In my room, and not that happy about it

   

  I know that after I've said a sad goodbye to the Comision de Accion Social Menonita and have returned to Canada, I will talk fondly to my friends about having had the amazing opportunity to travel around so much of Honduras through my work in all seven regions of CASM.

    But tonight I’m in a down-market hotel room in teeny La Campa, sitting under a hideous fluorescent doughnut light while dining on weird little coconut sticks I packed in my bag knowing that I’d be dead bored by Day 3 with the limited food selection here. There’s absolutely zilch on the 13-inch TV. I’m a very long bus ride away from home and am marking my 14^th day of out-of-town work in the last three and a half weeks.

    And I am not feeling the love.

    A job that involves travel sounds great until you actually have one. I remember having that same revelation as a newsroom manager in Victoria, when the excitement I felt at my first company trip to Toronto died quickly once I realized just how many hours are lost in transit, and how even a nice hotel room is a poor substitute for your own bed back home.

    At any rate, my Honduras travels don’t come with the option of a nice hotel room – partly because the little towns where CASM works simply don’t have such things, and partly because when you’re making $10,000 a year and paying much of the travel expenses out of your own pocket, you make very different choices.

    The rooms are never dirty, but they’re certainly basic. Some have hot showers; others have a cold-water pipe coming out of the wall. A few of the rooms have been unnerving, like the one in the Moskitia with its flimsy little push-button door lock and no one but me in the entire building most nights. There’s a place in Tocoa that I treasure because it has a small pool, a lot of TV channels and better internet than we’ve got at home, all for $22 a night. But that’s a rare thing.

    Then there’s the restaurant food. It gets tiresome pretty fast for a business traveller even when there are lots of places to choose from. But small-town Honduran food – well, just imagine eating the same meal three times a day for a week and you’ll get the picture. That’s why I packed the coconut sticks, along with 6 mandarin oranges and a small bag of apples. Bless those who can eat simply, but the tipico plate of beans, tortillas and spot of protein that a lot of Hondurans are completely content with as a steady diet just doesn’t do it for me this long into the gig.

    And even when I’m prepared to eat a plate of tipico, there are times when I have no idea where to find one. People who live in La Campa know that you walk down the dirt road to an unmarked house on the right and the woman there will serve you something, but I had no idea the first time I was here and basically lived on chips from the corner store. In the strange little town where I stay when in the Moskitia, nobody sells fruit or vegetables (that’s the case in La Campa, too), and access to a meal totally depends on whether Doña Doris is back from visiting her kids in La Ceiba and Doña Rosa isn’t too busy with her teaching.

    Then there are the bus rides. The shortest is four hours to San Pedro Sula, but most trips are closer to six hours. The monster trip is to Tocoa, where I’ll be going in another week – 10 hours. I’ve become a master at zoning out, and sometimes I even sleep if my knees aren’t jammed into the seat in front of me and the person next to me isn’t talking loudly on their cellphone, trying to soothe their baby while balancing an 8-year-old on their knee, or throwing up (surprising amount of motion sickness among Honduran bus riders).

    Yeah, yeah, I’m whining. Blame it on the coconut sticks. But as soon as I finish this post, I’m going to look at the video clips I got today of a solemn little group of La Campa Catholics enacting a ritual in honour of the patron saint of the town, Matthias, and I’ll probably feel all warm and fuzzy again thinking about all the things I’ve had the chance to see these past two years due to travelling the country for work.

    And then I’ll crawl into my plain but not uncomfortable bed, dim the fluorescent doughnut, and be one more day closer to going home.

Why does the schlub always get the pretty girl?

   

At least this frog turns into a handsome prince

I found an old Stephen King book in a hotel book exchange a couple weeks ago. I usually enjoy his books, but this one’s got a secondary plot line of a widower over 40 falling in love with an enchanting 19-year-old girl, and I just can’t bear that May-September thing even one more time.

     I mean, think about how many times you have read a book, seen a movie or watched a TV series  in which some aspect of the plot involved a man who was either much older or much homelier (and often both) than the woman who loved him. If books and movies were real life, we would have to conclude that young, beautiful women overwhelmingly prefer schlubby, unattractive and aging men.

     Don’t get me wrong, I embrace the concept of gorgeous young woman seeing past the superficiality of physical beauty to the cool, sensitive dude inside the aging bald guy that the rest of the world sees. But how often have you ever seen that plot line in reverse? On the rare occasion that a good-looking male character finds himself drawn to the homely girl, there will always be a scene toward the end in which she undergoes a makeover and is suddenly ravishing. When does the schlubby, old-enough-to-be-Mom woman EVER get the young, handsome dude, other than in movies whose whole premise is to throw something “weird” like that at us as a kind of satire, or in teen comedies in which boys sleep with their best friend's mom? 

     I saw the best/worst example of this overdone plot line in an episode of Criminal Minds, a popular American TV drama about FBI agents hunting serial killers that plays endlessly here in Honduras. I’ve come to despise the show because it’s such a thinly veiled excuse to show women being mutilated, raped and tortured on TV. But we’ll leave all that for some future blog post.

     Anyway, there’s a quirky female character in the show, Penelope, who plays the classic stereotype of the brilliant but never-chosen woman – buddy to everyone, girlfriend to none. Nonetheless, there was a small plot line that played out over two or three episodes one season (yeah, I know, if I hate the show so much why have I seen all these episodes? But sometimes you just want to watch something in English) in which Penelope got wooed by a Handsome Man.

     She’s overweight and wears glasses – a funky dresser and amazing computer whiz, absolutely, but a long way off the TV norm for women. Handsome Man, on the other hand, is steel-jawed and fit, with a full head of hair and yearning eyes. But there he is, crazy about Penelope. A more naive viewer might conclude that the less-hot chick might actually be poised to get the dream guy. 

     Not a chance. Penelope’s FBI buddy Derek, who ought to be slapped upside the head for all the times he calls her Baby Doll, gives us our first clue with his reaction to Handsome Man. He is very, very suspicious of Handsome Man right from the get-go. And who can blame him? A good-looking guy picking a less attractive woman - well, that’s just messed up.

     How messed up? Murderous-killer messed up. Penelope and Handsome Man are outside her house after a romantic dinner date, she leans in close for that first wonderful kiss - and blammo, the guy shoots her. Shoots her. Could there be a more pointed message about what happens to women who go looking outside their league? Honey, when a Handsome Man is flirting with a Plain Jane, it just has to mean that he’s either going to steal your money or try to kill you!

     As much as that plot development stunk, the clincher was still to come. Returning to work after her shooting injuries have healed, broken-hearted Penelope lifts her gaze one day and connects with the bespectacled gaze of a dumpy computer nerd character who has been inserted in the story line, one who deeply admires Penelope for her adept computer work. She looks deeply into his non-luminous eyes  and by the end of the episode is falling for the guy, who is most definitely less attractive than she is. All is right with the world again.

     I suspect the main reason why pretty-young-girl-meets-homely-old-man is such a popular plot line is because men make most of the movies. They make shows from a male perspective - that being that dewy young women like nothing better than aging, funny-looking men like themselves (“Don’t they?” joked my spouse. At least I think he was joking.) 

     And so we get very odd romantic combos like Scarlett Johannson and Bill Murray, Michael Douglas and Sharon Stone, Sofia Vergara and Ed O'Neill, Woody Allen and…well, all his leading ladies. Back at home watching our televisions and movie screens, never seeing any variation on that story line, who could blame us if we conclude that women must strive to be young and beautiful in the search for love, while men can look and act however they choose and still get the prettiest girl?

     I would, of course, be completely delighted if TV shows and movies started shifting away from the young and beautiful and giving roles to those who look more like the rest of us. But it’s only the men’s roles that seem to come with that option. So few female actors continue to be successful after the last blush of youthful beauty fades that I think I could probably name them all. (Helen Mirren, Judi Dench, Dianne Wiest….uh, are there any more?)

     As for the Stephen King book, I’m just going to give up on it. I can’t concentrate on the ghost story when I’m thinking the whole time, “Oh, come ON!” as Sad Rich Widower moons over Sweet Conflicted Child from the Wrong Side of the Tracks. 

     Gee, what a surprising twist. 

Nothing simple about building volunteerism in Honduras

 

    After many years as both a volunteer and an employer working with volunteers, I am well familiar with the highs and lows of the volunteer experience from both sides of the fence. So I'm watching with much interest as the organization that placed me here in Honduras, Cuso International, reshapes itself in the country as the lead hand in the development and management of a national volunteer program.
    It's a wonderful vision. Honduras has a considerable amount of informal volunteering going on - through the church, neighbour-to-neighbour, a handful of service clubs - but could really use structure and support around identifying opportunities, needs and processes. The small NGOs that Cuso works with in Honduras are always run on a shoestring, and stand to benefit significantly from access to skilled volunteers from their own country.
    Several Hondurans have told me that the culture generally doesn't attach much value to volunteering, so Cuso's work could also help change that. And who better than Cuso to take on this work, with a vision centred on building volunteerism?
    But that's not to say it will be easy. Having technically been working as a volunteer these past two years (in truth, we get a stipend and to me it feels more like consulting work), I see much work, frustration and challenge ahead on all fronts to develop a successful volunteering program for Hondurans.
    Consider my personal experience, for instance. If I hadn't been a comparatively well-off Canadian arriving in the country with my own laptop, good camera, collection of software programs and extra money for travelling around to the various regions to help them with their communications, I'd have been hooped. I even had to scrounge up my own desk, and at this moment am sitting in a broken office chair with no back and a propensity to sink slowly toward the floor.
    My job description was "communications and knowledge management facilitator," a title that fits with my work experience in Canada. But the organization I was placed with mostly just saw me as another pair of hands - someone who could perhaps write English-language funding proposals from time to time (not actually in the job description), but otherwise nothing special.
    I am happy to say that has changed over these two years, but only because I learned how to tap into the most persistent, demonstrative, pushy, relentless, show-up-uninvited-and-get-the-job-done version of myself. I got on many buses and travelled many hours to the regions where my NGO works, almost all of it on my own initiative and using my own money because there was no budget for my work. I just showed up and did useful things until they slowly started valuing me.
    Now, let's imagine a Honduran volunteer in that same situation. Most people don't have their own computers or cameras here, especially the young ones that Cuso will be focusing on. They couldn't possibly cover their own transport costs, or food costs if volunteering away from home. Nor would a young Honduran be likely to have the forceful personality needed to find their place in organizations that have no culture of volunteers or experience with managing them.
    What I've seen happen to the handful of Honduran volunteers who have tried to attach themselves to my organization is that they generally spend an inordinate amount of time just sitting in the office staring into space. Even the poor practicum students here tend to have that same experience, and those ones actually have a work plan.
    If someone needs a poster to hang on the door for Independence Day, sometimes the volunteers will get enlisted for that. The last batch was very good at twisting crepe paper in just the right way to trim a doorway. But mostly what I see are enthusiastic young people being made to feel welcome but otherwise largely ignored.
    That's a grand mistake that not only makes it impossible for volunteers to put their skills and abilities to work, but also leaves the organization feeling like there's no real benefits to having volunteers. Worse still, it fritters away all that young enthusiasm and makes people less likely to want to volunteer the next time around.
   What's the problem? My organization has no idea how to use volunteers. If there are any work plans at all, they're a haphazard mish-mosh of ideas tossed in by the employees under orders from the boss to come up with something for the volunteer to do. There is no process for establishing the skills and interests of a volunteer, or determining how they fit with an organization's needs. There are no formalized work expectations or clear lines of authority.
    Nor are there mechanisms for identifying potential volunteers, beyond the usual Honduran method of inviting somebody's family member to give it a try. So an organization that specializes in agricultural development  - and really needs someone to build vegetable gardens, dig holes in the mud and talk to campesinos in the countryside - ends up with a young volunteer whose speciality is computation and who shows up every day dressed in office-style clothes and shoes with three-inch heels.
    That's a problem that could be corrected with a work plan and a some honest talk about appropriate clothes and expectations, of course. But as noted, there IS no work plan, and Hondurans tend to be loathe to engage in any conversations that are potentially conflictual. An organization may not have even thought through how they want to use the volunteer. So everybody just muddles through unhappily, neither party getting what they want and both concluding that volunteering really doesn't work for them.
    The Cuso plan also calls for volunteers to be placed in unpaid work positions that let them develop experience for the paid workforce. Such positions give small employers a chance to test new initiatives without financial risk, or create short-term capacity  to expand their business and create more jobs. Cuso has a great program in Ghana that uses volunteer teachers for chronically hard-to-fill teaching positions in regional areas, later providing them with scholarships that the volunteers to get their formal teaching credentials. Win-win: The volunteers learn a profession; the kids get an education; the country gets more certified teachers.
    But in Honduras, an exploitive work culture with poor worker protection is standard, and any program that matches young volunteers with unpaid work in the private sector has to put those kinds of practices top of mind when developing the plan. I suspect there's also a potential PR problem when the many, many Hondurans desperate for work get wind of a plan to place unpaid volunteers in jobs that they might think should have been available to them.
     And as mentioned earlier, unless employers begin to attach value to volunteer work experience and not just paid work experience, these volunteer employees won't find it any easier to land a paid job. As the Ghana experience demonstrates, partnerships to ease labour problems through volunteer use are definitely possible, but much care must be taken not to end up with a program that looks more like it's providing slave labour for favoured companies.
    I am, of course, hoping for the best for Cuso Honduras. But we're talking about a program that is not just starting from scratch, but looking to change a culture. And we all know how hard that is.
    Take care, guys. Nothing about this transition is going to be a snap. 

Where dreams come to die

Family home at Dixie

    The stink is what hits you first, a fetid blend of sewage, rot, musty laundry washed in a contaminated river, and poisonous-looking water spewing into the river from the giant factory across the road.

    Dixie, they call this place. It’s one of San Pedro Sula’s notorious bordos, the riverfront slums where an estimated 8,000 families from all over Honduras have ended up putting their dreams for a better life behind them to live as squatters in rickety shacks built out of scrounged materials. Squeezed onto a tiny strip of land between the factory and the filthy river, Dixie is one of the most impoverished of the bordos.

    The Comision de Accion Social Menonita (CASM) has been working in the bordos for a decade now, helping the makeshift communities organize themselves for better services; providing school supplies and educational support to children and teens; giving lifeskills workshops and job training to young people in hopes of getting them out of the bordos.

    Young lives have been changed by the work, says one of my CASM co-workers. But the bordos just keep getting bigger and more complicated, she adds. Gangs have now taken control, divvying up the power and even rotating supervisory positions within the various bordos. Nobody comes in and out of the bordos without the gangs knowing; boys take their first step toward gang initiation as banderos, the sentinels who report back to gang leaders if anyone new enters the territory.

Waste from the Dixie factory

    To the outside eye, a bordo looks like a place where a person hits bottom and makes a plan to get out as soon as possible, a place where you linger only for as long as it takes to find a real home – someplace where you don’t have to steal electricity from nearby streets or endure the stink of you and all your neighbours flushing toilets straight into the garbage-filled river just outside your back door. If you even have a door.

    But it turns out that there are perks to living in the makeshift communities. There are no bills to pay, no place worse than where you are to worry about falling into. Yes, bordos are where dreams come to die, populated by citizens of a struggling nation who moved to the big city looking for work only to discover that they can’t afford to pay rent. But that’s not to say that everything about them is bad.

    Without housing costs to worry about, a person can get by on the proceeds of collecting and washing plastic, tin cans and other castoffs for resale, a common job in the bordos. They can find a horse and cobble together a cart, and make a living hauling fruit and vegetables to market. A significant number of men in the bordos work as security guards – dangerous, underpaid work that no one else wants, so there’s always someone hiring.

    And over time, it seems that a sense of community develops even in the bleakest of places. In Rio Blanco, a bordo with a 25-year history, there are barber shops and beauty salons, corner stores, tortillerias and even a new private school run by a Chinese couple, albeit without any of the required state permissions. Many of the shacks have satellite dishes on the roof and big TVs inside, and motorcycles parked out front.

Hair salon in Bordo Gavion

    The community leaders in Rio Blanco now collect and distribute river water for the 800 families living there, and with the small profits that have accrued from the paid service are constructing a health centre – the first ever in a bordo. On the wall of one house we pass, someone has painted, “I will die to stay here.”

    That’s not the sentiment in Dixie, however. Named for the factory whose shadow (and contamination) dominates the neighbourhood, Dixie has a death wish. All the residents want out. CASM is working with them to plan a relocation, and hopes to win support from the owners of the factory – a snack-food manufacturing plant owned by one of the wealthiest and most powerful families in the country, the Facussés – in swaying the government on the idea of relocation. Another government-supported relocation is already underway in a neighbouring bordo, although in that case it’s because the land is needed for a new highway.

    But until a new day dawns, life goes on in Dixie. Children bounce past as we walk along the dusty strip of road between the factory and the shacks, showing off their new school uniforms to the CASM worker who helped their families buy them. A horse-drawn cart passes by, looking strangely out of time with the smoke stacks of the factory rising up behind it.

    As we pass by a garbage-strewn area, I ask a family working there if I can take a picture of the group sorting recyclables. The dad smiles broadly after I take the shot and show him the little image in my camera of his family hard at work. “Que bonita!” he declares. “How nice! Look at all of us together.”

Three generations of a bordo family that works in recycling

On the bus: A Honduran tale of courage and kindness

My new friend Jose

 
 He got on the bus not long after we left Copan Ruinas, and unlike most passengers opted to sit beside the gringa. I told him I liked having a seatmate because it lets me practice my Spanish. He told me he travels the same 10-hour bus route every three days, going between Guatemala City where he works and La Entrada, Honduras, where he lives.
    His name is Jose, 37 years old and still married to the same woman he met as a teenager, when she was 13 and he was 15. They've had their ups and downs but have stuck it out. They have three children, ages 20, 11 and 5. He pulled out his phone to show me photos of his youngest, who is currently feeling a bit mopey due to having some of his bottom teeth pulled out. "Are those your real teeth?" Jose asked me. "They're beautiful!" I didn't even know where to start to try to explain the many reasons why a Canadian's teeth might be better than a Honduran's.
     His kids are the reason he makes the long bus trip so often, racking up 100 hours in bus time every month. He and his wife are currently raising the two young children of their 20-year-old daughter as well, who decided in October to follow the well-worn path between Honduras and the United States and seek a better future for herself and her family by working illegally in the U.S.
    She left with 4,000 lempiras in her pocket - $200, not nearly enough for what is typically a $5,000 trip for those who aim to pay all the bribes along the way and hire a coyote to lead them on the dangerous journey. The family knew she'd have a tough time with so little money, as she'd have to avoid all the people who would be demanding money from her along the way and fight off the thieves who would try to steal what little she had. She would also be travelling alone, a vulnerable young woman on a journey that eats up even the toughest, best-prepared mojados. "But there's no other way to get ahead in Honduras," Jose said.
    The plan was for the girl to make her way to Pennsylvania, where she has an aunt living legally. The family said a tearful goodbye to her that morning in October, then cried for the next two months straight when they didn't hear anything from her. Sometimes they were sure she must have died; other times they just kept on believing that the phone was going to ring one day soon. And it did, on Christmas Day, when she called to say she had made it to Houston.
    The journey had been something that no parent would ever want for their child: Riding on the roof of the notorious train through Mexico known as La Bestia, eventually falling from that dangerous perch on the roof and into a field of desert cacti. The young woman was bruised, battered and covered in hundreds of cactus spines, embedded too deeply for her to pull out. But as it turned out, her fall was a blessing in disguise, because she later found out that immigration officials stopped the train not long after and arrested everyone on the roof.
    The girl became adept at hiding from the criminals who prey on the migrants, dodging the extortionists and the rapists and all the other predators who extract their pound of flesh from the desperate travellers trying to make their way north. Against all odds - Jose has heard that only one in 10 migrants who attempt the journey from Honduras actually make it - she got herself to the border, but was in such agony from the infection in her legs caused by the embedded cactus spines that she had to turn herself into authorities.
     The news stories about illegal migrants rarely mention kind-hearted immigration officials. But someone at the border took pity on Jose's daughter, and got her medical attention for her infected legs. They listened to her as she told them she was trying to make it to her aunt's house. In the end, they admitted her legally to the U.S for five years. Her aunt sent the money for her niece to fly to Pennsylvania, where the girl has now found a job cleaning houses.
    She makes $250 a week and is sending $100 of it back home for the day when she returns, says Jose. Like so many other Hondurans, the young woman doesn't want to stay in the U.S. She just wants the chance to put together a nest egg - for a better house, maybe to start her own business, to pay for a better school for her children. Savings just aren't possible on the low, low wages paid in Honduras; for the same work the girl is doing in Pennsylvania, she'd be lucky to earn $25 a week in her home country, and would very likely have to work six or seven days a week just to earn that.
    Jose's story-telling made the trip to La Entrada go much faster than usual. We said our goodbyes as the bus pulled up near his neighbourhood, exchanging phone numbers in case there came a time when we could be of help to each other, or perhaps so I could someday hear how the story of his courageous daughter ends. From his well-worn duffel bag he pulled out a batido, a big plate-sized fudge-like thing made from sugar-cane juice, and gave it to me as a parting gift. I shared it with my other seatmates all the way to Santa Barbara.