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.
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