New Blog

Transferring to BlogSpot from Tumblr. I found Tumblr very confusing to use and while I probably could have figured it out quickly, my online time is so limited that I didn't want to spend the time and I knew BlogSpot is easy to use as well as to comment on.

I'm going to try to treat this more like a blog and get it active again. Before I was typing really huge updates that were probably longer than anyone would read every couple months, and I'd like to try and do the just putting down some thoughts I have on my mind every few days things. We will see if that happens. I think before I was getting in a perfectionist state of mind that I could only put something up if it equaled the post before but I guess thats not what blogging is for so I'll try to putting up not as good stuff more reguarly and see how it goes!

Child Prostitution (December 17th, Ceiba)

This is about an experience that happened to me my first week in Honduras, and I’ve wanted to write about since then but its been really hard to. I don’t think I did a great job writing about it, but this is basically just my thoughts while it was happening. Like I said, it was really hard for me to write about, but this is what happened.

“It’s really a dream living here. I just ride my bike down the beach all day and am free to do whatever I want basically.”

He is about 5 foot 9 and overweight, although far from fat by American standards. Unshaven bits of facial hair appear next to shaved sections, razor cuts, and the messy, disorganized hair of someone who has no need to impress anyone whatsoever.

He is seated at a table with two other middle aged Americans, moving in slow motion as a day of drinking catches up to them and the lightheaded jubilation of earlier turns into a confused stupor that has not yet been broken by the nightly boost of cocaine.

Young girls in tight shirts and short skirts mill around the vicinity of the table, rapidly bouncing between talking to the men and talking to other friends at the bar. The excitement of their buzz and quick, youthful flirtation contrasts and accentuates the stupor of the older men.

To anyone watching in this relatively small town where everyone knows everyone it is completely obvious what is going on. Everyone knows the resident ex-pats from the States, and it is impossible to not notice everything they do and everyone they talk to in a place where they stick out so much.

As if what was going on wasn’t already obvious enough, Rick begins his bragging after about 5 minutes of small talk about the areas geography and beaches.

“I make as much in an hour as any of these fuckers in this town make in a month! The girls here are so easy that its embarrassing.”

His voice is filled with contempt and disgust as he launches into his monologue. “All they care about is your money. Their fucking parents teach them to suck it out of the gringos. It’s disgusting. I fucked a 14 year old girl here. She wanted my cell phone. Dumb bitch didn’t even know that it only cost 15 dollars! But yea, they really don’t want anything from you except money.”

The contempt in his voice rises. Contempt towards the stupid girl who was pathetic enough to have been born poor. Pathetic enough to have never had anyone teach her about self respect, and stupid enough to need things bad enough to abandon her morals in her desperation.

An awkward silence follows his bragging. How exactly does one respond to an admission like that? I barely get out “that’s pretty messed up man.”

“In the States yea, it would be. Here its no big deal it’s pretty normal actually.”

I make a mental note now. If people are born poor its perfectly acceptable to do things to them that would be unacceptable in a richer country. Important to remember.

As I look into his eyes, I can see centuries upon centuries of this mindset. Columbus landed for the first time on the mainland a few hundred miles down the coast, and greeted the beauty of a new land and the new cultures he discovered by immediately taking slaves. I can picture him using the same justifications.

“Of course it would be messed up to do this to Europeans. But not to do it to people who were born here. Do it to people who were born here, and someday you’ll even get a holiday named after you.”

I see Rick’s face and see his complete lack of shame as he tells a stranger about child prostitution. He is so out of touch with reality at this point that he doesn’t even seem capable of realizing that this is something someone should feel shame at. He lives in a reality where he expects anyone else from the United States he meets to high five him and buy him a drink after they hear about his exploits.

I picture the leaders of United Fruit company in Central America and how they must have felt when they killed union leaders who demanded more pay. I picture US and Russian leaders funding civil wars and death squads throughout the region, and how little shame they felt in playing their games of world domination with millions of lives hanging in the balance. I see how much Rick despises these people for being so poor, and I can see the leaders of industrialized nations not even counting the dead civilians in poor countries we invade, people killed like one kills a line of ants without it not even be worth knowing how many have died. I can see the true, honest belief that things that happen in poor places are not real, and that nothing has any real consequences if its done to people who already live in misery. I think about how many people without even realizing it have the mindset that things that happen in the developing world are not real, and that actions there have no consequences.

Rick sighs. “These girls are just trying to get a drink off of me.”

I think about making a sarcastic remark about girls in the States, and how 16 year old girls there must talk to him for so much of a wider range of reasons besides money, but I decide saying anything is pointless as I sit in shock and horror.

“They really think they’re going to get something worthwhile out of me. They won’t get anything more than 5 dollars, maybe 10 but they’ll try their asses off for something more.”

I see now the contempt towards poor people for being desperate enough to do whatever it takes to get ahead. The same as the contempt directed at immigrants in the US.

“How dare these people leave their familes behind and risk starving or getting massacred crossing the desert? How dare they think they deserve the right to work the lowest paying jobs in our country? How dare they be willing to do whatever it takes to move out of dirt floored, one room houses that are shared by 3 generations of family? Why don’t they just accept that they were born poor and leave us alone?”

Rick begins talking about safety in Latin America.

“I would be really careful in La Ceiba. You’re really likely to get robbed or something there. Here, the tourist police will shoot anyone who robs a gringo to keep the place safe for tourism.”

Yet another reason for Rick to feel that this place isn’t the real world. It’s an alternate reality with no consequences, a world where he can do whatever he wants to people and the law is set up to protect him because he brings money in. Where he can steal girls dignity and respect, yet someone who resented his presence there could get shot for stealing 5 dollars back from him.

“Anyone man I gotta run. These two girls are coming back to my place and they’re gonna fuck and I’m gonna watch. If you’re back in Tela sometime, look for me or ask around, people know who I am.”

As he leaves with the two girls, I sit in stunned silence. Everyone in the bar watches them leave, and I know that at 16 years old the girls will be known forever in this community based on the choices they are making. That they will forever be known as whores, and as worthless, based on choices they are making in desperation while they are too young to understand the ramifications of them.

I think of the volunteer work I am doing, and how as someone from the United States I try to integrate myself as part of a community here and convince people that I am their friend. Then I think about the impression of my country that Rick is making, and that the CIA and United Fruit company have made, and I think again of the insane look I saw in Rick’s eye at the moment I realized none of this was even the real world to him. I think about evil, which had always seemed like a rather abstract concept, and I wonder if this is what it is. And then I wonder if there is really any way to stand up to it that is worth anything, and whether education and development can ever stand up to the people who see people in poverty and immediately seek a way to exploit it.

Here is a good article about sex tourism in Central America.

http://gbgm-umc.org/response/articles/sextourism.html

If anyone knows about any other NGOs or organizations that are doing anything about this please post them.

Running in La Ceiba (December 17th, 2010)

By some miracle I have pulled myself out of bed at the break of dawn to go for a run before it gets too hot to walk, or stand even, without being drenched in sweat. I leave the house where I am staying in one of the upper class neighbourhoods of La Ceiba, Honduras, and begin running down the straight, paved street of a tropical version of the American suburb.

Fluffy white dogs bark and chase after me from behind gates as I pass their owner’s houses. House after house and gate after gate, in a never-ending procession. It’s possible to tell the owner’s social classes without even looking at the houses, as the gates mirror the houses behind them. Simple chain link fences guard modest single story houses with disorganized, untrimmed gardens. The houses where chickens still run free in the yards rather than being bought at the supermarket, but the families have just recently managed to tile their living rooms. These houses are far from luxurious, but living in a safe, well-educated neighbourhood like this in itself is a rare achievement and a luxury for most families in such a poor country.

I pass a much higher, sturdier fence, with barbed wire across the top. The one-storied house has a very nicely trimmed yard and tiled flooring even on the patio outside, and a rare two-car garage. Then I pass the houses where the gates are built directly into the second story, which overhang the driveways. The kind of gate that tries to fake you into believing it isn’t really necessary and is only part of the aesthetics of the design. The houses generally have a balcony on this second floor overhang, most of which are large enough to fit a dining room table and several hammocks.

Then I pass houses with enormous stone-walls built around them, and huge imperial white gates built into the walls to suit the grandeur of the BMWs and Hummers that pass through them. One house is equipped with a stone tower resembling a medieval castle. Balconies are now the norm, some with elaborate gardens even built onto them. Some of these two story houses feature an accompanying one-story house where the gardener, caretaker, or security guard lives.

As I pass the imposing gates, I look down the straight side streets my street intersects and see more of the same. Every third or fourth street I pass intersects a small suburban park, the kind of park that contains a couple medium sized trees and a bench or two. I know these parks from the suburbs in the States. The kind of nature that is mass-produced to be sold along with a community, so that realtors can advertise that there is a park within walking distance. The parks are calculated to be just big enough to help sell property, yet small enough to not take away too much space from profits on the housing.

As I round a corner I immediately cross the line from upper class suburb into developing world city. While I remain in the upper class part of town, some of the chaos of being in the third poorest country in the Western Hemisphere sets in. I am now running along the sidewalk past traffic as far as I can see, primarily an endless line of taxi drivers that outnumber potential customers by a ratio of maybe 25 or 30 to 1. The drivers honk aggressively and slow down to shout when they see me. Even though I am clearly working out, on seeing my white skin they can’t bear to believe I don’t want a ride.

The taxi drivers brake and accelerate rapidly as they weave through intermittent clusters of other cars, buses, trucks, and bicycles. I force myself to breathe deeply, attempting to filter the air of developing world emissions, with trucks spitting out clouds of smog which equal the smoke from the biggest bonfires I’ve ever seen. I wonder briefly if Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh would be jealous of me, free from the evil big government in the United States which impinge on our freedoms with things like emission testing.

A cart pulled by a donkey is somehow surviving the chaos on the road, and I watch him, trying to imagine a time when this mode of transport was all that existed. As I see the back of the cart I realize the donkey is pulling microwaves and tvs, and the daydream of a world before my birth vanishes.

I pass the extensive golf course on my right stretching on as far as I can see. A string of street vendors hug the little bit of grass on its edge that is public space. They fight for the shade of the trees lining the courses exterior as they fight for customers. 10 vendors sell newspapers over the course of two blocks and 4 or 5 sell pineapples.

While the vendors hug their 2 foot shoulder, two white, foreign older men and two Latino older men stretch out as they walk down the center of the course with golf bags. I wonder if they are executives at a multinational corporation, knowing how rare Hondurans are who have enough money to afford golf clubs. I imagine them making deals and decisions based on abstract business models and their theories about development as they walk past. Making giant otherworldly business decisions, and I wonder if the impacts of those decisions may somehow trickle down and in some unforeseen way affect the mortals on the edges of the course, either for good or bad.

I pass the golf course and dodge traffic as I fight through a chaotic intersection. It is the crossing of the road going into the middle of town and the road going off towards San Pedro, the business capital of the country. I am dodging traffic that should be sitting at a red light, yet cars are streaming forward through it towards a gridlock. I am in a place where real traffic tickets for running red lights don’t exist, yet the police sit at checkpoints out of the city and look for excuses to extort bribes from anyone who drives a nice car.

As I survive the intersection I enter one of the main commercial centers of middle class Honduras, passing successive larger than life signs for Quiznos, KFC, Dunkin Donuts, Pizza Hut, and Wendy’s. The signs advertise free wi-fi at the fast food restaurants, in a place where United States fast food joints are one of the only places upscale enough to be safe with a laptop. The fast food joints with their air conditioning and moderately clean bathrooms that are always stocked with toilet paper, rare places that reliably serve every item on their extensive menus. The cheapest meals from the United States are a luxury experience that only the upper class can afford here.

I pass the megaplaza mall, with its huge department stores, food courts, escalators and Santa Claus, an exact replica of the malls to the north. Pass Expresso Americano and its balcony lounge, where rich Central Americans drink overpriced 2 dollar lattes, not quite rich enough for the luxury of the 5 dollar ones Northerners buy at Starbucks.

I have seen all this 6 minutes into my run, but am already ready to get away from the chaos of the traffic and the monotony of the strip malls, so I take a spontaneous left turn which leads me towards the enormous mountains that surround the flat city center. I have not really explored the foothills of these mountains, and have thought many times about finding a running route through them towards the protected rainforest of Pico Bonito national park, and the enormous trees, brightly colored birds and fresh air it offers. When I see a cobblestoned street ahead leading straight uphill into the mountains I take it, and start panting as the flatness immediately turns into an intense climb.

As I start uphill I pass mansions grander than the ones in my neighbourhood, expertly engineered into the sides of the cliff to take advantage of beautiful views of the city without letting the cliffs inconvenience the owners. I look behind me and the neighbourhood I live in is in view, a grid of big and smaller boxes, with social class as easy to see in size from above as it was by observing gates down below.

I keep climbing and the cobblestone turns to a rough, rocky dirt path. Now when I turn around I can see almost the entire city, with the mega plaza mall as the only building really noticeable as more than an insignificant dot. I continue up and when I turn back I primarily see the blue of the Caribbean Sea hugging the north edge of the city, and the green of the jungle embracing the rest. The urban streets seemed so inescapably large before, but now what seemed like a city is melting into the green of the jungle surrounding it. I am reminded of the geography and ecosystem of the surrounding area, and imagine the brutal struggle over generations it must have taken to carve air conditioned KFC’s out of this chaos. Thousands of people and machines fighting nature for hundreds of years, yet from so close to the center I can still see more green than the grey and white of roads and rooftops.

I am not in nature, however, nature just has a stronger presence here than down below. As I look around, I am surrounded by tropical plants and weeds, but equally surrounded by red dirt and earth cleared out of the jungle. When I look away from the city and towards the mountains of the national park, I see dozens and dozens of hills of various sizes and shapes, hills that were invisible behind the one I am on when I was in the center of the city. All of them are covered with paths that shoot steeply up in whatever direction is possible, and tiny little shacks hug the sides of every hill. The shacks are built out of whatever supplies could be scavenged for, and built into the hills in ways that seem impossible, even if they will only stay there until the next storm and round of mudslides force rebuilding.

I am determined to keep running as far towards the national park as I can. The enormous mountains grow larger and larger as I reach out towards them, seeming already close enough to touch. I take a reasonably well-maintained path over a hill in the direction of the peaks. As I get to the top of the hill the path ends and I am suddenly in someone’s front lawn at the top of a cliff, with the whole family standing outside looking at me curiously as my run awkwardly dead ends. They are not looking at me as a trespasser, because here whatever path you can take to your destination seems to be the public road, regardless of its violations of privacy. They are rather looking at me as an oddity because a sweaty gringo seems so out of place here.

I see a more substantial looking road below that I realize had angled around the hill I climbed. Rather than admit I was wandering aimlessly by turning and retracing my steps, I quickly look for a way down so I can pretend this was all planned as part of my route. I see what looks like a staircase built into the cliff to the left of the house, and cautiously put my foot on the first step. Rocks slide down the cliff but the foothold sticks, and I inch down the path with more and more confidence, then jump down to the main road below, although the word main is being used rather loosely at this point.

I am now 15 minutes into my run and was planning to go for half an hour, but the green hills of the park seem so close now and I am determined to make it to fresh air. I follow the road along a ridge and then angle down a side path towards the mountains. This path is moderately flat but too rocky to run on, so I walk and then get to a path that is steeper and even rockier, and my walk turns to a slow crawl. As I crest another hill, however, I am still surrounded by shacks, and looking down the other side I still see hill after hill of mazes, with paths and staircases built into hills seemingly at random, although there was obviously a purpose in every twist and turn. Even more insane than the maze of paths and “roads” are the mazes of electrical wires. Masses of wires hang over every road and seem to be too heavy to stay up, as the planned wire configurations of the city gives way to the do-it-yourself wiring of squatters. The masses of wire parallel the growth of the slums, with city planning replaced by individual builders making houses on whatever safe ground can be built on, out of whatever materials are safe to build out of.

After about a half an hour of running I decide I am not going to reach the green of the forest, and head back towards where I think my neighbourhood is, although the city is hidden by hills by now, as my plan to “just run uphill” towards the peaks turned into running up and down over and over again. I am following paths almost randomly now, awkwardly dead-ending in people’s yards several more times, sometimes with no possible escape but turning back. I realize I am veering more east than before, yet the landscape stays the same as far ahead and to both sides as I can see, endless shacks and endless hills. I remember studying urban migration in Latin America while in college, and how for years the rural poor have colonized whatever land they could find near the cities in a desperate attempt to seize some of the wealth they sensed was being created there. I think about my half an hour of running through these terribly dis-repaired paths and the slums that are even further away than the ones I reached, and try to imagine how any of the wealth from the city down below could escape to this place so far away. I wonder what drove these people or their parents and grandparents to move to this place, and I wonder whether the urban poverty now is any easier to bear than the rural poverty that preceded it. I think back on my college economics classes again and the graphs and numbers we used to try to explain demographic trends. Then I look at the faces curiously peering out of the shacks at me, and think about the life stories behind all the faces that I will never know, and the futility of trying to reduce all those stories to charts and graphs to somehow explain all of this.

I think of the politicians and economists on tv who use the charts and graphs to explain this or that plan for development, who somehow understand what is best for the world and for people in countries they’ve never even visited. As I get back towards the city center, I realize that even visiting the country doesn’t give one a grip on what its like, as I look around me and am back in the hustle and bustle of a modern city center. The shadows of the logos of global capitalism block out the shantytowns on the hills, which are completely invisible to anyone who doesn’t spontaneously run up a hill towards them. I pass the enormous billboard for KFC and 10 foot by 10 foot bucket on it, blocking out the signs that advertise any Honduran restaurants. I see 3 private security guards at the entrance making sure it is safe for the upper class to funnel their money to the US there.

I pass back out of the hustle and bustle of the city and into the order of the straight, logical suburban streets. The houses and yards I pass are certaintly beautiful, but I can’t help but wonder about what is lost here that might have existed in the chaos above. Back in a place that wasn’t planned by bureaucrats and businessmen, but just came into being spontaneously, through desperation. The desperation is terrible, but I think that there is an intense beauty born out of the desperation. The beauty of walking down paths that feel organic and real in a way this place will never be, and in a way suburbs everywhere from here to Long Island never will be.

In the slums above I was walking down something that just grew randomly out of people doing whatever they could to get by. There is an excitement, and an energy that flows out of seeing how people deal with the challenges of needing to find a way to live in a place like those hills, and needing to find a way to use land that is discarded by everyone else and creatively build a home out of it. At the end of my run I was grateful to be back in the cleanliness and safety of the middle class neighbourhood, and don’t wish poverty on anyone. I just wonder about a way to bring the spontaneity and ingenuity of squatters building on cliffs to the monotony of strip malls and mass produced parks.

Cutting Wasteful Government Spending (December 17th from Ceiba)

The United States deficit keeps growing and is quickly approaching the annual GDP. The new Republican Congress faces the prospect of cutting spending enough to balance the budget while extending the Bush tax cuts another two years, eliminating a possible source of income. The government has already cut much of the wasteful spending, such as providing for the unemployed, but its going to take great courage to cut government spending much more without unpatriotically touching the defense an military / Pentagon budget.

I’ve been living in Central America for the last few months, splitting my time between the city of La Ceiba, Honduras and a small village nearby. I know Conservative leadership may find it hard to believe anything of value could come from such an undeveloped location besides the cheap labour they enjoy in their mansions while officially denouncing it. Despite what they may think, however, Central American governments have a lot of experience in balancing budgets while lowering taxes for the wealthy. Honduran leaders have actually been chosen by the CIA throughout history based solely on their ability to do just that: the job requirement for the Honduran President, as seen by the leaders of the US, has been to balance their budget for the IMF while keeping taxes low for US based corporations. And contrary to what US leaders may think about the unsophisticated behaviour of our southern neighbours, Honduras recently showed the kind of patriotism Glenn Beck would be proud of: they overthrew what seemed like a democratically elected President when he attempted to raise the country’s minimum wage and in doing so became a dictator.

So let’s be open minded, and look at some ways of cutting wasteful spending that come from an unlikely source. Here are six simple cuts we can make to, like Honduras, avoid some of our wasteful big government excesses.

Trash collecting and dumps

It’s pretty disgusting when you think about how much our government spends rounding up trash and putting it in a place where we don’t have to look at it everyday. In most of Honduras they don’t waste money on garbage, or on dumps in places where big business could otherwise be prospering. Instead, garbage lines the streets, is burned, or is thrown into the ocean to drift further down the coast as someone else’s problem. What’s the problem with this method of dealing with trash? You can always just throw that candy wrapper down in a public park, the public beach, or some other socialist created common space, and the law will still keep people from dumping trash on private property. What do we need clean public spaces for in a free society? Is it really fair that we should be required to waste money on big trucks representing big government coming to gather up our trash?

Used school buses

In Central America the public buses are yellow USA school buses that were taken out of commission because they’re too old to past safety inspections in the States. So because of big government regulation and meddling in our lives we are forced to pay taxes for newer, safer buses for our children to ride on. What would a few more bus crashes be in exchange for the money we could save buying our school buses second hand from other countries? The sucker socialists in Europe can keep wasting their taxpayer dollars on such ridiculous luxuries as safe transit and we’ll get the last laugh when we buy them used at bargain prices. In fact, many Latin American countries have recently elected more socialist oriented leaders who want to waste more money on services for their people, and a decent amount of those leaders have so far survived the CIA. Maybe these new governments will implement some type of safety standards for transit, and will be willing to sell us our second hand buses back third hand, saving us even more money in wasteful spending! We could experiment with the used buses in heavily Latino areas first, to teach those selfish immigrants a lesson. They thought they could escape their birthright of riding second hand buses as easily as they have? Simply by running across the desert for days, leaving their families behind, and moving to a country where they don’t understand the language to work for minimum wage? Guess again suckers, you’re going to ride old, unsafe buses here too!

Paying teachers

The US state governments keep resorting to the inefficient practice of cutting out public school teachers in batches of 100 – 200 at a time to save money. Honduran leadership actually found a brilliant, far more efficient way to cut wasteful spending on education, and blame the teachers in the process. The government simply lowered teacher wages enough that the teachers now refuse to work for what they are paid. In the last year public school teachers in the country have been on strike because of unpaid wages and spending cuts for a third of the school year. So not only has the government saved money by paying the teachers a sub-standard wage, but it saves more when they strike. It’s a brilliant two for one blow to wasteful government spending!

Of course, there are those typical liberal elitists out there and their obsession with education. They will reason that getting rid of public education completely will set our economy up for failure in the future, and make other silly, elitist arguments about the right to education. These arguments are ridiculous because American children will still have the same option that Honduran children who want to learn reading and writing have: be born to richer parents who can afford private school!

Emissions testing

This useless practice is really a combination of big governments obsession with regulation and its desire to spend all of our money. Cars in the States all have to have a little sticker that proves that they don’t let off too many fumes, and can you imagine how much money is wasted on this testing and printing the stickers?

In Honduras, private citizens have the right to send as much smog into the air and neighbourhood as they damn well please, and the used school buses we send them sure take advantage of this to the fullest. What reason is there that in the land of the free we restrict how much poison cars can send out into the air at all? Everyone knows freedom means the freedom to pollute, just ask BP!

Of course, we will have to wait until health care reform is repealed to get rid of emission testing completely, offering yet another reason to push ahead the repeal effort. If not, we would risk the savings to taxpayers being offset by all the medical bills from the asthmatic kids who breathed in too many free market emissions.

Bridge repairs

It’s a miracle, but big government sympathizers in the US still complain about our government not spending enough on infrastructure, just because we don’t have fancy trains like the silly socialists in Asia and Europe, with their elitist opposition to sitting in traffic for hours. Not enough spending on infrastructure? We spend embarrassingly large amounts on infrastructure compared to Honduras!

In the small town I used to live in Honduras the only bridge that directly connected the town to the main city was out of commission for three months, because Hondurans don’t waste money on ALWAYS having someone available to fix important bridges immediately when they break. People survived without the bridge. When the water level was low they could drive through the river it crossed, and when the water was high they could go an hour out of their way to take a different road around. In fact, longer delays to fix bridges could even help stimulate the US economy by forcing people to spend more money on gas to detour around the broken bridges. Imagine the pathetic waste of money when the US government sometimes spends money on fixing bridges quickly, when it could be stimulating the economy by leaving them in disrepair!

Disaster relief

It’s kind of embarrassing to talk about, but the United States government actually spends money on giving people reasonable housing if a natural disaster destroys the ones they have.

A few months ago, most of the neighbourhoods in La Ceiba got flooded by a tropical storm, and rather than properly house the people whose houses were destroyed, the government stuck then in gymnasiums and other athletic arenas. The US government could save…what’s that? Oops forgot. Guess the Hondurans learned that one from us. Maybe we don’t have as far to go as I thought!

Light in the Darkness (November 12, 2010, from Belize)

It is around 5 o’clock on a Friday night and I am biking away from the center of the small town I live in. Away from the middle class with their surplus of lightbulbs, tiled floors and other luxuries not to be taken for granted in a place such as this. I am biking through knee deep puddles that will remain through the next 4 months of the rainy season, still water that is a breeding ground for parasites, bacteria and viruses. Past piles of garbage 4 feet high. Dogs with ribs poking through their skin rummage through the garbage desperately, searching for the unlikely scent of something edible that was abandoned. They growl as I approach then scatter as I fake picking up a rock. Generations of conditioning builds this fear into them in a world where man’s best friend is an enemy who he somehow must learn to live with, where it is impossible to determine whether the humans became scared of the dogs or the dogs scared of the humans first, but it is clear that desperation on both sides somehow brought on the conflict.

Houses built of cement give way to those made of mud, which give way to houses made of scraps of wood abandoned by everyone else. The houses here are patched together in layer after layer, as rain has seeped in and they have been too poor to do anything but cover up their buildings with tarps, sheets, the occasional piece of sheet metal, and whatever else they have.

I am here, in this place, for reasons that are hard to remember anymore. Some abstract thing about trying to bring a little bit of light from the developed world to this dark place. Yet whatever light I allegedly might have had is long gone and forgotten. Maybe it never even existed in the first place. What can an American possibly do for this place when the people who live in these places work for Dole, an American company whose executives probably hold the same ridiculous delusions about helping people that I do. These people live in a reality created by my country, in a banana republic whose leaders have been chosen by the United States ever since they were done being chosen by the Spanish. A country whose economic development has been totally based on satisfying our needs: the American needs for bananas, pineapples, and cocaine, with a little bit of tourism just now being thrown into the mix to diversify.

This country is the secret that everyone who bites into a banana or pineapple in the United States would like to pretend doesn’t exist. The children who get wet lying in their beds when it rains, and ride school buses abandoned by children in the US when they were deemed to be too old and unsafe for us to ride. The buses our parents don’t put us on because they worry about us, yet mothers here have no choice but trusting on crumbling roads and crumbling bridges. We are on the outskirts of global capitalism, experiencing the inherent contradiction in a worldview that holds that globalization helps everyone. Workers for a multibillion dollar corporation raise their children in piles of mud and trash, and we tell them they are lucky that we allow a little trickle of their country’s natural wealth remain in the country. Our corporation can own 90 percent of the land in this town, yet we go crazy if a resident from the town steals a minimum wage job in our country

I am exhausted as I approach my Honduran family’s house, totally spent mentally and physically. I am physically worn out from a parasite that kept me in bed without food for three days, and emotionally worn out by my helplessness in the face of the desperateness around me. I stumble along weakly, the walking definition of someone who is clearly out of heart, and out of light. Somedays here I can see the light shining through palm trees and banana trees and am filled with hope, but today the little bit that shines through the general greyness only illuminates the piles of garbage. Illuminates the Pepsi symbol as it glares out of the mounds, as if reflecting the Pepsi logo on the sides of all the tiny little stores, void of most food but never ever out of Pepsi with which to feed the addiction. The same sign is visible on an abandoned tarp, now draped over a small house, used to keep the rain out of a house where inside 2 year olds pour Pepsi down their throats. A textbook case of good business, as Pepsi and Coke seem to have gone town by town throughout Honduras splitting up the country. A national addiction that starts before one can even walk, in families as oblivious to the effects of caffeine and sugar on toddlers as our parents were oblivious to the effects of smoking on lungs.

I try to distract myself from the dark holes of the garbage and look for some light. None in sight. The yards we go past are filled with water and mud, and the faces are blank as they stare off their porches at the white person, the most interesting sight they’ve seen in the day since the hurricane sideswiped the area. Still no light in sight even as they smile back at me with curious warmth.

As I am focused on finding the driest route through an especially large puddle, Fanny, Edgardo and Estefanie run down the road to meet me as I get to the point when they can see me approaching. They are 4, 8, and 10, and it is a race to hug me first. They all start rapidly speaking Spanish at the same time and I am too exhausted for it, barely managing a smile to answer the words I have no chance to understand.

I get up to the house and am greeted by my Honduran mother and her two older daughters, and a mob of their young sons and daughters whose names I still can’t keep straight even after visiting dozens of times. 15 people living in two tiny houses in their yard, each of which are smaller than my bedroom in the States. Sheets divide each into 3 or 4 different rooms, creating the type of privacy that the taller family members can see over when they stand up.

I go into the house occupied by my Honduran mother and her daughter Lillianas family, and attempt to knock on the curtain that is the doorway to Lilliana and her husband Alex’s room. Alex answers from the room and I go in, feeling my normal slight unease at crossing every barrier of privacy we in the US have erected, as with several steps I cross through everything these people own or ever will own.

I hold out the electric razor to Alex. He is a barber who had his razor stolen a few months ago and can’t afford another one, and I am letting him borrow mine to try to cut a little hair and make a little money. In addition to being a barber Alex is an electrician, a carpenter, a farmer, a plumber, a painter, a lumberjack, a mechanic and a handyman who can fix anything from watches to bikes. Between all of these jobs, he can pretty easily manage to live in this tiny house with his family and their family and feed his 4 kids.

The strong confident Alex that I am used to is gone, however. He is suffering from a nasty infection in his legs from the cesspools of bacteria surrounding his house, and the infection has drained all his strength and left him unable to walk, let alone perform all the jobs he needs to support the family.

After talking to Alex for a few minutes I begin to leave. He tries to put on a positive face and jokes about how I need to learn bad words in Spanish “so I know not to use them by accident and offend someone.” Even through his joking, however, I can tell he is scared for himself and his family. With his infection taking him out of commission his brother in law Jorge is now responsible for somehow supporting the whole family on his 8 dollar a day Dole salary, which I am still embarrassed to tell the family is what an American eating the pineapples is required to make for a single hour of work.

As I begin to say goodbye and walk away, Alex’s wife Lilliana stop in front of me and glares. ”You really think you can leave here without eating? Sit down.”

I reluctantly sit on one of the three plastic chairs they own, knowing that the family is even more desperately poor than usual but also knowing that it would be insulting, not to mention impossible, to refuse their food. I should have brought a bag of beans, flour or Pepsi to share in exchange for the meal but was hoping to make a quick visit, something that I should have known could never be possible.

One of the children sets down on my lap a pile of 7 flour tortillas with refried beans and cheese, and I quickly forget about everything else. The usual serving of eggs and sour cream is noticeably missing in the escalating poverties elimination of the simplest luxuries, yet the warm, sweet, thick tortillas that manage to be soft and crispy at the same time somehow seem even better in the absence.

As I taste the tortillas I can imagine the generations of mothers spending their entire lives around open fires mastering the art of tortilla making. I see the essential need in such a poor country of somehow making something so simple taste new and fresh every single day, and the brilliance of the women who wake up every day and somehow remain enthusiastic about the same routine that they will repeat every day for the rest of their lives. I see the pride they take in it, and the pride that they take in seeing how somehow from the richest country in the world believes it is one of the best things he has ever tasted. That all the money in the world can’t replace the passion and heart these women put into their cooking.

Chickens run around pecking at my feet as I drop a little bit of cheese, and the red dirt begins to gradually turn to black as the small amount of sunlight that was shining through disappears. I look around at the evening light reflecting the banana trees, and realize the whole family is watching me and laughing while I have disappeared into my own world. I come back to reality, to dark brown faces all staring at my white one and laughing, as I sit on a plastic chair sinking into a pile of mud my face is showing complete bliss and a very sincere happiness.

A moment’s awkwardness sets in as I realize I have been ignoring everyone, but I bridge the gap back to the human world with a joke about how many tortillas I can eat in one day. The conversation topic that will always be there and always be amusing no matter the situation; men sitting around joking about how much they can eat.

It begins to rain and everyone hustles me into Jorge’s house, across from Alex’s and apparently in better condition to deal with the rain today. Perhaps due to Alex’s sickness and inability to patch his house as constantly as Jorge has. Roof repairs are a daily routine in the rainy season.

I then realize the reason they were huddling me in there rather than into the other larger house, as they proudly hold up a VHS tape of Jurassic Park and point at Jorge’s tv. Jorge puts it in and it begins somewhere about half an hour in. The writing across the screen says “San Jose, Costa Rica” and shows a geography similar to the one surrounding us, and two men talking in English with no subtitles, although none of the family speaks English. Lilliana looks in the room and rolls her eyes, yelling “they watch this same movie every day. Every single day its the same movie, over and over. And no one even understands what it says!” The men and children laugh and ignore her.

The rain accelerates. I begin to get slightly wet in the house, which through a roof like this means it is raining medium hard to heavy. Jorge begins to fast forward the movie, and clearly no one in the house has any interest in following the plot or actually watching it in the conventional sense. We see gorgeous waterfalls and a plane flying over remote, mysterious, unexplored jungle. I take this opportonity to try to convince Fanny that dinosaurs live over the mountains that surround Porvenir, deep in the unexplored, impenetratable depth of the national park which is so similar to the one shown on the screen.

At 8 years old she is apparently less gullible than my fellow volunteers, who believed giraffes live somewhere over the mountains. ”No! Dinosaurs no son verdades!.” She uses the “stupid gringo” tone of voice. Stupid gringo! Didn’t you know that dinosaurs aren’t real? I feel relief at her knowing dinosaurs don’t live in Honduras, yet wonder if she even knows that they had been real at one time.

The rain comes down harder. The house is under attack now. The rain that is soothing while you sleep is turning into the rain that will wake you up and make you think someone or something is trying to kill you while you sleep. The rain that feels you with a sense of dread when you awake to it, that makes you understand how storms can kill so many people in a place like this. I am now getting hit with a much more steady barrage of rain through the roof.

The fastforwarding stops again. There is a storm in the Central American jungle. I try to explain that the character running across the screen chased by poisonous spitting dinosaurs is Newman, and he is a famous… (villian?) (idiot?) (what words do I know in Spanish to describe Newman??) a famous actor from Seinfeld, a very popular show in the United States. I realize they are not listening as I stumble through the explanation in improvised Spanish, as they have fastforwarded the tape again and stopped it in a critically important part. Everyone is sudenly screaming my name at once and my face is darting from one scream of “A-ron, A-ron” to the next. I realize everyone is only interrupting each other to tell me to look at the screen, as the T-Rex rips the lawyer off of the toilet seat. No English is necessary, no context is needed and high definition television is definitely not needed to fully enjoy the scene, as the dinosaur rages across the screen.

I think about whether the power will go out, and ruin our enjoyment of watching people run away from dinosaurs during a power outage. Screwed by dinosaurs because they took electricity for granted, and took for granted that it woud always be available. I think of how Fanny’s family was out of power for 6 months after Hurricane Mitch hit, and recall the fear I felt walking through the town in total darkness during recent power outages. Try to imgaine raising children with that fear day after day, and I wonder how the fear of gangs and drug dealers in the darkness compares to the fear of dinosaurs in the darkness.

More of the family crowds into the room, some who just returned home in the rain. We all huddle in the small shelter and I become even more conscious of the insufficient size of the room as a child tickles another child in my direction. I knock down an important curtain as I swerve to dodge the children, turning a living room and a bedroom into one united space. Everyone laughs and one of the children mends it as the others make sure I don’t turn my eyes away from Jurassic Park for too long. The new arrivals shiver, but it is clear that no one has a problem with the situation or the lack of space, either because there is legitimately nothing wrong with living in such close quarters or they are too used to it to know that it is supposed to be a problem.

The sun has now set completely and it is totally dark besides the one lightbulb and the television. The lighbulb illuminates spiderwebs and the tangles of wires it took to home-wire electricity into a homemade house, in the real world nonglamorous version of “do-it-yourself” home improvement.

I realize suddenly that the tiny lightbulb is giving off the light I had been looking for all along. Or illuminating the light that is in the room from some other source. I look around and everyone is glowing with the same light, the same positive force which I was supposedely intended to bring into this place from the States.

The light is found in my Honduran families constant defiance of the logic that is beat into us through our lives. The logic that says we have to be jealous of those who have more than us, that we need to covet what they have and guard what we have tightly. The light is found in their refusal to be jealous, in their refusal to think about someone’s relative wealth, and in insisting on giving when they don’t even have anything to give.

In taking joy in a VHS tape of Jurassic Park time and time again, even without understanding the words. In taking joy in eating tortillas, and the magic that makes them taste new day after day. In the bonds formed around the fire making them every morning, noon and night, and the smiles and jokes that get the women through the monotony. In insisting on sharing whatever joy they find, no matter what, and in insisting on feeding someone who is hungry no matter the situation, no matter the conventional assumption that poor people only beg the rich for something.

No matter how desperately poor they got this family kept giving to me, to the point that I wanted to grab them and scream, and somehow make them understand that it was insane for them to be feeding me when I have so much and them so little. Tell them that they’re supposed to be jealous of me, that they’re supposed to be less happy than I am, and that I am supposed to be bringing the light to them, not finding it in this ugly yet beautiful place.

I think about the craziness of the situation again for a couple minutes. About defiance, and how being defiant doesn’t always mean being negative. About how beautifully defiant it is to be so happy when living surrounded by such ugliness, and how you can bring your own beauty to any place you find yourself in. I think about life, inequality, and what makes a house beautiful, and I also think a little bit about the upcoming walk home through even deeper water and darkness. Then, all these swirling thoughts drift further and further away as Lilliana brings out another serving of fresh tortillas, and all my thoughts have totally vanished by the time I finish my first serving.

Education in Porvenir (October 2)

So I’ve had a lot of trouble getting consistent internet access and have been too overwhelmed to know what to write when I have had it. I’m just going to wing it and try and get something down now.

I’ve been teaching English lessons to students in El Porvenir. But before I get into that just a little background on the educational system in Honduras. It is an absolute mess, there’s really no other way to put it. The first two weeks we were here the public school teachers in the whole country were on strike so there were no classes at all. Since then there’s been school but every 2 or 3 days there’s none for some reason, either because its raining, there’s some obscure public holiday, or the teachers just didn’t show up. Its totally normal for teachers to show up an hour after class is supposed to start with a couple bags of groceries. Apparently the public schools all have something called shadow teachers, who are teachers that are on the books to receive a salary but don’t teach classes. The principal and the union get a kickback off this salary so everyone wins except for the students. At least the teachers who are 2 hours late with groceries show up from time to time!

There is absolutely no discipline in classes here. The students come and go as they want, and talk as loud as they want in classes. The 6th grade class is absolutely heartbreaking because it has students up to 18 years old in it trying to finish primary school. The younger kids are the smartest most focused ones who made it to 6th grade on time, and you see them trying so hard to pay attention in a totally chaotic environment, as kids twice their size will literally fight in the classroom.

There is absolutely no creativity or out of the box thinking in Honduran education. We have observed Hondurans teaching English and watched one teach the students to say “How do I get to the Social Security office”. Everything is by the book, and that is what her ESL manual said to teach. She didn’t have the flexibility to realize that there were more important things to teach a 10 year old in a tiny village where adults don’t even know what social security is.

Another example is a woman who was teaching me Spanish lessons. In the first lesson she was teaching me basic things like “como esta” and “como se llama” when I clearly was moderately conversational, and didn’t adjust the lesson when she realized my level. She had me copy down a matching exercise from the book she was using, so I copied the left hand side and then wrote the answer to each question next to it. She looked at the notebook and said it was wrong. I needed to draw lines connecting to the questions to responses! In her mind, even if I knew all the answers I was wrong because I didn’t follow the instructions exactly as given. And this was in a voluntary lesson being given to a paying 23 year old!

We have seen ESL notebooks from other classes taught by Hondurans that have had phrases copied 40 or 50 times as an assignment. Many of the students have memorized complicated phrases, yet have no idea how to formulate their own sentence. We are trying to make the classes fun and get them to think creatively, but when we put examples on the board they will copy them exactly as given. For example, we wanted them to draw a crazy face (3 eyes, 4 noses, whatever they wanted) and write sentences about it to practice body vocabularly and plurals. The students all laughed at our drawing, but then drew one exactly the same, not getting that we wanted them to make their own face.

Anyway, onto something positive. Our classes are going really well, and we’re starting to get the students to learn how to put together their own sentences, although most of them so far are variations on “Aron is crazy”, “Aron is a monkey,” or “Aron is a frog” (they can’t pronounce Aaron). For whatever reason the whole town is obsessed with the word crazy, and students I don’t even know will sit outside our gate chanting “Aron is crazy” for hours. I thought being a celebrity would be a lot cooler than that!

Children and adults alike are desperate to learn English. In Porvenir people who speak English on average make twice as much as those who don’t, and that’s not counting the oppurtonities English would open up in other more touristy areas like Roatan and Utila, islands whose economies are booming and the native population is bilingual. Obviously the oppurtonities English opens up for people who move to the States are even bigger. Whenever I bring my Spanish/English dictionary somewhere people will eagerly look up words for as long as I let them, and its clear that a lot of them had never seen one before. Its amazing that people here can’t even take something so simple for granted. I had a taxi driver pull out a notebook and he had a list of words he needed to know in English that he wanted me to feel in. Its amazing that in the States we take for granted having all the information we need, yet for him it was so difficult to even translate a few words. The gratitude the community has towards us has also been overwhelming. We have had families in mud floor houses with 12 people living in a single room offering us meals every day. Its clear that it has never even crossed their mind that they are poor and we are rich, they simply are so grateful that we are teaching their children that they are willing to share whatever they have with us.

Our neighbors across the street also live in a tiny house with more people than we can count, yet offered to somehow let us sleep there if our house floods (I honestly don’t know if there would be room for us all standing let alone lying down). Someone recently tried to rob a couple of the volunteers, the first incident of crime since I’ve been here, and they were chased off by the neighboors. The whole town worked together to track down who it was and we had people all over town offering vigilante justice against them. It was obviously scary but also comforting to know that most of the people around are on our side.

Anyway, I’ll try and get something else written down soon. Hope everything is well with everyone in the States, don’t get too jealous of life on the Caribbean Coast because its rained hard every day for the last couple weeks.

El Porvenir (September 13)

So its been 3 weeks since I arrived in Porvenir, and I haven´t had regular enough internet access to really write any kind of update. The other day I found an internet cafe that I can ride my bike to, so hopefully I’ll be online more often now (assuming the power stays on).

I’m currently living in El Porvenir, a small village about 20 miles west of La Ceiba, the biggest city on the Carribbean coast of Honduras. La Ceiba is a modern city with a shopping mall that could be in America; it has Wendy’s, Pizza Hut, and American style department stores.

El Porvenir is a totally different world. There’s probably about 10 thousand people who live here although the neighbooring towns all kind of run into each other, and there is one block of concrete in the middle of town with the rest of the roads all being dirt and gravel. There are basic markets that sell rice, beans, fruit, water, and other necessities, but for most shopping you have to go to La Ceiba. The bridge that goes to Ceiba is broken and right now we are rerouted through a dry river bed, but if it rains heavily before they fix the bridge it will be almost impossible to get to the city for supplies because the river will flow through the road.

The town is squeezed between the beach and the Pico Bonito mountain range, which is a national park and extremely beautiful mountains that are over 7,000 feet tall rising straight from sea level. Between the town and the mountains there are miles and miles of pinapple fields that hug the mountains to take advantage of the extra rainfall there, for whatever reason it rains twice as much by the mountains as a few miles away. Most of the men who live in town and have jobs work on the pineapple fields for long hours and little pay. Dole owns almost all of the land in the town, and its because of this that there is no money to build a dump in Porvenir. There is trash on the beach and pretty much everywhere else, but the only way to get rid of it is to burn it which is far worse for the environment than leaving it to decay. A lot of the Americans who first get here are disgusted to see people littering everywhere, but when there’s nowhere to put your garbage how would you ever learn to take pride in your community and keep it clean?

I guess this is part of the utopian future Sarah Palin envisions for America. The huge corporations will own so much that the evil “big government” won’t even be able to afford building a dump. and the children will have to breathe in the toxic fumes of burning plastic whenever the wind blows in a certain direction.

Pretty much everyone we have met in town is extremely friendly. Whenever we walk anywhere we get stared at pretty constantly, although my tan and stereotypical Latino haircut (it seems like it was the only way the guy knew how to cut it) will hopefully cut down on the stares a little. Sometimes it will seem like people are glaring at us but when we say “Ola” and smile they will smile back and start a conversation. Everyone pretty much lives on their front porches since the houses get too hot and everyone is always willing to talk for awhile, which makes it really easy to practice Spanish here. My Spanish is improving quickly, but I find that there are some people I can understand easily and some people I can’t understand at all. Its usually the better educated people who are easier to understand even when they speak fast, it seems like the lower educated people usually don’t pronounce things as well and are often impossible to understand even talking slowly. Obviously there are exceptions to this and some uneducated people who speak very well, but in general it seems to be the rule.

Anyway, I am out of time and still have a lot to write about. I’ll try and write in the next couple days about the work I’m doing at the school.

Paranoid Relaxation (August 21)

We sit, leaning back comfortably against the thick tree branches and dangling our legs over both sides of the branch we are on. We are about 15 feet above the water in a tree that is growing out of the shallow water at the public beach in Utila.

It is one of those trees that is perfect for climbing. The sturdy branches curve upwards gradually to allow you to climb up at the perfect gradual incline. The sun is setting, and the tree gives us a perfect view of the lagoon behind us and the sea ahead. The clouds turn to dark shades of purple and grey, shades barely distinguishable from the darkness of the coming night. There is lightning in the distance, but it seems to be headed away and it looks like it will be a clear night as the first stars become visible and the full moon slowly begins to rise.

The bottom of the tree begins to come alive as big and little crabs leave their little holes in the trunk. They love this time of night, and when we leave the tree and walk back to town the whole beach will seem to move as hundreds of crabs scurry out of our way.

“Do you think we could jump into the water from here?”

Spencer hesitates. “Yes, but we have to be very careful. My brother got hurt this way.”

We sit in silence for a few minutes, taking it all in with no need to say anything. Taking in the cool evening breeze and the sound of the waves on the shore. This is a beautiful tree, with a very unique curve to it that makes it look like it shouldn’t even stand upright. Even in the fading light the trees green and yellow leaves are bright and vivid, and the contrast of the bright leaves against the clear blue water is hypnotizing.

Spencer suddenly gets excited. “Look down there! Look!”

I squint but don’t see anything. Experience the inevitable delay between when a native spots an animal and the tourist does. Then I move to a different branch and it becomes clear. The shape of two giant stingrays just below us. Right where we were planning on jumping down.

This is traveling in Central America. You can be in absolute heaven, as far away from your problems as you ever have been. Yet if you let your guard down for one second, heaven can turn to hell. So enter a state of deep, deep relaxation, but while you do, remember what happened to the crocodile hunter. Relax, but also be paranoid and constantly on guard. Master the art of alert relaxation.

My bicycle got stolen the other day on the island that everyone brags is so safe that you can leave your bike unlocked. I was eating at Will’s Tacos with the owner and some of his friends, and Will asked if one of them could borrow the bike. It turned out Will had only met him that day, and he was a thief who rode up and down the island stealing from unlocked hotel rooms.

It was a rental bike, and I wasn’t too upset that it was gone. It just meant losing a $20 deposit and the ability to ride around the island for a few days. But local friends insisted I go to the police to report it, and a couple days later I did, even though I knew these things never work out.

The police station was in the middle of the jungle far out of town, and 10 officers sat doing nothing as we approached. We described the man who took the bike, primarily by talking about his dreadlocks which went down to his hips, a pretty distinguishable feature. The officers laughed and told us to go look around the side of the building. We walked around and saw a dark room with bars on it, and as we approached we saw the thief sitting in the cell! He began screaming at us, and my Honduran friends screamed back that he represented everything that was wrong with their country. He continued screaming and the biggest, scariest cop came over and banged on the bars menacingly, shutting him up instantly.

The thief said he had ditched the bike before getting arrested and didn’t know where it was, but the cop didn’t seem happy with that answer and said he would get an answer out of him. I wondered if I was about to know for sure whether or not Jack Bauer style interrogations actually work. Is torture acceptable when a bicycle is at stake? This is one of the great moral questions of our time.

He didn’t torture the guy right then and there at least, and had me answer some questions. My Honduran friend said something the officer laughed at for almost a minute. When I asked what it was he said that he had suggested that the cop use the money they found on the thief to pay for the bike.

“Its a joke because everyone knows that the police pocket all the money.”

Obviously.

We thanked the police and left, with me still being pessimistic. Within a couple of hours, however, they called and said they had my bike back! I have no idea how it was recovered but was in absolute disbelief, how could corrupt developing world police recover a bike? As far as I know no American cop in history has ever recovered a stolen bike. It must be because its an island and there’s only limited places to hide. Everyone knows everyone, and word had got around quickly that a guy with dreadlocks was stealing from people. The island is not safe because no one steals, but because they get caught quickly.

So losing the bike turned out to be a free lesson in awareness. I’m supposed to be in Honduras to be part of the community and develop close relationships with people. But how can you develop close relationships with people when one of the first people you trusted with anything turned out to be a thief? Be constantly relaxed but on guard, and somehow get close to people without really trusting them. These are two paradoxes I somehow have to get used to for my time volunteering here.

Entrepeneurs (August 20, 2010)

Entrepreneurship

“So what did you do on Utila, famous for its scuba diving, whale sharks and deserted Cay Islands which you can only get to by chartering a boat from a fisherman?”
“Well, I hung out at Will’s Tacos a lot. And tried to open a business selling some alcohol.”
Soon after I got to Utila I made friends with a Honduran named Spencer on the beach. Spencer is from Tegulciapa, a large city in the south of Honduras, but has Irish family that lives in America (Spencer is not a Honduran name). Through a variety of unfortunate circumstances he ended up stuck on Utila with no money and no way to get home. He’s been living in a tent behind his friend Will’s house, the same Will who owns the taco shop that he works at with a couple other friends.
After hanging out on the beach a few times with Spencer I told him I would give him a little money if he was willing to teach me some Spanish vocabulary and pronunciation, and he quickly agreed. At some point in our “Spanish lessons” (its really mainly been hanging out at the beach and making him say everything he says in both English and Spanish) he shared a drink he had brewed that was a mixture of coffee, whiskey, cream, chocolate, cinnamon, and some other secret ingredients.
The drink was absolutely delicious and Spencer kept talking about selling it for money on the island. Tonight Will’s Taco stand is having a party with a bunch of people coming by, and I agreed to lend Spencer a little money for the ingredients we would need to brew a few bottles of the drink. He took me to an out of the way market that sold things for about half of what they did at the touristy supermarket on the beach and we bought enough supplies to make 60 or 70 servings of the drinks for about 15 USD.
Our plan is to give a first drink away free with a purchase at Will’s Taco, and then charge for more drinks. Usually tourists on Utila pay about 25 limperas for a drink, which is a little over a dollar. Theoretically, if we can even sell 15 drinks we’ll recoup our money. If we can sell 40, Spencer can make enough money to keep a little, repay me, and buy ingredients to make another batch.
Its amazing to me what kind of opportunities there are for entrepreneurship here, and how easy it is to start your own business. Imagine a young person who wanted to sell drinks in United States and tried to just set up somewhere and sell for a profit. You’d need to get a permit, fill out piles and piles of paperwork, and pay rent. After doing all of that, you probably wouldn’t really end up selling anything anyway since a giant corporation could sell the same product cheaper. Parks are supposed to be public space, but you can’t even just set up and start selling something in American parks, whereas here you can create a business in a day and start selling something anywhere.
Obviously I’m not saying that selling liquor for a living is the ideal childhood, but there’s definitely merits to living in a place where so many more people can be their own boss and make their own business decisions. Young Americans work at Dunkin Donuts and WalMart and learn how to kiss their boss’s ass and turn off their brains for the time they are on the clock, and they learn not to care about their jobs because it makes no difference whatsoever to them how many coffees Dunkin Donuts sells in a day. Obviously everyone can’t be their own boss, but it seems like a lot more young Hondurans have the chance to learn how to create a self sustaining business, and work somewhere where they’re actually invested in the outcome of what they’re doing.
It’s also pretty amazing how big of a difference a little bit of money can make for people in places like this. If Spencer’s business ends up being successful, a $15 loan literally could have changed his whole life, and gave him the chance to be self sufficient. Even though there’s times he doesn’t even get to eat, Spencer has never asked me for anything for free, and its clear that the money I gave him is a loan towards starting his own business. Lots of people in poor countries really just want a chance to make it, and its hard for us to imagine but for a lot of people a small loan could be almost impossible to obtain in their communities.
With the Internet, you don’t even have to leave your house to make this kind of difference in someone’s life. I don’t know how many of you know about Kiva, but Kiva is a website that loans money to entrepeneurs, primarily women, in developing countries who have an idea to make money but need capital to start.
Entrepreneurs on Kiva propose their business ideas to a local micro-finance organization (micro-finance is the concept of loaning money as a type of charity rather than for profit) and they explain how their business will make money. Then people in the US and Europe lend money to the entrepreneurs so they can start their business. Eventually the loan gets repaid, and the donor can either take their money back or give it to a different entrepreneur. An incredible 98.84% of the loans made on Kiva get repaid, which is really hard to imagine when you think about the world we live in. Goldman Sachs has billions and billions of dollars and access to all the best ways to make money in the world, and they need billions of dollars from the US government to survive. On the other hand, people so poor that a tiny loan can change their whole life manage to always pay their creditors back. Imagine if the US government had given all those billions of TARP dollars to developing world entrepreneurs rather than the greedy morons at Goldman and AIG. I feel like the world would have been alright if we let those banks collapse but gave millions of people the opportunity to start their own businesses…most developing world entrepreneurs don’t use their loans on private jets!
Anyway, before this turns into too much of a rant I’ll wrap it up. Everyone really should let someone borrow money through Kiva.org , its a FREE way to give people the power to change their own lives.

In Utila… (August 15, 2010)

Or I died in La Ceiba and went to heaven, and haven’t realized it yet. Not quite sure which.

I’ve been wanting to write something here the last couple days but have been too overwhelmed by everything that has happened to even know where to begin. I’ll just write about what I’ve done and where I’ve gone today, and I’ll update again in the next couple days with more descriptions of what Honduran culture and life is like. So if you don’t want to just read about me going to beaches and whatnot, wait for the other post.

Right now I am on Utila, one of the Bay Islands off the coast of northern Honduras. I flew into San Pedro Sula on Wednesday, a city in the Northeast of Honduras near the border with Guatamala. I took a taxi from there to Tela, a city on the northern coast west of where I’ll be volunteering, and stayed there from Wednesday until Saturday.

I met some other tourists in Tela from Italy, the States, and Australia and decided to take some tours with them. The Australians were in the middle of a year long trip through South America, so talking to them about all their favorite places was obviously really interesting. On Thursday we took a boat across the bay that Tela is on to a national park in the rainforest that can’t be reached by cars. The park was beautiful and has a sad story behind it. The area was going to be developed and luxury hotels were going to be put in but a Honduran woman protested this and organized to have it turned into a park. She succeeded and now no one but Indians who live off the land lives in the park, but she was murdered soon after it became a park, and most people think it was by someone in the tourist industry although the case was unsolved.

When we landed in the park we went for a short walk in the rainforest. We saw about 20 howler monkeys which make the most terrible sound you can imagine, some enormous spiders that made webs that covered three trees, and about a million crabs and lizards.

After that we rode down the coast a little, past some beautiful rock formations that were covered with birds including tons and tons of pelicans. Then we went snorkeling and drifted down to a beautiful beach where we had lunch. Saw a lot of jellyfish and tiny little fish as far as we could see.

After that we basically just lay in hammocks on the beach for a couple hours and relaxed. Our guide was a Honduran who lived in NYC most of his life and then went back to live there. Basically he sat on the boat, went for a walk and sat in a hammock on a beautiful deserted beach all day, and got paid for it. We can’t really understand why he would leave NY for this.

All of this cost around 25 USD which covered the boat ride, lunch, and the guide for the day. Everything in Honduras is ridiculously cheap; right now I’m staying in a hotel right by the beach for 8 dollars a night if that gives you any idea. Meals can be under 2 dollars if you get food from one of the street vendors who sell fruit and tortillas filled with meat, rice, and beans. Sit down restaurants are usually more like 4-6 dollars but the cheap places are almost always delicious, so I’ve only ate in the nicer restaurants a few times.

On Friday I went with the Italian woman I met to the village of Miami, Honduras. Just like our Miami Beach its an hour out of town on a very rough dirt road and has no electricity or running water. The economy is basically based on a couple fishing boats and a couple restaurants that serve drinks and food to the tourists, who seemed to usually be younger Honduran couples and families.

The “village” if you can even call it that is between a lagoon and the ocean, and wherever you sit you have a nice view of both. The local people built a lot of cabanas out of straw and we spend most of the day swimming or just sitting under them. It was pretty much beach as far as we could see in either direction and then mountains in the distance (pretty much everywhere you go in Honduras you can at least see the mountains).

To give more perspective on prices, the taxi driver who took us to Miami stayed there all day and waited for us since it would be impossible to catch another one there. It cost around 10 dollars to have him for the whole day, although he played cards with the people who owned the restaurant and didn’t seem to mind waiting.

After that we went to the Mesa Andes hotel where the American family was staying and had dinner. The hotel is about 10 stories up overlooking the sea, and from the top you can see the whole town, the rainforest, the bay, and a few other small villages. We had dinner there during sunset, which cost a little more than usual (about 7 or 8 dollars) but considering it was one of the nicest views I’ve ever seen and really good food I couldn’t really complain.

Yesterday I took a bus to La Ceiba, which is west of Tela and the big city that is close to the village I’ll be volunteering in. I took a taxi to El Porvenir where I’ll be volunteering to drop off my luggage that I wouldn’t need. We got there and the driver started yelling at everyone he saw “donde esta los gringos?” Eventually a little kid jumped in and said he would take us to Charlie.

Charlie is an older American from Louisiana who lives in El Porvenir with his wife. I’ll talk more about them once I start volunteering, but they work with the school and are very involved in the community. Charlie got in a fight with the driver when I told him what I was paying, I was apparently getting ripped off badly which I usually just assume at this point. Its funny because you catch yourself arguing prices intensely with people here and then realze suddenly that you’re arguing over 30 or 40 cents, but in this case Charlie managed to negotiate a rate 10 dollars cheaper so it was worth it.

After I left my things the driver took me back to La Ceiba and then I took a boat to Utila, one of the “Bay Islands” off the coast of La Ceiba. Utila and Roatan are the two most famous islands in the Honduran Caribbean, and I had trouble deciding which to go to. Roatan is much bigger and more developed, and has cruise ships stop there and lots of families vacationing. Utila is an island that is famous for its diving, and everyone said it was cheaper and better for younger people.

When I got to Utila I arrived in a towns that has tons of restaurants, dive shops, and an absurd amount of bars. I pretty much just randomly looked for hotels and found one with a room for 8 dollars a night run by a really nice older Honduran couple who talked to me for awhile about the island.

“So its safe here at night?”

“There is no crime in Utila. If you fall asleep on the beach don’t have too much money on you but you probably will be ok anyway.”

“No crime?”

“Well if you want a fight you could ask somewhere at a bar nicely. But only if you want to. Otherwise no. Were you here for Sun Jam? Tourists were on the beach all night!”

“What is Sun Jam?”

“It is three days on a small island off of Utila in a cave. I think they listen to this music…electronic? Do you know?”

“So if I was here a week ago I could’ve gone to an electronic music festival in a cave on an island?”

“Yes. Very nice people there!”

“……” unable to say anything.

So anyway, Utila is totally different from mainland Honduras. Everyone is bilingual whereas in the mainland no one spoke English anywhere. On main land Honduras I constantly felt like I had to be careful with everything I owned. On Utila I rented a bike (no cars here only bikes, golf carts and mopeds) and don’t even need to lock it, although apparently there’s some risk of someone drunk taking it and riding it a ways down the beach, but never actually stealing it.

Everyone on Utila is either a diver, a backpacker, or someone who is sick of the real world and wants to relax on the beach and do nothing. Everyone works in tourism, and everything is locally owned so most people own their own business or are friends with the people who own the business, and everyone makes enough money to live moderately comfortably there. There’s lots of retired Americans and Americans who are working in restaurants and hotels, but it doesn’t seem like anyone really does any work, because all the jobs just involve sitting on the sea talking to tourists. I talked to one Honduran who said he worked at a restaurant but they were closed today for some reason I didn’t understand in Spanish. An American translated it for me, and it turns out the whole resturant was taking the day off for “don’t give a fuck lets go to the beach”. That basically describes the universal attitude here, no one really cares about anything. I never really liked Jimmy Buffet but I feel like I can totally understand the song Margaritaville now, its basically just about Utila.

Everyone in Utila starts conversations with strangers, and everyone is totally friendly. I had a guy offer me cocaine yesterday and said no, and then he asked me where I was from. We talked for awhile about the US, and he gave me some travel advice. Even the cocaine dealers here are the nicest people you’ll ever meet!

So my plan is to stay here for a week and work on Spanish, and then go back to El Porvenir and begin volunteering. Studying is hard with everyone partying all the time, but I found a tree on the beach that is pretty peaceful and I can sit under it and practice with flashcards. Its tough but someone has to do it. Of course, I can also practice Spanish at the bars and restaurants, but its tough to force yourself to when everyone speaks English, especially when my brain is exhausted from needing to get by in all Spanish on the mainland.

First Day in Honduras- August 17, 2010

So I decided to write about my first day in Honduras as a collection of thoughts I had over the course of the day in no real comprehensible order. It’s one of those things where you write really poorly and try to play it off as being artistic.

5:20 AM- Arrive at BWI airport.

5:30- Sign warns that “for your awareness, passengers traveling from Venezuela may not have been properly checked before leaving airport”. These passengers are still allowed to fly, but they just want you to adapt your plans to having this knowledge somehow. What exactly can I do with this information? And is airport security really any worse in Venezuela than in any other South American country? Or African country? Or is this just some subtle propaganda to remind us that we´re supposed to be angry at Venezuela when none of us really know why?

5:35- Video clip of a woman wondering why she can´t carry liquids through security. A guy explains that Al Quada wants to use contact solution to murder us all and she smiles and thanks him for taking care of her. Everyone in line looks pretty unpersuaded.

5:40- I clear security with 2 things of contact solutions, a water bottle and toothpaste in my carry-on bag. They need a warning- “Americans may not have been properly cleared at security.” Obama must be in league with Chavez! Fox was right all along!

6:30-8:30- Fly to Atlanta, sleep a lot

9:15- Woman asks me the time in Spanish and I answer perfectly. I got this down no problem!

9:16- She immediately switches to English. What happened? I don’t have an accent do I?? It turns out that she’s a lawyer in La Ceiba, the city next to the village I´m volunteering in. She gives me lots of advice on the area and her phone number. So far so good with hospitality from Hondurans.

11:00- Begin flying over the Gulf of Mexico. It just looks like water from up here! Was it Rumsfeld who said that Iraq doesn´t look like its on fire from the air? By his standard BP has nothing to apologize for.

11:15- (Honduras time) A heated debate breaks out between 3 passengers over which place I should visit first when I land. Either they really want me to enjoy myself or just like to argue!

11:30- Begin to see land. The water along the coast makes unbelievable patterns of clear blue water mixing with normal blue and darker blue that I assume is coral reefs. The coast I see is covered in a forest that seems to go on forever with no signs of civilization.

11:40- This whole country seems to be wilderness with a few scattered dirt roads and huge banana and pineapple fields breaking it up. We´re supposedly landing in the second biggest city but all I see as we fly in for landing is forest.

11:50- After landing and walking towards customs I realize I´m the only gringo anywhere in site. No one seems to notice except the entourage of taxi drivers who begin to follow me as I walk into the main airport and wander back and forth confused trying to figure out which bus line I want.

12:00- Having decided to go to Tela, a city on the Caribbean coast west of La Ceiba, I begin negotiating with a driver, who convinced me I should just take a taxi all the way rather than just to the bus station. “50,” he says. No I’ll pay 40! “50.” Well how about 45? He smiles and writes 50 in huge letters and hands it to me.

12:05- I am such a typical American negotiator! Meaning, I pay what they ask but make sure they know I´m not happy about it. Much like paying 45,000 dollars for a year of college.

12:20- Is there anything but jungle here? We stay in the city center with signs for places like Burger King and Pizza Hut for about 2 minutes, and then are leaving the second largest city on a single paved road. We are surrounded by jungle with nothing but dirt roads and paths jutting off to the sides towards little houses made of tin, straw, plastic, and anything that can be used in construction.

The jungle is thick and vines cover everything, creating one continuous impenetrable wall of jungle. I don’t see individual trees but rather an unending barricade of vines and bushes strangling banana trees, palm trees, and bigger versions of your normal North American trees. Wherever we go the background is filled with more jungle that climbs hills, and the colors in the distance slowly change from bright green to darker green and blue on the mountaintops. This ecosystem is called “cloud forest” and the scientists clearly didn’t put much work into naming it. Every mountain or hill seems to have its own group of clouds hugging it, despite blue skies everywhere else.

12:21- Just as the jungle is a never-ending wall of trees, the road seems to be a neverending sea of chaos. Cars mix with bikes, mopeds, a few carts drawn by horses, and cows and chickens that are completely oblivious to the fact that they’re in a road. It is a two lane road with cars going in each direction, and a steady stream of traffic. This of course doesn’t stop everyone from passing each other constantly and narrowly avoiding cars coming the other way. What does passing accomplish when all the traffic is slowed to 25 MPH by something way in the distance? Is it just for fun or to pretend you’re accomplishing something?

12:25- We tailgate a cow for a minute or so and then honk, yell and pass him. Cows really drive unreasonably slow!

12:30- People describe me as a risktaker, but fitting 3 people on a single bicycle with a cart of bananas dragging behind seems A LITTLE excessive to me.

12:35- Car in a ditch totaled. People here don’t have the same embarrassment about rubbernecking, they just accept that curiosity is natural and almost everyone stops to watch for a few minutes. The cars that don’t stop to watch don’t take the crash as any type of warning and pass those that stop in reckless fashion.

12:40- Pass a flooded river that is overflying into the yards of all the houses near it.

12:45- No one has AC and its too hot to be inside so we pass by people living out their lives by the side of the road, almost like just seeing snapshots of typical life as we drive by. We go by a straw house with children playing soccer in the yard and an older man hacking intensely at random clumps of jungle in the yard with a machete. Am I in a movie?

12:50- Apparently some type of berry grows in this section of jungle and people who are desperate for work pick it and sell it by the road. We buy from one of them and the drivers offers me some. I don’t like the taste but enjoy spitting the pits out the window. We laugh and spit them at cows. Serves them right for driving so slow!!

1:10- We arrive at a hotel. I realize I am far too sleep deprived to think when I can’t figure out if 150 lempieras a night is a good rate after repeating the exchange rate constantly to myself all day. I am sure the woman is ripping me off when she says its 10 dollars, then changes her mind and asks for 12 (dollars are accepted currency in Honduras but they usually overcharge if you pay with them). I later realize it should have been $7.50. At least I knew I was getting ripped off, even if I couldn’t do anything about it.

1:20- I go to a store to buy a cell phone. The woman selling it to me is extremely nice and patient with me not being able to understand her. Thank god for such hospitable people.

1:22- I ask her how to call the US and she sends a text message to my phone and tells me to press “acceptar.” I do and she immediately yells “100 lempieras.”
“Para que?”
She shows me the message and I read it carefully. It says something like “this message costs 100 Lmps. Click to accept it.”

1:24- Debate trying to figure out what I paid for. I decide that I’ll probably get charged another 100 for an explanation of the explanation. I thank her and practically run out.

1:40- Alone. Scared. Confused. I walk towards the beach to try and get food and it seems like every 5 feet I walk I run into a restaurant or someone selling food on the street, and when I make eye contact with any of them they aggressively try to sell me what they have. Vendors seem drawn to me like a magnet from every direction, and it seems like everyone in sight wants to get something from the confused gringo who doesn’t know what the country is like yet. I look at menus but my brain isn’t working to translate the Spanish or have any idea what the prices are like.

1:50- Pick a restaurant basically at random and order fried chicken. A little girl sells me a loaf of bread for about .50 cents as I sit at the outdoor seating and as I begin to eat it I realize I haven’t really had food since the night before, and was up traveling all night.

2:10- Food arrives and as soon as I bite into it the world changes before my eyes. Amazing how your surroundings can be totally changed by your inner perspective changing. And amazing how food can be a catalyst for changing your whole worldview when you’re so hungry. I realize I am on an overwhelmingly beautiful Caribbean beach sitting and enjoying some fried chicken. What was I so worried about before? I look around and all the locals smile at me. Maybe they weren’t trying to take advantage of me! They now just seem to be curious about the foreigner and everyone suddenly seems to be my friend.

2:20- A beautiful gringo woman walks up to the table. “Turista?” I hesitate. It is usually better to never openly acknowledge being a tourist, but she seems harmless and I nod.
She is a tourist too and needs an extra person to go on a boat ride to a national park the next day. She also offers to help me out with anything I need help with getting arranged the next couple days. I feel even more relieved. Suddenly everything is going perfectly.

3:00- After going to book the tour for the next day I go swimming. I am in heaven. The beach in Tela goes the whole length of the town and there are restaurants lining the whole beach, but no road anywhere near it. So there are people hanging out everywhere having a good time but no noise from cars. The water is overwhelmingly clear and there are mountains all around me because Tela is on a bay and you can see the mountains on the other side.

3:12- The Italian “girl” is 38. I immediately believe everything I’ve ever heard about the Mediterranean diet. She looks like she’s younger than me.

3:40- I was telling people before I left I didn’t think Honduras would be as hot as DC has been this summer. Wrong. Tropical humidity is a whole new ballgame. I am drying myself with a towel and getting wet with sweat at exactly the same rate so the towel really seems to serve no purpose whatsoever.

4:00- Naptime. I designate the left side as the wet side of the bed so if I ever stop sweating I can sleep on the dry side. As I get into my room I see 2 lizards and a cockroach. I kill the cockroach and hope the lizards will stay.

5:10- Wake up confused, disoriented and soaked. Where am I? Is this real life?

5:12- In the bathroom it appears like the floor is moving. Ants converge from all different directions on a single point and swarm. I realize that its the cockroach I killed, and a little over an hour later the whole thing is almost gone. I should be in awe at the circle of life, but am slightly disgusted and remind myself to only kill cockroaches if I’m willing to bring the corpses outside.

5:20- As I leave the hotel room I am on a balcony looking into the backyard of a house where a woman is cooking. No privacy here, we live on top of each other. Her yard is packed with chickens, parrots, and a ton of kittens. I am torn between observing the chaos and not wanting to be nosy.

5:30- I realize she’s actually cooking food to sell on the street and it smells delicious!! I go down and get 3 tortillas filled with different types of meat and beans, and pay about 1.20 for them and juice. Life is good.

5:40- I walk to the beach as the sun sets and sit with my feet in the water. The crystal clear water reflects the sunset and the colors float off in a million different directions as they hit the waves. The mountains change to darker blue and then to darkness as the stars come out slowly at first, and then begin to overwhelm me. I think back to leaving the airport and it is hard to believe this is the same day. I am terrified and confused by this place, and the fact that I will be here for 6 months, but as the waves hit my feet and a vendor brings a beer right out to the water, I realize that I am also enchanted. There must be worse places in the world to spend 6 months!