In the land of big cows and gleaming rest stops

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

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

People's hope for prescription drugs goes up in flames

Medicines burn at the dump in Santa Barbara

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's not always about the money

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One more cup of coffee for the road

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tearing apart the old bathroom

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

A new front door! Not rotten!

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

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

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

Renovated downstairs bathroom

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

I wanna be free - or do I?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A clearcut problem

Corn-field clearcuts around Santa Rita, Copan

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

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

The road that convinced me to get out and walk

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

A rear tire from the CASM truck

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

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

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

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

Girl, you won't be forgotten

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No answers without questions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Turn around and there's another worthy project

Classroom windows at Copan's largest school

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

Not long before this classroom ceiling collapses

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

Yo entiendo! Yo entiendo!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When it's all up to you

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finally made the acquaintance of an albanil

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

And to think I thought it was about the money

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

Young people step up for Honduran children

Lunch at the pool yesterday, courtesy of Charrissa

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

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

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

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

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

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