No School in Honduras

We stop, and they stop. We look at cans of tomato paste in the grocery store, comparing prices as they stare intensely at our faces, comparing their brown skin to our white. Their clothes are dirty, tattered and worn but they are wearing shoes, so are probably not the abandoned street children who usually crowd around looking for money.

They don’t ask for anything at all, as a matter of fact, or say anything at all in response to my “Hola.” Just stare blankly. Faces motionless and expressionless. Looking up at us as if staring at the white people was the least boring of the many boring things they could be doing, not fascinating but a way to past the time. They stare yet seem to stare through us, without intensity or any curiosity and interest. The totally blank faces reveal no thoughts, no comprehension and no desire to process or take in any information. Their parents are at work leaving them with nowhere to go and nothing to do. The heat leaves it too hot to play football in the mid-afternoon. The illiterate children with no tv sets and no grass to sit on or parks to play in will sit in the air conditioned grocery store for the rest of the day in a glazed over haze of indifference that may hover around them through the rest of their lives.

There is no public school in Honduras. The five blue stars and two blue stripes of the Honduran flag guard all of the schools in the country, where every Monday morning comes and the classrooms sit empty, while the teachers camp with their slogans and pamphlets and megaphones outside. In the capital of the country they march with signs screaming and yelling, blocking roads and bridges as radical revolutionaries throwing Molotov cocktails mix with the striking teachers, getting beat back with tear gas and clubs by thugs who have somehow scratched out the legitimacy of being called police.

In the smaller major cities and Capitals of the 17 States the teachers are shouting angrily at government officials in face to face confrontations, the chaos now scaled down to empty threats and angry words. And in even smaller cities the distant echo of the conflict is shouted into megaphones for no one to hear as the screams float out down eerily empty streets. In the smaller pueblos and villages throughout the isolated valleys and mountains of the countries interior, the teachers sit quietly by their flags, passing the minutes of the day in a deep indifference that echoes that of the children, far removed from the actual conflict. In these towns without newspapers the teachers each day will learn secondhand from someone who was in the city that there will be no school the next day. The dusty flag is draped over the school doors there by blank faces and is symbolic of some far off conflict, some abstract struggle going on somewhere over the mountains that determines whether there is school each day.

The bell rings and the private school students I am teaching yell and scream as they run in the doors, exploding energy squeezed into a tight hallway as they race past each other to reach class on time. First class is PE and we file out to the football pitch. I make the 3^rd graders count by 2s in English while tossing a ball back and forth, and finally give into the pleas for football that were born stuck in their throats, sending them scattering out onto the pitch to chase the ball around for the next 40 minutes and use as much of their energy reserves as possible before class starts.

Beyond the fence, children wheel past with grocery carts jammed 10 feet high with cans; childhoods spent chasing 2 cent deposits towards abstract dreams, if they ever even learned how to dream. The curious children peer through the fence at the football game, wondering how they would size up. In clothes two sizes too big or small worn every day for two weeks, they stare in awe at the machine washed school uniforms worn by the children who can afford to be in school. Watch them play together, laugh together, and learn about compromising and the hardships of life when they end up fighting against each other. They say a fish can’t contemplate the fact that it is living in water. Living in a world where only some are privileged from birth with the right to go to school consistently, I wonder if it seems normal and natural to them to be left on the other side of the fence.

Some of the kids have nowhere to go and will linger all day watching the gym classes. Some wander back to homes, where illiterate parents will do their best to teach them or neighborhoods will organize classes in backyards and crowded living spaces, desperately attempting to compensate for the lack of free public education. The parents will nervously watch the days go by and are learning to stop hoping in vain when they hear the empty promises of reconciliation and compromise on the tv and in the paper. They can feel precious time being wasted and flushed away each day as their children stay at home and fall further behind the rest of the world in reading, math, computation, and the social development that occurs in a school environment. Some parents accept the situation with indifference, lacking the framework to understand the importance of education, while others fall into deep depression or anger at the teachers or government. Some will be seen in the schoolyards shouting at the teachers, filled with anger at the people who make more money than them yet still refuse to teach their children for what they’re getting.

On the other side of the screaming matches, some teachers enjoy the laziness of not working. Others want to work yet are terrified to go against the union, filled with sorrow at the empty schools and the empty minds of the students wandering around the streets yet powerless to act. Most are filled with one type of hopelessness or another. They watch populist Presidents and hardline Presidents come and go in rapid succession over the course of a lifetime, and watch every candidate’s campaign promises of more money for education lead to nothing no matter how loud and sincerely the promises are screamed by the actors with nice smiles playing politicians. Watching the cheap desks break over and over again until students are sitting on floors and being covered with fire ants and spiders, in barren classrooms with no electricity or water. The teachers live paycheck to paycheck in a country where savings is an abstract concept for 99 percent of families, getting by on their 10 or 12 dollars a day until a relative gets sick, and then living on nothing but rice and beans until the rains destroy the bean crops and raise prices, leading them to live on nothing but rice. Listening to the President on tv assuring them time after time that if they go back to work they can have a dialogue and things will improve. This time he promises that the government is ready to really invest in education, yet every time the issues that caused the strike will be forgotten about when they give in and return to work.

I haven’t written anything about the teaching conflict in Honduras in the 7 months I’ve lived here, for the same reasons for which I haven’t written about many other things I have seen and experienced. I feel like it deals with issues beyond my understanding, and complicated issues, details, and passions that I, as a foreigner from a rich country, could never understand. It is not possible for someone who grew up in the States to put themselves in the shoes of a parent whose kids don’t have the right to an education taken for granted, nor is it possible for the son of a middle class American teacher to imagine living paycheck to paycheck as a teacher even in the best of times. My mother is far from upper class in the States, yet makes teaching in one day what teachers here will make in a month, and even with the lower cost of living in Honduras this is a mind-blowing thing to think about.

My reluctance to weigh in has also been shaped by the fact that everyone else I talk to here either knows a lot about the teaching crisis or pretends to know a lot about it, and even when I try to read about the issue and talk to people on both sides this is an issue that has seemed to confuse me and leave me without a clear position, finding myself torn between those who demonize and denounce the teachers for not working and those who demonize the administrations and the government.

Right now the issue seems to be coming to some sort of head. The conservative “President”, Pepe Lobo (in quotes because Lobo was voted in after a coup in an election that the opposition boycotted because it felt it was illegal, so Lobo’s Presidential legitimacy is controversial to some Hondurans) is taking a hard line stand towards the issue, saying that teachers will be fired if they don’t return to work on Monday. The government also plans to jail a lot of teachers and union officials who are leading the strikes. Violence is increasing in the capital of the country as radicals and revolutionaries fighting for the return of the previous President’s party are mixing with the teachers, clashing with police as the government jails, beats and tortures some journalists and leaders in their attempts to restore order from chaos.

Many of the people I talk to are saying that the teachers will continue to strike now no matter what the government gives them, because they have learned that striking works to get at least some concessions. Some of them paint the teachers as lazy and constantly looking for any excuse not to work. I have worked with many Honduran teachers since I have been here, and some of them certainly fit this mold, such as teachers I have seen showing up late to school with bags of grocery on days they have actually been working. Although there certainly are very lazy Honduran teachers, I feel as if a lot of this laziness is a product of underinvestment in teacher training, which has led to teachers having no idea how to do their jobs. In the chaos of their failed classrooms that they have no idea how to control I can see how the teachers sometimes fall into a lazy, apathetic mindset, after watching students not learning even on the days when they try their hardest.

I just attended a teacher training program run by a Peace Corps volunteer, who teaches English to under-qualified teachers who have been thrust into roles teaching ESL. 55 public school teachers from our small city, while on strike, were giving their Saturdays to voluntarily take the course, which taught English but also focused on teaching the teachers creative out of the box methods with which to teach English. The teachers were incredibly focused on the course from which they would reap no monetary benefit, sincerely wanting to become better teachers and make up for their inadequate Honduran teacher training. These teachers were participating in the strike, yet were obviously self motivated to improve their teaching. Framing them as lazy selfish people who want to abandon the students of the future seems to not fit.

Lots of people blame the main teachers union, arguing that the union forces the teachers to strike against their own self interest for selfish reasons. The union is definitely corrupt, and an example of this is people called “shadow teachers” who receive salaries from corrupt administrators to stay on the books as teachers while never teaching. The unions and principals receive benefits in exchange for keeping these teachers on the books even though they never teach. Lobo wants to crack down on these types of arrangements, and losing these and other kickbacks can definitely be argued as one reason for which the teachers want to strike, although it seems like radically increasing investments in education administration would be the best way to fight this corruption, and the conservative government is certainly not suggesting that.

It seems to me that the teachers, who are well educated by Honduran standards at least, would not blindly follow a corrupt union for this long if they had no reasons of their own for striking. So if they aren’t all lazy, why are all the teachers consistently striking? It seems to me like the gross inequalities underlying the education system really have to be the root cause of the strike, inequalities that leave public schools I have been in with leaking roofs and 1 desk for every two students. Inequalities that send private, bilingual students to school for an 8 hour day in air conditioned buildings with modern computer and science labs, while the government only invests enough money to send public school students to a half day of school at all ages.

Critics of the teachers say that every time they strike they get benefits and that the government is being overly generous to them, but the bottom line is that for the Honduran education system to actually work for anyone a radical change is needed, and maybe something like a doubling of the public school budget. Honduras is a grossly unequal country, where a few families and international corporations own almost all of the land as well as the media and most of the government. Before “Banana Republic” was a trendy brand to wear in the suburbs it described many Latin American countries, primarily Honduras and Guatemala, and the way that the country’s development has always centered on giving banana companies everything they want at any cost. In Honduras tax dollars have historically paid for railroads that ship bananas to port, and this has always taken priority over improving education and infrastructure for the citizens who watch their country’s wealth ride the railroads and boats out of the country towards the United States, where they are forbidden to follow the wealth without an unattainable green card.

In the rhetoric of post Reagan/Ayn Rand America it may seem radical, revolutionary and socialist for me to say it, but I feel like maybe these companies should lose 1 or 2 percent of their profit to allow the country to double its education spending, or Americans should have to pay 5 or 6 cents more per banana in order to allow Honduran children to attend school. Yet any President of a Central American country who has ever suggested any policies that cuts even slightly into the profits of the banana companies or rich landowners has been shipped out of their country, with cries of “SOCIALIST” drowing out cries of “DEMOCRACTICALLY ELECTED”. So, while blaming international corporations may seem cliché or predictable, it seems to me to fit more than blaming teachers making 10 dollars a day, or even blaming the powerless President who knows he will be thrown out if he proposes any reinvestment in education that takes away anything from the powerful corporations. So if blame needs to be placed in this situation, I blame not just the international corporations that act in greedy self interest, but the worldview they are a part of; the worldview that holds that a multi billion dollar corporation’s freedom to make 1 or 2 percent more money in a year is more important than right of a nation to public education. The worldview that allows a rich nation to take a poor nations resources and leave it with nothing with which to educate its children, while Americans refuse people from that poor country a right to move to our country in search of minimum wage jobs that pay in one hour what they make in a day. Call me a radical, but I believe we should either let them tax our bananas to educate themselves at home, or let them leave that school-less home and come to work as our janitors.

So is there anything you personally can do about this situation? Maybe not on a large scale, but I think it would be great if people who read this article could start keeping track of tropical fruits they buy that are imported from poor nations. For every banana or pineapple you buy, keep a record and make a small donation to a charity that supports education in Central America or other impoverished and exploited region of the world. Maybe 5 or 10 cents a banana, or whatever you can manage. A small voluntary banana tax, a way of saying that you would be willing to pay a little more for your fruit if it gave people in the country it came from the right to an education. The Porvenir English Program, run by Anne Fowler on Honduras’s Carribbean Coast is one example of the type of organization you could make a donation to. The Program brings American volunteers to Honduras to teach free English classes to students there, classes that are all the students have while their teachers continue to battle the government. The SOS children’s orphanages operating throughout Honduras are another great organization to support, orphanages which put children in home-like environments with “Tia’s,” or aunts, who offer them structure and continuity most orphanages never would. SOS also works with international volunteers to teach intensives classes to the orphans in all subjects, and is always desperately in need of funds. If anyone has any other charities they’d like to share that would be great, and I will post more in the coming days. Just ask yourself if paying 5 cents more per banana would be worth it to educate a nation, and if you think it is then voluntarily tax yourself on behalf of the Honduran government, who may never be able to.

The website for SOS Children's Village is

http://www.sos-childrensvillages.org/pages/default.aspx

You can go to country specific pages for Honduras, Haiti, or any other country you would like specifically to donate to, and find information about what this great international organization is doing all around the world.