

Every dry, hot day brings the crisis closer

A major funder was in town this week for its annual perforance evaluation of the Honduran non-profit that I work for. So off we all went to the little town of La Cumbre, where 30 or so people from a dozen neighbouring villages had gathered to share their stories.
As always, I was struck by how little margin for error there is in the lives of these people. One misstep, one bad harvest, one unexpected turn of events can sink a family. Rural Hondurans are exceptionally resilient, but I do have to wonder how they're going to manage with climate change.
In Canada and the U.S., climate change tends to be one of those off-in-the-distance kind of things - something you know you'll have to worry about one day but that right now just means you think more about turning off your idling car or buying reusable shopping bags.
That's not the case in Honduras. In a country full of subsistence farmers who rely on seasonal rains to water their food crops, the impact of climate change is as real as the May rains that start  a little later and end a little earlier each year. Simple agricultural strategies that rural Hondurans have practiced for generations can no longer be counted on to produce enough corn and beans for the family.
In Canada, a dryer growing season forces farmers to rely more on irrigation, which increases costs. It brings new plagues and insects that require more labour-intensive strategies to combat. It reduces yields, which in turn reduces a farmer's already tight profit margin. Climate change complicates the life of a farmer anywhere in the world.
But in Honduras, a bad harvest isn't just a blow to a farmer's profit margin. It's the herald of a famine.
There are no irrigation systems to turn to for backup when the days run long and hot. There are no other sources of income to turn to for buying food. There isn't so much as an extra centavo in most rural Hondurans' households for new treatments that might ward off opportunistic bugs and fungi being unleashed by climate change.
Everybody sees what's coming for Honduras, and they're urging economic diversification before it's too late. There's some real doomsday stuff out there on the impact of climate change on corn, bean and coffee crops in Honduras over the next five years. Nobody's taking those reports lightly.
But few Hondurans have the savings, education or time to explore new ways of keeping their families fed. Nor is there a culture around market development, or any meaningful plans in the country to do something about the hopelessly poor infrastructure that prevents goods from getting to market regardless. There aren't even jobs in the big cities to fall back on; Monday's paper brought news of almost two million Hondurans looking for work, a quarter of the country.
Coffee has been relied upon to put badly needed money into Hondurans' pockets for many years now. But this year, a coffee-leaf fungus known as la roya is causing unprecedented damage, fuelled by hot, dry conditions resulting from climate change.
This year's harvest will be down by as much as 50 per cent as a result. The declines are anticipated to be even more calamitous in the next three years. The older plantations that marginal producers tend to have (coffee plants are ideally replaced every eight years, but poor people can't afford to do that) will likely have to be destroyed. Where will the money come from for new plants, or to get growers through the three long years before a young coffee plant starts producing?
Honduras is no stranger to disaster. But the aftermath of a hurricane is so much easier for the world to get its head around than the slow-motion crisis that's unfolding in the country right now. Whatever has to happen, it needs to happen soon. 

The good, the bad and the uncertain

Somebody posted the following comment under my recent blog about job insecurity in Honduras. I wanted to repost it here because the writer does make the very valid point that there's much about Honduran employment practices that I don't know.

"While your comments about CASM having one year contracts are technically true, the fact is they still do pay out the benefits at the end of every year. Many employees actually prefer that, so that they get their retirement money at the end of each year and can do with it as they like rather than wait until they finish employment at an organization to get it. Most people would rather control their own retirement money than have an NGO or company have it, and if the NGO flops then they are out their money. There are also annual certified audits and turn in financial & activity reports to the government which would catch if any of the benefits are not being paid. You might want to ask your CASM co-workers more about this, you might not have the full story here. I'm not saying it is a great practice but it actually might be better than you lay it out in your article."

I've since talked to my CASM co-workers more on this subject, as suggested in the comment. They get paid a half a month's additional salary in June and the other half in December, as required under Honduran law. They also receive a little more money for one month of the year in lieu of prestaciones, the health, disability and social benefits that Honduras employers are also required to pay for full-time employees.
So nobody's breaking the law around benefits. And it could be that people do indeed appreciate having the money paid out every year rather than gambling that their employer - and their benefits - will be there when they need them. But that still doesn't address job security.
At any rate, I hadn't intended to disparage CASM's employment practices in my post - I just wanted to make the point out that even when you land a pretty good job here, you still have no job security. I do know that my co-workers don't like going into every single December wondering whether they'll have a job to return to in January.
But I appreciate this comment and all others -  I like feedback, and the chance to pick up new information from those who know more than I do.  

Pulperia dreamin'

Somebody told me a few months after we moved here that Honduran women often long to have their own corner store.

I thought it a strange thing to say at the time. But it makes more sense now that I see how impermanent the work culture is here. I’m betting that it’s not racks of little chip bags or a cooler full of giant bottles of Coke that gets a Honduran woman hankering to open her own pulperia. It’s economic stability.

The days of 35 years and a gold watch have been over for a while now in virtually every country, what with free trade having unleashed a new kind of work culture that just moves around the globe to whatever country has the hungriest workers willing to work for the cheapest wages. No job is a sure thing anymore, wherever you live.

But the sheer uncertainty of any job in Honduras - well, that would set me to dreaming of economic stability as well were I a Honduran woman trying to keep my bills paid and my kids fed, clothed and educated over the long term. Even the “good” jobs here are often year-to-year at best, and there’s a lot of work that’s literally one day at a time.

An example: The situation for my Honduran co-workers at the non-profit where I volunteer. Their jobs are the envy of many, seeing as they earn the equivalent of $500-700 a month and enjoy comfortable working conditions. But they’re still working year to year under contracts that never go past Dec. 31.

I didn’t know that until last month, when I went to the annual spiritual retreat for the organization and watched everybody getting handed the standard form letter that all employees get in December. It’s more or less a “Dear John” letter: Thanks for your service, your contract’s done.  Apparently it’s common practice among many Honduran non-profits, many of which opt to meet the letter of the law by giving people an additional month's pay every year without having to keep them on longer-term contracts.

The lucky ones end up getting their contracts renewed. But there are no guarantees.  A person could work for the same organization for 10 years and still be gone just like that in Year 11.

Nor are you treated gently when the end comes. One woman who works out of the same office as me got a terse email at 5 p.m. on the final day before the Christmas holiday informing her that she was done after three years on the job. Her project continues for another year or two, but she’s no longer the one leading it.

And those are the good jobs. Two million Hondurans count on seasonal income from the coffee harvest, but that work is brief, frequently involves travelling long distances, and pits you against the nimble fingers of legions of children whose parents send them into the coffee fields every year in hopes of boosting the paltry family income.

Move to the city and you might land a job in one of the maquilas – the international factories that have benefited the most from free trade. But those employers get a special exemption so they don't have to pay the minimum wage (which is damn minimal in Honduras, as little as $1 an hour). Maybe you can find a service job, but prepare for long hours, low pay, and more of that chronic insecurity. The young man who manages the pool where I like to swim works at least nine hours a day, seven days a week. Christmas came and went for him without so much as an afternoon off.

Back in Canada, we tend to think of “good” jobs as being the due of those who are focused, flexible and attentive to their studies. Here, you can be all those things and still get nowhere. 

One young friend who works in administration has spent every weekend for the last four years going to college in a town that’s a slow two-hour bus ride away. She figures she needs at least two more years of study before she has enough qualifications to land a better job. And it could very likely be a year-to-year job even then. 

One of these days, she might just wake up to find herself ready to give it all up and open a pulperia. Who’d blame her?

Hard times coming as coffee production falls by half

Sesemil producers pack coffee beans for sale in Copan

There’s no avoiding the earthy, acrid smell of wet coffee cherries these days if you’re walking any of the dirt roads winding through the hills of Copan.  It’s the smell of money for Hondurans, who count on the annual coffee harvest from their small plots of land to provide their families with enough money to get them through the year.   

That’s a risky dependency any time you’ve got a commodity whose prices bob up and down as much as coffee. But climate change is adding a whole new layer of risk, bringing plagues and uncertain growing conditions to torment small coffee producers with little ability to ride out rough times.

Producers knew going into the current harvest season that they were up against a persistent fungus that has been spreading with abandon through a widely grown strain of coffee plant, says the administrator of an agricultural co-operative of organic coffee growers based in Copan Ruinas, Wilson Colindres. Work is already underway to develop and plant more resistant strains to slow the spread of la roya.

 But the impact is turning out to be much worse than anyone expected, Colindres said when I talked to him last week at the co-operative's offices in Sesesmil, Copan.  He fears the 2012-13 harvest season will be the worst in the co-operative’s history, with production down by half for the 39 Copan and Comayagua growers who belong to the 12-year-old co-op.

Coffee has been a very good fit for the country up until now.  Honduras’s legions of small producers operate with little margin for error, but coffee thrives on Honduras’s forested slopes without the need for costly irrigation systems or major interventions as long as a grower pays attention to soil quality and plant regeneration. The clockwork nature of Honduras’s rainy season was also good for coffee-growing, as it always started in early May and continued with heavy daily afternoon rains right through June. Coffee plants set a lot of fruit when they’re getting both heat and plenty of rain.

The healthy plant on the left looks strikingly different than
the defoliated plants all around it

But all that’s changing, says Colindres. Now, the country’s rainy season starts later and ends earlier every year. What used to be a daily rain has now diminished to rain every third or fourth day.  With the soil now drying out in between rains, conditions are ideal for the spread of la roya spores.  The fungus kills off the leaves of coffee plants, which stunts growth and decreases yields.

This year’s yields have been dramatically affected, says Colindres. But it’s a problem for coming years as well, as the sick, spindly plants don’t recover quickly.

And while growers are already planting more fungus-resistant varieties to try to reduce their losses, Colindres says the flavour of the beans isn’t as good from those strains. The world’s coffee drinkers are a notoriously finicky lot when it comes to the taste of their favourite brew, so that’s worrying producers as well.

What can be done? COAPROCL has just started into a new project with my organization, the Comision de Accion Social Menonita, to improve soil quality at organic fincas and increase plant health. Healthy plants are better able to resist la roya. Other projects  are striving to increase the amount and quality of ground water in the region through better watershed management.

Some growers are planting resistant strains and hoping that flavour concerns will take care of themselves.  Coffee plants produce in their third year and are ideally replaced every eight or so years for maximum productivity (although that's often not the case among Honduras's small producers), so many growers are accustomed to adding new plants every season anyway.

 I walked the Sesemil finca of Alfredo Morales, president of the co-operative, and noted a few “survivor” plants thriving amid their defoliated brethren, despite being from the same vulnerable strain. No doubt scientists are studying such examples of natural resistance as well.

Coffee beans drying at the coffee cooperative
in Sesemil, Copan

Natural fungicides exist for organic producers, but Colindres notes that plants are already showing resistance. Growers often have to resort to three applications of three different fungicides now – an added cost for a marginal producer.

In the short term, the next couple of months are still a happy time for Hondurans. Some two million men, women and children participate in the annual coffee harvest, counting on it to provide money for all the things they aren’t able to afford at any other time of year. 
This is a time of buying new clothes for the kids; finishing off the community water tank; paying off the loans and store credits that got the family through the last half of the year; adding another room on the house.

But in the longer term, Honduras is up against a global change in weather that is expected to wreak havoc within as little as five years with many of the crops grown in the country, including essential food crops such as beans and corn. The emergence of a devastating coffee fungus is not just a stroke of bad luck for a country that has certainly known no shortage of it, but a mere sample of what’s to come if the country can’t adapt to a rapidly changing environment.

Dryer, hotter weather is not just the problem of the moment. It’s a permanent change that puts the country at grave risk of slipping even further in world rankings for malnutrition, poverty, maternal/child health and more.  Efforts to help Honduran producers adapt, mitigate and diversify can’t come soon enough. 

Reflections on a life-changing year

This time last year, I was in one of the most stressful periods of my life as we stripped away all that was familiar and beloved to prepare for our move to Honduras.
I was stepping into a new job in a strange land where I'd have to work in a language I barely knew, leaving behind friends, family and the security of a comfortable and fulfilling 30-year career. I was unsettled by the constant reports of violence and murder coming out of Honduras, and wondering just what my spouse and I had gotten ourselves into with our decision to volunteer for Cuso International.
But it felt like the right thing to do even so. And with a challenging, exhilarating year now under our belts, I'm happy to report that it was.
We had no idea what  to expect when we boarded the plane for San Pedro Sula on a cold, damp January day. More than 50 years of middle-class accumulation had been reduced to a small storage locker of largely worthless personal possessions and 40 kilos of baggage we were taking with us. Except for short bursts of travel, I'd never been farther than a few hours away from my family.
And you can't help but be a little edgy when everyone keeps reminding you you're headed for the murder capital of the world. A newcomer reading the relentlessly grim news coming out of Honduras is bound to feel at least a little apprehensive about spending time here, and the scary in-country briefing we got upon our arrival in Tegucigalpa certainly didn't help with that.
But the reality has turned out to be so very different. Virtually every Honduran I've met this past year has wanted only that I like their country. People are friendly and helpful, and despairing over the daily deluge of bad-news media stories that are scaring travellers and aid missions away. Sometimes I'll be walking through an area that I walked ever so tentatively in those first few weeks in Honduras and flash back to how nervous I felt back then, and how sharply that contrasts with the way I feel now on those same streets.
My first couple of months on the job were admittedly really difficult, what with understanding so little of what my workmates were saying. I fear my inadequate Spanish skills left me devoid of any outward signs of personality or humour. My head ached at the end of every day from the effort of trying to communicate.
But little by little I learned. At the six-month mark, something kicked in and I began to understand much more of what I heard. The writing and reading came along even quicker. A year on, I can hold my own in any conversation without having to rehearse every sentence in my head before daring to open my mouth, and now use Google Translate solely to confirm what I've already written rather than as a crutch to get me through another baffling day.
My co-workers gradually started inviting me out into the field with them, where at least I could take photos and see for myself the work of the organization. I tried to be helpful in any way I could. I had to let go of the "Canadian way" and adjust to a laid-back work culture that feels none of that sense of urgency to complete tasks on time or on plan.
It was hard to be reduced to a virtual novice on the work front after many comfortable years of recognition back home, but it has also been exciting to be proving myself all over again. My role here is to help my co-workers get better at telling the stories of the great work they do, and I'm finally starting to think that just might be possible.
Perhaps the best part - as strange as this might sound -  has been to experience a country with problems that are not only much more profound than anything my home country faces, but far more complex. To see such problems up close has not only given me a new appreciation for good governance - something that is almost completely absent in Honduras - but challenged me as never before to take more personal responsibility for affecting change. More and more I see what can be accomplished simply by one person doing what they can.
I've learned that while Skype and Facebook are not substitutes for time spent with family and friends, they're pretty good ways to stay in touch. I've learned that you can pack a lot into a short visit home, and hope to one day be as good as my well-travelled cousin at finding cheap flights and arranging meet-you-in-Las-Vegas kinds of holidays for quick catch-ups.
I have another year here to build on what I've learned so far. I'll need it, and am grateful that we had the good fortune of being accepted for two-year positions. It feels like the adventure is just getting started.

The end is in sight - at least for 2012

Parque Central decked out for Christmas and the
end of the Mayan calendar

Feliz Navidad a todos as the festive season closes in. And if the world must end, may it be as sunny and as pleasant as it is right now in Copan.
We'll be out at the Copan Ruinas archaeological site tomorrow night with the rest of the crowds just in case there's something to this end-of-the-world business. Might as well have ringside seats.
But I'm counting on the experts and the Mayan people to be right about the whole thing being a trumped-up myth. We're leaving on Saturday for two weeks of enjoying the Caribbean beaches of Honduras, so I'd hate to think the world might end before we fit that in.
I don't expect to be blogging much in the next while, what with all the travelling, snorkelling, lying around in the sun with a good book and other forms of merriment. My son and his family are here visiting until mid-January and  I want to free up as much time as possible to help them enjoy Honduras.
 But thanks for  reading my blog this past year and for sending comments my way once in a while - always great to hear from you. The Honduran adventure continues in 2013 and I'll back to documenting it sometime around the second week of January (barring something so fascinating happening that I just can't help but comment).
My plan is to see even more of the country in the coming year, as I'll be visiting the six other regions where my organization works.  Such an opportunity to get even further off the beaten path in this lovely, interesting country.  

Oh, the weather outside's not frightful (and by the pool's delightful)

Copan Christmas elves

I was sitting by the pool today, sipping a cerveza and thinking about what a very different Christmas I’ll be having this year.

This is my first Christmas ever outside of Canada.  I’m not the type to make too big a deal out of Christmas, but I did have a few rituals around the season. The absence of those rituals this year is making me newly aware of the ones I’m missing and the ones I never did take much of a shine to.

Cold weather, for instance. Maybe I dreamed of a white Christmas a few times as a kid, but that desire pretty much went away once I started to drive a car and work for a living.

Yes, it’s a little harder to summon Christmas feelings while lying poolside, despite the colourful light display at one of the local drinking holes I walked past on the way home and the inflatable snowman on a neighbour’s roof.  But I will be perfectly happy Christmas morning to throw the doors open and breathe in warm, tropical air.

I also don’t miss Christmas carols in all the stores. Come to think of it, I don’t miss the stores, either.  

The variety stores in Copan do carry a few Christmas supplies: Lights; garlands; Christmas wrap; candles. There are poinsettias for Christmas – they grow here – and maybe a turkey in the yard whose end is coming soon. But there’s no crazy mall scene like I’ve been used to all those years, or hordes of people jammed into over-stocked stores with a look of panic in their eyes.

Santa did come to the town square to throw around a few candies. But while he’s known around these parts, my co-workers tell me that few Honduran kids ever get up Christmas morning expecting to find gifts from Santa. I won’t shed any tears for Santa’s absence, because it’s a strange myth when you get to reflecting on it.

However, I’m definitely missing the many seasonal rituals involving family. I would have made shortbread and homemade Bailey’s with at least one of my daughters by now, and would have dug out the giant bag of tree decorations that always triggers much reminiscing about when and how each ornament from the ragtag collection came to be special and loved.

My son and his family will be here with us over Christmas, so at least we’ll have a few family members around.  But that still leaves four children, three grandchildren, two brothers and two sets of parents who we won’t be spending Christmas with.  I’m really going to miss those guys.

Posadas are held nightly Dec. 1-24

 I’ll miss the scraggly potted pine tree that I dragged indoors to serve as our Christmas tree for the last six years. I’ll miss the various Christmas gatherings that are a staple of this time of year – the mulled wine, the fancy snacks, the excuse to put on nicer clothes. I’ll miss the sheer abundance and variety of food and booze that punctuates the season, although I won’t miss the two months of new-year dieting required to shake off the Christmas bulge.

Copan has its own Christmas traditions to connect to, of course. Posada is a particularly lovely one. People walk through the streets throughout December singing and carrying candles, each night visiting a different posada – somebody’s home designated as that evening’s resting place – where they’re welcomed inside. Anyone can just join the group and follow along.

There’s something happening every night in the square in the 10 days leading up to Christmas, from theatre to celebrations related to the end of the Mayan calendar Dec. 21. There are more tourists in town, more street vendors selling grilled meats, more park vendors selling bright-red Delicious apples imported for the season.  

There’s a nativity scene at the big Catholic church that we want to see. And there are fireworks, endless fireworks, which apparently will just intensify in the days to come. I’m not so enamored of that tradition, but I know my grandsons are going to love it.

Best of the season to you and yours, however you define your Christmas. I will think of you when I’m lying at the beach, and you can think of me when your family gathers around the turkey.  There’s something to be said for both of those. 

The road to nowhere

http://straightfresh.net/editorial-racism-the-war-on-drugs-2/

A good read from the always engaging Richard Branson, this time on the senseless "war on drugs." Hope I live long enough to see us shake off that grand bit of foolishness, but I'm not counting on it.

I come from British Columbia, a land where the marijuana grows so abundantly and well that the veteran growers driving that $6-billion-industry would be winning agricultural awards and international acclaim for their products were it any other crop.  Now I live in Honduras, a country situated halfway between the world’s largest cocaine producer and the world’s largest market for cocaine.

Could there be two better examples of the utter failure of the war on drugs? We've been hard at it for more than 40 years now, and the result of all that effort is that more people than ever are using drugs, selling drugs, going to jail for drugs,  getting killed over drugs, and making a living from drugs.  Yeah, that’s a job well done.

Global leaders look at the world through an economic perspective all the time, which is why it baffles me that they can’t seem to get their head around the illegal-drug industry. It follows the same guiding principles that govern the free market: Find a niche, serve it well and stay ahead of the competition, and you just might make a lot of money.

It’s possible to shift people’s thinking, of course. Consider the dwindling number of cigarette smokers over the last four decades in countries that have relentlessly campaigned against smoking.

But that’s a different thing entirely than prohibition, which is how we've managed “bad” drugs like cocaine, heroin and marijuana all these years. History has proved prohibition a failure as a strategy, and now we've proven it again. Yet here we are, still treading water while a rising tide lifts an industry grown so large that I fear no government will ever actually control it now.

I went to one of the hotel pools a couple of months ago and found myself in the middle of a big wedding in the adjacent reception area. It was a different looking crowd than I've seen at most Copan events – better clothes, higher heels, little girls looking like cotton candy in their pink dresses, hair bows, teeny-tiny purses and matching dolls.

 I remarked to the manager the next week that a striking number of the male guests seemed to have very big guns in their belts. “That’s because they’re narco-traficantes,” he told me matter-of-factly. “But they’re nice ones. We don’t have the bad kind like they have in Mexico.”

I wouldn’t know about the Mexicans. But the point the fellow brings up about nice-guy narco-traficantes is a good one.

We’re still conjuring bogeymen when we think about drug trafficking. But in fact the industry is fully integrated with “regular” society. The children of people in the illegal-drug trade go to school with your children. They shop at the same stores you do, and in all likelihood worry about the same kinds of things that worry us all over the course of a lifetime.

 Whether it’s Honduras with its vast cocaine distribution network or B.C. with its marijuana cultivation, the truth is that people working in the illegal-drug industry look and act a lot like the rest of us. For the most part, they don’t stand out in a crowd. I suppose some of them could be pure evil, but I’d bet that a lot of them just drifted into their jobs the same way that many of us do.

I don’t know if there was ever a time when we could have regulated this industry; it’s hard to control a market for things that give pleasure. But we certainly can't get there by sticking with prohibition.

You could probably make an “if only...” argument as to what we could have done to reduce drug consumption if we’d had a workable plan around that goal. You can change people’s behaviours if you work at it long enough with just the right strategies.

But it’s way too late for that now.

There’s nothing “burgeoning” about the illegal-drug industry anymore. When we inevitably get around to regulating an industry that we’ve been trying to deny since the 1970s, the regulators will be up against well-developed markets, huge investments, major transportation infrastructure and products that are completely beyond their control.

People, there’s no war anymore. The “bad” guys won. We played this hand so poorly that all we can do at this point is to hang our heads for all the wasted years and then find ways to tax what we can, decrease the violence in the industry, and give the public (especially young people) enough honest information about drugs that they can make informed decisions.

A global illegal-drug industry is what happens when countries with lots of money and guilt over pleasurable activities encounter impoverished tropical countries full of poor people desperate to make a living. You have to know how a story like that is going to end.  Time to get real.

A campaign whose time hasn't come

Imagine the garbage ethos of 1950s-North America overlaid with the acute environmental sensitivity of the modern-day world, and you've got the Honduras dilemma.
People are still  dropping garbage on the streets here. They're chucking it out of the windows of their cars. Shredded plastic, rusted tin cans, chip bags and pop bottles are common sights along rivers and creeks, as are garbage-strewn spots along the road that residents without municipal garbage services have turned into dumps.
Yet the country also has educated, affluent citizens influenced by the Internet, television and all those other forms of media that carry word of global campaigns to reduce, reuse and recycle. Pushed by countries with 50 or more years of garbage awareness under their belts, the arrival of such campaigns in a pre-Litterbug country creates a confused response.
So it is that twice in the last week, I've found myself listening to presentations about reducing the use of plastic bags in Honduras.
This is a popular theme in countries like Canada, where some grocery stores now leave you with no option but to either get it together around reusable shopping bags or stagger out the door with your loose purchases balanced precariously in your arms.
I'm all for fewer plastic bags, of course. I've read the scary stories about the impact of plastic bags on our environment, and am diligent about bringing my reusable shopping bag whenever I go to the store.
But I do fear that we'll soon see anti-bag campaigns funded by developed-world dollars in a country that has yet to engage its citizens or local governments on much more basic messages around littering.
It's rare to see a public garbage bin here, and even rarer to see one get emptied before the garbage has spilled over the sides and been torn apart by all the wandering, starving dogs. Surely that's the first step -  make it easy for people to choose a different option for disposing of their garbage.
Then comes the campaign in the schools. It's accepted theory that to change culture you start with the children, who then badger their parents into changing their behaviour.
Meanwhile, somebody has to take a look at how the grown-ups are handling things. My town of Copan Ruinas does a heck of a job picking up residential garbage three times a week, but the trucks merely transport the garbage to the sewage settling ponds and dump it behind a retaining wall that runs right alongside the Copan River. You can't shift a cultural mindset without also holding local government's feet to the fire around waste management.
Then there's the virtual absence of municipal staff designated for street cleanup. Somebody from the municipality must empty the four garbage bins in Copan's main park, but it's pretty obvious that they don't do it often or feel any sense of urgency around returning the emptied bins. Everywhere else, garbage builds up on the street  until some frustrated resident  rakes it up and sets it on fire.
Maybe  it's the broken-windows theory at play, but I see garbage build up quickly anywhere there's an empty building or vacant lot. Residents appear to do a good job of picking up the litter that accumulates on the street outside their homes, but who takes responsibility for the rest?
It could be a service club, a school, a volunteer group or city hall. It could be neighbourhood associations or local businesses. (Some of the earliest North American anti-litter campaigns were launched by local business groups.) I'd love to get the owners of Copan's "cantina row" working on a cleanup of the street across from their bars, a  main entrance for tourists and one of the most litter-strewn streets in town.
But whoever ends up taking the lead, it won't just happen out of thin air. First comes the work to raise awareness that something needs to be done, then comes the work to designate just who that is. And in Honduras, you have the added challenge of figuring out who can even start the ball rolling, because community groups are scarce and all  levels of government shirk responsibility.
When you think about all the initiatives that wealthy countries have undertaken in the last 50 years to reduce garbage, you realize what it takes - and how difficult it will be for developing countries to catch up.
Fueled by our well-resourced tax base, we've got high-tech, no-smell landfills in places that no citizen ever has to lay eyes on. We've got expensive bottle-deposit programs, elaborate at-the-curb recycling services, and large municipal departments and government ministries dedicated solely to waste management.
We've got multi-level dumping fees that motivate us by way of our (ample) pocketbooks to reduce, reuse and recycle. We've got costly systems at our landfills that remove toxic methane gas from rotting garbage and convert it to electricity for our homes. We've got at least four generations of citizens with anti-littering messages burned into their brains, and more than enough highway police and vigilant citizens to keep watch for anyone brazen enough to throw garbage  from a car window.
Countries like Canada and the U.S. have great garbage habits not because there's something intrinsically tidy about us, but because we've spent a fantastic amount of time and money over five decades to make that so.
Lucky us that we've advanced to the point of now being able to consider the lowly plastic bag. But Honduras has miles to go before disposable shopping bags will ever be the answer to its problems. 

A Christmas wish for a better children's home

Celeste, a new arrival at Angelitos

I wanted to share the Christmas letter of the young Philadelphia woman who is trying to start a better  foster home/orphanage for the children in Copan. My heart is with the kids at the current children's home,  Angelitos Felices, but my dreams are pinned on Emily Monroe, as her project would definitely be the long-term solution to the endless problems at Angelitos.

Orphanages and foster homes are all run in different ways in Honduras - from essentially private operations like Angelitos, which scratches up centavos wherever it can to provide basic care, to well-supported facilities that see the kids through various life stages and even get them into vocational training. The Honduran government has its own orphanages as well, but the media reports on these homes make it clear that they have even more problems than Angelitos.

Emily is going about things in all the right ways. She started a day care for impoverished working mothers three months ago, and now she's up to her eyes in paperwork she needs to complete in order to get non-profit  status in the U.S. and legal standing in Honduras. None of it will be easy, cheap or quick (especially the Honduras part).

I'm quite an admirer of her tenacity, and try to do what I can to support her while continuing to support the 25 children at Angelitos. We're here through January 2014 and I think I can accomplish a lot at Angelitos, but it would make me so happy to see those kids transition to a new facility run by Emily's group before we pack up.

I'm deeply grateful for the tremendous help I've received from my friends to fund projects at Angelitos. But anyone looking for a long-term way to help vulnerable children in Honduras will also want to check out Emily's good work at Casita Copan. 

Dear supporters:

Santa has one more stop this year – the new children’s home Casita Copán in Copan Ruinas, Honduras! To make our very first Christmas memorable, we are reaching out to supporters like you to ask you to be a part of the celebration. As a growing, grassroots organization, Casita Copán is entirely funded by the generosity of people like you, people who believe that all children deserve to grow up in safe, healthy, and loving homes.

What started as a (slightly crazy) dream has turned into a reality. Three months ago, Casita Copán opened its doors to some of the most vulnerable children in our community. Now we are providing care 7 days a week, 11 hours a day to 19 children. Every day, our kids receive loving care, healthy food, access to medicine, educational tutoring and support, fun activities, and so much more. The change in them is visible.  Our future plans remain focused on opening our doors to even more children, including orphaned and abandoned children.

This holiday season, we are asking you to be a part of our efforts to make the future a little brighter for some special kids in Copán. We know that at this time of year, everyone is asking you to give something. The great thing about donating to Casita Copán is that your money goes far. We are still a small organization with very little overhead, and your donation can mean the difference between a child roaming the streets or spending his days with the Casita Copán family.

Ready to join us? You can help right away by making a donation to children of Casita Copán – just click here. Or if you are interested in a longer-term commitment, consider sponsoring one of our amazing kids. You can also help by forwarding this email to a friend or family member to help us spread the word. We are so thankful for the energy, commitment, and generosity of people like you who have brought this project to life.

Wishing you all the best this holiday season,

Emily Monroe

Casita Copán

Copán Ruinas, Honduras

www.casitacopan.org

Up against the culture

You haven't really tested your inner fortitude until you've done a few Honduran meetings. I mean, we're talking a serious endurance test.
Fresh from a three-day retreat for the non-profit I work for in Copan Ruinas, I'm newly reminded of the Honduran capacity to just hang in there at meetings and presentations that just go on and on.
I even think the people here like it that way. I can't tell you the number of meetings I've been to here at which the fourth or fifth straight hour rolls around and things seem to be finally wrapping up, and just as I presume every participant is as twitchy, inattentive and restless as me, they launch into an enthusiastic question-and-answer session that keeps the meeting going for another hour or more.
I found myself grousing quietly to one of my co-workers at the retreat that in Canada, our presenters believe that people need breaks every 90 minutes or their exhausted brains will go on presentation overload and they won't hear a thing. I suspect he thought I was whining. I guess I was.
But let's consider how those three days went:
Day 1: People arrive for the retreat in Siguatepeque from massive distances - drives of seven or more hours. As a result the devotional doesn't get underway until almost 4 p.m., and the presentation portion of the day doesn't start until after 5 p.m. The meeting goes on until 9:30 p.m.
Day 2: Devotional shortly after 8 a.m., day-long presentation starting around 9. One presenter, without so much as a PowerPoint or flip chart, will spend the next day and a half talking to the group. On this day, he goes into it hard and doesn't stop until we break for lunch at 12:30 p.m. Then he's back at it again at 2:30 for another hour and a half, after which we get a couple hours off to rest up for the evening of devotionals, presentations, videos of the past year's festivities, talent show and bible trivia game. That goes until after 11 p.m.
Day 3: Another 8 a.m. start, with a devotional first and then more presentations until noon, at which point we eat lunch and then pile into our prospective vehicles for the long drives back to our communities. I am by this point totally exhausted, and dreading the nausea-inducing five- or six-hour ride back to Copan stuffed into a van with eight workmates and no leg room. But everybody else looks positively energized.
The Monday morning staff meetings are similar tests of endurance that everybody but me seems capable of handling. The meetings start at 10 a.m. or so, after the weekly devotional, and can last until 3 p.m.  I appear to be the only one who finds that ridiculous.
 I'm positively jiggy by the end of those meetings, struggling to contain an urge to either run shrieking from the room to just say screw it and start checking emails. I doubt I'll ever get used to these meetings.
My dream meeting is one where everybody comes in focused on the task at hand, with a clear agenda and a chair who knows how to run that thing perfectly. The conversation is informed, inclusive and purposeful. We're done within two hours at the most; if it's a day-long event, there will be at least two coffee breaks, some entertaining "break-out groups" and strange but welcome stretching games, lunch and a 4:30 p.m. finish.  We leave with clearer knowledge of the tasks that lie ahead and a better understanding of what needs to be done.
Here, I just stagger out of the room, too tired to even appreciate that at least I've survived another meeting. If there's an agenda, I never see one, which is also true for any of the people in my line of vision. I  leave with no idea of what I should do next or whether we accomplished anything with our hours and hours of talk. Am I just a difficult gringa princess unable to shake loose of her own cultural practices, or is this a crazy way to do a meeting?
But so it goes. (Kurt Vonnegut, thank you for that useful phrase.) I've got two days before I have to be at the regular Monday meeting, and then one whole day in between before I make the five-hour trip  to a town in Lempira for two days of meetings.
That which doesn't kill us makes us stronger. Funny how often that saying comes to mind these days.

A country without care jumps at the chance to see the doctor

The doctor is in at Angelitos Felices

I’ve known for a while now that accessing medical care was a challenge for the majority of Hondurans who have to rely on the public system. But it wasn’t until I put in a couple of days as an ad-hoc translator for a U.S. doctor in the villages this week that I fully understood that medical care is as good as non-existent for a whole lot of people.

The doctor was part of a faith-based group out of Illinois and Tennessee who were here to build fuel-efficient stoves in three villages around Copan. She hadn’t planned on seeing patients, but word got out fast that there was a doctor among the group and she graciously agreed to see a few people.

And they jumped at the chance. On Monday and Tuesday we were in Guarumal, Cabanas, a village of 15 families, and at least nine of those families were in the lineup within 10 minutes of the doctor pulling up a chair on the patio outside a resident’s house. I suspect the other six families would have been there, too, if they’d heard the news that an impromptu clinic was on.

They arrived with all the problems that any family bumps into in the course of a life: fevered little children sick with a seasonal virus; bad coughs; yeast infections; stomach pain; acid reflux; foot fungus; bad teeth; lumps and bumps and itchy rashes that they’d had for years in some cases.

But unlike a typical North American family, these ones rarely got care for their illnesses and injuries. Even if they were able to find the $5 fee to see the doctor at the public clinic, the nearest clinic was a long, hard 10 or 15 miles away and many of them didn’t have transport. Nor did they have money for any necessary lab tests to confirm what ailed them, or for medications. Not that they could count on the scarce public health clinics in this area to even be open when they showed up, or have the medications they needed.

The pharmacies in Honduras are loaded with all the modern medications, and virtually all are available without a prescription. But until a doctor gives you a diagnosis and the name of a drug that might help, none of that means a thing. I wouldn’t like to think how many people end up using the wrong medication for an ailment, simply because they don’t know which one to ask for.

High-sugar diets, poor oral hygiene and no dental care
is a recipe for pain and problems for impoverished
Honduran children.

So while the people in Guarumal were grateful that the visiting doctor sometimes pulled a free bottle of painkillers or antibiotics out of her magic bag, they were equally appreciative just to have her write down the name of the medication they needed.  Money is one hurdle, but knowing what drug to buy is an additional barrier.

The good doctor let me lure her to the Angelitos Felices foster home as well, where 25 or so kids pass their days in unsanitary, damp conditions in which they share towels, clothes, bedding, shoes and therefore all the diseases and infections that spread that way. I’d cautioned her that the kids might be shy about being examined, but in fact most of them really seemed to like the personal attention, not to mention the chance to get a band-aid (or two or three) on their many cuts and scrapes.

I came home with a list of suggested medications for all the kids with ailments, with an asterisk by the ones who need treatment most urgently. That included a two-year-old and a four-year-old who both have severe staph infections on their scalps, a nine-year-old suffering from a monstrous tooth ache from the worst of his many cavities, and a 14-year-old with a urinary tract infection. (Wish I could have done something for the asthmatic little boy we met in Guarumal, who was so obviously struggling for every breath.)

The doctor says just about every child in Angelitos has a chronic fungal infection on their feet, and some have it on their faces and scalps. So I bought a big tube of anti-fungal cream at the pharmacy this morning and am going back for two more when the next shipment arrives from San Pedro next week. Clearing the fungus out of that place sounds like an impossible task, but even a month or two without cracked, achy feet should be a relief for those kids.

Spare a thought for them next time you’re grumbling about the wait at the walk-in clinic or the lineup at the pharmacy. The people here would be ecstatic if that was as big as the problems got. 

On a mission to help a mission

My boss Merlin Fuentes demonstrates a  miniature
version of a fuel-efficient fogon at the Feria Ambiental

Oh, what a week it has been - freshly back from a fast holiday in Las Vegas with a couple  of my daughters, now plunged into a week of acting as a kind of tour co-ordinator to a group of 15 Americans who have come to Copan on a mission to help my organization build fuel-efficient  stoves.
And just to add to the over-stimulation, it's election day in Honduras today. People have already started streaming into local schools and other polling stations to participate in what is essentially the primaries for the 2013 election.
Rumour has it that things get interesting on days like today, when political opinions tend to heat up. Cuso Honduras actually told us volunteers to stay indoors today and stock up on emergency rations, advice that the locals got quite a kick out of when I told them. At any rate, my American friends are counting on me to lead them on a tour of the Mayan ruins and later the foster home where I help out, so shutting myself in the house isn't an option.
It's pretty amusing to be called into service as a Copan tour guide and a translator, neither of which I'm remotely qualified for. Happily, a genuine tour guide who's quite fluent in English has already attached himself to the group, wisely seeing an opportunity to be of service in all kinds of ways. But I suspect the group and I will still have a lot of hanging-out time  in the  week to come, and now the bonding experience of going through our first Honduran elections together.
Hosting missions from the U.S. and elsewhere is one of the goals of the Honduran non-profit I work for, the Comision de Accion Social Menonita (CASM). Faith-based groups from various denominations do a significant amount of project work in the country, coming down for a week or so to build schools, take on a water project, construct chicken coops or tackle whatever else needs doing.
This particular group is more eclectic than most, coming from four states and having family ties, old friendships and a parish preacher in common. So there's a mom-and-daughter pair, three siblings from another family, two parents with their two kids, a couple cousins. Some have done several missions before while others are trying it for the first time; one fellow is on his first-ever trip outside the U.S.
Starting at 8 a.m. tomorrow, they'll be spending five days in the countryside around Copan building about 40 wood cooking stoves in the homes of subsistence farmers. The group raised $2,000 to cover the costs of the stoves - fogones, as they're known here - and soon they'll be mixing cement and stacking bricks in homes in Guaramal, Mirasol and Libertad, three of the many, many struggling little villages around this region.
My organization has built about 350 stoves like these ones over the last three years. Everybody loves them. They burn 45 per cent less firewood, have chimneys to vent smoke out of the house, are insulated with ash so nobody gets burned, and have big cooking surfaces that can easily accommodate all those tortillas that are a constant of the Honduran diet.
But while the stoves cost a  scant $40-$60 each to build, that's still a lot of money here. The only way farmers get the stoves is if CASM has development money from somewhere to do a project. Or if a good-hearted mission group from outside of the country raises money among their friends and heads on down to Honduras for a working holiday.
Pictures to follow.  And now I'm off to the ruins, on a beautiful day in the midst of the drizzly season that I think must be some kind of karmic reward for good people who come all this way to make life a little easier for a few Honduran families.

Give this poor country a break

This is the first time I've lived anywhere other than Canada, let alone in a country with such a ferocious reputation for violence that my friends and family are regularly checking in with concerned voices as to whether everything’s fine down here. 

Nothing to worry about, I tell them. And I mean that. Despite the endlessly bleak news about Honduras and a truly formidable murder rate, this country has in fact been a very pleasant place to live these past 10 months. The place needs work, absolutely, but this seemingly global need to portray the country as a random killing zone is both cruelly inaccurate and damaging to the people who live here. 

A worried friend back home recently asked me about this comment from the latest newsletter of Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders. In Honduras, “violence is the main strategy for solving any problem, whether it’s related to drugs or not,” said MSF spokesman Javier Rio Navarro.

I don't know about you, but that kind of statement conjures in my mind visions of dangerous men everywhere, daggers clenched between their teeth and assault rifles at the ready should there be a need to gun down random strangers. It conjures up a country that is inherently violent, where the norms of civilized society have broken down and no one is safe anymore.

I have tried to square that image of Honduras with my daily experiences here, in which I walk back and forth to work and meet nothing but friendly people also walking to wherever their day-to-day routine is taking them in the moment: To the market to sell tortillas; to their child's school; to the field where they're moving the cows; to their construction job. It doesn't square.

I've even walked the wild streets of Tegucigalpa. And while the city has yet to win me over, nobody my partner and I have come across in our visits there has been looking to do two gringos harm.

Nor were they shooting at each other, having fights, robbing passing strangers, or otherwise wreaking havoc on the social order. They were going about their business. That’s what human beings tend to do most wherever they are in the world, even in the middle of a full-on war.

I've yet to see a problem solved with hand-wringing. But that and a challenging reform of the Honduras police force – badly needed, but not a solution  all on its own -   are pretty much all that’s going on. As far as I can tell, no work is underway to get underneath the scary statistics and figure out who is really at risk and what can be done about it. Simply piling on more headlines to scare off even more of the tourists certainly isn’t any help. 

Here’s my take on who’s really at risk here, based on my reading of the news and the many stories I’ve heard from Hondurans:

• Anyone associated with the illegal drug industry, where assassination is used to kill off the competition, wreak vengeance, and “send a message” through the murder of family members, loved ones and acquaintances of a narco-traficante on the wrong side of somebody’s list.
• Poor people who live in the poorest barrios and ride the cheapest buses, which are regularly held up by robbers and gang members who either want to steal what they can in the moment or extort the driver and passengers with a “war tax.”
• Poor business owners who are extorted by gangs just for trying to make a living in the roughest areas of the big cities where law and order simply don’t exist.
• Campesinos fighting in the heated Bajo Aguan land dispute.
• Hondurans engaged in Hatfield-and-McCoy style vendettas over real and perceived wrongs of the past, in which one violent act begets another and another for potentially years.
• People who get fingered by acquaintances as a known killer, robber or otherwise bad person, and thus become candidates for the kind of street justice that can happen in a country with a troubled police history and a largely ineffective justice system.
• The unfortunate innocents who occasionally find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time when one of the above-mentioned groups engages in violence and kills them by accident.

That’s a lot of people, for sure. But except for the last category, it’s not a random collection. It still means Honduras has some big problems to get a handle on, but it doesn’t mean that the whole country is a dangerous wasteland that only dare devils and the uninformed would ever spend time in.

That image does such a disservice to the vast majority of pleasant, peaceful, deeply religious Hondurans. It does the country genuine harm by scaring off the aid programs, investors and travellers that are so vital to a brighter future for Honduras.

Don’t believe everything you read. Good people live here, and they need more from the world than condemnation and fear-mongering.