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.
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