Bringing a dog home from Honduras: Hard lessons learned

 

  Maybe one day you’re going to find yourself somewhere in Honduras thinking, hey, here I am in a country with way too many sick, underfed dogs, and I’d like to find at least one of them a great new home in Canada.

    And with that one little thought, the grand and costly adventure will have begun.

    I must admit, bringing White Dog home seemed destined. We've been feeding a variety of dogs during our two-plus years in Copan Ruinas, but White Dog appeared out of nowhere for the first time a couple of days before one of my daughters and her husband arrived for a visit in January, and the three of them instantly hit it off. Unlike a lot of the other street dogs here, who really love their wandering lives, White Dog seemed done with the entire business and eager to shift into a more domesticated life. Why not, we all said.

   So I went on-line and started looking for information on airline web sites. United is the airline we’ve used the most for flights back and forth to Canada since we came here, and information on the United site about the company’s PetSafe program seemed pretty thorough. It looked like the rate for a dog of White Dog’s size in the (giant) kennel required by the airline would be around $289 – pricey, I thought, but not impossible. United also got back to my email requests for more information, unlike Delta and American Airlines.

   United’s initial information was wrong, mind you, and I would eventually come to see that what was on their site wasn't even remotely thorough and in fact was downright misleading. But in those halcyon days of January when I did not yet know just how little I knew, choosing United seemed logical.

   I quickly learned that while there was quite a bit of information about PetSafe on the site, getting particulars for booking a specific dog on a specific plane was like pulling teeth. I didn’t really get why it was going so badly until I got in touch with a Facebook acquaintance who’d been through the experience of shipping a dog from Honduras to Canada, who told me Honduras requires the use of animal brokers. He sent me a contact for Rex Internacional, which United uses.

   In hindsight, I should have paid more attention to the teeny notice on the United PetSafe rate page that says “Note: Additional fees may apply in countries that require the use of animal brokers.” But isn’t that just always the way with hindsight? At any rate, never in my wildest imaginings would a passing aside about “additional fees” lead me to think that it would increase the rate quoted on the United site by 140%.

   But I’m getting ahead of myself. While waiting for more information on how to ship White Dog, I got started on the veterinary processes. We live in Copan Ruinas, which has no veterinarian, so the first step was an eight-hour return bus ride for me and White Dog to San Pedro Sula to visit a vet who knew all the steps to meet airline requirements. Canada’s requirements turned out to be surprisingly simple - a current rabies vaccination – but the airline needed things like a health certificate dated within 10 days of your flight and an export permit (really?) from the Honduran government.

   Price for vet services, export permit, and one month of antibiotic treatment for a tick disease we discovered White Dog had: $250. Add another $28 for the round trip bus ride to and from San Pedro, as I had to buy White Dog her own bus ticket. But hey, I was still thinking that the airfare was $289, so I remained calm.

   Now, the kennel. The airline wants the dog to be comfortable, so you need to pick a kennel according to a set of measurements based on the dog’s size. I thought we could save $200 for a new kennel by having my youngest daughter bring a used kennel with her when she came to visit us this month, not fully understanding just how big and awkward a Kennel 500 can be. We could have gotten away with the smaller Kennel 400, as it turned out, but at least White Dog now has a doggie condo to relax in for her flight.

   As things went, that too was a much more hassle-filled endeavor than I had anticipated, and Houston airport actually threatened my daughter with having to pay $200 to ship the kennel here because it was oversize (a kinder agent stepped in and resolved the crisis). I make a point of not saying “You would think” anymore, because that’s a very clear sign that a person is not adjusting to Honduran culture, but really, wouldn’t you think United might consider renting the damn kennels?

   Anyway. So early March comes and I'd now been in email correspondence for six weeks with the Rex Internacional and United folk, and had had the dog vaccinated, treated for her tick disease, organized the kennel journey and booked our own flights back to Canada. I send another email to Rex Internacional confirming that all is a go, and they finally tell me the total price: $805. It is not overly dramatic to say that I thought I was going to throw up. I mean, not only is that way, way higher than my daughter or I were planning for, it is a truly embarrassing amount for two volunteers to pay to bring a dog home from an impoverished country where $805 is many people’s annual income. It is almost $200 more than our own tickets cost us.
   Not only that, but they would only fly her to Vancouver, not Victoria. So we would now be arriving at midnight in Vancouver with a dog, unable to use our tickets to Victoria and with no transport to get the three of us to Victoria. 

   But by this time, almost 2 months had passed since White Dog started hanging around. We had moved into full-on domestication. This dog was a pet, pure and simple. I couldn't have lived with myself if we’d just abandoned her to her Copan fate at that point. We were totally over a barrel.

   I did my best, sending Rex Internacional a note that made it very clear that we were devastated and angry. I CC’d high-ups in United. It helped a little: Rex acknowledged they’d made an error of $110 by charging us for 2 dogs in the kennel (even though I’d filled out a form stating there was only one). But United didn’t budge. I sulked for a few days, but then confirmed with my daughter that we were all still committed, and booked the flight for $695. Which is still more than our own tickets.

   Add it all up and we’re basically at $1,000. The kennel ended up costing $40 for my daughter to bring as a second piece of baggage. Plus it got cracked somewhere along the way, so add in maybe another $30 to fix it. And then there will be the cost of private transport for getting the dog and her condo-kennel to San Pedro, as not even the most tender-hearted bus driver is going to let us lug that huge thing onto a crowded local bus. I’m not even sure it would fit through the door.

   Call me suspicious, but I have a strong feeling that the costs aren't fully tallied yet. I've been joking with my daughter that we should rename the new family member Golden Dog. Thanks to Facebook, though, we do now have transport to Victoria after a kind-hearted person who I don't even know that well said she was going to be in Vancouver on April 2 and would come pick us up. 

    But it’s all just money, isn’t it? White Dog only has to make that little extended-paw gesture of hers that always makes me smile, and all is forgiven. As for Rex Internacional and United Airlines – well, that might take a little longer.  

The wheels on the bus go round and round: Tips for a better Honduran bus experience

   

Spend enough hours on a Honduran long-distance bus and you will end up boarding them with the seasoned eye of a veteran seat-assessor, able to take in the available options at a glance and make the best choice with barely a moment of additional anxiety to the passengers jamming in behind you. Having been up, down and around this country on all manner of public transportation, here are my recommendations for how it's done:

1. Do I have control of the window? Unless you're on a first-class, air-conditioned bus - in which case none of this matters, because you'll have an assigned seat - this is perhaps the most important issue for your comfort. Without control of the window, you forfeit your right to get a little cool air in your face during a hot time of year or stop the passing storm from pouring in on you in more inclement times of year. Plus you're not going to be able to buy snacks and drinks from the vendors who come rushing up whenever the bus stops if you're not near a window that opens.

2. Is this seat back in good shape? There are a lot of busted seat backs in the lower classes of Honduran buses, and if you don't check this out you could find yourself slowly sinking into a reclining position no matter how many times you try to get the damn seat to stay straight up and down.

3. Did I just pick a seat over the wheel well? Classic error - you see the empty seat at the back, you rush to grab it, only to discover that the wheel well is right below your feet and you will now have to sit with your knees at your chin for several hours.

4. Did somebody spill something on this part of the floor? Unless you want your shoes lightly stuck to the floor and making that strange ripping noise every time you adjust them, stay away from any seat that appears to have borne the consequences of a sugary drink having been spilled two seats further up and then spread through a thousand or so stops and starts of the bus.

5. Am I sitting near anyone who gets motion sick? I don't know about you, but being too close to someone who is barfing makes me want to barf, too. Sniff the air. Look for evidence of someone clutching a small plastic bag and looking embarrassed. Pay attention to who takes up the bus guy's offer of plastic bags and move seats accordingly.

6. Is my seatmate a Honduran male? It could be that any male seatmate is a problem on this front. Men sit like it's their right to take up as much space as their body feels it needs, and never mind that you are crouching on the edge of your seat trying to avoid having your legs touch as the guy inevitably lets his knees swing open as wide as he likes and claims not just the arm rest but three more inches beyond it. Women, on the other hand, seem much more aware of sharing the common space fairly.

7. Does this mom with her baby in fact have 3 more children in a seat behind her? Children have zero rights on a Honduran bus, which means that if Mom has planted her kids in another seat and the time comes that the seat is needed for another adult passenger, those kids will now have no option but to stand in the tiny slip of space between the mom and the next seat. If you happen to be sitting next to her, count on having a child standing in front of you, too.

8. Am I better off with the seat big enough for 2.5 people that will end up holding 3, or the one big enough for 1.5 people that will end up holding 2? You're on your own for this one. I ask myself the same question every time I get on the refitted school buses that have this seat arrangement, and I've yet to figure out the right answer. I suspect there isn't one. 

Crack down on crime where it counts

  This morning's paper brought news of a tiny baby found abandoned at the foot of a tree in a village not far from the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa.  Next to him was a bag full of baby products - a bottle of milk, diapers, talcum powder, a bib - and a note asking whoever found the baby to look after him well. A neighbour saw the news about the foundling and called in to report the young mother who had abandoned the baby, and now she's going to prison.
    Oh, come on. In the same paper, there were stories about 14 people who had been fatally shot in Honduras the day before, including two in wheelchairs. Another story listed details of four massacres that had happened since November in which 17 people had been killed.
    With the exception of one of the massacres, there are no suspects in any of the murders. And if things go the way they usually seem to go here, there never will be.
     Elsewhere in the morning paper, the Ministry of Social Security reported a theft of 23 million lempiras (about $1.2 million) resulting from "ghost" companies billing for non-existent services. Meanwhile, an editorial noted that the number of women murdered in Honduras - which has the highest homicide rate in the world - has increased by more than 18 per cent in the last two years.
   And the new president's "firm hand" is coming down on desperate, impoverished moms who don't have the resources to look after one more child?
    I don't want to knock President Juan Orlando Hernandez for trying to get a handle on crime in the country. But what I've seen so far is a lot of busy-work at police road stops - cars pulled over, buses stopped and passengers ordered to disembark for inspections - while the fundamental problems continue unchecked.

    Honduras doesn't just have a lot of murders, it has an unbelievable number of assassinations - murders for pay. It's not just random violence happening here, it's executions. While the Direccion de Estadistica Policia Nacional has no data available for 55 per cent of the 7,500 or so murders committed in the country in a typical year (quite an appalling problem all on its own), at least 30 per cent of those that have been classified are listed as "retribution killings by hit men." (http://latam-threads.blogspot.com/2012/01/violence-in-honduras.html). 

    One of the most horrendous of the massacres on that list in today's paper was one such killing, and it happened just five kilometres away from our town of Copan Ruinas two weeks ago. Two young men chopped up five members of a family with machetes, reportedly in retribution for a murder a year ago. Two of those killed were children, one age six and the other a mere 11 months old. 

    What did Juan Orlando have to say about that? Nothing. He did give a speech yesterday in which he mentioned that the level of insecurity in the country is intolerable, but neither he nor any other political leader - or police chief, or church leader, or anyone beyond some poor, sobbing relative - ever comments on specific murders, or proposes something more substantial than an increase in police roadside checks and a few more heavily armed military guys standing around here and there.

    It's not just the murders that are weighing this country down. I chatted with my taxi driver in San Pedro Sula this morning about "war taxes," the money the gangs extort from small businesses in exchange for not killing them. The gangs operate at every spot where the taxis queue up for passengers - outside the malls, at the bus terminal, at designated areas in the city centre. A typical San Pedro taxi pays the equivalent of $90 a month in war tax, my driver told me.

    A bus driver on one of the long-distance routes told me his company pays $50 a week for every bus in its fleet, all of it due and payable every Monday at the San Pedro main terminal. All in, some $27 million a year is extorted solely from the transportation sector. The driver says all the stores working out of the bus terminal also have to pay the gangs. The gangs are a bitter fact of life for tens of thousands of hard-working, honest people trying to scratch out a living. 

    So yes, Mr. President, spread a little of that firm hand around. Your citizenry urgently needs the help. But get real. Get focused. And as for mothers too poor to raise their own children, how about you give those ones a hand up?

The end

   

The pool swim with the Angelitos kids this past weekend had a certain poignancy about it. I expect there will be one more and then we'll be gone, back to Canada to start whatever the next adventure will be.
    We always knew there would be an end to our time with the orphans. I imagine it kept the relationship at something of an arm's length from the beginning, knowing that there was no future together that we were building toward. A little detachment has proven to be a good thing already, what with six of the kids having vanished from our lives during these two years, whisked off to what we will have to hope are better lives with no hint to us (or them, I suspect) that the next time we came to the hogar, they would be gone.
     Still, it's a strange thing to walk away from children after all this time. Just because I say I have guarded my heart doesn't mean I actually have. It's not love that we have between us - really, it would be irresponsible and unethical to seek love from children when you know from the start that there's a time limit. But they have come to count on us, and we have come to feel responsible for them. And that's its own kind of love.
    I think we may have changed each other's lives through all of this. By my rough calculations we have spent 300 hours together, mostly at the pool but also shopping for clothes, kicking the ball around in that empty dirt lot above Angelitos, buying sno-cones in the park. We spent one memorable afternoon at a little carnival last year, sweltering in the heat and surrounded by crowds of other children from poor families who saw the gringos buying kids fair rides and drew close in hopes that some tickets might come their way, too.
    They have learned to swim. I have learned to child-wrangle in two languages. In the early weeks, I cried for them, but time passed and I saw that they didn't see themselves as deprived. They are, of course: stunted from inadequate nutrition; behind in school; virtually no medical care; no champions in their lives to step in when things get rough. But that describes so many of the impoverished children in Honduras that I guess the Angelitos kids just feel like everybody else.
    I have seen no obvious signs of abuse at the orphanage, although I suspect that some of the impatient, frazzled staff - most of them broken single moms with no place else to go and slim hopes of getting paid for their work - do hit the kids sometimes. Certainly one broken mom is not sufficient for 14 robust children, especially the crazy little boys who find all kinds of trouble to get up to in their boredom. Dona Daisy, the woman who owns the orphanage, always talks about the need to find "Christian people" who will take that round-the-clock job out of the goodness of their hearts, but I stand inside that dark place with all its bad smells and endless heaps of dirty laundry and think, Who could ever be good enough to stay here for any longer than they had to?
     We've tried to make the children's home better in our time here. There's a water system now, a better floor, a wood stove that doesn't poison the air with its smoke, beds and mattresses and sheets for all. But with its hopeless and haphazard management and the complete lack of transparency in how donor dollars are used, Angelitos will always be something of a disaster. My long-term hopes are all pinned on Emily, the young American whose Casita Copan will one day be a replacement for Angelitos. Her dream is big enough for the 14 Angelitos kids, too, although she'd be in for the fight of her life.
     I don't expect the younger children to remember me for long. I've seen for myself how quickly they forget others who were once in their lives, the price of having grown up with a string of well-meaning but ultimately transient foreigners passing through your doors with their gifts and their cuddles and their tearful goodbyes. They hug easily, these children, but I fear it's because they know to get it while the getting's good, and that nothing lasts.
     The older ones, though - they'll remember. I've already talked to Rosario, the 9-year-old who I feel the most attachment to, about the little box that I'm going to buy her, and how I'll put my email inside it for the day when she wants to find me again. Hide it under your mattress, I told her, knowing how rapidly treasured things go missing in that place. When you're ready to come looking, I'll be there.
     If she could be tucked inside a kennel and whisked off to Canada as easily as the street dog we're bringing home for one of my daughters, I think I would be tempted. But of course, adopting from Honduras is nothing so easy as that, and in fact I'm already seven years past the age cutoff in the country anyway. She's the most independent minded (and stylish) of the Angelitos gang, and I am choosing to take that as a sign that she will be OK.
     "But who will take us to the pool when you're gone?" asked one of the girls, long gone now, when I first mentioned last year that our positions in Honduras weren't permanent. I think that will be the question on most of their minds when we do our final outing at the end of this month.
      I don't know, kids. Let's hope for other travellers with $30 jangling around in their pockets who want to make some children very, very happy. Let's hope that some of the wealthier Copan families wake up to the fact of all these poor kids right in their own community, and make a decision to bring some along next time they head to the pool.
    Let's just hope for the best. For all my little friends at Angelitos Felices, that's all I can do. 

Reconsidering Canada's prostitution laws: An opportunity to do so much better

We have until March 17 to give the federal government our opinion on laws around sex work, as the 3 major laws affecting adult, consenting sex workers were struck down in December as unconstitutional. 

Here are my answers, and I urge you to submit your own responses here,

Please don't make the mistake of thinking you don't know enough to respond. Just imagine that it's your sister, your mom, your little brother who is working in the industry, making a free choice as an adult (because nobody's talking about changing any laws that prevent violence, coercion, human trafficking or child exploitation - this consultation is strictly about the sale of sex between consenting adults). What would you want for them if this was their work? 

A group of sex workers and supporters have put together some guidelines for responding. I'd be happy to forward them to anyone who's interested. The group would also love to have copies of people's responses. But with or without guidelines, just give these questions to your head and heart to mull over and see what comes out. 

Do you think that purchasing sexual services from an adult should be a criminal offence? Should there be any exceptions? Please explain.

I support decriminalizing the purchase of sexual services from a consenting adult. I am a committed 57-year-old Canadian feminist and journalist who has come to this conclusion after many years of working with and getting to know adult sex workers, whose life experiences with Canada’s criminalized system have shown me that such laws not only do not reduce the demand for sexual services, but inadvertently make the work considerably more dangerous for the people that the law is supposedly trying to protect.

Better minds than mine could write a treatise on the nature of the human sex drive, but after so many failed efforts in so many countries over so many generations to stop sex work through criminalization, it ought to be clear that criminalization does not work as a deterrent to stop the buying of sexual services. What it does is push this work even deeper into the shadows – into the dark places where no one goes, into a stigmatized, misunderstood world that is practically custom-made to cover up the crimes of the predators who end up there in search of victims.

I have learned from my sex-work acquaintances that the majority of the people who buy sex are not horrible,sick predators looking to cause harm. But because they have to work in shadowy isolation, the conditions are perfect for predators who do hunt among the workers not for sexual services, but for vulnerable, stigmatized people to rape, beat and murder.

Were the purchase and sale of adult,consensual sexual services decriminalized, workers would finally be protected by all the systems Canada has in place to keep us safe from predators: Well-lit work areas; police support; the safety of having other people working nearby; the right to report crimes or suspicious behaviour without being judged, mistreated, ignored and shunned. Decriminalization need not mean that we condone the purchase of sex, just that Canadians accept the reality that criminal measures merely increase risk and misery for those who work in the industry. Even among those who are exploited, victimized and coerced into sex work, the criminalization of this work just adds more suffering. It fixes nothing while causing immense harm. That is bad law.

Do you think that selling sexual services by an adult shouldbe a criminal offence? Should there be any exceptions? Please explain.

I support decriminalizing the sale of sexual services between consenting adults. In Canada we seem to want to view sex workers as both victims and criminals, putting them forward in the public eye as vulnerable, desperate people who need our help to flee the horrors of the industry (whether they want to or not), while at the same time targeting them for criminal charges should they dare to resist our need to “save” them.

Many of the same comments I made in the previous question apply to this one as well. Criminalizing the sale of sexual services increases the danger and the stigma for those who work in the industry. It pushes workers into dark places to avoid being criminally charged.They avoid calling police when they do encounter predatory clients, because police might just as easily decide to charge the worker once they arrive at the scene. It lends a strong air of “well, they deserved it” in the event that violence is committed against them, a moral attitude that dramatically affects sex workers when they seek help at the hospital, try to find housing, look for mainstream work. Society sits in severe judgment of sex workers, and I strongly believe that criminalization feeds this judgment while at the same time doingnothing to improve the situation for anybody – the sex workers, theneighbourhoods where outdoor sex takes place, the exploited children who desperately need targeted, wise services to turn their lives in a different direction.

For me, this is also an issue of workers’ rights. The sale of sex is legal in Canada. It’s the marketing, location and income from sex work that is illegal. This criminalization shuts a whole class of Canadian workers out of all the normal workplace protections. They are denied the same level of police protection (or would at least perceive it that way); they cannot access our court system for a dispute over a contract or to bring a case for sexual harassment. There are no employment standards that apply to them. Decriminalization will not fix every problem in the sexindustry, but it will at least open the door for people to pursue the same courses for legal action and seek the same level of rights protection that other Canadian workers enjoy.

If you support allowing the sale or purchase of sexual services, what limitationsshould there be, if any, on where or how this can be conducted? Please explain.

I support the creation of legal workplaces for consenting adult sex workers. These sites should be treated like any other business and regulated municipally through zoning bylaws in terms of location, and subject to the same employment standards that any Canadian workplace is subject to. For the safety of the workers, these sites should not be banished to industrial parks or “red light districts” where they are out of sight of mainstream society, but rather mixed in to commercial areas and regulated in ways that ensure low public profile. This is the way that many of Canada’s brothels operate now, in truth, as the clients of this business also prefer a low profile.

Canada’s bawdyhouse laws and related court rulings over the years have basically defined “bawdyhouse” to be any location where sex is bought and sold. They have been a failure by any definition, asthey have not curbed the sale of sex and have created a very dangerous work situation for those in the industry. The only achievement of the country’s bawdyhouse laws was to deny sex workers even the most basic protections of a typical workplace: A clean and pleasant place to work; shelter from the weather, the company of co-workers, people around you to respond in the event of something bad happening.

The issue of outdoor sex work is more complicated, as some people working outdoors are there because their profound personal problems – addictions, mental health issues, disabilities – prevent them from being able to work in an indoor venue. They also work outdoors because there are customers who want to be able to buy sex that way; curbing that desire will require an entirely different strategy than anything Canada has ever tried. The percentage of sex workers who work outdoors is small –estimates are around 10 per cent – but the outdoor stroll is definitely the“face” of sex work that people react most strongly to.

Outdoor work is definitely much more of a pressure point for a community, and is almost always where the violence happens for sex workers as municipalities try to push the “stroll” out of sight. While I sincerely hope legal, safe workplaces are coming for consenting adult sex workers, I fear pressure might increase to criminalize all outdoor work, a development that would put the most vulnerable outdoor workers at even greater risk. As Canada moves forward into what I hope will be enlightened policy around adult sex work, I think the issues of outdoor sex work should be separated out for further exploration and understanding, as my experience has been that the issues for the small minority of sex workers who work outdoors are completely different than those of the large majority who work indoors. This exploration must include study into the psychology of clients who prefer to buy from outdoor workers, because there will always be sellers if there continues to be buyers.

Do you think that it should be a criminal offence for a person to benefit economically from the prostitution of an adult?

I believe that a law that makes it a criminal offence to benefit economically from prostitution is far too broad to be effective, and has a negative impact on people who in no way are acting in a predatory manner by taking money from a sex worker. Canada does need a carefully considered law that prevents predators from forcing people into sex work in order to benefit from their earnings, but criminalizing the income of sex workers is not the way to achieve that.

While rarely used in Canada, the former law around “living off the avails” put people at risk of criminal charges just for accepting payment of any kind from a sex worker. Not only does that unfairly affect all the people a sex worker might choose to employ – a driver, for instance – but also relegates anyone who lives with or loves a sex worker to the category of  “pimp” under the law just by splitting the rent, food costs or other expenses with the sex worker. To criminalize the income from legal work is both fundamentally wrong and totally ineffective as a means of curbing the sex trade.

As noted, the law has not been used much in Canada. But its existence alone opens the door for harassment of sex workers and the people in their lives, as even a private romantic relationship is now open to police scrutiny. It is also an impossible law to administer fairly. With what is likely tens of thousands of Canadians working in the sex trade in Canada – making mortgage payments, buying groceries, paying car loans, payingfor daycare services for their children, eating at restaurants, hiringrenovation crews to redo the kitchen – the sheer volume of people benefiting economically from prostitution is enormous. And yet the impact of the law is only ever felt by those closest to the sex worker. Once more, that is bad law.

Are there any other comments you wish to offer to inform thegovernment’s response to the Bedford decision?

Please do not let the high emotion of the debatearound this issue affect your decisions when considering new laws for thebuying and selling of sex among consenting adults. So many people havesuffered, even lost their lives, because of Canada’s former laws aroundprostitution. Please do not let this become an issue of agreeing or disagreeingwith the idea of selling sexual services.

The sale of sex is not inherently violent. It is our laws that have actually created much of the risks in this work. Yes, the fight must continue to prosecute those who are violent, predatory, exploitive and coercive, and to protect underage children from exploitation. But we must stop this senseless application of law as a tool of morality - an approach that has caused great harm to many, many good people and virtually guarantees a continuation of the damaging stigma that shuts sex workers out of mainstream society.

The reality is that rightly or wrongly, thisindustry exists. I don’t know if its existence is inevitable, but I do know that 147 years of trying to stop it through criminalization has not worked – not in Canada, not in any country.  Canadahas a chance to do itself proud yet again and create a regulatory framework that is thoughtful, realistic and humane. 

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.
    

The soundtrack of our lives

   

   I think I'll have to make some sound files as keepsakes of our time here before we head back to Canada this spring.

    The blog posts, the photos, the videos – sure, they’ll all keep the memories alive. But an audio clip of all the noises that go on outside our door every day would probably be the thing that would instantly bring me back to this kitchen table, where the soundtrack of daily life is the rumble of cars a foot away from our front door, the BROO-broo-broo-broo-broo barking of the dog next door, the blaring television from the house across the street where we’re certain a deaf man must live.

    It’s the toddler two doors down having one of his usual tantrums, and the stressed mother down the way bellowing “Callete!” – “Shut up!” – at her worried looking little two-year-old. It’s the snatches of conversation of people passing by, mostly talking in animated Spanish but occasionally in that distinct way that, even when you can’t make the words out, makes both Paul and I look up and cry, “Gringos!”

    It’s an  injured-animal call that the kids do here for fun – the sound of a dog right after it’s been hit by a car or beaten, a cat trapped on a roof. The kids fake the animals’ desperate cries so perfectly that it never fails to shake me up. It’s a vibrating bass line thumping out of the disco two blocks away, and an enthusiastic evangelical church service that our neighbours sometimes organize in their garage, replete with much religious rapture. It’s the guy with the bad starter trying to get his car to turn over, and the neighbour with the makeshift tin door on his garage dragging it out of the way every morning as he leaves for work at 4:30 a.m.

    In this moment, I am hearing the dog Hegel tormenting the fuzzy dog behind the fence, a scene that plays out at least twice a day. Hegel is free and Fuzzy is stuck behind bars, and Hegel never tires of reminding the poor thing of that fact. In the distance I hear a moto-taxi labouring to climb the hill near here, and the little boy next door – a terrible brat a year ago, always howling indignantly – asking in the nicest possible way if his grandfather would like to play with him.

    I had to wear ear plugs every night in our first weeks here to try to tune out the endless din. (OK, not really endless – most nights, Copan Ruinas falls deathly still between 1-4 a.m.) And the roosters! Whoever fed us that story of roosters crowing at dawn has clearly never lived in a small Latin American town, where the birds crow with gusto at whatever hour they please. The strangled, discordant sound that emerges from their straining throats sounds nothing like “cock-a-doodle-doo,” and each one seems calculated to provoke a chorus of equally hoarse calls from every rooster within hearing range.

    I know I’ll miss the grackles – big, black shiny birds that emit the most amazing whistles, pops, and complicated lines of chatter every morning from our roof top, their beaks pointed straight up to the sky like sentinels. Were I at any risk of sleeping in – as if that would be possible, when the whole world begins its noisy day here well before 6 a.m., with mighty throat clearings and the honk of car horns to beckon someone from their house, the scrape of tin on asphalt as that damn makeshift garage door is dragged out of the way – the sound of grackles would be sure to rouse me.

    The firecrackers and gun shots – well, I hadn’t expected to get used to them, but I have. Sometimes I think I’m getting better at telling one from the other, but who knows? There are still mornings when I curse the Honduran birthday custom of letting off firecrackers at 4 or 5 a.m., I admit, but at least now I fall back to sleep quickly instead of lie there cursing the early wakeup. And on the rare occasion when a mariachi band shows up as well to fete the birthday person, I kind of like it.
    I still crave silence sometimes, the kind that only insulated windows, doors that go all the way to the floor and a 50-foot setback from the street will get you. But I’ll be back soon enough in the land of noise bylaws and closed windows. I expect I’ll miss the sound of life. 

Nothing sudden about the death of newspapers

   

My journalist friends and I are doing a lot of hand-wringing these days over the death of the Kamloops Daily News, which has a history as a good, strong community newspaper.  The News is not the first nor the last newspaper to die in these difficult times, but that a paper should die that journalists themselves thought of as a good paper perhaps feels weightier to us.

    It’s all very sad, of course. A community is losing its long-time local voice. People are losing their jobs. Loyal readers are losing their beloved morning read. But on the other hand, nobody can possibly be surprised that the newspaper industry is finally in the death throes after more than 20 years of being terminally ill.

    However you might feel about capitalism, at its essence it’s about producing something that meets a demand and thus earns you a profit. When the profits start falling, that’s a rather clear signal that a company either has to do something to turn things around, or fold up the tent and go home. Doing nothing is not an option.

    Once upon a time a community newspaper made loads of money. But the signs were all there 20 years ago that the glory days were over. The fact that newspapers aren’t dead yet is an indicator of just how damn profitable they once were, that they’ve been able to hold on this long. And that so many readers clung on even as newspapers grew thinner and lost their community focus tells you just how much of a habit the daily newspaper once was, and that the industry managed to fritter that away too by ignoring all the alarm bells for an astounding two decades.

    Twenty years ago, the industry knew it had a problem with young readers, but thought that would resolve itself once they got older. It didn’t. It had a problem with working couples, who increasingly didn’t have time for a morning read and by nighttime, sought more up-to-date news from the local TV station. Nobody did anything about that, either.

     It had a problem with a growing generic look and feel that was developing among newspapers mandated to look like each other and share the same bland news in order to reduce newsroom costs, a change that really bothered readers who valued a real community paper. Today, with newsrooms skinnier than they’ve ever been and chain ownership a given, you can travel across the country without being able to distinguish one city newspaper from another.

    Long before I left journalism 10 years ago, the industry also had a big problem with advertising revenue, especially classifieds. The rise of on-line alternatives like craigslist, offering way more flexibility and coverage for a much lower price, indicated a sea change in how the game would be played from that point on.       Newspaper analysts duly noted the problem and the industry just kept on doing what it had always done.

    As readers started to drop away in earnest even while major newspapers clung to their stubbornly high advertising rates from the good old days, big advertisers (grocery ads used to be huge for newspapers) began looking for cheaper alternatives with more reach. Those lost revenues led to more cuts, which in turn resulted in even fewer readers and advertisers.

    The industry diligently documented each of these threats as they emerged, hiring costly consultants to identify the problems and come up with schemes to turn things around. But for whatever reason, nothing significant changed. Sure, there’d be a design remake here, a new weekly supplement there, an (unfulfilled) promise to focus on local news. But it was all a bit like showing up at a four-alarm fire with one bucket of water.

     Even when the industry finally tried new things – on-line classifieds, Web news – it always seemed to launch them at least 5 years behind the trend, and do clunky things like erecting pay walls even while dozens of other Web sites provided fairly similar news for free. The generic feel of the news grew ever more generic, despite constant reader feedback that generic was not what they wanted.

    For me, the newspaper industry’s response to changing times has been like someone on a beach who spots a tidal wave 25 years in the future and just stands there rooted to the same spot until the tsunami finally hits. As badly as I feel about the decline of the newspaper industry, I can’t have much sympathy for a business that has done so little to change course in the face of decades of obvious threats.

    As for my journalist friends, they are having a hard time accepting this, although the truth is that many of them haven’t changed their approach either as the numbers kept on falling. I was surprised during my years in management in the mid-1990s at how few of the reporters even read the paper they worked for, or any other. How can you expect people to love the newspaper you write for when even you can’t be bothered to read it?

    Journalism ought to be a passion, a burning curiosity for helping your readers understand their world. But too often, it’s just a job. It’s just what you do after you get a degree in journalism. (And have the journalism schools kept up with the changes?)

    There are some very fine writers out there who continue to write with insight and integrity, but there are also quite a few who have been standing paralyzed on the beach for the last quarter-century as well, watching that tsunami creep closer. They talk a lot about the problems in the industry, but don’t seem to understand that they’re part of it.

    Anyway. Today we mourn the passing of the Kamloops News. Soon enough, there will be more. The world changed and the industry didn’t. Nobody can say we didn't see it coming.

Nice face, shame about the rep

 

 We're newly back from two weeks of travelling on the Caribbean side of Guatemala and through Belize. It's easy travel in Belize, where English is the primary language, and the little country is clearly a popular choice for North American and European travellers. But while I totally get how nice it is to just breeze through a welcoming country with great tourism infrastructure, hopefully we convinced at least a few of the travellers we met to give Honduras a try, too.
    The travellers I've met who have been to Honduras always say how much they loved their time here. It's a gorgeous place, and a person can still have the highly prized "authentic" travel experience here. But the poor country's horrible and undeserved reputation as a murderous, thieving land is certainly scaring off travellers who don't yet know the place. Many people we met appeared to be avoiding Honduras entirely as they made their way through Central America.
    We did our best to present as Honduras ambassadors in our travels, chatting up the beautiful sights we've seen here while assuring our fellow travellers that despite the scary statistics, the country is a warm and friendly place. It's also much cheaper than Belize, and the snorkelling and diving in the Bay Islands is at least comparable if not better than around the cayes of Belize's Caribbean coast. Honduras has monkeys, birds, nurse sharks, even manatees, just like Belize. It's got miles and miles of untouched beaches.
    But Honduran towns dreaming of tourism dollars definitely need to take a leaf from the Belize tourism book in learning how to promote themselves better and package their offerings in new and appealing ways. (Why, for instance, do all the horse rides in Copan Ruinas only go to La Pintada, which is actually a pretty depressing little introduction to the culture?)
    Here in the Copan region, there are a lot of interesting things to do if you speak Spanish, know who to ask, and can make your way around by bus without being frightened off by aggressive bus touts who all seem to be shoving you onto a bus that you're not sure you want to be on. But in a Belize tourist town, all a person has to do is walk down any main street to find any info they need right there at handy-dandy kiosks smack-dab in the centre of town, all with beautiful promotional material and calm, English-speaking tour drivers.
    Speaking of English, Honduras needs more. I love the Spanish language and agree wholeheartedly with the principle that a country's citizens should have the right to speak whatever language they like in their own homeland. But it's just a reality that any country hoping to score tourists needs to have way more English. I know Honduras wants a more vibrant tourist economy, and doing more to help its citizens communicate in more than one language has to be part of that.
    And of course, the Honduran government needs to play a much more active role on all fronts. You're never going to convince travellers that Honduras is safe in the absence of a clear plan to reduce violence. It's true that virtually all the violence in the country is directed at Hondurans and not foreigners, but that's a fairly small point to be trying to make to a nervous traveller poised to fly into "the most dangerous city in the world" to begin their sun vacation.
    Without sufficient tourists, tourism-based business is scared to invest. Without tourism-based business, the tourists won't come. Fewer tourists mean fewer people saying good things about Honduras, and more people thinking the country is too dangerous to visit. Something's got to give.
     The government also has to be out there responding to the terrifying travel advisories. The alarming advisories definitely don't reflect the lived experience in Honduras, but how is anyone supposed to know that if the government never responds to any of the advisories and just leaves people to presume that all the horror stories must be true?
    So yeah, Belize is beautiful. So is Honduras. But until something meaningful happens to turn around the scare statistics, who's going to know that?