Passionist Volunteers: Honduras 2005-2006

The Last Post

2006-08-16T11:19:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm sorry I haven't posted in a while. I was just so busy getting ready to go, I didn't have time.

But I am now back in the good old U S of A, in the middle of orientation for medical school. It is different to be back. I feel often like I'm living the high life, living extravagantly, with everything I buy, and throw out, and eat. I'm amazed at how soft my clothes are after a machine wash and dry. I keep trying to throw out my toilet paper instead of flushing it. I forget that I can drink the tap water, and go searching for a water bottle when I brush my teeth. And my showers have been lasting upwards of 20 mins, as I relish the limitless hot water.

It was a wonderful year. I learned so much, and it was very, very sad for me to say good bye to all the folks I'd come to know and love in Honduras. It especially tore my heart out to leave the aldea of Los Izotes.

Of course, I wish I could have gotten farther along in some of my projects, but that will have to be for the new group of volunteers. It took a while to figure out what I was doing, but that was the nature of going as one of the first group.

I am very happy with the work I did, all that I learned, and especially the relationships I formed. For now, it's back to my US life. But my year in Honduras will leave an indelible mark.

Cutest Pictures Ever

2006-07-08T17:00:00.000-07:00

Whenever we go to Los Izotes, James takes a children's book to read, as part of his ongoing project to read to kids to promote education and literacy. If James can't make it, I'll take the book so the kids won't be disappointed.

Today's book was, "Donde Viven los Monstruos" ("Where the Wild Things Are"). During the story, I had the kids make monster faces and growl and gnash their teeth...so cute!! Take a look:

Gosh, those little guys are cute!

Things that seemed strange when we first got here, which we have gotten used to, but which may not be obvious to all of you in the US

2006-06-17T08:30:00.000-07:00

INSTALLMENT 1: BUSES

All over the highways of Honduras you see yellow school buses. Many of them will have writing on the sides along the lines of "Garret Park County Schools," etc., etc. Are these Honduras' extensive school transporation system? Nope. They are public buses, which Honduras buys for cheap from the US. I would estimate that more than half of the public buses are yellow school buses, although they often have some design or name painted on the back.

You would be surprised at the number of people that can fit in these buses. You know those signs they often have in the front, saying "maximum capacity: 50 passengers"? Well, those are a lie. When the seats fill up, you squeeze three onto a two-person seat, or you stand people in the aisle. When it's really full, you can even squeeze two rows of people into the aisle.

The buses roll through at a roughly set schedule. On their front they usually have painted their destination, like "Talanga-Tegucigalpa." There is also a "wingman" kind of guy who rides standing next to the driver. Every time the bus stops, he gets out and shouts the destination of the bus, getting passengers to come on board. His job also includes collecting the fare once the bus is underway and organizing the passengers when it's crowded ("everyone standing move to the back of the bus." or "make two rows!").

When you want to get off the bus, you ask the driver to let you out. There are a few regular stops, but anywhere in between is fair game. If you want to get on the bus somewhere that is not a regular stop, that's fine too. You just wave the bus down.

There are also vendors who will get on the bus for a short time to sell food. They get on at one stop, walk up and down the aisle with a basket full of pizza, or bags of popcorn, or cold sodas. Then they get off the bus, and catch the next one going in the opposite direction.

A Field Regrowing Over Ashes

2006-06-01T10:43:00.000-07:00

A verdant green has grown over the blackened wasteland. In a previous post I have talked about the brushfires that have been lit over the past few months in the hills around Talanga, clearing out the undergrowth by burning everything in their path and leaving a blackened waste behind. Last week on the drive to Los Izotes there was post-conflagration blackness on each side of the road as far as the eye could see.

On the drive this week, the scorched earth has been covered over by a lush green meadow, and where there was once an expense of black there is now a light-green field. The Los Izotes area now looks like a well-maintained country club; three inch tall green grass with occasional trees and not a weed or bush in sight. Now I see the logic behind the burning - all of this short grass, with no bushes in the way, will be great grazing land for cattle. The cost, however, is the damage to the ecosystem and the coughing smoke that fills the valley.

Seeing the blackened wastes turned to green reminded me of the Easter season we are in, a time of rebirth and renewal, where we are reminded of how Christ died and rose. The landscape of Talanga could be analogous - burned to ash, it has been renewed into fields of green.

Did you know Paul Simon was a Catholic hymn-writer?

2006-05-30T14:42:00.000-07:00

One thing I love about church in Honduras is the singing. At my home parish in the States, the choir tries their best to get the congregation singing but our hymns are not as great as they could be. In Talanga, everybody sings with enthusiasm, and claps too. Hymns here have a tricky clap rhythm, where one has to double-clap on every eighth beat. There is a national Catholic songbook and many of the faithful here know the music to almost all the hymns in it by heart.

There are a few hymns that stand out, especially 'The Missionary Song' which has become sort of our theme song, with the words 'llevame donde los hombres necesiten tus palabras' (Carry me to where the people need your words)

One hymn that will surely catch a north american visitor by surprise is the Honduran version of the sung 'Our Father', which is sung to none other than the tune of Simon & Garfunkel's 'The Sounds of Silence' Where Paul Simon sings 'and the people bowed and prayed, to the neon god they made' the congregation here sings 'Un la pan de unidad, Cristo danos tu la paz' (In the bread of unity, Christ give us peace)

The sixties folk repertoire is also present in the hymn 'saber que vendra' (to know He will come) which is sung to the tune of Bob Dylan's 'Blowin' in the Wind.' Most Hondurans first heard these songs in their hymn versions, and are unaware that the tunes are derived from sixties folk hits. The faith community here has taken two pieces of popular culture and made them their own, reworking the lyrics into songs of praise.

Pray for Nelson

2006-05-29T15:30:00.000-07:00

This is a prayer request. Please pray for Nelson, our friend. He has been hospitalized in Tegucigalpa. He has a neurological condition that is damaging his brain cells. so he is losing motor control, especially the ability to hold objects. He has been in the hospital for over a week, and his prognosis is “mid-term.” He is one of the strongest people I have ever met, and he was formerly a professional basketball player. Nelson’s goal is to earn his teaching certificate. Please pray that Nelson’s health improves.

Frightening Hospital

2006-05-29T15:25:00.000-07:00

A waking nightmare. That is the only way I can describe the Hospital Escuela, Tegucigalpa’s public health facility. Last week I went there to visit our friend who has been hospitalized there. The deplorable, unsanitary conditions were shocking, and showed me just how dangerous receiving care in a third-world hospital can be.

I rode the bus into Tegus and took a taxi to the hospital, for visiting hours at 3:30 PM. I had been told to arrive early, and I saw why. There was a queue of at least seventy people lined up to get in to visit. The line stretched along the side strip of Tegucigalpa’s main artery road, with not even a guardrail between the waiting people and the busses and taxis that hurtled by. We stood there for an hour breathing in the black smoke belching from the busses and seeing cars justmiss careening into the line.

Eventually we were let into the hospital one at a time, and had to go through a full frisking. All my pockets were searched, and after passing security I was sent in through the front gate, a blue A-frame that could be mistaken for an IHOP. Ironically, after entering the hospital I realized that I still had my Swiss Army Knife in my pocket – all that waiting and security, and I still walked right through it with a knife in my pocket.

The hospital is a labyrinth of dirty gray-green walls and even dirtier floors. There is barely any signage to find one’s way by, and what signage exists is spray-painted on with a stencil. Lost in the maze, I asked a nurse, who was a Garifuna woman (the Afro-Caribbean culture that lives on the north coast) and she kindly gave me directions to the sixth floor. It was a delight to hear Spanish spoken with a Jamaican-like, lilting accent. Her directions led me to the stairwell, though I worried what it must be like to come to the hospital in an emergency, and to be unable to find medical services due to the lack of signage and the labyrinthine hallways.

Our friend’s room was six floors up the stairs. On the third floor, I passed the neurosurgery ward – with the world “neurosurgery” spray-painted in stencil and flaking off. I wondered what it must be like to have one’s brain operated on in a ward with a stenciled sign. On the fifth floor, my way was blocked by a cadaver, simply laying there on a gurney in the doorway, so I found an alternate route. On the way I stopped to use the bathroom, where there was human waste all over the floor. There was also no soap in the bathroom. How can a hospital be sanitary if one can’t even wash one’s hands?

Eventually after asking directions a few more times I found the sixth floor men’s ward. The room was filthy, with mold growing over the room’s mirror. Our friend's family was already there, and we spent time with him together. The side table was covered with trash, including beverages that had been left out for hours in the hot room.

After some time a nurse came in to change the catheters. This scene shocked me to the core. He changed the catheter needles without wearing gloves. Then he took the bloody cotton swab that had been covering the catheter – with his bare hands - and simply placed it on the side table. Not in a biohazard box, or even any kind of container. He just put the bloody cotton ball on the table’s surface next to the open beverages. This was one of those situations where you want to say something, you want to scream what are you doing for goodness sake? But you can’t.

The hospital is in chaos. An atmosphere of dirt and decay is everywhere, from standing on the side of the main road waiting to get in, to bio-hazardous waste simply placed on the table and left there, to a cadaver blocking a main stairway. If a patient does not come into Hospital Escuela with a disease, it appears they are likely to leave with one. Please pray for the patients at the hospital that they receive the care they need despite these conditions and come out safe.

103...

2006-05-29T15:18:00.000-07:00

...is the number of flies I killed (with a flyswatter) today at Casa Pasionista. It's a new Passionist Volunteers record for flies killed in one day. Thought you all would like to know.

Well, to give a little background to the killing spree, I'll say this. Much of Casa Pasionista is open to the air - it's got a central atrium/garden (unroofed), which is surrounded by a covered area that has no walls. This covered area connects to the kitchen and living room. So flies can fly around at will. And sometimes, we just get a ton of them. At which point, I go nuts and start the killing.

Hilarious!!!

2006-05-28T09:59:00.000-07:00

Last night I was relaxing in the house after a full day in Los Izotes. Since I was a computer science major in college, one of my favorite ways to relax is to program computers. In other words, I was doing a little programming for fun.

At one point, James was reading stories to three little boys who are 5 to 7 years old, and they wandered into the room where I was programming. James, trying to model positive career options, told them that I was programming the computer, and that they could someday learn that if they wanted.

"Can you program computers?" James asked the kids. They all bounced up and down, saying sure - you move the mouse this way to go right, this way to go left. I smiled ruefully at James and said, "I don't think they really understand what computer programming means."

So James explained it to them. "Look," he said (in Spanish), "I can give you instructions." Pointing at one of the boys, he said, "Brinca," which means jump. The boy jumped. Then James pointed at the other two boys. "Brinca. Brinca." They jumped, giggling.

James continued. "'Jump' means brinca in English," he told them. "I can tell you to jump in English." "Jump" he said in English, pointing to them. After a short hesitation, they all figured it out and jumped.

Then James made his point. "Todd can give the computer instructions in a language called Java," he said, "just like I can give you instructions in English." (For those of you who don't know, Java is a computer programming language).

The little boys nodded and seemed to understand. Then one of them turned to me and said, "Tell the computer to jump in Java."

James and I must have lauged for five minutes straight. Hilarious!!!

The Rains Have Come

2006-05-25T07:42:00.000-07:00

I realize that it's not obvious to all of you back in the States, but we have already past the hottest part of the summer. March, April, and the first half of May were really, really hot - sweltering. That was the thick of summer for the Hondurans.

About a week ago, the rains came. (Here in Honduras, summer is followed by rainy seasons). For the past two weeks, we volunteers have been thanking our lucky stars for the almost daily downpours that cool things off and tame the dust of Talanga streets.

(It was really hot before).

So, basically, now things are cooler, although it is still hot. But I believe the worst is past. Although we do have to contend with mud and numerous drips in our roof. Oh well.

La Hora Nueva

2006-05-22T12:48:00.000-07:00

On Sunday, May 7, Honduras jumped ahead an hour, switching to Daylight Savings Time. This is the second attempt to do so ever made by Honduras.

The last attempt, made several years ago, met with overwhelming public opposition, criticism, and strikes, and was revoked.

This year, the hour change brought a good deal of confusion (witness: we had arranged a meeting in Los Izotes to which everyone showed up an hour late). However, as far as I can see, the Hondurans seem to be taking it a little better this time. Still, a lot of the people I know are quite bent out of shape over it. There seem to be several different responses people make:

OPTION #1: Ignore the time change completely. In the aldea of Terrero Colorado, everyone just pretends the time change doesn't exist. "Mel (the president) can keep his hour"

OPTION #2: Accomodate the time change but refer to it by the old time. This is my personal favorite. For example, at a school, the principal announced, "School now starts at 6am instead of 7." Did this mean that school was starting at 6am by the new time? Nope. It meant that school would be starting at 7am new time, but that we would just refer to it by the old time.

Similarly, a friend of ours complained to the girls that she had to leave for school in Tegucigalpa at "4am!!!!" When pressed, however, we discovered that, well, ok, it was 5am with the time change :)

OPTION #3: Complete acceptance. It seems to me that the farther you get from major cities, the less likely this option is. Most of Talanga is now on board, though not without some grumbling :)

The most common reaction, however (at least for the first week or two) has been to maintain BOTH time frames, using the terms hora nueva (new hour) and hora vieja (old hour). If we state both, we can avoid any possible confusion. For example, "We will meet at 7pm hora nueva, 6pm hora vieja."

As for us volunteers, being seasoned gringos already accustomed to bi-yearly obfuscations of the clock, we're taking it in stride. We are laughing quite a bit, though.

Family Systems

2006-05-21T18:19:00.000-07:00

In a previous posting, I talked about the children who have been showing up at our doorstep to listen to stories. I have gotten to know many of the children in the neighborhood by sharing the story of Noah's Ark or Sleeping Beauty with them. But I know almost nothing about their homelife, where they come from, or what they face during the rest of the day. I learned a little bit about that today.

While walking back from bringing the Eucharist to the sick, as Todd and I do Sunday mornings after the 7 0'clock Mass, I ran into Christian, who comes to my house for stories. He showed me to his house, made of blocks and daub with the floor about a foot below ground level, and introduced me to his brothers, children I was acquainted with but previously did not know were his brothers - everyone in Talanga seeming to be related by interwoven family networks.

Upon entering his house, I was introduced to his grandmother, a thin woman in her eighties. The grandmother told me that she is the sole caregiver for Christian and his brothers, since his mother left with a marero 'gang member' and left the very old grandmother to care for a group of 8 to 11 year old boys on her own. This confirmed what I heard earlier about the mother being a drug addict.

This made me worry for the future. What will happen when the grandmother dies, probably sometime when Christian is in his early teens? Who will take care of the boys then? They will be a group of young men on their own with practically no family network, and will become what the government calls 'at-risk youth'. I worry, without family, what they could be involved in, and am scared to think that the smiling children who come for stories could become involved in the maras for lack of family. The hardest part is that there is nothing I can do about the situation, except to keep reading stories and trying to be a positive role model.

At orientation we had a workshop on 'family systems', which at the time seemed a lot of irrelevant sociological theory, but now I see its relevance. When the representative from Catholic Medical Missions came to visit the aldea Los Izotes with us, we talked about burning the fields, which I wrote about in a previous blog. When I asked how to stop the burning, he explained that 'people burn the fields because their father and his father burned the fields, and it will take three generations for a change to be made.' Three generations is a very long time to wait.

A Disclaimer on Politics

2006-05-21T18:06:00.000-07:00

Living in Honduras has been an eye-opening experience. Here I have been saddened by poverty and inspired by how Hondurans transcend it. My consciousness has also been raised as to the possible factors which lead to and perpetuate poverty in Central America.

To that end, on this blog I have expressed my opinions on legislation regarding immigration reform and economic globalization, which I felt is germane to understanding the situation of poverty here. Speaking about justice I felt is in accordance with my duty as a Catholic to proclaim Catholic Social Teaching, the Preferential Option for the Poor, and the Latin American tradition of Liberation Theology. This can involve some rocking the boat. As Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker movement, said, If you feed the poor, you're a saint....If you ask why they're poor, you're a Communist."

Some blog readers have commented on my opinions on these issues, and I thank them for their thoughts and input. In writing about specific pieces of legislation and certain politicians, I may have given the mistaken impression that the Passionist Volunteers International as an organization takes a political stance on these issues. To be clear, PVI is a *service* organization and does not have a political platform or take a position on legislation. To clarify this, I have removed my blog postings on politics from this forum and reposted them on my personal blog.

Slight Change to the Blog

2006-05-20T15:55:00.000-07:00

I've made it so that the main page only shows the first part of each post. Click "SEE THE WHOLE POST" to read the rest.

I figured this would make it easier for people to skim posts and find the ones they want. If it seriously bugs you, please do let me know :)

Just to show you how the text gets cut off early, I'll keep typing a little bit here. La-ti-da-ti-da.

Bible Stories

2006-05-14T17:22:00.000-07:00

For the past two weeks, every evening, an eleven-year-old boy from our neighborhood named Christian shows up at our door. He is quiet, with a winning smile. Christian is in third grade (grade levels here have little correlation with age) and cannot read yet. Since he found out that I like to read stories, he has been coming by our house every night to listen to Bible stories.

We bought an illustrated children's Bible in Spanish, which as been a great resource. It summarizes each Bible story in one paragraph with simple language, and an accompanying illustration. Each evening we read three or four stories. Whenever we have completed some passages and I think that Christian would want to leave the next story for tomorrow, he always asks to 'read one more.' We started with Creation, and are already up to Joseph and the Coat of Many Colors after only two weeks!

It is very rewarding to help share my love of reading with a young person, which I hope will encourage him and give him more enthusiasm for learning to read on his own. I also been glad to be able to pass on the important stories of our Christian and Catholic tradition. And it is such a delight, after having heard these stories so many times, to witness a child hearing Adam and Eve or Noah's Ark for the first time!

After each story I ask comprehension questions to help develop higher-level critical thinking skills. As products of the Honduran school system, children such as Christian are able to memorize rote facts - the names and occurances of the story - but have great difficulty thinking critically, since those skills are not part of the memorize-and-repeat educational approach here. Questions like 'what are the names of the man and woman in the garden' are answerable, but questions like 'why do you think this character feels this way?' or 'what do you think will happen next?' present a great deal of difficulty.

One approach to teach reading to children not yet able to decipher the letters is to show them the pictures and ask the child to 'tell you the story' based on what they see. This increases book-and-print-awareness (awareness of what a book is and how it works, which needs to be learned before decoding letters) and predicting and critical thinking skills, and gives Christian pride that he is already 'reading'. This also gives his creativity a chance to express his self. Some of the his interpretations of the story, based on the pictures, have almost nothing to do with what the text says but are wildly creative understandings of the book in their own right. As a plus to this reading, I have been learning a lot about the Old Testament that I did not know before. The text of the Old Testament is so dense in my Bible, so having the summaries and illustrations has shown me passages I would have overlooked before, and made those I know more clear. Did you know there is a scene in the Book of Numbers where a donkey talks? I look forward to reading with Christian again tonight, when Joseph will interpret Pharoah's dreams.

Reading to Children

2006-05-12T08:56:00.000-07:00

'Read me a story!'

Over the past few weeks, an increasing number of children have been showing up at our door asking to hear stories, and this has been one of the more wonderful and rewarding parts of my service here.

Honduras has an adult illiteracy rate of 27.4% according to the UN, and many more are functionally illiterate. Reading to children is not a commonplace part of the culture, and from my observations it seems that reading to children is barely done in the schools either. Education here consists almost entirely of rote memorization of facts and copying passages out of the textbook, regardless of whether the students understand what they are copying or not.

The primary reason that I love to read as an adult is that my parents read to me as a child, and I wanted to share that with the children of Talanga, to expose them to books and the joy of reading where they would not see them otherwise.

So I went to Talanga, bought some children's books, and just started reading. On Mondays, I read a story to every class from 1st through 6th grade in two public schools, and on Tuesdays I read a story to the whole school in the Terrero Colorado aldea school. The kids love the stories! Some of them have never seen a children's book before, and they are captivated by the pictures and the tales. When I finish a story they want to hear another one!

I also read to a group of about twenty children after the children's Mass on Sundays. I want to try to put books, and the message that books are fun, before as many children as possible so that hopefully they will be encouraged to continue reading on their own.

Since the word spread that Jaime the Gringo reads stories, children from our neighborhood have been showing up in the evenings to read bedtime stories. I have been reading from an illustrated children's Bible, and understandable text. We are already up to the Tower of Babel!

One difficulty I face is finding books that reflect and affirm the culture of the children who listen to them. Most of the books I found in Tegucigalpa are Disney movie adaptations. Here I am reading stories about kings and princesses and nobility before poor children. Also, even in Honduras, I have had a lot of trouble finding books whose characters look like the children of Talanga. The edition of 'Sleeping Beauty' I found was in Spanish, but still portrayed 'Beauty' as a blond haired, blue eyed, and skinny woman. I ask myself if the benefit of reading story to kids and sharing a classic is outweighed by portraying an upper-class and Nordic idea of good looks. Because this 'Beauty' looks nothing like the golden-skinned and ebony-haired children who are listening to it, nor does she have the body type of people of Mayan descent. I would really like to find books that look like their audience.

Nonverbal Communication

2006-05-12T08:36:00.000-07:00

Italians and other speakers of Romance languages are famous for speaking as much with their hands as with their words, and speakers of Honduran Spanish are no exception. Learning the language of gestures has been a significant part of learning to communicate here. Here are some particularly Honduran gestures and turns of phrase.

THE LIP POINT: To indicate an object in the distance, one squeezes one's lips together as if to kiss someone, and then turns and twists the lips in the direction of the object being indicated.

THE NEGATIVE FINGER SHAKE: To indicate 'no' or a negative response, rather than shaking their head, hondurans raise their index finger and wag it from side to side. This simply means 'no' - the fruit vendor might give me the Negative Finger Shake to say simply 'we don't have any pineapples in today'. However, this is the same gesture that grandmothers in the United States use when chastising naughty children. So at first, when someone gave me the finger shake, I felt like I was a bad boy being castigated, and felt a little piqued. It takes some getting used to.

THE HONDURAN HANDSHAKE: Among youth, rather than shaking hands, youth will slap their palms together like a horizontal High Five, then form a fist and punch their fingers against the other's fist.

THE CATHOLIC TRINITARIAN HANDSHAKE VARIATION: Especially popular among seminarians, here is the Catholic greeting. First, the hands are grasped pointing down, and both handshakers say 'Father', then the hands are flipped upward and grasped vertically, and both parties say 'Son'. Then both people link their thumbs together and flutter their fingers like a dove, saying 'Holy Spirit.'

THE 'WHAT NEXT' HAND RAISE: To ask 'what next', both arms are raised, elbows down, palm upward. This can be a gesture indicating not understanding, or to ask the next item in a sequence. The shopkeeper might do the hand raise to say 'you want milk and eggs, what do you want next?

THE BLOWN SMOOCHIE: 'Piropos', or catcalls, are an unpleasant fact of life in Honduras. Picture that image from old movies of a group of construction workers in the 50's hooting and commenting as an attractive woman passes by. This happens all the time, for both genders, and is something that just needs to be tolerated. For piropos from men to women, the men typically call out the four or five words of English they know in a taunting voice - 'I love you forever' is a common one. For women harassing men, they wait until the man passes by and squeeze their lips together to make a loud smooching sound.

THE 'ANDA' EXPRESSION: According to a Spanish textbook, the verb 'andar' means to walk, but in Honduran Spanish it is the General All Purpose Omnibus Verb. 'Andar' can be used to express almost any action, and can take the place of many other verbs. 'Andar' can be used to ask if one is carrying something ('Anda money? Anda a tissue?') to be in a space (he anda in his house) to be going out with someone (he anda with her) to be in an emotional state (he anda happy or unhappy) or any other verbal expression.

THE 'BIEN' CONSTRUCTION' - The adjective 'muy', which means 'very much' is almost absent in Honduran Spanish. It is replaced with 'bien', which means 'well'. If someone is very rich, he is 'bien rico', and, somewhat oxymoronically, if someone is very bad he is 'bien malo' (very well bad?) One delightful moment in seeing this turn of phrase was when we did a skit about scripture with the children in the aldea Terrero Colorado. Each week we read a passage and then have the kids dramatize it. This week, it was the story of Adam and Eve. When the child playing God showed his ire at Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit, he said 'yo ando bien enojado' - a particularly Honduran way of God expressing himself.

The Cave of the Glowing Skulls

2006-05-11T15:32:00.000-07:00

Honduras' history is ancient, with a legacy that stretches back to the Mayan Civilization and even before, to other previous civilizations so far back that almost nothing is known about them. Yesterday we saw one of the traces of one of these ancient societies from so far back in time.

We went to the Cave of the Glowing Skulls, near the city of Catacamas in Olancho. Olancho is the largest departamento (or state) of Honduras' 16 divisions, and the one most comparable to Texas. It is Honduras' 'wild east' as the guidebook says, a land of ranchers and cowboys, with a spectacular landscape that reminds me of Glacier National Park in Montana (sans snow). It is fiercely independent and Olanchanos have much pride in their homeland. I have been out to Muralla national park in eastern Olancho before (see previous blog). This trip took us far out into Olancho's west, a three hour drive from Talanga. Our guide was Fr. Daniel of Talanga, who took us on a day trip.

The cave is a spectacular underground cathedral, with a cool wet interior that was a welcome respite from the heat. We penetrated deep into the underground, past fantastic rock formations that formed over millennia and into great halls that reminded me of the inside of Notre Dame or the Dwarven Halls in Tolkein. The Maya and their antecedents believed that caves were the entrance to Xibalba, the underworld, and so they were used as sites for burial, rather than habitation.

Ten years ago archaeologists found a spectacular find in this cave - a burial area full of skulls and bones that glow! These bones were buried almost three thousand years ago, from a civilization that predated the Classic Maya society by over a millennium. Over the course of time, dripping calcite, through the same geological process that forms stalactites, coated the bones with minerals so that they now sparkle and glow in the light.

The society that built these bones built stone mounds in the area around Catacamas. The bones were excarnated (had their flesh removed), coated with a red ochre, and buried according to social class. I think it is fascinating to find that civilization in the Americas reached far back before the Maya, or even the Olmecs. In the darkness of the cave, I felt a sense of the awe at being in the underworld that the Maya conceived of as Xibalba.

Getting back to Catacamas, we ate one of my favorite Honduran foods, 'tilapia'. It is an entire fish fried and served with red onions. Eating tilapia is a delicate process to pick through all the bones, but is definately 'bien rico' (very good)

An Ethical Dilemma

2006-05-11T15:16:00.000-07:00

Today we faced an ethical dilemma as a group, another illustration of the complexity of our situation, and the fact that so little is black and white and so much is gray in Honduras. As I have spent more time here, I have found my understanding of poverty becoming more complex and deepening. I used to have a pseudo-Marxist style of thinking, that all poor people were poor because they are oppressed by the rich, and if only the oppression were removed poverty would disappear. In some ways, that analysis is correct, but in many situations, poverty is not so starkly defined. Here is the quandary.

We drove from Talanga to the town of Valle de Angeles, a touristy area frequented by many foreigners, drawn, like us, to the handicraft shops that offer discounts for missionaries. When we parked our truck, a man offered to wash it for us, and we politely declined.

A few minutes later, he was washing our car.

We made it politely but firmly clear that we did not want our car washed.

When I came back an hour later, the man had washed the entire car, washed the tires, rinsed out the flatbed, and when I arrived, had lifted up our windshield wipers to clean under them.

My reactions were mixed, and confused. We had made it clear we did not want our car washed. So, in lifting up our windshield wipers, he was invading our space and our property. We were being guilt-tripped into paying for a service we did not ask for. On the other hand, how can you see that someone has cleaned your truck spotless and not pay him? Maybe, considering Honduras' drastic unemployment, this is his only source of income and by not paying him we would be refusing to support a worker. Then again, this all took place outside the town park, where a huge renovation project is underway, and most of the workers were this man's age, so there is employment available. There is no way to completely know the situation. The other side of the coin is that, if we were to pay him, we would be saying it is alright to somewhat extort foreigners and supporting a cycle of exploitation and dependency. As I came upon him cleaning our tires, this was the dilemma that ran through my mind.

The man sat beside our car the entire day as we walked around Valle de Angeles, waiting for us to return to pay him. After a lot of thinking, we came to the conclusion that not only would we be paying him for a service we didn't ask for, we would be paying for a service we specifically asked him not to do. So, with a degree of guilt, we drove off with the man glaring angrily at us.

Was this the right decision? I'm not sure. He did wait and work all day without pay, but he also took advantage of us. This is just an illustration that the dynamics of poverty are more complex than they appear.

Facts of Life and the Honduran Dream

2006-05-06T15:52:00.000-07:00

Facts of Life:

According to the Inter-American Development bank, in 2004, money sent back to Honduras from workers outside of the country (primarily immigrants in the US) constituted 15% of Honduras' GDP.
see: www.iadb.org/IDBDocs.cfm?docnum=537360 (it's in Spanish, though)

This percentage has increased sharply since the devastating Hurricane Mitch hit Honduras in 1998. Workers remittances in 2003 were 4 times greater than foreign investment in Honduras.
http://www.sela.org/public_html/aa2k5/ING/consejo/Di9.pdf

It is claimed that without this source of income, the Honduran economy would collapse.

Also an interesting article: http://ncronline.org/NCR_Online/archives2/2004c/081304/081304a.php

The Honduran Dream

In the US, we have the American dream: to work hard and get rich, no matter what background you come from.

Hondurans have a dream too: to sneak into the US, work for several years, make a lot of money, then come back, by a house, and live comfortably in Honduras.

Obviously, I'm generalizing, but so, so many people here want to get to the US. Most of them plan to come back for a few years, although a good number eventually decide to stay. And almost every family has a parent, son or daughter, or cousin in the US or in Spain.

It makes me so sad sometimes to see families split by working in the US. On the other hand, very often people are trying to do the best for their families, given that the Honduran economy and job market are not great. We know one family where the kids have not seen their parents in 7 years (because they are illegally in the States, and can't come back). However, these kids are also better off than most kids here. It's a tough trade-off.

This morning, in the aldea of Los Izotes, James and I spent an hour talking with a 14-year-old about his plans to go to the US illegally. We were asking him questions, sort of joking, because I doubt he'd be able to go anytime soon. But even though it was all joking, I think the responses are telling.

"How will you get there?" "Walking."
"What state will you go to?" "I don't know."
"What work will you do?" "What I find when I get there."
"Where will you live?" "They'll give me a place to stay where I get a job."
"What if you get sick?" "I'll go to a doctor." "How will you pay for it?" "With the money I get from working." "What if you are afraid to go to a doctor because you might be deported?" "I don't know."
And of course: "What if they arrest you and send you home to Honduras?" "I'll go back."

It is very striking, and representative, that this young kid at 14 years has been planning for 2 years to go to the States to work. That is his career goal.

I suppose this all ties in to the Day without Immigrants and all the hubbub about immigration recently. Here's my political two cents (seems sort of obvious to me). All the immigration legislation in the world is just a band-aid that doesn't get to the root of the problem. It's like sticking your fingers into holes in the dam instead of changing the flow of the river. The ultimate solution to immigration is to economically develop the countries sending the immigrants. As long as those countries are poor, people will keep trying to get to a better life.

¡Levantame!

2006-05-03T19:15:00.000-07:00

¡Levantame¡ means 'pick me up' and I hear it from children in Talanga whenever I walk through the town. Often three or four will come running at once all shouting ¡levantame! and then '¡yo! '¡yo!' for 'me!' asking to be picked up first. I respond by picking up a kid and throwing him into the air, or swinging him around by his arms, and they always want to go again. Often by the time I get back to our house from the market or the internet cafe, I will have had a good upper-body workout from picking up every kid along the way.

This got started during the first weeks I came here, when I wanted to engage with the kids here but what I could say in Spanish was limited. So I played the kind of games my father played with me when I was little, getting picked up and thrown into the air. The kids love it! Quickly word spread through the Talangan four-to-seven-year-old grapevine that Jaime the Gringo will throw you up in the air. Since then, every journey through town is accompanied by throwing kids up in the air. The especially like playing 'basketball player' or 'astronaut walking on the moon' when they 'jump' and I do the rest of the lifting and they jump high into the air.

Since I've gotten to know the kids from playing around, those connections have grown into effective ministry. Many of the children who now come to my story time in the park when I read kids books I met from them coming to me and saying 'throw me up in the air.'

I have not posted much to the blog recently because I've been wrapped up in our work, but I am going to start posting more often, there is so much to tell about.

Christmas in May

2006-05-01T16:14:00.000-07:00

A much-belated Christmas shot of all of us, Fr. Lucian, and Fr. Neil. No tickling, Todd! :-)

Us and Capt. Hook

2006-05-01T16:06:00.000-07:00

This picture is from our trip to El Patio Restaurante in Tegucigalpa. This is a neat place to eat, full of Mayan decor and lit by lightbulbs coming out of cow skulls. Imagine an open-air Hard Rock Cafe with a Maya theme, and that's El Patio. They serve 'pinchos,' which are these giant shish kebabs about two feet long - my favorite are the all-shrimp ones. We had a nice meal there with the internos from the Casa Pasionista, and here is a picture of two of the internos, Saul and Reina, myself, and our friend Captain Hook.

...and to dust ye shall return

2006-05-01T15:55:00.000-07:00

It’s everywhere. It works its way into your lungs and nasal passages, creating coughs and phlegm. It burns your eyes red. It drives people to the medical clinic with respiratory problems.
It’s the dust and air pollution of Talanga.

Talanga is a very dusty town. None of the roads are paved, and all the streets are made of compacted dirt. When it does not rain, as it has not rained for the past few months, the ground becomes bone-dry and with no moisture to hold the dust to the ground, it gets kicked into the air with every passing car. There are so many dust particles in the air that it creates a sooty fog that makes faraway objects blur.

The dust works its way into everything. Every day we sweep and mop our entire house. If we didn’t, it would quickly become buried under the dust and the air would become unbreathable. Each morning, I run a Lysol wipe over our coffee table, and when I pick it up brown dirt covers the wipe. That evening, only eight hours later, I wipe the table again and pick up the same amount of dust.

Wherever you walk in town, you are breathing it in. When I go to blow my nose, the snot comes out brown-black from all the dust that was caught before it went into my lungs, and I wonder how much I breathed in. Just breathing the air here must be equivalent to smoking a few cigarettes a day.

When I spoke to a man from the health clinic and asked him what the most common illnesses in Talanga are, he told me he sees more respiratory problems than any other ailment. This is not just from the dust, but from pollution from the wood mill outside of town. The mill is making people sick, but no one complains because it is such a major employer. The choice is a slow death from lung contamination, or a faster one from unemployment.

More air pollution comes from everyone driving diesel cars, and almost no enforcement of emissions laws. Trucks belching out thick black plumes of acrid smoke are common. Many of the poor cook on wood-burning stoves, which adds to the smoke. Even worse, many of the poor do not have chimneys for their stoves, so the smoke circulates in the house. I am reading a book called "Donde no hay doctor" (Where there is no doctor) which is a medical guide written for campesinos who live in rural areas without access to medical care. The book cites wood-burning stoves without chimneys as one of the main causes of respiratory problems.

The other major polluter is the constant fires that blaze on the hills all over our region. Every night I can see a brushfire burning on one of the hills outside of town, and when we drive by them we see that many of the hills have been burnt to a black waste. We are in the dry season, so it has not rained for months and the brush and forests can go into flames like a tinderbox. But most of the fires are intentional. They are deliberately set.

Some are from farmers burning off their fields. "Milpa" agriculture, practiced by the Maya for millennia, involves slash-and-burn farming with the fields allowed to lie fallow and rejuvenate after burning. When done correctly, this type of farming is sustainable.
But the fires that are set here are often are uncontrolled and chaotic. The popular belief is that burning kills off the pests in a field, or for livestock farmers , the burning leads to grass growth later in the season that can be used for grazing cattle. When a farmer lights his fields on fire, though, there is almost no way to stop the fire except to let it burn out. The fires can spread for acres and burn down any forests, houses, or aldeas in their way. The people who start the fires don’t seem to care. They simply light the fields and let them burn as they will. The people of the aldea Todd and I work in, Terrero Colorado, just had to fight off a massive acre-wide blaze that came within meters of their homes - some person who started a fire and didn’t bother to stop and control it. There seems to be an "I’ll take care of my field and forget the rest of you" mentality. I wonder what the people who start these uncontrolled blazes are thinking. Don’t they realize that the fire is going to keep burning until it runs out of fuel, and often that fuel is people’s homes?

After asking about the deliberate brushfires, I have been told that many of them are not lit with any agricultural purpose in mind. They are lit for the sake of seeing something burn. People who are angry at the world, or bored, light the fires and watch them go, knowing that the lax police force and understaffed firefighters will do nothing to stop them. People seem to vent their aggression and rage by watching the fires burn for kilometers over the hillsides. They are especially common in the shantytowns outside of Tegucigalpa, where the cinderblock houses of the poor are build packed together on impossibly steep cliffs. Driving back from Tegucigalpa, we saw fires burning just meters from homes, with no firefighters or police on the scene - they are simply apathetic. I wonder how many people were burned out of their homes, or died that night, because someone was angry at the world and lit a fire that was unstoppable until it burned itself out.

Needless to say, these fires generate huge amounts of smoke and pollution. In fact, if you go to the Weather Channel website and look up the forecast for Tegucigalpa, they will sometimes predict "smoke" in the weather report! The sad reason for Honduras’ spectacular sunsets is that the sunbeams are touching the dust particles in the air. Sometimes I wake up with my throat full of phlegm and a persistent smoker’s cough, a cough I have not had since I was a child in similarly-polluted Germany.

At times I have thought about the question, if I were to suddenly come into a large sum of money which I could use to develop Talanga, what would I do with it? After seeing the dust, my first choice would be to pave the roads. This would seem a strange priority. Why not spend the money improving the schools, or the medical center?

Paving the roads would dramatically reduce the amount of dust in the air, which would improve the health of the entire community. Recently I visited two other towns of about the same size as Talanga, Cantarranas and Copan Ruinas. Both of these towns had cobblestone streets, and the improvement in air quality was remarkable. The air was breathable. Also, paving the streets would create much more employment. Local jobs are desperately needed; otherwise many young people will risk going to the States "mojado," or illegally, looking for work.

The Cardinal Visits

2006-04-08T18:55:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday (April 1), Cardinal Oscar Andres Rodriguez came to visit Talanga. For those of you who don't know, a Cardinal is the highest position under the Pope in Catholic Hierarchy, so this is a fairly important guy.

It was a really nice visit. He came and met with the active members of the church (including us). We all went out to lunch, then to look at some land the Talanga parish is thinking of buying. Then we came back for a few more meetings, and a big Mass, which was absolutely packed. (Hondurans really love the Cardinal).

This is the second time we've met the Cardinal, and what struck me most for the second time is that he is such a humble man. For as important as he is (and the Cardinal here in Honduras wields A LOT of influence - a whole ton more than a US Cardinal), he doesn't put on airs. He's not intimidating at all. My favorite moment was when he took about 10 minutes to jam on the keyboard with the choir. Just smiling and bobbing up and down and plucking out notes on the keyboard with some of the young people of Talanga.

I really like Cardinal Rodriguez. He had a wonderful way of making time to listen to all sorts of people and to give them encouraging words. And he's really focused on the needs of the people - education, ways to keep kids out of drugs and gangs. After he left, everyone was really excited to keep on working on projects. He gets an A+ in my book.

The Honduran Mafia

2006-03-16T18:01:00.000-08:00

They're not really the mafia. That's just my nickname for them. They are actually the "Comite Económico" for the Catholic church. Their job is to undertake fundraising projects and stuff for the church.

The first time I attended one of their meetings, I was met outside the door by four older men. They all talked in husky voices and addressed each other as "Don So-and-so." We had Don Mario, Don Guillermo, Don Guillermo, and Don Daniel. You can see where I got the mafia impression.

Most of their work these days is raising money to build a second Catholic church here in Talanga. Which is a really good idea because it takes an hour or more for some people to walk from the other side of Talanga to the church, and that's a big bar to participation for people who would like to come.

I have been working with them a lot. The Comite Económico is the comittee that is administering the scholarship fund I have started. One of them is a "public health promoter" in the Centro de Salud, and he has been invaluable in helping us set up for building latrines in the aldeas.

They are a great, great crowd. I really like working with them. They are enthusiastic and driven, and really excited about working to help other people. I could not have done the scholarship project without them! I realize all the time how much I don't know about how things are done in Honduras. But they have been so wonderful about managing the scholarships that it has compensated for my ignorances.

I just sort of stumbled across them one night by chance, but lucky me!

Tomorrow we have 4 college students arriving. They are coming for one week to volunteer here. I expect we'll be quite busy putting them to work all next week. They're going to build two pilot project latrines for us in Los Izotes.

Ok, I'm off! Until next time!

Los Izotes

2006-03-11T12:05:00.000-08:00

By the way, just so you all know, it's not that I'm stingy about posting pictures. It's just that it takes forever, because the internet is so slow. For example, to post all the pictures for Terrero and Los Izotes has taken me a full 7 days of uploading pictures.

Anyways, here are the pictures from Los Izotes. James and I go there on Fridays. I think Los Izotes is the aldea closer to my heart. The people are just so welcoming (we can't visit a house without being offered food).

It's also farther from Talanga, which means that it is poorer. It takes us about 50 minutes driving to get there. They do not have electricity or running water. There is a bus that runs from Los Izotes to Talanga Fridays through Mondays, so that they can get into town fairly easily.

And they have AMAZING coffee. I don't even like coffee normally, but they grow, roast (in the sun), and grind their own coffee, and it tastes INCREDIBLE!! I doubt even the richest people in America have such good coffee. Not that I'm really an expert.

Ok, here are the pictures:

A view of a small part of Los Izotes. It is so gorgeous in this aldea. Sometimes I wonder if that's what really made me fall in love with it. You can't see the beautiful horizon in this picture, but take my word - it's gorgeous.

Also, that building whose roof you can just make out all the way on the left is the Catholic church, where James and I spend a lot of our time.

I'm really proud of this picture too. It's a shot of some sugarcane, which a lot of people in Los Izotes grow and sell to make some extra money. There's even a "galera" in Los Izotes - a place where the sugarcane is ground up, the juice heated until it turns the consistency of molasses, and then dried into cubes of sugar.

This sugarcane is probably 12 feet tall. The part you see sticking up is just the flower. Beneath it is a stalk like bamboo, which contains all the sweetness. The kids in the aldeas love to peel those stalks and munch on the tissue underneath. I like that too. It's not super super sweet, but its a bit sweet and cool and refreshing. And I feel quite Honduran munching away on it :).

Me with several of the kids in Los Izotes. They're a cute bunch.

Again, several of the Los Izotan kids.

James rides a horse for, I believe, the 3rd or 4th time in his life. They let him ride it in a circle around the house several times this day. James really likes that horse!

James and I run a youth group in the afternoons. Here, the kids are playing an icebreaker called "The Human Knot" (under James' watchful supervision). They all grab hands in a tangle, and try to untangle themselves without letting go of the hands. At first, they were super shy, and it was like pulling teeth to get them to play. But now, after several months, they go right to it.

This is me with my little friend, Cesar. For some reason, he has always been very attached to me (they say he mistakes me for his father). Whatever the reason, he likes playing with me a lot. A few weeks ago, we had a good scare, because poor Cesar got a really bad case of diarrhea, which kills a lot of young children here. They took him to a doctor, though, and fortunately, he pulled through just fine.

Several of the kids from Los Izotes, in front of the church. The people of Los Izotes are really proud of their church. They've worked hard to build it. It's still not done - you can see that the walls are unfinished, as is the floor inside. The big hitch is that they can't afford the materials. The cinder blocks and roof of the church were donated. From time to time, they have fundraisers to raise the money to continue work.

That's all the pictures for now. Until next time!

Terrero Colorado

2006-03-04T13:55:00.000-08:00

James and I work in two aldeas: Terrero Colorado and Los Izotes. I've finally gotten around to putting up some pictures for them.

This entry is about "Terrero." It's the closer of the two aldeas to Talanga. James and I spend every Tuesday there. At first, it used to take us half an hour to get there, bouncing over this bumpy, pot-holed, dirt road. Now that we're old hands at the deal, James and I can get there in 15 to 20 mins.

Terrero Colorado is divided into two parts, an upper and lower part. In between, there's a stretch of road with no houses. The lower part has a pretty good water supply, although it is not piped INTO their houses, just to right outside. The upper part has water that goes INTO their houses, into sinks and stuff, but that water supply fails for most of the summer. No one has electricity.

As seems typical of the aldeas, the men typically work during the day, in some sort of agriculture. The women stay around the house doing house work. And the kids go to school or play around.

James' and my typical schedule is like this: In the morning, we go in and play with the kids. Since school started, instead of playing, we've been helping out in the one-room, one-teacher, 50+ kid school. Around lunchtime, we visit a few houses, just to spend time with the people and see them in their homes. Then, in the afternoon, we run an adult's group (the idea being that the adults can help us organize the community), followed by a youth/kid's group.

Ok, enough talk. Here are the pictures.

This is a view from the road through Terrero (in the lower part). You can see how gorgeous the vistas are - I love them. You can also make out three houses. They're spread far apart, which is pretty typical.

Gosh, these guys are cute. They're three of the younger kids we know well: Mauricio, Fernando, and Marcela.

This is me with Margery (left) and Bessy (right), two of the kids we know best from the aldea. Since day one, these two love to hang out with us and play games all morning. At this particular moment, we were singing Christmas Carols, and, unbeknowst to them, I was preparing to tickle them!

This is us with a bunch of the kids from the youth/children's group we run. More than anything, they love to play games. Sharks and Minnows, Red Light Green Light, Marco Polo - all of them are HUGE hits.

I am quite, quite proud of this picture :). I really can't claim credit; it was just dumb luck. Her name is Danisela - she's three years old and just ADORABLE. She's also a bit of a terror to all the animals that live around. She's been known to toss kittens through the air and leave puppies stranded on a stool. But she is cute.

I took the picture when they had just harvested the corn, which they themselves grow. Most of their food they buy with the wages of the men, who typically work with crops for some bigger land owner. But they grow their own beans and corn (for tortillas). For about a month there, every time we'd visit a house, the people would be scraping the corn kernels off the husks.

I love this picture. I like to call it, "James enjoys the company of the children in Terrero Colorado." As they all grab his ears. Heh heh.

And that's Terrero Colorado. This is one of the aldeas where we are sponsoring two girls to go to secondary school.

Until next time!

Halfway There

2006-02-25T17:22:00.000-08:00

´Whoa, we're halfway there
Whoa-oh, livin' on a prayer!
Take my hand, we'll make it I swear
Whoa-oh, livin' on a prayer!'

- Bon Jovi

Three days ago, we completed our six month anniversary in Honduras. I woke up to Lauren playing this song on our stereo. We really are ´halfway there´ and time has flown by quickly. It is hard to believe we boarded the plane in New York six months ago, so much has changed. I am looking forward to the next six, I have seen how far our mission (and my capacity in the Spanish language) has developed since then, and it will be neat to see where they are in the next six months. Livin' on a prayer...

Scholarship Profile - Karen

2006-02-22T10:25:00.000-08:00

Story #2:

Karen is 14 years old. She graduated from elementary school at age 12, but couldn’t go to secondary school last year because she got sick, and for financial reasons. This year, she will be going because our scholarship fund has committed to pay for her three years of secondary school.

Karen’s father died 8 years ago. She lives with her single mother, Euphemia, who is still raising 3 of her 8 kids. Euphemia is also raising four grandkids – that’s seven children and one single mother.

Euphemia – the mother – is the midwife for the small town of Los Izotes. She wanted to be a nurse, but was never able to afford the education. Karen wants to be a nurse just like her mom did. Before I told her about the scholarship, Karen had a plan to become one. She would study for two years as a seamstress, which she could do very cheaply. Then she’d work for a while until she raised enough money to pay for secondary school. Then, probably more work to get the money to pay for training as a nurse.

As it is, we’ve saved Karen at least three years and made the possibility of her becoming a nurse much more real. Besides the fact that it is wonderful to enable a child’s education, I am thrilled because little towns like Los Izotes need nurses. It’s an hour walking to the nearest nurse for the people of Los Izotes. A whole day to get to a doctor. They need better health care. And it’s my hope that in accepting Karen, we’ve not only helped her, we’ve helped a whole town that she might some day serve.

Make a Donation to the scholarship fund.

Scholarship Profile - Ana

2006-02-22T10:18:00.001-08:00

I'm going to post stories about some of the scholarship winners. Here's the first one.

I was in the aldea of Los Izotes, walking around, and inviting people to apply for the scholarship. I came to a house (withabout half a dozen giggling kids in tow) where there live two girls who we know pretty well from coming to Los Izotes every Friday.

One of the girls is fourteen, the other is twenty. I told them about the scholarship, and then sat down to answer any questions. To my surprise, the 20-year old, Ana, bombarded me with questions. I sat talking to her for 45 minutes! Normally it takes me 5 minutes.

Is there an age limit? How important are grades? What else is it based on? What does it cover? -- I could tell by all her questions that she was very interested.

And then she asked me if she could take the scholarship and go to school in Talanga.

Let me do a little bit of background here. Los Izotes is a small aldea of about 300 people. It is about an hour away driving from Talanga, where we volunteers live. Talanga is a ‘big’ town of 30,000, with four secondary schools. Los Izotes has no secondary school. But there is a nearby, larger aldea, which does. That school is about an hour away from Los Izotes walking. With a bike, which is included in the scholarship, it’s 15 or 20 minutes.

So I was surprised that she would prefer to go to a school in Talanga, which would mean she would have to live with relatives during the week. Going to the nearby school, she could live at home with her family.

So I investigated more. It turns out that girls do not feel safe making the trip to that high school alone. They don’t even feel safe walking with other boys from the town. Ana told me that two girls would have to go together for it to be a safe venture.

As a result, no girls from Los Izotes currently go to secondary school. Three boys do. As I thought about it, I realized people had been talking around the fact all along. One mother earlier that day said she’d send her daughter to school if another girl went.

“Wow,” I thought to myself, “I was in this for social justice, and lo and behold, it intersects with feminism too!” (Maybe I wasn't that eloquent when I was thinking to myself, but you get the idea :).

But that’s not all. I asked her why she had never gone to secondary school, since she’d graduated from elementary school some five or six years earlier. She said that she enrolled in school, but that after a few months, her father pulled her out. “He said he didn’t have the desire to be putting a girl through school anymore.” As it turns out, the same thing happened to her 14-year old sister.

Feminism again. I guess there are two things going on here. First, there are these two girls, at least one of whom clearly has great desire to go to school, and they can’t because of their family structure, and because they’re girls. But giving them a scholarship would enable them to go, even if they didn’t have that support from their father.

And second, there is the fact that one girl alone can’t get to the secondary school. I think it’s a bit of chicken-and-egg: the few girls who want to go to school are all waiting for someone else to commit to going before they commit themselves. I couldn’t help thinking to myself, “What if we funded two?” If we could fund two girls, not only would it be getting those two girls to school, it would be opening the door for other girls to go as well.

Secondary school in Honduras is three years long. For those three years, any girl who wants to go to school will know that there are at least two other girls going with whom she could go safely.
As it turns out, we did commit to fund two girls from Los Izotes. And Ana was one of them. And in addition to those two girls, two other girls (for a total of four) will be entering "colegio" this year. I am so excited about that! Although I admit, I was a little surprised to find that in my pursuit of social justice I was doing a little bit of feminism on the side (my sister will be proud :) .

Make a Donation to the scholarship fund.

Honduras Scholarship Fund

2006-02-22T09:55:00.000-08:00

In my previous post I alluded to scholarship fund I've set up to help some of the children in the aldeas get to secondary school. Let me tell you a little more about that.

Most of the kids in the aldeas make it through primary school, but virtually none go on to secondary school because the cost is too high. So it seemed a natural idea to try and organize a scholarship fund to help "apoyar" (support) education in the aldeas. And it's not just a matter of paying for one kids to go to high school. My hope has been that the scholarships will also be "icebreakers" - that once the children see several kids going to secondary school, the barrier will be lower for them to want to go as well, even if they don't have a scholarship.

I priced out what it would take to send a kid to secondary school, which is three years in Honduras, with everything they could conceivably need paid for. I came up with a sum of $700, to which I added an extra $100 for unforseen expenses.

So for $800, we can put a kid through all of secondary school. $800 doesn’t seem like a whole lot, especially when compared with, say, tuition for a year at college. But many of these families live on $15 a week. You can see how the cost is prohibitive.

My next step was to organize a group of Talangans to administer the scholarship, for two reasons. (1) I'm leaving in August, and someone needs to make sure the scholarship continues. (2) Talangans know much better than I all the little nuances - where to buy school supplies, what constitutes good performance in school, etc. etc.

As it turns out, the "Comite Economico" (economic committee) from the Catholic church in Talanga was really excited to take on the project. This is the group that organizes fundraising for the church - they just finished with a big raffle of a car. They are perfect, because they know all about managing finances! Plus, there are several teachers in the group.

About four weeks ago, we picked our scholarship winners. We have six (all of them girls, actually) from four different aldeas. The past two weekends I've gone shopping for school supplies with them (in Honduras, the school year has just started), and they were SO EXCITED at buying shoes, clothes, and a bike. it was really gratifying to see the looks on their faces.

On top of that, it's even more fulfilling because I know several of these girls pretty well from my work in their aldeas. So I know their stories, where they're coming from, and what the scholarship means to them. That's really neat. I think that's really a strength of our focus on accompaniment. I'm not only giving aid, but I really know the people I'm helping. In fact, I'll put up some more posts about them so you all can know them too.

At this point, I will put in my fundraising blurb: I am still trying to raise the money to cover the rest of these girls' educations. I've got enough for this year, but I am still working for the next two. Any money that doesn't get used this year will be used next year, for someone else just as needy. So, if you have an inkling, even a small donation will be helpful, since the dollar is so strong.

You can see the post here for how to donate. If you want to earmark your donation specifically for the scholarship fund, please put "Honduras Scholarship Fund" in the comment field. Thank you.

It's a really neat project. I'm always thinking about ways to make sustainable changes. Education is a sustainable change. It’s an opportunity for these kids to learn skills and have a better life beyond just my short stay in Honduras or three years at school.

And let me tell you one more story - this is really, really neat! Last year, there were four students, all boys, enrolled in secondary school from the aldea of Los Izotes. We gave two scholarships in Los Izotes. This year, there are SIX students enrolled in just the first year, four of them are girls. At least one was definitely not going to go until she found out our two scholarship winners were going. So I think we really have helped break the ice there, which is GREAT!!!!

The Aldeas

2006-02-22T09:49:00.000-08:00

Here is a little piece I wrote about our work in the aldeas.

“They can’t play,” the kids told me, pointing to two 11-year-old sisters.

“Nonsense,” I said (in Spanish). “Anyone who wants to can play Go Fish with us.”

But I soon realized what they meant. The two sisters didn’t know their numbers. If someone asked, “Do you have any nines?” they would answer yes or no at random. They really couldn’t play, because they’ve never been to school.

We were in the aldea of Terrero Colorado. James and I roll into “Terrero” every Tuesday morning, and into another aldea, Los Izotes, every Friday. It takes us 30 minutes on ugly dirt roads to get to the first, and a full hour to get to the second. The towns are small – about 300 people. They have no electricity. Some houses have running water that comes to a valve outside. The vistas are gorgeous – green mountains swooping up to meet a bright blue sky.

James and I have worked on getting to know people and building community. We typically spend our mornings playing with the kids who swarm around as our truck pulls in. Later on we visit houses – just spending time with people, in the Passionist spirit of accompaniment. In the afternoons we run a youth group and an adult group that helps us plan activities..

We are also working on some projects for the future. The two biggest needs that we see are health care and education. We plan to bring doctors in for free consultations and to offer public health education. We’ve set up a scholarship fund so that some of the kids will go to secondary school.

And we’ve hoping to get school supplies donated from Talanga, so that kids too poor to get to primary school won’t have, for example, uniforms as an obstacle. That way, everyone could play Go Fish.

Honduran Houses

2006-02-19T14:31:00.000-08:00

During my weekly Sunday visits to the sick and going to many community meetings in people’s homes, I have been in many houses in Talanga. Being inside a Honduran casa is quite different than a North American home. In my hometown of Longmeadow, MA, houses were large and set far back from the street. Most people did not know their neighbors. Each house had multiple floors and many rooms. So observing the dwellings that people live in is an interesting cross-cultural observation.

The houses that the poor live in here are not all that different from the houses that the poor lived in during the Maya civilization. They are made of mud brick, whitewashed or painted green. The roof is either tin laminate or red tile. With all the red tiled roofs, looking down on Talanga from the hill outside looks like a view of an Italian Mediterranean city. Since there is no need for insulation, there is a gap between the roof and the wall that air can flow through. Most houses have only two or three rooms at most. Lawn chairs suffice for furniture in many houses. If the family has a television or stereo, it is set on a large metal frame entertainment shelf, sometimes in the shape of a heart. Houses are not built separately but directly adjacent to the next house, making a solid row of homes around the block. Inside the block there is often a large courtyard where cars are stored, gardens are kept, and there are the workshops for cottage industries such as shoemaking.

Hondurans decorate their walls by hanging all manner of pictures, paintings, and icons. When children graduate from school, next to their diploma and class picture is a shot of each child sitting behind an executive-like desk, with telephone and globe, pen in hand, like they are businessmen. Kindergartners also have the executive-desk photo, but their desks have stuffed animals and Mickey Mouse faces instead of phones and globes.

Religious icons, especially the Sacred Heart, are very popular. Many show Christ pulling his cloak apart to show His flaming Heart, others wearing crown and scepter as King of Kings. The remarkable thing about these icons is how feminine Christ looks. His soft eyes look like they are wearing eyeshadow, and were it not for the thin beard, He could pass for a young woman. Perhaps this makes the icon easier on the eyes to contemplate, and I believe that Christ values all gender expressions, but I wonder how the scruffy-tramping-through-Galilee guy Jesus was in person ended up being portrayed in such an effeminate manner. Also popular are images of Mary. The most common is Our Blessed Mother wearing an oversized crown and holding a toddler Jesus, who presents us with Scapulars (devotional items worn around the neck) in His hand. Below, damned souls burn in Hellfire, yearning for Mary.

Family photos are commonly posted, with one thing in common – nobody smiles. Hondurans do not smile for pictures. Flashing a smile for the camera is an American custom. Hondurans simply face the camera as they are. However, when the photos come out it often looks like they are glowering. For weddings, photos of the bride and groom are taken to painter, who paints their faces onto a frame that already has a brides gown and groom’s suit, just the faces missing. He paints in the faces based on the photos. Since the images are not smiling, and the realism of the photo-painting contrasts with the cartoonish dress-and-suit frame, it creates an image that to me is very eerie. But every married couple has one, so it is considered beautiful by the culture.

Those who have children in the military hang their army diplomas. Once I saw a diploma from the School of the Americas (SOA) on an old lady’s wall. The SOA is a school were the US government trains torture and death squads in Lain America, that have murdered many including nuns and priests. But, at the same time, attending the SOA was probably the only way that this woman’s son could get out of their small village and see the larger world, and have opportunity. Nothing is black and white.

“Cute” images are also hung, things like kittens and puppies, with a Bible verse alongside. One really popular one is a chubby naked baby boy with a baseball cap. Everyone has this naked baby on their walls.

One image that is very telling is that many people hang pictures of mansions on their walls. In many houses I have seen large prints of beautiful mansions from Malibu hung up on the wall of a two-room brick house. This is the same fantasy as watching the affairs of the rich on the telenovelas, dreaming vicariously about a life of wealth they cannot have.

Meeting the Queen of Honduras

2006-02-04T11:22:00.000-08:00

Last week I took part in a perennial Honduran tradition - the Suyapa pilgrimage. During this week, innumerable pilgrims come by bus, motorcycle, or even on foot to Tegucigalpa to pray before the patroness of Honduras, Mary, the Virgin of Suyapa. I went by bus with our parish on the 27th, and the Cathedral of Suyapa was already packed, and I have been told that yesterday, Suyapa's feast day on February 3rd, there is a sea of humanity pouring out of the Cathedral into the city. People from as far away as El Salvador and the Bay Islands journey to Suyapa on her feast day. What inspires such devotion?

Our Lady of Suyapa is one of the many titles of Mary, the mother of God. She is known by various titles around the world that highlight one of her attributes or describe her patronage over a certain area. Mexicans have Our Lady of Guadalupe, the Portuguese have Our Lady of Fatima, and the Inuit have Our Lady of the Snows. Suyapa is her title in Honduras, where she reigns as spiritual Queen of the nation.

Suyapa herself is a six centimeter tall doll of Mary. The doll is covered with a gleaming dress streaming out from her and a gold frame with twelve stars. The story goes that 257 years ago two campesinos (fieldworkers), from the aldea of Suyapa were trying to sleep in a field, and couldn't get any rest because something kept digging into their back. One man, thinking it was a rock, took it out and found it to be a tiny statuette of Mary. Believing this to be miraculous, a great devotion grew up around the doll and now she sits enshrined in a large Cathedral on a hill above Tegucigalpa. The cathedral is fantastic, with a massive echo that sounds like the booming voice of God when someone talks, and stained glass windows of triumphant crosses and a lion that look like illustrations from the Chronicles of Narnia.

When I first heard of Suyapa, I have to admit it seemed to me a little comical. All this profound devotion, the building of a Cathedral, and journeying from all over to see a little doll found in a field? I wonder how our devotion to Mary went from praying with a fourteen year old Jewish girl from Nazareth to a six centimeter doll encrusted in gold. But then I realized that the doll itself is not the point. Mary as the mother of the world is universal, and each culture depicts her in a way that they understand and which is relevant to their culture. The pilgrims are not worshipping the doll, but rather reflecting on Mary made understood to the Honduran culture and mindset. She makes herself relevant to each culture in the world.

Outside the Cathedral are a large amount of vendors selling all manner of religious articles and knickknacks. I also got to eat there my favorite Salvadoran pupusas, a filling wrapped in a circle disk of melt-in-your-mouth bread.

Also around Suyapa are a group of beggars, who make their living sitting by the church door and hoping that the Christian charity inspired by seeing the Virgin will move them to give. Three ancient women sit by the smaller church, and outside the main shrine sat another man begging. I went to talk to him, and we chatted for a while. I had burns over the right side of his body, such that his lower arm was fused to his upper arm by the burn. He had an open bleeding sore in a ring around his wrist, because he could not afford skin grafts to cover it. He has been making his living by begging at Suyapa for twenty years. We had a good conversation and he was very open in sharing his life and his suffering with me. So many times we pass by beggars and, in ignoring them, dehumanize them to just another face in a crowd of suffering people. It was good to get to know one begging man as an individual.

Since we came as a parish bus trip, we went to the Mall in Tegus after the cathedral. My friend Maria and I supervised a seven year old named Jose from our church. It was his first time at the Mall, and he was awed and amazed by everything. I imagined what a shock it must be to grow up in Talanga and then see a Mall. (In a pun, 'Mal' also means 'bad' in Spanish) He thought the escalators were the coolest thing, and we spent a long time riding up and down and up and down the escalators with him.

Two Nights in Los Izotes

2006-01-29T16:25:00.000-08:00

Every Friday Todd and I visit Los Izotes, one of the two aldeas, or outlying villages, that we work in. It is set far back from the highway, along a rutted road that winds through forests of thin pines and steep hills. Usually we take the truck in, listening to a musical or a book on tape on the way. This time, however, the truck was in the shop, so we took the bus in. The bus only runs this route on Fridays and Sundays, so if we went in, we would have to stay the weekend. We packed our bags and rode in. We had the wonderful hospitality of Doña Esmeralda, who welcomed us into her home for the two nights. Her house is set high up the hill, along a road we have only attempted once in the pickup because it’s one of the ugliest roads we’ve ever seen. Where there are not craggy rocks or foot deep holes, there is slick mud. From her house is a gorgeous view of blue hills fading into the clouds, and with the mist and pine trees it reminds me of the Pacific Northwest. Here they have the best, richest coffee I have ever tasted. There is some bean that is crushed into the coffee to give it a warm cinnamon taste. They grow and grind their own coffee, and Doña Esmeralda showed me how the beans are dried in a sieve and then ground in a hand-cranked machine. Like during my ride with the cafeteros in Olancho, I was reminded again how much labor goes into making a cup of coffee. She also showed how tortillas are made from scratch, ground corn meal pushed between a press. The first tortillas I tried to make looked like misshaped disks and must have been the weirdest looking tortillas in history, but I will practice on other visits.

Los Izotes has no electricity. So we passed the evening by candlelight, telling jokes and stories and performing skits. This is what people do without television, they get entertainment by spending time together and passing on the spoken word. We saw one skit whose message was not to go to “brujos” (witch doctors) if you are sick. The man playing the brujo waved a plastic bag around his patient to “cure them” and there was laughter. Then I told one of the two children’s stories I have translated into Spanish and figured out how to tell like a storyteller, “The Rich Fool.” The next night, I told “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.”

The next day was the main event of the weekend, the horsemanship competition! The aldea had organized an equestrian championship to raise money for the church, and we looked forward to being present at this important event of the aldea of which we now feel part of the community. For the game, the men of the town lined up with their horses. Then, rings about an inch wide were hung on a string between two poles. The objective of the game was to gallop toward the poles at full speed and try to spear one of the rings with a twig. The winner received a handkerchief and a kiss. It had been raining all day, and the ground was muddy and slippery, and the spectators took shelter under a tent. The men took their turns charging for the rings. Then someone suggested I enter the competition. Now, I have only been on a horse three times in my life, and two of those were on a pony ride at the town fair. The other was a short riding lesson in Los Izotes the last visit. So, having no horsemanship experience and no idea how to steer or stop a horse, I entered the competition. I think all eyes were on the gringo as I mounted a big gray horse, and considering I failed at my first two attempts to even get in the saddle, this did not look promising. After a five minute riding lesson, which consisted of “pull left to go left,” my horse walked to join the others waiting to charge. Hey, this isn’t so hard, I thought, I can steer this bronco, and I entertained the thought of how cowboy-cool I must look; then I realized just how far the fall is from the top of a horse. The other competitors charged in turn, a few horses slipping and even falling in the mud. Then came my turn. Throwing all caution to the wind, I kicked with my feet (though not so hard because I didn’t want to hurt the horse) and my noble steed took of galloping. I kicked again and the stallion picked up speed to a full charge. The line between the poles loomed closer as the horse bucked under me and I held on to the saddle knob for dear life, thinking I would get clotheslined. As I got closer I drew my twig – and missed the ring. But my horse got past the poles, and I didn’t fall! I was even able to steer the horse back to the starting line for another try! In all I made three attempts, all galloping like Paul Revere on caffeine, and missed the ring each time, but had a lot of fun.

That evening in the church we had a vigilia, a spiritual cultural night with prayer, songs, Bible readings, and dramas. The church was packed as the generator slowly started working and the lights came on. The community began to sing and praise, and watch the skits. Drama is an important part of spiritual life here, and most evenings run by church groups have a least a few plays with a moral or spiritual theme. They are somewhat like the Medieval mystery plays. A typical drama would be a woman burdened by sin, represented by actors dressed as demons hanging signs saying “crime” or “alcoholism” around her neck, and then a white-robed actor portraying Christ takes off the signs and redeems the sinner. So the vigilia continued like this…and continued…and continued, until two in the morning, and then when the congregation was about to enter dreamland, we had the Celebration of the Word. After that we had to walk back to Doña Esmeralda’s house, and with a large overtired congregation and only two flashlights among us, we had to find our way back up the hill along the ugly road I described earlier, in close to total darkness. We made it safe, and had only two hours sleep because we needed to catch the early bus back to Talanga, and spent the next day catching up on sleep from the all-night vigilia.

¡Olimpia Campeon!

2006-01-29T16:21:00.003-08:00

Futbol (aka soccer) is far and away without a doubt the most popular sport, and form of entertainment in general, as it is the for the entire planet outside of the US and Canada. If the word ‘fan’ is short for ‘fanatic’ then that well describes the futbol fans here. Most of the action centers around the ‘liguilla nacional’ (national league) of futbol clubs from various cities, with names like Maraton, Platense, and Universidad. The three most popular teams are Real España, Motagua, and Olimpia. Olimpia reigns supreme as the undisputed champion and is the country’s team, the most popular in Honduras, like the LA Lakers of Central America. Everyone seems to be waving their flag with the emblem of a lion, or wearing their red, white, and blue team color bracelets. Everyone (except fans of defeated Maraton) loves Olimpia. Most of the players in the liguilla are not Hondurans by birth, but players from other countries, notably African nations and Brazil, looking for a chance to play professionally. At least a quarter of the newspaper each day is dedicated to futbol, with not just scores and game reviews but tabloid gossip about the feuds and personalities of the players. I have been making an effort to try to read as much of the futbol section as I can each day so I can talk about futbol intelligently with our neighbors, but there is just too much to keep up on.

Hondurans are also big fans of international futbol, and follow the British, Spanish, and Italian leagues with as much fervor as the Honduran. Loyalties are mostly divided between Real Madrid and Barcelona, in Spain. I have met teenagers here to have an encyclopedic knowledge of international futbol, and can tell me the names, stats, histories, and World Cup prospects of any player on any international league in the world. The biggest stars are David Beckham and Ronaldinho. For this reason I think that futbol is probably the greatest force for peace in the world today.

Think about it. Baseball, American Football, Basketball and Hockey teams only compete with teams from other cities within the United States and Canada. Futbol is on a planetwide scale, with teams playing against other countries around the world. This leads to a greater understanding of international cultures, geography, and people, in a spirit of peaceful competition. While I bet Joe Schmoe American could barely name three African nations, practically any Honduran kid can tell you not only every country in Africa that has a team, but all the teams and all the players and all their stats on the national leagues within each country! Baseball and Basketball tie for a far distant second. Baseball is mostly popular on the Bay Islands, where English is spoken, and Basketball is always being played in the town park, and Honduran kids post pictures of Shaquille O’neal on their walls.

I never really considered myself a sports fan. I rooted for the Red Sox in the World Series, but that’s about it. That is why I am surprised how much I am getting into futbol here. Along with all of Talanga I am an Olimpiista, though I think I will root for Real España because I dig their colors and mascot (an angry yellow and black owl).

The Rich Fool

2006-01-24T17:52:00.000-08:00

Children here love to hear stories. This is a tale I translated into Spanish and adapted from a children’s book, and made it apply to Honduras. With some practice I’ve become alright at telling it as a storyteller, and have told it in the aldeas and around a campfire in the street when the power went out.

Many years ago in Talanga there lived a rich man. He was very rich. He always wore the finest clothes, the flashiest jewelry, and he lived in the biggest house in town. However, his neighbors were a very poor couple, so poor they had almost nothing. One day the poor couple decided to play a trick on the rich man. They went to his house and said, “we know of a man so rich, that he eats with a different spoon for every meal! After each meal, he eats with the spoon, then gets rid of it, and uses a new one for the next meal!” When he heard this, the rich man became very jealous. He liked to think that he was the richest man in the world, and he couldn’t stand the thought of anyone being richer than he was. He would show who was the wealthiest one of all! So the next day the rich man went to the department store in Tegucigalpa. There he bought many spoons. A ton of spoons! Boxes and boxes of spoons! And then he went back to Talanga.

For dinner that night, the rich man sat down to eat. He took a spoon out of the box, ate with it, then threw it away! The next day, he ate with a different spoon, and threw that one away too. This went on for a while, and after several months the rich man had thrown away all his spoons. But he couldn’t let the poor couple see that he wasn’t the wealthiest man in the world.

So he went back to Tegucigalpa. There he bought many spoons. A ton of spoons! Boxes and boxes of spoons! And then he went back to Talanga.

Again, he sat down to eat, took a spoon out of the box, ate with it, then threw it away. After another few months he had thrown away all his spoons, and had spent thousands of lempiras buying spoons. He was almost broke! But he still could not let anyone see that he wasn’t the richest one of all. So he went back to Tegucigalpa, and spent all the money he had left, down to his last centavo, buying spoons. He ate with them and threw them away, until he had no spoons, or money left.

The rich man went to the poor couple shamefaced. “I have learned my lesson” he said, “I am not the richest man of all. Would you please show me the man who is so rich that he eats with a different spoon for every meal?” The poor couple smiled and took the formerly-rich man to a small aldea outside of Talanga. There they led him to a tiny house, where a tiny old man sat eating dinner. He took a tortilla, and used it to scoop up his rice and beans, then ate the tortilla! The rich man was embarrassed, because while he spent all his money buying spoons, the poor always have a spoon, made right out of corn.

The moral of the story is: THE POOR ARE SMARTER THAN THE RICH

The Town's Wise Woman

2006-01-24T17:49:00.000-08:00

When I go to Mass, or walk by the church, I am always glad to see Doña Camilla there. She is the town’s wise elder, and a deeply spiritual woman. Just to look into her face you can see she has a deep connection with God. During Mass she sits in the front row enraptured in the miracle taking place, and sometimes during Mass she gets up and walks around the altar. This is completely acceptable, and understood, because she is the town’s wise woman and her spirituality is respected. If you sit with Doña Camilla for a while, she will share her wisdom with you. She kisses you on both cheeks, then blesses you on the forehead, chest, and shoulders in the Sign of the Cross, and one can feel the holiness of her blessing. Then she will proudly tell you that she’s ninety-two, “Even older than the Holy Father!” she says with a smile. Then she shares her wisdom, one time explaining to me the depths and meaning of the Our Father prayer, which I had never seen before. If Doña Camilla is at the Mass, I seek her out to receive her blessing. She is a wise and revered person, and I am glad to be her friend, and I treasure those moments when I can sit with her after mass and learn from her wisdom.

Dirty Kids in Doorways

2006-01-24T17:41:00.000-08:00

What’s with all the dirty kids in doorways? Whenever I see in the media an image that is supposed to represent “poverty,” it is almost always an unwashed child standing listlessly in a doorway. I’ve seen these image on ads about poverty in Appalachia, on those Save the Children TV fundraisers, even in the campaign ads of the candidates here during the presidential election. It seems that image of Poverty in the popular imagination is that poor children spend all their time standing listlessly in doorways or staring out windows with sad faces that say “won’t you please make a donation?” I wonder if those pictures are posed. Because they don’t look anything like the third-world poor kids that I know, who are full of smiles and laughter, and energetic for games and activities. It’s just an iconic image that represents poverty in the popular imagination. And it is a disservice to portray the poor as listless and sad, because that does not reflect their reality, they feel as much joy and have emotional lives as full as anyones – what they lack is the resources to provide for their needs. People in poverty are not helpless, and they are not sad all the time. I wonder if the people who look at those fundraiser photographs ever think, “maybe those kids are dirty because they’ve just been playing, maybe they’re in the doorway or looking out the window because that’s where they happen to be at the time.” If you walk through Los Izotes or Terrero Colorado, you will see some listlessness and sadness, but also happiness, play, and exuberance. But in some eyes, that’s not what “poverty” looks like. There is no one face of poverty, and the kids that one might think stare out doorways are probably playing games at an activity. Question what the face of poverty looks like.

Which reminds me, the presidential election I mentioned earlier is over, and Manuel “Mel” Zelaya of the Liberal Party won, and will be inaugurated in the next few days. A peaceful and electoral transfer of power in Central America is something to be applauded. The ceremony is going to take place in a giant replica of a Copan pyramid, to show his succession from the Mayan rulers. And I also don’t have to hear the annoyingly catchy campaign songs anymore

Deep Enculturation

2006-01-08T14:17:00.000-08:00

I have reached the point in my stay in Honduras when life here has become Everyday Life, and that's a positive development.

When I first arrived in Honduras I was amazed and awestruck at everything I saw. The people, the landscape, the music - whenever we would walk about the town or drive in a car I would look, eyes wide and amazed, at the array of new things I saw. Everything was new, novel, fascinating, and intriguing for the sheer fact that it was new and different. Just walking around the town felt like an expedition or adventure. Though I was residing in one place I felt like a traveller, seeing new sights with each venture out the door.

Then some months passed. Then some more.

And now when I walk around, my eyes aren't wide, they are just seeing the town as it is as I go about my workaday tasks. Honduran ways are not novelties any more, they are facts of life. A honduran pine is no longer something to catch my eye because it's different from a USA one, reggaeton music doesn't stand out because it is different than hip hop, seeing oxcarts and mariachi bands in the streets is no longer a novelty but a part of the everyday scene.

This is not jadedness. It's deep enculturation.

At this point we are seeing and participating in daily Honduran life as it is, after the veneer of novelty has faded, to see the daily struggles and life here and not just the immediate things that caught my eye when I arrived. We are moving past superficialities and becoming slowly inmeshed in life as it actually is.

Another program that I considered for this year would have sent me to several different countries on three continents. However, I would only have had a one-week stay in each country, most likely with an English-speaking family. I am glad that I went with the Passionists instead. Instead of a superficial, surface-level taste of a country that I would have gotten with the one-week stays, we are becoming deeply aware of the culture and becoming immersed in it in way that tourism or a multiculti sampler couldn't give. It would have been like being a jack of all trades and a master of none. I would rather get to know one country very well than skip across nations without getting to know them.

That said, sometimes I do need to refresh my sense of wonder, and yes, novelty at living in another country, hence the trips I have made to Copan and Olancho. Seeing a different part of Honduras renews my curiosity and interest in my host country.

Olancho y La Muralla

2006-01-05T12:14:00.000-08:00

I had a few days of down-time between Christmas and New Year’s, with little immediate work to do. So I took the opportunity to visit another of Honduras’ departamentos (states) , Olancho, to get a better understanding of the country. Olancho is considered the ‘Texas’ of Honduras – most people there work in ranching, and there is a cowboy culture there. Olanchanos take great pride in their departamento, and put the phrase “Olancho y que?” (Olancho and what else?) on the windshields of their trucks. I read that the landscape was spectacular, and read about a national park called La Muralla where it was common to see quetzals, beautiful bright colored birds with long tails, that are sacred to the Maya. So I decided to use my free time to do to the national park.

It was a long bus ride up, not on the cushy bus I took to Copan but the famous ‘chicken bus’, a converted school bus where as many people are packed in as possible, and yes, chickens are carry-on luggage. It was a five hour ride to the small town of La Union, much of it standing.

Far into Olancho, La Union is rather isolated, there’s nowhere to go beyond it. The drive in was as spectacular as it was described; towering cliffs, hills, gorges, waterfalls. It was like Glacier National Park in Montana without the snow.

Once there I checked into a hotel, and went down to the Forest Service office where I had read one was supposed to check in before going into the park. There, the woman told me that it’s not safe to camp in the park (scuttling those plans) and that the trails were in a state of disrepair. Hmmm, what to do now? She recommended a day trip, riding in and out of the park on the coffee trucks, which turned out to be a good experience.

That night in the hotel ($2.50 USD a night) , I hung out watching TV with the kids there, they had cable. They were flipping channels and the mock-horror movie Sean of the Dead came on. I was translating it for the kids, and then it hit me how surreal this was – here I was, in one of the most isolated parts of Honduras, only to find myself watching Sean of the Dead.

I got a ride into the park on a truck filled with cafeteros (coffee farmers), all of us loaded into the flatbed of a truck as we crawled up the mountain. I will never look at a cup of coffee the same way again. But this was the first time I had seen how much endurance cafeteros have, to get up before 5 each morning, ride packed tight into a truck, cut coffee all day, and ride the truck down packed again. There were boys about twelve working in the coffee plantation.

They dropped me off at the park, and I knew I had to be out of the park by about one to catch the last truck down the mountain so I wouldn’t get stuck in the park. The woman was right, it was in disrepair, the cabins and interpretive center were locked, and fallen trees lay across the little-maintained trails. Still, when I entered the forest, it was like a primeval world. Think of your typical image of a tropical forest from a movie – this was it. Enormous trees arching through the mist, hanging vines, the rich scent of earth and life. I had read about ‘cloud forest’ and now I was standing in one, surrounded by verdant vegetation appearing only briefly through the mist, and when the sun shone through the eldritch fog, it had a circular rainbow crown around it.

I climbed up the trail over the fallen trees into the clouds, but did not see a quetzal, even though I stopped still for a long time waiting. I did startle two orange and black howler monkeys who went hooting away into the undergrowth. Seeing a monkey was one of the first reminders for me that I am actually living in the tropics, something I forget living in a semiurban setting with coniferous forest around the town.

Fortunately I was able to catch a ride on a truck going down later that afternoon, and the next morning got up at four AM to wait for the next chicken bus back to Talanga, because if I slept past five, I would have spent New Year’s in La Union.

Copan

2006-01-05T12:11:00.000-08:00

Copan

Awesome. It’s a word that’s bandied about by young people, to refer to anything interesting. But it means something incredible, that fills one with awe.

That is how I felt at the Mayan ruins of Copan. Awe-struck. Awesome.

I had wanted to visit Copan from the minute my plane touched down in Central America. In college, I had visited the Mayan sites on the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico; Chichen Itza, Uxmal, Tulum, Labna. Being there is what ignited my interest in Mesoamerica, and indigenous culture, the interest that led to me living in Honduras today. Copan, Tikal, and Palenque are the sites I have not been to yet, so I began to plan my trip.

After a long while a block of a few days of free time presented itself, and I took the eight-hour bus ride from Tegucigalpa to Copan Ruinas, via San Pedro Sula. Honduras looks small and Central America looks thin on the map, but there are wide distances within this country.

Arriving at the bus station a group of eight men started yelling at me to take their taxi, saying that the other would give me a bad price and then arguing back and forth, several guys falling over themselves to get the small fare of one passenger. I negotatied a fare and had my first ride in the town of Copan Ruinas taxis, which are essentially a motorized rickshaw, a three wheel motorcycle with a frame built around it, that rattled and threatened to toss me out the side as it raced along Copan Ruinas’ cobblestone streets.

The first strange thing about Copan Ruinas was the large amount of foreigners. Talanga isn’t in my tourist guidebook. Which was why it was so bizarre to see so many tourists, and hearing Swedish, Dutch, French, and German being spoken about as frequently as I heard Spanish. The hostel I stayed at (for $4 UDS a night!) was full of European backpackers.

This surreallness continued to the town, which was full of trendy upscale restaurants and cafes catering to moneyed tourists. I never thought I would see a menu offering Thai food in Honduras, or hear French dub techno playing in a café. Among all this trendiness, the town residents went about their lives. Mayan women walked by in their multicolored huipils, (dresses), speaking in the Chorti Mayan language, one of over twenty five distinct living Mayan languages.

So in the evening before I went into the ruins I went “fishing for conversations.” I sat in a café and made a sign on my table that said “Good Conversations Here” in English, Spanish, and Esperanto. People came by and talked, and I met many neat folks, from a local women who invited me to her house for dinner, to hanging out with a Dutch and aIrish traveler.

I decided that I was going to take two days at the ruins, one day exploring on my own at my own pace, and one day with a guide. I usually don’t care to go with guide, so I can take time to appreciate things, but I had heard they were very knowledgeable. Walking into the ruins, you pass colorful Macaw birds, and as you round the corner you see the first pyramid, with stelae (carved posts of inscriptions) around it. You came out of the forest and see the enormous complex, massive pyramids rearing into the air, surrounded by equally massive Tree-of-Life ceiba trees. I spent all day just taking it in, trying to appreciate the unbelievable fact that I was standing atop a Mayan pyramid where once kings and priests alone could walk, where human sacrifice was performed, on a building constructed in perfect alignment with the stars. I paid a little extra to go down into the archaeological tunnels under the pyramids. I must have spend ten minutes just gazing at the carved faces under the earth, the remnants of a previous ruler whose old pyramid was built over by the new ruler.

I also went into the lesser-visited El Cementerio site, which was actually a residential area, and climbing among the buildings.

Going in the morning was a good idea, before the tour groups arrive. There was certainly some ‘ugly american’ conduct going on. Note to tourists: wearing a colorful Jimmy Buffet parrot shirt, Bermuda shorts, knee length socks, and a fisherman’s hat with an expensive camera around your neck is like wearing a big sign that says “ROB ME!”

Walking back from the ruins the first day, I visited the nature trail in the forest around the ruins. It is filled with gigantic Ceiba trees, sacred to the Maya. Their trucks are as wide as a redwood, and their branches twist and gyre like a baobab, or like a strongman flexing his arms. The roots represent the Underworld, the truck Our World, and the branches the Overworld. This reminded me of the world-tree Yggdrasil in norse mythology, or even the Cross, a ‘tree’ bridging Heaven and Hell.

The next day I went back with a guide, to be recommended. The guides here have been working at the site for over twenty years, and are Harvard-trained. I paid $30 USD for an interpretive guide’s service, and the information he shared was worth every penny. It was good to get a Spanish-speaking guide, the English ones we passed weren’t sharing half the information that the Spanish language guides were.

The guide made the site come alive. He translated the glyphs on the stelae and showed me how to read the basics, he made stones and sculptures I had passed by into sites more fascinating than the pyramids. One stone which I had passed turned out to be the altar of sacrifice, and he showed me how the victim would be layed out, and even the grooved channel where the blood would run.

He pointed to sculptures and pointed out Gods, including the Bat, who was the patron of Copan, which in Mayan is called the “City of Bats” He shared their numerical system, which was base-20, and amazing knowledge of astronomy and architecture. There are two stelae on opposite ends of the Copan valley that align perfectly in the sunlight on the vernal equinox, to mark the start of the agricultural season. The entire complex of Copan was engineered with perfect acoustics, so that someone standing on the pyramid can be heard anywhere in the city. I tried it, and just one clap there resounds everywhere, with better sound quality than a concert hall. They were also one of only five cultures in the world (Chinese, Phoenicians, and Hittites among others) to develop writing independently. All this was happening during the Mayan Classic Period between AD 200-800. I liked how all dates on plaques in the park where given with the Mayan calendar first (8 Baktun) and the Gregorian calendar second.

While this was happening, Europe was in the Dark Ages. The people whose descendents would conquer the indigenous Mesoamerican people and call them savages spent these years bashing each other over the head with battleaxes, while the Maya were developing advanced mathematics.

The next day I visited Las Sepulturas (the tombs), a site off to the side of Copan and not as frequently visited. I planned to just see it and head off, but when a guide offered to show me around, I followed him. Good choice. The guide, Jesus, was an expert on the site, also having been here over twenty years. His direction turned a site I would have passed over into a location I found even more interesting than the visually impressive pyramids. Las Sepulturas was a suburb of Copan, where the nobility and middle class lived. What to me looked like some assembled stones, Jesus showed was a house of the nobles, and showed me the beds, the children’s rooms, the nursery, the concubine’s room, the oven, the clinic, the school, and made a whole living community come alive. Copan was about Kings and priests, Sepulturas was about how everyday Mayans went about their lives. The tombs the name refers to are those of 18 Rabbit, my favorite ruler of Copan, and other nobles. I was allowed to climb down into the King’s tomb.

We also visited the house of a scribe, and I had a picture next to the monkey-god of Writing, hoping for his blessing on my writing. Writing was done on straw mats, the mat being a symbol of nobility. The sacred Mayan text the “Popol Vuh” means “mat” and the second ruler of Copan was named Mat Head.

Jesus also pointed out the plants in the area, and spent much of the tour pointing out vegetation. At first I thought I wasn’t that interested in botany, but then he revealed how the Maya use plants to make cement, and dyes, and which were curative.

On the last day I went north of Copan Ruinas to the hot springs, where geothermally heated water comes out of the mountain into the river. It’s piped into pools, where I had my first and only hot tub experience in all of Honduras, and some flows directly into the river. It was incredibly warm. One of the best parts was when the hot water flows into the river behind a stone dam, so you get in the hot water until it burns, leap into the refreshingly chill river, and back in again. The river also flowed quickly, so even though I didn’t have an inner tube handy I could float down the river through the rocks.

I also went to a small site called Los Sapos (the frogs). There, cute happy frog statues are carved out of the hillside rock. It is on the grounds of a Hacienda called San Lucas, where I had to cross the river and ride in a truck with coffee workers to get there. After a short hike, there are these contented smiling froggies carved centuries ago. I take it as a sign that the Maya had a sense of humor, and that humanizes a people usually seen through temples and kings. I had read that this location was also a birthing site for Mayan women, and I assume the frogs are somehow linked to fertility. There was supposed to be an even more worn carving of a woman giving birth, but I wasn't able to find it.

The next day, I boarded a 5 AM Bus (all long-distance busses in Honduras leave at 5 AM or earlier) to ride back.

Seeing Copan was an important part of understanding my experience in Honduras. It is a mark of national pride, but more importantly, it was built by the ancestors of the people we serve. Most Hondurans are mestizo, with Mayan ancestry in the west or Lenca or Miskito ancestry in the east were we live. This land that is now so impoverished was once one of the world’s wealthiest civilizations.

New Year's and Navidad

2006-01-05T12:08:00.000-08:00

The holiday season passed tranquilly here, with thankfully much less of the chintz and commercialism that marks the season in the States. We do have a nine foot plastic tree occupying the living room, which came out of a box from a Tegucigalpa department store. Seeing a tree assembled with Tab A Slot B instructions made me reminisce of my family’s annual ritual of climbing up a snowy hill on the tree farm to pick out our own tree, and yelling ‘timber’ as it fell.

On Christmas Eve I drove up to the aldea Terrero Colorado to give my wishes to our friends there. The kids walked with me and we went to a friend’s house as the sun set. It is a two room-house, with kitchen and a living space. The women were cooking in the darkness, and the room was illuminated by candles and a Coleman lamp. Only seeing by the candlelight, I saw the contrast and warmth to every other Christmas Eve I had experienced before. Usually that evening was filled with blinking lights and noise, tinny Christmas tunes, specials on TV, and all manner of color and stimulation. Here, in a bare room over the candles, I sensed something purer, and more authentic, of a family eating tamales around the lamp, than in all the hubbub of the “season” I had a sense that this is what the original Nativity was like, in a small building with animals around, lit only by firelight, before all the traditions that grew around it.

Christmas eve is traditionally seen as an evening to spend at home with family, hanging up stockings and reading Clement Moore’s poem before the children are sent to bed so parents can commence present-assembly.

Not here. At midnight, the party begins.

At the stroke of twelve, illegal fireworks reach the crescendo of the explosions they have been making all night. My least favorite are these little rockets that one sets off between ones’ two fingers, so after a thousand degree flame shoots through one’s digits, one aims the little rocket at passers-by. The children’s game is to hit the other children/horses/flammable roofs of houses with the rockets that fly in an erratic pattern. I am torn between wanting to stop this and realizing that I’m not a parent and it’s not my role to.

Then at midnight everyone goes to the Casa de la Cultura, a dance hall in the center of town, to dance until five AM on Christmas morning. Cumbia, pop, and reggaeton music played as the whole town packed the hall. I went to be part of the town’s event, although I have to admit that shaking my tailfeather didn’t seem Christmassy to me.

New Year’s was a similar fireworks frenzy. The tradition is to make a stuffed effigy of a man with a milk carton for his head, which represents the Old Year. Then one stuffs the effigy with fireworks, places it in the middle of a public street, and blows the smithereens out of the Old Year at midnight.

Christmas in Talanga

2005-12-24T09:13:00.000-08:00

It's been awhile since the last blog posting, and we have all become caught up in our ministries. The first months were spent wondering what to do, and now that we are on a roll things are getting busier. My last posting was on El Dia de Accion de Gracias (Thanksgiving) and now I find myself at Christmas (la Navidad). Many English speakers know that name from the repititive 'Prospero Año y Felicidad' song that is playing over and over again ubiquitously.

The weather today is a balmy mid-70's with a baking sun for the season, though on a few days the temperature has dropped down into the forties. On those days the Talangueños put on their full winter garb - snow hats and parkas. Though this isn't the stereotypical Christmas of white, this is probably what the weather actually was like in Bethlehem.

In Tegucigalpa we see a more USA type of celebration, as American monoculture spreads south and norteamericano traditions catch on, such as Thanksgiving. In Pricesmart, the Costco-like bulk store, they have sleighs and giant inflatable snowglobes and snowmen for sale, and the same Christmas songs playing on a loop.

In Talanga, it's not that evident, I think because Talangueños don't have the money to by tacky holiday knicknacks, and because the type of celebration that is marketed down from the States of snow and sleighbells is foreign to them. Christmas is much more religious and focused on Christ.

There are some distinctly Honduran traditions. The first, like for seemingly every major event, is fireworks. Walking to the post office this morning I passed a stall filled with all manner of dangerous explosives at child-affordable prices. At midnight tonight (it's Christmas Eve) there will be a huge firecracker extravaganza.

Another tradition is Las Posadas (the Inns) in which children portraying Mary and Joseph looking for a place to stay go to a house and ask to be let in. Then the people inside the house play the innkeeper, and there is a call and response between them through the closed door of the house.

It is common to set up Nativity scenes outside the house. The Honduran tradition is for neighbors to steal the baby Jesuses from their neighbors' scenes and hide them. Then one has to search for the stolen child of God. When He's found, there's a party.

Congratulations in the Day of Thank's!

2005-11-27T09:27:00.001-08:00

That was an amusing translation I found of 'Happy Thanksgiving' in a newspaper ad for turkey day food. Like Halloween, Thanksgiving is starting to catch on in Honduras, but it is still largely unknown. So to celebrate this holiday when we are far from home, and to thank the people who have helped us get settled here, we invited our friends to a Thanksgiving dinner. A shopping trip to a Tegucigalpa supermarket got us most of the traditional foods. I made the mashed potatoes.

Our guests sat at tables with tablecloths in the autumn colors of red, orange, and yellow, with neat turkeys made out of chiles from Todd. We shared the story of 'El Dia de Accion de Gracias' as it's known here. It was good to remember and commemorate something familiar, and to share some of our culture with our friends as they have shared their culture with us.

It has been very cold here recently. Temperatures have been chilly in the day and during the night have dipped into the 40's (Fahrenheit) This raises the possibility that it could actually *snow* in Honduras! People have been bundled up in hats and coats. However, today the temperatures shot back up again and people are walking around with umbrellas to block the sun.

Today is also election day here, and tonight we will find whether the next presidente of Honduras will be Manuel 'Mel' Zelaya of the Liberal Party, or Porfirio 'Pepe' Lobo Sosa of the National Party. The town is covered with signs in the party's signature colors, red and blue. Supporters are driving around town on trucks waving their party's flag. I have been asked many times who I am going to vote for and I have kept saying 'I'm a foreigner, I can't vote! :-)'

The BBC has an article about the election at this URL http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4475240.stm

Marching Bands, Futbolito and other Gringoes

2005-11-17T16:01:00.000-08:00

Ah, the typical Honduran morning. Watching the sun rise over the cerrito, reading my El Heroldo newspaper over a breakfast of black coffee with sugar and beans, and listening to the melodious sounds of a full marching band parading past our house at 4 AM.

I am not making this up. For the past four days a marching band, trombones, drums and all, has played Sousa favorites at four in the morning in front of our casa. This, of course, was to wake up the townsfolk to celebrate the final days of the Patronal, the twelve day festival in honor of Talanga's patron saint. I hope that all the many Masses, marches, and launching of fireworks will bring many blessings and graces upon Talanga through San Diego's intercession, the first of which I hope will be protection of the people from the many dangerous homemade pyrotechnics launched during the patronal.

So the celebration has concluded, with a huge mass in which the church was strikingly decorated with many green fronds and the words 'San Diego, Model of Sanctity' hung above the pews. Soon the revival spirit will continue with a parish Mission that is starting in December. So it is with relief that I say that it's over, if only because of the many celebratory explosions going off twenty four hours a day.

But Talanga is still abuzz with activity. The Talangueños are excited about the futbolito tournament that has been going on for several weeks. Futbolito ('little soccer') is a sport like soccer, played on a basketball court with fewer players and a smaller ball, which makes for a very fast paced game. The community comes out in large numbers seemingly every night to cheer on the futbolito teams made of local youths. The teams wear the jerseys of the teams of the Honduran soccer league, the most popular teams being Olimpia and Motagua. This is a major social event, with vendors and people coming just to hang out. This spirit of coming out in public space to have fun together is something I love about Honduran culture. Where Estadounidenses (US citizens) seem to stay in row houses and watch TV (ok, a generalization) Hondurans come together to cheer on local teams, or to put on skits, or organize dances.

The other buzz comes from the country's general elections, which are happening at the end of the month. Talanga is the site of enthusiastic campaigning between supporters of the Liberals and the Nationals, the two largest of Honduras's political parties. Each party has a theme color, red and blue respectively, and a catchy campaign theme song. Supporters are frequently driving around town on pickups waving their party's colored flag and playing the theme song from loudspeakers. Interestingly, candidates in Honduras go by their first names, so the two candidates we hear about most are named 'Mel' and 'Pepe'. They are campaigning to succeed Honduras' current president, Ricardo Maduro, who bears a striking resemblence to the actor Richard Gere.

Another interesting thing that comes up from time to time is seeing other gringoes in Talanga. After living here, I can think of many wonderful reasons to visit Honduras, and Talanga. However, our town is not exactly a tourist destination - it's not even mentioned in my Travel Guidebook. So when I see other US Americans here, which happens infrequently, there is a curiosity as to why they are here. Most are volunteers or prosthelityzers for other denominations. At the airport, we have also had a gringa come up to us who saw our appearance and was desperate to talk in English to someone, anyone. So I was surprised when recently a school bus full of gringoes showed up in Talanga, from some Christian organization. The people got off their bus, walked around the park for a while, handed out clothes, and left.

This is a contrast with the approach to service that we take. First, this group did not take the time to get to know the community, they just showed up. Second, I don't think they knew Spanish. Also, they didn't provide any kind of service, they just gave something out, which is not sustainable, not empowering to the community, does not have any community involvement, and ends immediately when this group left. Furthermore, they weren't addressing a real need. The people of Talanga already have clothes - mainly secondhands from the US. When you put your old clothes in the donation bin, it's likely that they'll end of in Central America. So this group built no community structure, did not get to know the people they were serving, and didn't craft a sustainable solution.

The approach we PVI's take is to get to know the community, work with them not for them, try to empower the community as they craft their own solutions with us as facilitators, took the time to learn Spanish, and work to create structures that will continue after we have left.

Like the work we are doing in the aldea of Terrero Colorado. With the aldea's Delegate of the Word, we are organizing a youth and children's group, and an adult's council to organizing events for the community. Before that, we visited every house we could in the aldea to get to know the people of Terrero first. So those are some of the different approaches to service.

Fiesta Patronal

2005-11-12T12:15:00.000-08:00

We've been nutso here with the Fiesta Patronal (celebration of the patron saint of Talanga, who is San Diego). There have been processions, called "gremios" all week. For each procession, people march in from one or a few of the aldeas. They meet up with the Talangeños and then process from the outskirts of town to the church in the center. The processions follow a decorated pickup truck, bearing a statue of San Diego.

Today is the actual feast day of San Diego. The processions have been leading up to it all week. Yesterday was the "tope" - the really big procession the day before. They went all out. There was a pickup decorated with palm branches leaves and little girls dressed as angels passing out candy. Then there was an ox-driven cart loaded up with little kids dressed as campesinos. Then there was a big flat-bed truck with models of all of Talanga's traditional productions - they had a fake bread oven, a fake "fogon" (basically stove-top) for tortilla making, a machine for grinding sugar cane, and a fake oven to make "cal" - a traditional Honduran construction material made from stone. The models were all "manned" by little kids dressed up as Honduran campesinos. And the statue of San Diego was borne on a litter, carried by, of all people, four old ladies.

For the tope, the aldea that came was "La Ermita" the biggest of the aldeas that pertain to Talanga. They brought in a big tractor dragging a truck bed. The truck bed was super decorated with plants and arches of leaves, and little kids in beautiful dresses and suits, plus an image of Our Lady of Lourdes (who is La Ermita's patron; our Lady is the Virgin Mary, but Mary has about a million different incarnations especially in Latin America. Lourdes is one of them). From the arches dangled letters spelling out, "San Diego, Lourdes te saluda" (San Diego, Lourdes says hi).

The whole procession looked AMAZING and so beautiful. One of the things that I really liked is that in addition to being a celebration for a Catholic Saint, it was also a celebration of Honduran culture. All the decorations were themed around typical/traditional Honduran products and people. And these decorations were incredibly elegant - an enormous amount of work must have gone into them.

The Hondurans love setting off these explosives that make loud noises. They've been doing it all week at every procession and during every mass. Basically, they are just rolls of gunpowder that explode and make a big bang. There are two major types. "Carreras de Bombas" (runs of bombs) go on the ground and have about a dozen charges. You light a fuse and the bombs explode one by one = huge racket. The other type are called "cuetes." They launch into the air, and then have two explosions. The two explosions go off sequentially, anywhere from a split second to five seconds apart. And I don't know if I've made this clear - the sound is ENORMOUS from these things. If you're not expecting it, it makes you want to cover your head and hide.

The cuetes are used much more, because they explode in the air, so you don't need a big clear space to shoot them off. For the processions, they set them off about every five minutes. You always here a whistling, then the first explosion, and then you wait until you hear the second explosion that you know if coming.

This was a scary thing that happened: I was at the back of the procession before we started, complimenting the leader of the crowd from La Ermita on how beautiful their whole setup was. I heard a cuete go off, and I watched it shoot up. But instead of shooting off 50 or 100 feet into the air like it's supposed to, this one seemed to fizzle. The first explosion was only about 20 feet from the ground. I had a moment of utter horror, because I knew their was a second explosion coming, and that cuete wasn't going anywhere but down. I can't really describe the scaryness of it - the moment seemed to drag on for a long, long time, and all the while I was thinking, "where is it going to land?" There were people all around.

After what seemed like minutes, but was really only about five seconds, suddenly there was the explosion. It was on the Ermita flatbed, right next to this little five-year-old girl in a pink dress. There was a moment of silence, and then the little girl screamed and started crying and everybody rushed to her. I could see that the lower part of her dress was in tatters. Her mom grabbed her and started crying. A man picked her up and put her in a nearby car - as he carried her, I could see some flecks of blood on her arm, but I couldn't tell how badly she was hurt. They drove her off to the red cross."

I'll save you the suspense I had and tell you that she was just fine. The procession passed her about 30 minutes later, and I stopped by to see her. She just had some minor burns on her arms and legs, and a few dots where gunpowder had spattered onto her cheek. But no serious damage or scarring. She was just shaken up. I guess that for all that noise, the cuetes aren't that powerful, because the explosion couldn't have been more than two feet from her.

But it certainly cast a pall on the rear end of the procession. I was quite shaken up. All along, I'd been thinking how dangerous all these explosives seemed, and then, right in front of me, there was this worst nightmare scenario of what could happen. Geez. And I will never forget how those seconds just dragged on and on while I wondered where that explosion would land.

On a funnier note, the man who was in charge of the La Ermita cuetes (who did not send off the one that hurt the girl - that was someone else) seemed petrified of shooting them off for the rest of the procession. Poor guy.

It seems odd to now go back to describing the fiesta. But after finding out the little girl was fine, I was able to relax and enjoy the procession. There's actually not a whole lot more to describe.

When the procession got the church, there was a big mass. The altar was decorated BEAUTIFULLY with palm fronds and branches and an arch of leaves flowers. The church was packed - standing room only and people crowded out the doors. And of course, bombs and cuetes going off the whole time. During one part of mass (the offering of the gifts), they brought up a bunch of typical Honduran products (cane, bread, tortillas) to offer up to San Diego. Again, I thought it was a really nice celebration of Honduran culture as well as a religious service.

That night, there was a two hour sing-along/concert leading up to midnight. At midnight, they sang Happy Birthday to San Diego. At 4am this morning, there was a prayer service. Or so I'm told, because I did not actually attend :)

Then, lastly, there was another huge mass this morning at 10am. A bunch of priests from nearby towns came in to celebrate as well. And again, they offered up a bunch of typical Honduran products during mass. The church was even more packed, if you can believe it.

But I think with that, the religious part of the fiesta is over. There is still a carnival set up in lower Talanga for the rest of the week, complete with Ferris Wheel. And there's a stunt car show tomorrow. But it's been a fun (and busy) week.

¡La Policia!

2005-11-10T15:01:00.000-08:00

Approximately four times now I have been stopped by the police.

The thing is that they have these "Puestos de Control" (Control Posts), where they randomly stop cars. The first time they stopped me, I was a little nervous. But they just asked for my license and registration, looked at them, and sent me on my way. I had an international driving permit that is supposed to accompany my US one here, but they didn't even ask for it.

It's interesting, though, because Lauren, who has driven around much more than me, has never been stopped even once. I don't know if it's because I'm male, or because I look more Honduran, or what. But it seems like more than just chance now that it's happened several times.

I also think that as soon as they realize I'm American (ie as soon as I open my mouth or show my license), they leave off. Once a police officer asked for license and registration, and when I said, "Just a moment," he said, "It's OK, you can go."

So yesterday morning, when they motioned me to the side of the road at the Puesto just outside Talanga, I thought, "Here we go again." And then, to my surprise, the police officer asked for a ride to a police station just outside Tegucigalpa. I was so surprised at first I didn't even know what to say. It's common to get asked for a lift, but this is the first time I've gotten it from a police office. After a brief debate, Fr. Lucian and I figured it could only help to make nice with the Talangan police.

She was a nice passenger. I realized later, though, I should have asked her why they keep pulling me over!

Fireworks

2005-11-09T15:33:00.000-08:00

We are in the midst of the 'Patronal', the celebration in honor of Talanga's patron, San Diego. Much of the celebration involves a particular community meeting at a location outside Talanga. Each aldea or parish sector makes a float on a pickup with a statue of San Diego on top. Then the community processes toward the church, with the church's altar servers in red robes leading the way, bearing a cross and waving incense. I am been to two of these processions, and I admire the effort and devotion involved in building a float and walking the distance in honor of a saint.

One other thing the processions, and the whole patronal, have in common is fireworks. Lots of them. The Talangueños love fireworks. Children play with them frequently, which gives us great worry when we see a little boy setting of an explosive with a fuse an inch long. Pyrotechnics are common to every celebration, even Mass, where they are exploded to mark the Consecration. So as we marched in the procession, people set off rockets on yard-long sticks in the middle of the street. Setting off rockets as cars passed by, right under powerlines, and near a crowd of people. These rockets go up to the sky and explode, which makes one's ears hurt after a short while, but then the stick - with a narrow point - falls down from a hundred feet in the air, in the middle of a bustling street. I worried someone might get impaled every time the sticks fell to the ground. Sometimes the fireworks don't go straight up and almost blow up a dog. All through the patronal, from the early morning till the night, you can hear booms going off.

This might strike US readers as a safety hazard, and it is, as are many aspects of Honduran life, from packing 25 people into a pickup (it can be done) to riding in the back of a pickup on the tailgate at highway speeds, or low electrical wires hanging in the park. In our overly cautious, litigous society this would be unthinkable. And it is a danger. May God have mercy on the souls of the people who market explosives to kids.

But at the same time, there is a freedom, an openness, and a serendipity here that our litigous society prevents. Maybe we are so worried about safety that we've forgotten to take chances. Which is better? I don't know. But it is a crosscultural comparison.

Today was a great day. I went in to the Casa Passionista and showed the internos how to make a tradition in my family - Christmas paper chains. When I was a child we'd make a chain out of paper links, each representing a day till Christmas, and tore one off each day to mark one less day till Santa. The internos got into making their colorful chains and hung them up in the Christmas display they'd already built.

Then we heard that the Casa Passionista's cemetery had become overgrown with tall grasses, so two of the internos led the way and showed me how to mow the grass with a machete. I had never wielded a machete before, and was surprised at how heavy it would be and how much it took to swing it after a while. The machete is a symbol of the Honduran campesino, so much that gift shops here sell ornamental machetes with national symbols embossed in them.
We worked hard and cleared the grass.

Then to top it all off, there was a rainbow on the bus ride home.

Feliz Dia de la Brujah

2005-11-04T10:54:00.000-08:00

Happy Halloween

Halloween, called El Dia de la Brujah (The Day of the Witch) started a series of holidays here. El Dia de la Brujah is somewhat controversial here, given the holiday's origins in celtic paganism, and some catholics won't celebrate it. Fortunately no one we know has those objections and we were glad to take part in this holiday that was fun and also a remembrance of home.

In the morning Todd and I went to ther mercado looking for 'calabazas' (pumpkins) for carving, and the closest we could find were 'ayotes', the local equivalent, which are greener and squatter with a much thicker skin. The muchachas had made cat costumes, and at the Casa P. we joined the internos in making costumes out of construction paper, including a lion, dinosaur, and angel. Todd made a crown and I made a pig 'disfraz' (costume) out of pink construction paper. I showed how to carve a pumpkin, and Don Corino showed me how it was done here by carving with a machete! We took the seeds and toasted them, and put faces into the ayotes. When it grew dark we lit the pumpkins and it reminded me of childhood Halloweens.

Then we explained trick-or-treating (truco o dulce, en Español) and hit behind the doors of the Casa P. with bags of candy. The internos in their costumes came around knocking on the doors trick-or-treating, it was great!

All Saints and All Souls days are sometimes passed over on the US catholic calendar, but they are big celebrations here. For all souls the whole town came out to the graveyard and decorated the tombs with flowers and crepe paper wreathes and crosses. The cemetary was a sea of color and took on a carnival atmosphere as vendors sold ice cream right in the cemetery!

We have started a new celebration, the fiesta patronal (patron saint's festival) here. Our parishes patron is San Diego, and we began with a holy hour. After presenting the Host, Fr. Lucian took the host and with the whole congregation following proceeded to march around the town in a candlelight procession, with people praying at every corner. There are eight more days of celebration in the fiesta patronal, with events from solemn prayer to four-wheeler races.

Poverty in Honduras

2005-11-02T08:09:00.000-08:00

I would like to describe the poverty that I have seen in Honduras, but I cannot generalize, because Honduras is a land of contrasts. The third-world poverty that I see here is very different from the images that North Americans have in their minds from the media.

When many norteamericanos think of the third-world, they think of infomercials that come on TV now and then raising money for some third world famine. They show emaciated children with flies, and then beg you to call an 800 number and solve the whole thing by pledging your money, money which often ends up lost in corruption or NGO bureaucracy. That kind of extreme poverty grips the majority of humanity. But those kind of commercials do a real disservice. In an effort to win money, they don't show the real situation in the country, or paint a complete picture. They also degrade the people they serve by portraying them as helpless and dependent on first world generosity. The reality is much more complex.

Honduras is the second poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, second only to Haiti. So a visitor would be surprised to go to Tegucigalpa, where there are fine dining restaurants, a large shopping mall attached to a supermarket and Costco-like shopping center, people talking on cellphones, young people dressed in the latest fashions, SUV´s, and fast food. Except for the Spanish signs, you could be in any US suburb.

Then you drive out of the mall and see disabled people begging in the middle of the road, and houses built of cinderblocks and cardboard.

Honduras is not absolutely poor; rather there is a huge disparity in incomes. The cost of one designer garment at the mall couldl probably buy enough cinderblocks to turn a cardboard home into something more stable. Much of the poverty is not seen because it is rural, out of sight in aldeas. Talanga, our hometown, appears at first to be doing relatively well, except for the dirt roads. I´m at an internet cafe right now, and there are cars and cable TV.

But if you drive the rutted and rocky road to Terrero colorado, the aldea where I'm working, you find a community with no electricity, little employment, isolated so that it is near impossible to get someone out in a medical emergency if its raining and the roads are sloshed, with no medical or dental care.

The poverty is not jumping out at you, and it comes up in ways you wouldn´t expect. Such as wanting to contact someone, and realizing they don´t have a telephone. Or, without a supermarket, having what you eat limited to what´s available at the mercado today. Or meeting children with special needs who have practically no resources at school.

I have gotten to know a family here in Talanga headed by a woman I´ll call Doña Luisa. Their house is made of wooden slats with many cracks and leaks - you can see the sun shining through the roof. The house is tilting to one side and looks like it could collapse on the inhabitants at any minute. All family members sleep in one room. They do their cooking on a wooden stove which has no chimney, causing the smoke to stay in the house and put them at risk for respiratory problems. Her two year old grandson plays in this house and could cut himself on the slats, the roof is so low in the kitchen you have to stoop. The little boy has dermatitis, her son is an alcoholic, and her mother sits in the yard all day because she has tumors on her ankles and cannot walk well. They have no source of income and live on ´´what Jesus provides´ as she told me.

So you would be surprised to know they have cable TV. Even the poorest families here find a way to pay for a television. It is a distraction and relief from the situation around them. There was such a contrast when I came into her house and saw wealthy movie stars on the screen, with the house crumbling around us.

Seeing this has given me a more complex picture of poverty. Today we are going to celebrate All Soul´s Day at the Casa Passionista, and will visit the graveyard of those who have died at the Casa P. and Rancho Pequeños Hermanos.

We're safe

2005-10-30T09:34:00.000-08:00

Just a quick note to let everyone know that we should get some extra wind and rain from Beta but that we should be safely out of harm's way. We'll let you know if not! ;)

Right now we're gearing up for a busy two weeks with All Saint's Day, the Day of the Dead, and then the Fiesta Patronal, the festival for the patron saint of the parish, San Diego. It will last from the 5th to the 12th with processions, Masses, and all sorts of carnival-like fun!

Evil black bugs and other fun details...

2005-10-29T12:05:00.000-07:00

There are evil black bugs in the aldea of Los Charcos. They leave welts that hurt and itch like crazy with red dots in the center. We got eaten alive by them and one of the welts tried to take over Lauren’s leg. One welt took over my left ear, it was swollen and red; beautiful but at least not too noticeable. People here tell us how it is and they didn’t say, “ew, your ear is twice the size of Texas!” so I guess it wasn’t too bad.

And the lady that lives in the vegetable house (the house we go to to buy vegetables) around the corner is recovering from dengue. I am wearing bug spray like crazy, that’s for sure. And sleeping under a bednet, which I have found 3 dead spiders on in the last 6 weeks but no mosquitoes so I guess that’s good news if I haven’t seen any of those pesky buggers. We have window screens on our two windows in our house so that helps keep the pest population down as well. And Father Neil lived here six years and never got dengue so I guess that’s good news that as long as we’re preventative we’ll be okay. Though our new friend Shapell, a Peace Corps volunteer, told us that he got dengue once. Yikes! We invited him to help with Earth Day since he’s pretty bored right now. He only has about 5 months left on his tour so he wouldn’t get to see the real Earth Day celebration, but he knows people in the mayor’s office and things like that so he could be a good resource at the least.

We are starting to get more into our work and projects and that’s been a good change from sitting around going to meetings and trying to find out what kind of work we can actually do. It feels good to be starting to act!

It’s getting colder here and I’m excited to go to Tegus tomorrow to buy a blanket so I don’t have to wear layers to bed to sleep under my two thin sheets. I’m also excited not to be sweating all the time or having the sun beating down on me. That means I can wear my shirts three or four times before I wash them now if I want. Just kidding, though I do wear them more than once. That pila is hard work and if they don’t sink or have stains on them, why waste the extra energy, right?

Well, that’s my two cents for now. And two US cents, not Honduran cents, which aren’t worth much! Take care and God bless you all!

Out of Wilma's Fury

2005-10-23T16:08:00.000-07:00

Don't worry, everyone, we are inland and far away from the coast, we didn't even get the heavy rains we thought we were going to get. The worst that came from Hurricane Mitch a few years back was flooding in the area, too, so we should be ok in terms of hurricanes this year.

Things are picking up here and we're getting busy (noted by a lessening of blog entries). The girls and I are making plans for Earth Day, hoping to start cleaning up Talanga. If our buddy Roosevelt, who has his round face on three huge billboards in Talanga, wins the mayor election we have grand aspirations of getting our faces up there saying something like, "The gringas say throw your garbage in the trash can!" Only more witty...like Smokey's "Only YOU can prevent forest fires." Something everyone will remember.

I have developed a new appreciation for the sound of running water. The pila and reserve tank only fill on Monday and Friday unless there's an exception and it fills on a day in between or does not fill on those days. The sound of that water trickling and giving us the water supply for the next few days is music to my ears. We feel like everything is right in the world those mornings. Especially now that we have the floods under control! And for the past 3 days I have woken up at 4am to the sound of water running in the pila, which I think may start driving me crazy if it keeps up, but I'm not going to complain about having water. If we run out we have to call a truck and buy water to last us in between.

In other sad news our shower head is not functioning properly and only trickles, but at least the water that comes out is warm. If we let it drip into a paila (basin for carrying water from the pila) for a while, we can dump it over our heads and take what we now call a "paila shower." Either way it gets you clean and the water is warm!

Other than that we have been having a great time showing Father Neil around, who arrived two weeks ago, is living at the Casa Pasionista, and is jumping right into pastoral work at the parish here in Talanga. The people love him and he has also been sharing his Tegucigalpa friends with us, who he knows from when he lived here 15 years ago. It's been good to have him here because he knows the ropes, culture, and language very well and has a lot of expertise to share with us.

Well, that's my two cents for now, I promise to try to be more up-to-date on my entries in the future!

Everyone Together

2005-10-21T16:43:00.000-07:00

If you were concerned about Hurricane Wilma, it barely rained here, thanks be to God. The storm hit the north coast state of Colon and the east coast state of La Miskitia, but where we were, all we got were overcast skies. We are four hours drive inland from the coast. The clouds did have the effect of chilling the temperatures, so we had the coolest weather here so far. I put on my sweatshirt for the first time then.

Two days ago we had days full of community together. First, we went to St. Paul of the Cross church in Tegus, for a celebration of the feast day of St Paul himself, the founder of the Passionists. I love masses in Latin America. The church was filled, and there was a band of over twenty musicians dressed in blue playing hymns in honor of St. Paul. Fr. Neil celebrated, and it was a coming home for him because he helped build that church. Like the music at the Casa P., it reinforced my identity as a Passionist. St. Paul was truly an amazing man, who dedicated himself to proclaiming the Passion.

The next day we had a big lunch in Tegus with everybody there - the internos, the doctor from the Casa P., all the priests, family members, Don Puri the director of the Casa P. and his nephew Alex who has been a great friend and help to us, in everything from driving us to Tegus to setting up our shower, and us. The whole family we have here in Honduras was in one place at one time, seated around the same table. We ate at El Patio, which is the restaurant to go to in Tegus, because it's kind of like Planet Hollywood but with a Mayan theme. There are colorful Mayanesque paintings and statuary everywhere, including paintings of men doing the I-have-to-go-bad dance outside the men's room. We ate pinchos, which are giant shish kebabs about two feet long. I loved the chance to spend time with the internos, as I always do.

Then later we had a Feast of St. Paul of the Cross our Founder at San Diego, our home parish in Talanga. Another great Mass, church was filled, and an icon of St. Paul and the Passionist insignia were placed on the altar. We did the collection. Padre Neil, a great preacher, said that since 'Neil' doesn't sound good in Spanish it should be thought of as sounding like 'miel', or honey.

After that Mass another family Pachanga (party) at the rectory, with all the internos and all of the musicians from St. Paul's in Tegus who came out for the Mass! We sang together and when I told the double bass player that I played a bit of electric bass back in the states, he insisted that I take up the huge instrument and play along! I had a great time plucking out the most basic rhythm that I could to the songs, and then played 'Come as you are' by Nirvana on the bass.

Today Todd and I went out to visit the Health Clinic in La Ermita, an aldea that we have visited before for Masses. We are interested in health issues here and what we could do to help. The staffers told us that the main disease they see is malaria, especially after it rains. They are also lacking medications they need. It was a good visit and when we went to leave with our truck, found it to be stuck in the mud. I got out to push, and when the wheels turned I got mud sprayed all over me. Then when we got it out of the mudpit the wheels were too slick to grip the steep slope out of the clinic, and we had to rock it back and forth again, but after some time, being splashed with mud, and the amusement of the storekeepers next door, we succeeded in getting the truck out.

Later on we traveled out to the largest aldea in Talanga, Corralito. It has about three thousand inhabitants, but their houses are spread out through the hills, and the settlement is very remote. It took us an hour and a half over crumbly roads to get to it from Talanga central, with some beautiful views of the bluegreen hills I've described in other entries. We had Mass, and as I talked with the people afterwards, I speculated how my life would have been different had I been born in Corralito and not Springfield, MA. What kind of education would I have? Where would I be now? What would my family be like, or would I have a family of my own already? Could I be dead or suffering from contracting a disease that would have been preventible in the states? What about the time I got a concussion playing basketball in middle school. In Longmeadow, it's just a short drive to the hospital. In Corralito its a long rocky drive, practically impossible if its raining. What would have happened if something happened to me and I could not get to medical care?

While waiting to leave in the rectory we had a visit from our friend Amelia. Amelia is an elderly woman who is senile who is usually found walking around the church. She is so sweet, and glad to see us, though its very difficult to understand what she's saying. As she left today she started dancing, spinning around as she went out the door.

Clinicas

2005-10-20T16:52:00.000-07:00

Being very interested in the matter of medical care here in Honduras, I've been busy the past two weeks familiarizing myself. The nearest hospital is in Tegucigalpa, so much of the primary health care is administered through "clinicas" - health care clinics. They can't provide specialists or surgery, but they can give consultations and provide medicines.

There are about half a dozen private clinics in Talanga, but, since many people can't afford those, I've visited three clinics that try to minister to the general population.

THE CENTRO DE SALUD (in Talanga)
The Honduran government, via the ministry of health, sponsors "Centros de Salud" (Health Centers) in most major towns. As it turns out, the Centro in Talanga is in charge of all the Centros in the area. We took a tour with the director, who's also the director for the other Centros in the area, two Wednesdays ago.

Centros have varying personnel, depending on the size of the town where they are located. Some of the smaller ones have only nurses. The one in Talanga has some 4 or 5 doctors and a dentist, in addition to nurses and support staff. Many of the doctors are just out of medical school; Honduran medical students are required to do one year of public service upon graduation.

The doctors provide health care and medications for 1 Lempira (basically for free). The problem is that there is very little money for medications, and they frequently run out. A very common complaint is that the Centro will give a prescription, but the patient doesn't have the money to actually buy the medicine. Another example: the Centro here has a half-constructed maternity ward that has been sitting for several years. The big problem is not actually the money to build the ward, but the money to pay the personnel once its constructed. So it sits unfinished.

To reach to communities where there is no Centro, the Centro de Salud has representatives who can provide very limited medications, and refer people to the Centro in Talanga. In addition, the Centro sponsors public health educators, who work in various communities educating people about healthy behavior.

LA CLINICA SOLIDARIA
I thought this clinic was a really neat idea. It was started less than a year ago by a pharmacist from Spain, who was working at an orphanage and left to help the public health sector.

The clinic is private, but non-profit. The basic idea is to provide self-sustaining, quality health care. Everyone who visits is charge a flat fee of 70 Lempiras ($3.50 in US dollars, although it goes a lot farther here). With that 70 Lempiras, they are given a consultation with a physician and any medicines they need (that the clinic can provide).

What is really neat is that with that 70 Lempiras per patient (actually, there are some types of visits that cost more, but that's the basic), the clinic is self-sustaining; it pays for medicines, doctors, and electricity. And 70 Lempiras is very cheap compared to the private doctors.ç

It was very high-tech - all the medical records and pharmacy orders computerized. New developments (building, technical machines, etc.) are paid for with donations from Spain. But everything else is self-sustaining. A really neat idea, I think.

And here's the neatest part. It is called "Solidaria" (solidarity) NOT because the doctors are in solidarity with the patients, but because the patients are in solidarity with each other. As the director explained it, some patients cost the clinic more than 70 Lempiras. But they make it up because other patients cost less. In essence, some people help pay for the health care of others, even though they don't realize it! I thought that was a fabulous idea.

Of course, there are lots of people that can't afford the 70 Lempiras. But for what it's trying to do, I think it does a very good job.

THE CLINICA IN GUAIMACA
The last clinic we visited was a free clinic run by the Catholic Church in Guaimaca, a neighboring town. It was started by a nun who is also a nurse practicioner about 3 years ago.

Basically, they have a team that is a combination of Hondurans and long-term (1 year or more) volunteers from the States. The one doctor is a Honduran woman. The money and medications are all provided for by Catholic parishes in the States that are connected with the parish in Guaimaca.

The clinic sees fome 40-50 patients a day. They also take medical brigades into the aldeas (mountain towns) every so often - particularly when they get a big short-term volunteer group.

The nun in charge was a wonderful guide. She had lots of pearls of wisdom about health care, two of which I'll share.

First, that one of the big challenges here is making long-term changes towards healthy behavior. She says they see lots of patients who come in every three months with the same problem because they persist in unhealthy behaviors.

Second, "en Honduras no falta doctores, falta la 'con que hacer'" (Honduras doesn't lack doctors, it lacks the 'with what' [ie supplies] to work).

The Centro de Salud has the same shortage of medications, so they help a lot by being able to provide medications for free. It was really neat to see the positive impact an organized faith group can make.

First - We're OK

2005-10-15T17:52:00.000-07:00

If you heard about the mudslides in Central America on the news - we're fine. We just caught the edge of Tropical Storm Stan, giving us just heavy downpours and washed out streets, thanks be to God.

For the people of Guatemala to our north, it was a natural disaster, with thousands buried under mudslides. Sites of former villages have been declared cemetaries. One reason the storm was so damaging is that the poor, needing land to build homes, build up on the steep hillsides where they are vulnerable to landslides. The same can be seen outside of Tegucigalpa, where as you drive into the city the hills are covered for kilometers with houses built of cardboard and cinderblocks all around the city. The people come into Tegus looking for work and the hills are the only place they can build.

We have some good news, and that is that Fr. Neil Tiedemann, C.P. has come to join us. Fr. Neil is a founder of the Casa Passionista and has also worked in the hillside communities. With Fr. Lucian, we have two priests now here with us volunteers.

Also it was good that Fr. Rick Frechette C.P. came to Honduras to visit. He is another Passionist priest who is also a medical doctor, who has spent many years working in Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. His accounts of work among the poorest of the poor were inspiring. His ministry definatly merits your prayer support.

Todd and I have spent our Sunday mornings for the past few weeks accompanying the women of the church as they bring the Eucharist to the sick, aged, and mentally and physically challenged of the parish. Then we go back and visit them again during the week. It is hard to be a disabled child here, with very few resources. Visiting the aged has been very moving - they are so moved to have a visitor. Many are bedridden. One man was emotional for me because he could not move, was thin, and could speak only in a barely audible whisper - the same condition my grandfather was in before he died not long ago. But he reached up and gripped my arm and did not let go the whole time we were there. It reminded me of how fleeting life is, and how I wish to be treated when I am old.

We have also visited more aldeas, and made return trips to Terrerro Colorado and Alto Viejo. For these second visits we went door to door, to introduce ourselves to the people and to find out what their needs are. One aldea said that they needed to form a youth group, and would like to buy land so they can build a chapel. Terrero, which is remote and a twenty minute drive in over bumpy roads, said that their greatest need right now is to build latrines, to combat disease, and to have a health center. The houses were separated in the pine woods for this one and we walked a distance between houses.

So now visits are going to be made to health centers to learn more about them and possibly how to establish one.

On today's agenda were driving lessons! I know how to drive manual, but navigating the roads here requires a different set of skills. First we practiced on the rutted gravel roads where we do much of our driving, and then on the carretera (highway) and after that navigating Talanga's streets. Thanks to St. Maria del Camino, I made it safely through my ´drivers exam´ and can drive between Talanga and the Casa Passionista.

The things I didn't realize I would miss: Fr. Neil brought us Peanut Butter! It was a great thing, I didn't know how much I liked peanut butter until living here.

Some Hondureñisms that are used here.

Todo Macanudo: Everything´s alright
Tuannis: Alright
Cheque: Alright, cool, fine
Catracho: The word Hondurans use to refer to themselves. It's not polite for an outsider to call someone this. It's kind of like calling a Canadian a ´Canuck´
Refri: Refrigerator

Las Aldeas

2005-10-06T14:13:00.001-07:00

Another of our ministries will be working with the "aldeas." The aldeas are little towns, ranging from 100 to several thousand people. Most of the ones we've visited have around 300 residents and 50 houses. They are often out of the way, in the mountains. Some of them are really hard to get to - as in the road is UGLY - first gear 80% of the time driving there.

There are some 34 aldeas that pertain to the Catholic parish at Talanga. Padre Daniel circulates around them, visiting a few each week. Most of them see him about once a month. So far, we have made quick visits to about 12 of them. For the visits, we go with Padre Daniel, and celebrate the mass. Afterwards, some family usually invites us in for coffee or a snack or even a meal.

Some of these aldeas are quite poor. Many do not have electricity, a few don't even have running water. Virtually none has direct access to medical care.

We are now investigating ways we can work in the aldeas. Last Friday, James and I went to visit one called Camalotal to ask about the needs. Today, all five of us went to visit another, called Terero Colorado, way up into the mountains.

It's amazing to me how hospitable the people are! We just walk up to their houses, unannounced, introduce ourselves, and ask if we can chat for a few minutes. And invariably the people (usually women since the men are at work during the day) invite us to their house or front porch to sit and talk. Sometimes they offer us food or drink. And they are happy to talk.

We want to visit a few more to get a clearer picture. But the aldeas look like a very promising area for our ministry.

A Day in the Life of Jaimelito

2005-10-02T08:57:00.000-07:00

'It's a beautiful day,
don't let it get away'

- U2

When I moved here my name changed to its Spanish equivalent, 'Jaime', and since then I've become 'Jaimes' (HAY-mz) and the diminutive 'Jaimelito'.

So you might have been wondering what a typical day is like in our ministry. At this point there really is no 'typical' day, but we are starting to get into a pattern of what we do. So here's what a day is like for me, noting that what a 'typical' day is, is likely to change during our year here.

On weekdays, I get up and have breakfast. When I came here I had apprehension about cooking but I am getting the hang of it. A normal breakfast here is cornflakes and eggs. The Honduran style of eggs, which I call 'eggs a la Suyapa' after our neighbor who taught us how to make them, is to make them sunny side up then flip the grease over the top to make a glaze around the egg. Then I eat the eggs in a warmed tortilla with hot sauce. Supplies like milk and juice come in much smaller containers here, but one thing I like is that unlike having to get into a car and drive to a supermarket, the mercadito where we get many of our groceries is right around the corner.

If its a day to go to the Casa Passionista, we go to the center of town to get the art supplies we'll need for our activities with the internos that day. Then we ride the bus in, careful to watch for landmarks in order to alert the busdriver where to drop us off. We get off the bus at the gates of Nuestros Pequeños Hermanos and walk the gravel road to the Casa P. We stay until after noon, after doing activities and most importantly just spending time with the internos. Some of the art projects we've done are 'bean art', in which you draw a picture on paper with glue and then stick beans on it to make a picture, and art with colored pipe cleaners. We have lunch there, and might watch a 'telenovela' (Spanish language soap opera) with them.

Heading back to Talanga, we catch the bus and walk to the Casa Cural beside the church. We are going to accompany Padre Daniel to an aldea, the outlying settlements around Talanga. Some of them are remote. We're going to take part in a Mass and introduce ourselves to the people who live in the aldeas. They are very welcoming and happy to have us there, and they are also happy to have a Mass. Since a priest cannot frequently make it out to an aldea services are led by lay ministers. Then we spend time with the people there.

Coming back, we usually have meetings to attend, such as the parish council. They are planning for a big celebration 'patronal' on Nov. 2nd in honor of San Diego, the patron of our parish.

We come back and make dinner together. A typical dinner would be catrachas, which are like tostadas, a fried flat tortilla with beans and chizmol on top. One night, having ganas for a taste of home, I made Irish beef and lettuce stew.

In the evening we read, listen to music, and write letters home.

If I'm not heading to the Casa Passionista, there is also much to do. We might travel in pairs out to visit an aldea ourselves. There we introduce ourselves to the people by going house to house and talk with them about what their needs are and how we could best serve them.

Or I might stay at the house to go shopping for food at the mercado or to be at home for the kind people who have been coming over to help us set up our house, from making curtains to fixing our oven to setting up our showerhead.

For myself, I might also work on my project of walking every street in Talanga and meeting as many people as I can. I have about a quarter of the town left to go.

So that's what the days are like today.

I also saw an amazing thing the other day. We were driving to an aldea and in the sunshower, we saw a full arching rainbow, the symbol of God's providence. Leprechauns probably don't live in Honduras though, so my hopes for a pot of gold were dashed. Then after mass we came out and the sky was clear but in front of us was a big cumulus thunderhead with lightning bolts dancing from one part of the cloud to another, arcing across the spaces and flashing. It was a lightshow that I watched as I rode back in the pickup.

Then that night, when it was dark, the power went out as it usually does when it rains. But with the city darkened we went outside, and the sky was completely clear and you could see every star, including the Milky Way in its brilliance. I have only seen the Milky Way a rare few times in my life, it was marvelous.

The Rainy Season

2005-10-01T18:49:00.000-07:00

One waterproof poncho: $6 at K-Mart
Keeping dry in a Honduran rainstorm: priceless

During the past week, I've realized that the most useful thing I brought from home was that poncho (thank you Bryan for finding it!). We have apparently now entered the rainy season here in Talanga. It rains about every day here. And not just rains. Pours.

We're talking get yourself soaked in 1 minute pouring. As in, "You are riding in the back of Padre Daniel's truck and you are done for" pouring. It's quite funny, actually. Sometimes it goes from overcast but not a drop at all to completely pouring in 30 seconds. And since all the streets in Talanga are dirt roads, the whole town becomes a quagmire.

It's rained every day this past week, sometimes twice a day. But I guess we're getting accustomed to it. And I love that poncho! The next thing is big rubber boots for us all, so that we don't have to play hopscotch through Talanga in every rainstorm :)

Hot shower!

2005-09-28T11:17:00.000-07:00

Maybe the shower head that heats the water was a purchase we could have done without, but I'm willing to say it was a great buy! Though the fact that it took a few hours to install because they had to run an electrical line into the bathroom made me feel a bit spoiled. But I know that after a rainy October day (we've been warned about the nasty rains coming our way), I'll be glad for the hot shower before going to bed. And nothing makes me feel truly clean like a little bit of warm water.

I've been enjoying the visits to the aldeas and the fact that we're picking up the pace. We are hoping to get insurance on our truck soon so that we can drive it, but we'll see. Things just don't work here the way they do in the US so you have to take it as it comes. I don't have a whole lot of interesting things to say, but for some reason I felt the hot shower was newsworthy.

It's getting rainier here and that means we're having more power outages, but so far it hasn't been a big deal. As long as we can cook, I'm happy. The other night we were without it for the whole night and it was pretty hot without our fans! That was the longest we've ever gone.

We had a great day cooking for the internos at the Casa Pasionista on Monday and it was a relative success. Except that the faucet in the kitchen broke and they have to turn the water on with pliars until they get it fixed. And a few oil burns. Some of us are still mastering the art of cooking with hot oil, which is involved in most meals.

Well, I had better go find Todd for lunch, we are the 2 staying in Talanga today and had to split since this internet cafe only has one computer working with the internet today. The smell lunch of the family who owns this one is making me hungry!

Pastoral de los Enfermos

2005-09-25T10:10:00.000-07:00

This morning I went with the "Pastoral de los Enfermos" - ministry of the sick - of the Talanga church. The ministry is a group of ladies who visit the sick of Talanga. On Sundays, they take communion to the sick, who can't make it all the way to church. They also bring a little food - some beans, rice, and bananas. And then, during the week, they visit again.

I went along today with two nice ladies to visit 6 "enfermos." Two of them were "niños especiales" (children with mental disabilities). The rest were elderly who were either bedridden or unable to make it all the way to church.

At each house, we'd walk in and say hello, and set up a candle and the communion on a table or stool. We'd then have a little miniature 'service' - say some prayers, sing songs, give the communion, and exchange the sign of peace. After the little service, we'd usually stay and chat for a bit, and give the food we'd brought.

We stayed about 10 minutes in each house. Even more time was spent walking (we covered a lot of ground!), so it took over 2 hours in total.

My favorite visit was to one of the niños, a little girl who smiled and giggled at me the whole time through. Her mother held her in her lap through the entire service. She also had three brothers and sisters looking after her.

And I traveled far and wide - we were really on the outskirts of Talanga. Our last two stops were in a barrio on a hillside that looked much, much more rural than the rest of Talanga. Instead of dirt roads they had grass, the houses were spread out and much smaller. And every house had a penned in area with chickens and horses and pigs. You see those animals in the streets of Talanga where we are too, but here they were just all over the place.

It was a very interesting day. But I am a little pooped! Until next time...

Cleaning the Pila

2005-09-24T10:12:00.000-07:00

First let me start off with the experience of washing clothes. The pila is about 4 feet deep, 4 feet wide and 5 feet long. It's a concrete basin full of water. Set above it is a little washbasin with a separate drain and a washboard surface on the bottom. I feel like it's a blast from the past when I do my laundry because you have to scoop water out of the pila into the washbasin area to wet your clothes, sprinkle detergent, and scrub away. Then it takes quite a bit of water to rinse each garment. The clothes are line-dried and have the texture of cardboard when done. It's not that bad, but bad enough that I iron every single thing I wash after it dries down to my underwear. It takes quite a while to wash the clothes and you know they're pretty clean when you're sweating profusely and soaked down the front of yourself from the vigourous scrubbing and rinsing. It's actually a lot of fun, I never thought of doing laundry as a form of exercise!

It's the cleaning of the pila when it empties that's not so much fun...it collects algae and dust and forms a nice, brown mud (spa treatment, anyone?) at the bottom. Our neighbor was going to teach us how, but we were completely without water and I knew that the water was going to run yesterday so I decided to take matters into my own hands. There's a plug in the bottom that Todd pulled out and then I had to sweep the nasty mudwater out of a hole that's about the size of a 50-cent piece (the drain is not in the low spot, go figure). This was all while standing inside the pila. Then I had to bleach the walls and sides and sweep THAT water out. Afterwards I put the baggies of crystals that keep mosquitos from making the pila their home on the bottom and plugged it up and prayed that the water would come soon. Thank heavens it did, within half an hour of when I finished! And not while I was standing inside the pila, though on hot days I'm often tempted to jump in to cool off...except that we need to keep the water clean.

Other than that we're staying busy and starting to visit the aldeas and caserios (outlying communities) with Padre Daniel for masses and to get to know the areas. They're very rural but the people are very nice and hospitable and the kids don't know what to make of us. Mostly they just stare but some of them are okay with talking to us if we start a conversation. And they're all so dang cute!

The country is also beautiful. When we went to Valle de Angeles and climbed in elevation on the way, the valleys were so green and the hills in the distance were such a great backdrop. And it reminds me a lot of Washington with all of the pine trees. So amazing and green and still rather natural! I can't describe it! This really is a beautiful country.

Meeting the Cardinal

2005-09-20T16:55:00.000-07:00

Yesterday we had the honor of meeting His Eminence, Oscar Andreas Cardinal Rodriguez, the spiritual leader of Honduras. A Cardinal is a bishop who can vote for the pope and wears red garments. He is a very charismatic and interesting man. He is a candidate to be the next pope. He flies his own airplane and helicopter, and he can speak eight languages. And we are grateful for his support of our project. We were speaking with him in Spanish, and he would sometimes speak in English, and when another man walked by he spoke with him in German! The Cardinal talked with us about the social problems facing Honduras today. I'm thankful that His Eminence took the time to meet with us, and come the next conclave, I'll be rooting for him!

To get to the seminary where we would meet the Cardinal, we had to ride southwest of Talanga high into the mountains, into the pine cloud forest. I rode in my favorite way, in the back of a pickup, with the wind in my face and the sky above me. The winding road took us to higher altitudes, where the air was cool and crisp. Along the way we would stop for the vista, which is better seen than described. To see the looming Honduran mountains over a green-yellow plain through the mist looks like an image from a Luminist or Hudson River School painting.

We stopped in Valle de Angeles, a touristy town known for its artwork. There were many stores selling handcrafted art from local artisans. Some had images from the Mayan glyphs, others images of idealized Honduran villages with white churches and houses, and relicious iconography such as images of Our Lady of Suyapa. The talent to create these works, especially the intricately carved wooden chests, was impressive. I bought a keychain with the seal of the State of Honduras on it. Our group bought a hammock. I am hoping that the profits from the sale will stay local and actually go to a local artisan and not to a factory somewhere.

For lunch we had popusas, which are a Honduran-Salvadoran dish of a circle of bread with cheese or chicken inside. They are very good, and filling. The neatest part was behind the popuseria.

They had a giant slide, called a 'Tobogan'. It was a concrete chute with no guardrails about sixty feet long with twists and turns. For 5 lempira you could ride down it on a plastic bag.

In the USA, we call this 'Liability waiting to happen.'
In Honduras, we call this 'Really really fun.'

I bought my plastic bag, went to the highest chute and barrelled down the slide, then did it again. Thanks, popuseria!

A Free Honduras & a Haunted Cave

2005-09-18T11:33:00.000-07:00

Two days ago was Honduran Independence Day, known as the Dia de la Patria. This was a big event with a lot that led up to it. The schools had spent the days before mostly preparing for the parade. The day could be compared to the fourth of July, except that the colors here were the white and blue of the Honduran flag. Parades, with parade queens, food, cotton candy and icies, notables giving speeches, military marches, and so on. During the parade both soldiers and schools did a salute I hadn't seen before, where they get down on one knee as a group and raise their arms to mid chest height.

I rose at 4:40 that morning to go cook. Each social group of the parish was going to make a different food or beveridge to sell during the festivities. I was working with the 'Emmanuel' youth group, who were making 'elotes'. These are ears of corn shucked and crisped in a fire then covered with butter, salt, and grated cheese. We put corn into the flames until it was time to go to the parade.

After that I put on my favorite sombrero and walked around the festival, waving at folks and looking for conversations. I bought carne asada from another group's booth, but there I was reminded that standing in line isn't really a part of Honduran culture. Whether you want to buy a dish or get in the communion line, you have to assert yourself.

Later on, some boys took us volunteers to show us where the cave was. I've done some hiking in the cerritos, the hills outside of town. I'd been told there was a cave somewhere, but I was warned by an old woman that the cave was haunted and that I needed to go in groups. So we went up and down three cerritos, past a futbol field in the middle of the woods, and saw the triangle shaped maw of the cave in a cliffside. I went in, and kept going in as far as the light would permit. Without a flashlight, it *was* rather spooky, and in the depths of the cave I thought I saw a shape moving but it could have been just the light. Would like to go back and explore sometime.

Yesterday I climbed the highest cerrito of the range, which was actually a ridge, about double the height of the previous one I'd climbed. At point the trail was a near vertical rockclimb with slippery rolling rocks. But at the top the view was spectacular, and since it was a ride I could see for miles on all sides off until the blue hills. Thought about how ancient this land is and could envision the Maya climbing this hill to survey their lands. Up there alone with the wind, the hawks, and the thin pines that cover the hills here. There is so much natural beauty here.

Our Ministry

2005-09-14T18:33:00.000-07:00

You have read the previous postings about our travels, trips to Tegus, and setting up our house . So I thought I should write about the ministry we have been doing at the Casa Passionista.

We have spent the past three weeks getting to know the 'internos' or residents. We've started friendships, and at this point we are creating activities for the internos to enhance life in the Casa P. To get there you catch a morning bus out of Talanga, which is tricky because there aren't regular bus stops and not all busses have the same stops. So you get on and the driver tells you to stand all the way in the back, then later you have to push your way back forward through the crowd with a lot of 'con permisos' and then stand up at the front and time it so you don't miss your stop. But the busdriver kind enough to drop you off right in front of Pequeños Hermanos if you ask. (The orphanage) It's a nice walk in along a dirt road through Honduran hill pines then up to the house, where we greet each other with the traditional peck on the cheek.

Yesterday the muchachas did a great painting activity. They brought watercolors and everyon expressed themselves in art. The internos painted beautiful flowers and birds. Or painted designs significant to them or from nature. Everyone seemed to have a good experience and enjoyed creating something. Kudos to the muchachas for planning it.

We've also taught the card game Uno, had conversations, facilitated a Bible study, played Pictionary, chatted about music, and learned English. We're thinking up new activities to do with the internos.

They have also shared there lives with us, including Carino who is a craftsman of keychains.

Today we returned from a busy day in Tegus getting the rest of our household supplies. Had lunch at the mall, which is a surreal experience, to go from rural Talanga to a Mall lifted out of US suburbia. Its a strange cultural shift. Part of me wants to avoid any taint of my old culture and immerse myself in the new. But at the same time, I cannot romanticize poverty and this mall might be a symbol of economic empowerment. I don't know what to think.

We're going to be turning in to bed early tonight, because tomorrow is El Dia de la Patria - Independence Day. We are all rising early to cook foods to cell during the festivities with the different social groups of the parish.

¡Mas fotos!

2005-09-11T20:04:00.000-07:00

Here are a few more photos for everyone:

Padre Daniel, the pastor of the Talanga parish, on his birthday. Notice the message on the cake we gave him: "Feliz Cumpleaños. Sin Bombas." - "Happy Birthday. Without Bombs." That refers to the fact that at midnight on his birthday, the parish youth came to his door with fireworks and gave us a huge fright (see earlier post).

This is us at the Casa Pasionista, about to have lunch with some of the internos. Puri, the director of the Casa, is the man in the red shirt on the left.

Another photo of us at the Casa Pasionista.

And here we are, the volunteers, riding in Puri's enormous, 12-passenger van on the way home from Tegucigalpa. Let me tell you, Puri sure can handle that monstrous van on the hectic streets of Tegucigalpa!

That's all for now. More soon!

Caminando, Caminando

2005-09-11T17:34:00.000-07:00

'So Paul and Peter walked.
They did not ride,
they had no chariot and they could not fly.
So Paul and Peter walked.'

- Salamander Crossing

The past weeks have been filled with listlessness. I've come to Honduras with zeal, ready to start projects, wanting to begin right away. Then to find, that projects cannot begin until one knows the community, knows the language, knows the town and cultures and mores. So we have spent these weeks getting acquainted with our neighbors, introducing ourselves at Mass, being guests at people's houses. This is important, and the lesson I have been taught many times by Honduras is *patience*. But I have been itching to do something real, something to make me feel like I am being effective. But the means are not in place.

So I have started to walk. And walk. The word in Spanish is 'caminando'

I began my walks to get to know the area outside the central square and church, where we live. I've since walked most of the streets in the town. I start with no destination in mind, hoping to let Talanga discover me as I discover it. My goal at first was to learn the layout and geography of the town, but it's become so much more than that. It's been a chance to get to know the people on their own space and own terms, too see poverty in effect and love at work. It's been a chance to go to the parts of Talanga where few if any gringos have been before, even though Talanga is already off the beaten track.

I set off down a road, sometimes aiming for a sector of town I haven't been too. Along the way, I greet everyone I meet, usually with a '¿Como estan ustedes? (how are you doing, polite) and hope that conversations with happen, and they often do. I'm a curiousity, a gringo walking into places I might not be expected to frequent. But that's where the connection can be made. Once a conversation starts, I have learned so much about people's lives, their struggles. They have welcomed me into their homes and had me play with their children. They tell me about life as lived firsthand. They bear with my Spanish and we have spent long periods of time just talking, just learning. I introduce the Passionist volunteers and myself, and answer their questions about us and the USA. They give me ideas for ministries. Then on to seek more conversations, with at this point is the most genuine way I can find to interact with the people. Or sometimes I go into a Pulperia (sort of a convenience store run out of someone's house) but something like a snack, and chat with the proprietors. They are interested in having me here.

In doing so, I am trying to follow the Passionist mission of accompaniment, 'walking along with' or 'being with' people, especially the crucified of today. One part of me feels that I am not really doing anything - I'm not teaching classes for example, or doing something immediately and tangibly 'productive' here. But I am being with the Talangeuños, with alongside them, being with them, and that has to mean something.

For example, I went up to the people who dwell on the cerrito, the rocky hills on the edge of town. Their houses are up rocky pathways, and I marvelled at the strength it must have took to haul the cinderblocks they used to build their houses up the hill. I saw a girl running down the hill at full speed over the stony path - barefoot. At the top there was a great vista of Talanga, and a ¿Como estan ustedes? started a conversation with the people who lived at the very top. They were probably curious why a non-Honduran would go up there, and I was interested in their lives, high up and separated from town. They too welcomed me into their home.

Sometimes if its raining people ask me to come inside. I've learned that each small barrio of Talanga has its own name, and distinctive people. The only problem is the many stray dogs of the town, who guard their territory by coming close to nipping you on the road.

I will post more about who I meet on my walks again. Continuing, caminando.

¡Viva la Pachanga!

2005-09-10T10:14:00.000-07:00

'Even if you don't know all the steps,
you must learn to join the dance'

- Jethro in 'The Prince of Egypt'

Yesterday was what we call in Massachusetts a 'wicked fun day.' I've had many moments recently when I've thought 'I love Honduras' and this was one of them.

We woke up in the morning on Lauren's birthday. At nine we were to head to our friend Karen school to join in the celebration, because today was the national Day of the Child. Karen teaches at an elementary school called Ecuador, because somehow it's sponsored by the Republic of Ecuador. It was interesting to see Latin American cultures supporting each other. At the school it was joyful chaos. Kids running everywhere and loud pop playing from huge speakers. We went to Karen's classroom and played with the kids, showing them pictures on the digital camera, chatting, and giving back rides. Then there was a rally with all the students, and after that they got on the bus to go swimming. I decided to go swimming too and walked back to our house to change. Good idea, because when I got there, there was mini-flood No. 3! It wasn't as big as the others. The reserve tank, which is elevated above the bathroom, was filling and the splashes were falling on the floor. We worked together to sweep it out, building dams out of towels. Once our house was restored to its antediluvian state, we got on the bus and rode to the pool. It felt soooo good to dive into the cool water. The children went into the wading pool, and we started a kids vs. grownups splashing war. There was a turtle swimming in the pool with us.
After that the kids ate something like tostadas but with a different Honduran name.

After that Padre Daniel took us out to eat fried fish for Lauren's birthday. You pick the fish out of the bucket and its a skill to eat it around the bones, and it tastes great. We rode in the flatbed of the pickup again and, as I do every time I ride that way, I marvelled at the beauty of this land, the green-blue hills especially.

On returning we started to get ready for our 'pachanga', or party. 'Pachanga' is less formal than 'Fiesta'. The cause for celebration was Lauren's b-day and also to celebrate with and thank the neighbors who have helped us so much. Since I'm slowly learning to cook I took on the task of running errands to the mercadito to buy ingredients and watching the kids. Karen's son calls me 'James Bond' so we played spies and superheroes.

The only downside to the whole day was that I find when I get frustrated with the language, I tend to 'zone out' and not follow what's going on, so I miss the details. I nearly spilled the beans about the party. I'm going to have to work on staying focused in following spoken spanish.

As the pachanga drew closer I rolled taquitos. I never knew that tortillas actually have two different sides, called 'the face' and 'the back', like a coin. You have to put the chicken on the 'face' before rolling it. Then they are fried with the nachos to make them crispy and rich.

We announced the party for 7. I decided to get dressed up and put on my dress shirt and tie.
But I resolved one thing. I would NOT dance. I don't know why I dislike dancing so much, maybe I'm just not coordinated. So as the music began to play I just bobbed my head. Then the guests became more and more insistent that I join, and I finally gaved in and one of the Doñas led me through a number. Then I realized that I already look ridiculous enough and it can't hurt to look any more so, so I joined in with gusto. I ran to my room, grabbed my sombrero, and it must be a magic dancing sombrero because I got my groove on. I didn't know the steps, but the women were glad to show me and we danced till 11. I had a great time, so much fun! One lesson I've learned here is that things are usually bigger worries in your mind then they actually are its its better just to try things, it's rarely as hard as you think its going to be.

We danced to the cumbia, merengue, Latin pop, and punta, which is the music of the Afro-Caribbean culture on the north coast. We had a piñata, and I yelled 'Muerta, piñata, muerta! (Die, piñata, die!) as I swung my bat. Then we put a birthday cake on a low table as the crowd gathered 'round and had her 'blow out the candle', but instead someone smooshed her face into the cake! One person grabbed frosting, then another, until cake was flying everywhere in a frosting fight. We smeared it all over each others faces. We had a good laugh and washed ourselves out in the pila. Pictures will be posted.

Today we're going to continue the festivities by planning a chongengue (another word for party) for the 'internos' (residents) at the Casa Passionista.

¡¡Talanga!! ¡En foto!

2005-09-07T12:08:00.000-07:00

Let´s start with a map of Talanga. As you can see, it´s just south of the road to Tegucigalpa. It´s also divided into eight "barrios" (neighborhoods), each of which has a different color (or white) on the map.

Here´s a shot of Talanga from above. What you see is about a tenth of the town - it´s the red sector in the map above.

And here, finally, we have Talanga from the ground. This should give you a feel for the town. All the streets are dirt roads, the houses are all one story. Most of the streets around town look like this.

Here´s another typical street. What you don´t see is all the stray dogs that are everywhere. Nor the chickens. Nor the holes that are always popping up as they put in an underground sewer system.

This is the "calle principal" - the main street of Talanga. It´s formal name is the "calle San Diego", named after San Diego, the patron saint of Talanga. This is the busiest street in Talanga. It´s lined with shops on either side, and it´s usually teeming with cars, bikes, and pedestrians.

And, while we´re on the subject of streets, this is our street. You can just barely make out our house on the left. It´s the first one that´s strikingly white.

One very convenient thing about our street is that on either end there is a "mercadito" (a little market). So we actually don't have to stock a lot of stuff in our house. When we want to eat, we can just hop on down to a mercadito and by what we need for the meal.

This is a shot of the church from outside. We spend a lot of time in the church, since we're so involved with the parish here.

And here´s the church from inside. It´s pretty simple: stone walls, wood benches, plain scaffolded ceiling. On Thursdays, the have an "hora santa" (holy hour) and they decorate the altar beautifully. They put tons of effert into it. Also, you can´t make it out, but the crucifix is extremely lifelike.

Here´s a shot of the "plaza central." I think it´s so pretty. Out of view there are basketball courts where kids are always playing.

This is a shot of the office building for the municipal government. We got a tour a few weeks ago and got to meet the "alcalde" (mayor).

This is a gigantic tree that grows on the outskirts of town. It is ENORMOUS! I think it must be a thousand years old. They call it "La ceiba." Ceiba is the type of tree. I guess when you´re that big you earn the "La."

Diluvio

2005-09-07T10:22:00.000-07:00

'Rain, rain on my face.
Hasn't stopped raining for days.
My world is a flood.
And slowly I become,
one with the mud'

- Jars of Clay

These lyrics pretty much describe the past few days. It's the rainy season, which as one friend told me, 'sounds like something from the Discovery Channel.' We've had daily monsoons. The first one turned a good part of our street into a river that you could ride an inner tube on. Our roof is made of tin, so when it rains hard the sound is so loud that its nigh impossible to hear what anyone is saying. The next day it's hard to navigate the streets. The next day our pipes broke and the house was flooded, but we got our mops and brooms and swept it out. With the help of a Kool Operator (our favorite fan) we dried out the house soon enough.
It rained again this morning, and for the walk to the internet cafe we slogged through the mud and I jumped over some construction holes. My recurring mantra is that 'It's all a part of the adventure.'

The gas prices have gone up to over $4 a gallon. When we went into Tegus yesterday, we couldn't reach one of the stores because the taxi drivers were on strike about the prices, blockading the roads. They are burning tires to block the streets. I didn't see this by hand but read it in the paper the next day.

Today we've been advised not to go into Tegus or ride the bus to the Casa Passionista because of the demonstrations and, some might think, anti-US sentiment. So as a result, I'm stuck here in Talanga and bored, with nothing to do but go to the internet cafe and write monster blog entries. We have lunch (almuerzo) with a friend of Padre Daniel a little later on today.

Last night we went to a meeting of one of the parish sectors, Luz de Cristo (light of Christ). The parish of San Diego where we work is divided into sectors, with names like Luz de Cristo or the Immaculate Heart of Mary. The sectors are almost all run by women. After fervent prayer and scripture discussion, I was given a piece of cake to celebrate the birthday (cumpleaños) of one of the children, and Lauren took it and put the frosting on my face! I wasn't the only one that this happened to, apparently it is some kind of tradition. Then they put on dance music and we began to dance. I respect the culture, but I was less than enthusiastic about participating because I don't care much to dance. But with the encouragement and coaxing of the members of Luz de Cristo I grooved - a very little. We had a late dinner of beans and eggs, where I realized that I really need to learn how to break eggs as I got yolk all over the kitchen. My bad. Mixed the eggs with chorizo and scrambled them and they came out pretty well.

Open the floodgates...

2005-09-05T12:28:00.000-07:00

Oh, wait, they already were.

The good news: we have (or at least had for a few hours) running water and some water in the reserve tank.

The bad news: our house flooded this morning.

The girls and I woke up in the rectory with the intention of eating watermelon for breakfast, climbing the cerrito and taking a nice shower, which I hadn't done for real in almost 3 days. If a cold shower can be considered "real." Instead Lucian was chatting with us over the watermelon when he got a call from Todd...

Todd woke up to the reserve tank filling in the middle of the night and everything was cool, but at 8 this morning we woke up to a puddle. Fortunately the boys we able to move our dressers in the living room and dammed off that room and the kitchen in order to keep the water mostly flowing out the front door. The culprit was our toilet, which had a disconnected hose. I'm sure most the reserve tank water wound up in our house. It wasn't the first flood since we've been here and I'm sure it won't be the last. We cleaned up and made ourselves a brunch, after which I finally got my cold shower. It was the best one I've had so far.

In other news...I often feel like an animal in the zoo due to the fact that many rural people have not seen white people before, at least not too many. We went to visit Olma's (our neighbor) classroom last week and when we walked by one house a little girl asked her mom who we were. The mom replied, in wonder, "Se llaman GRINGOS." Later that day we sat down by a group of schoolgirls and one sat down next to me and started showing me all of her homework. Her friends followed suit and I was surrounded by a crowd of staring girls. Slightly disconcerting, what do you say/do when surrounded by staring eyes?

Like Kathy, I too have found a Honduran boyfriend, but he is 2 years old. His name is Daniel and he is the son the people who run the internet cafe we frequent. He is probably the cutest 2-year-old I have ever seen. I have a year to devise a plan of how to kidnap him. Ok, maybe not a boyfriend but still, I love that baby, we're buddies when I come to the cafe, right now he's sitting next to me eating an apple.

Well, until the next time...hopefully the water will be running then and not flooding.

Dance, gringos, dance!

2005-09-04T11:24:00.000-07:00

Why do I feel so loved by the Hondurans? Because every chance they get, they call us up to the front of the church to dance. Really, I think they're glad we're here so they can get a kick out of us. No, that's not true, but at the rate this is going, we will be choreographing dance more sultry than Brittney's so they don't get tired of our moves. And I found out, thanks to the moves of our friend Alberto, that shaking your butt in front of the congregation is not taboo so dancing like Brittney may just be ok. At any rate, we have windows in our house now and the curtains for the doors have been made. I'm glad that a call to the US is only 20 cents a minute via internet since we can't use phone cards. Talk about being cut off, at least we have internet cafes at our disposal!

Katrina is all over the front page of the news here and I am aghast at how poorly the disaster has been managed. The US is being ridiculed for how it has handled things and even the gas prices here are spiking. Over $4/gallon. Well, I had better post this and get off to lunch. The boys are living in the house and we're cooking there now. I would also like to start moving some stuff into my room now that the windows are in and I can somewhat keep the dust out. Take care and keep us in your prayers!

Boda en las Aldeas

2005-09-04T11:00:00.000-07:00

Yesterday we were invited to attend our first wedding ('boda') in Honduras, by Padre Daniel. The wedding was to take place in an aldea, called Jalaca. The aldeas are the remote, outlying villages of Talanga. They are small hamlets of a few houses, located far out in the countryside. To get to this one, we had to ride the pickup (with me riding in the back again) along a hilly, rough dirt road with mud pits and steep slopes, through the hills to get to Jalaca.

After coffee at the house of a Doña of Jalaca, we went to the wedding. To get there we parked on the gravel road and walked along a path covered with dry cowpies to the wedding site. First we met a group of Delegates of the Word. They are a catholic lay organization in Honduras. There are not enough priests to say Mass in all the aldeas every Sunday. So the Delegates are laypeople who are trained to hold Liturgies of the Word, i.e. a service like Mass but without the Eucharist. The groom was one such Delegate. At the wedding there were about fifty people sitting outdoors in lawnchairs with the couple in the center. People of all ages from the aldeas from kids to seniors. One took up the guitar and we began a lively wedding Mass, and I was able to pick up the words to some of the songs. I felt privileged to be a guest there. Here I got to take part in the celebration of a rural Honduran wedding, something many gringos probably don't do. It was so simple yet moving.

During the wedding chickens walked around in front of the altar and cows with humps and their backs lowed beside.

At the moment that the priest married the couple, I swear that a dove, the symbol of the Holy Spirit, took off from the roof.

After the final song we were served tamales, which in this case consisted of sticks of cornmeal covered in melted butter. An acquired taste, but not too bad. They were quite filling and I was only able to eat half the dish.

We were not able to eat long because there started a torrential downpour. Good timing, because it happened about five minutes after the wedding concluded. We made it back to the pickup in time, and managed to squeeze all five of us into the truck. Though the last time I rode in the flatbed of the truck in a rainstorm I have to say I actually had a pretty fun, though soaked, time. I like adventuresome stuff like that.

Last night we had another blackout. We lit a candle and hung out, and took the opportunity to enjoy some cerveza. There is one brewery in Honduras that makes all five types of Honduran beer. The two I have tried are Imperial and Salva Vida. Imperial is thick and hoppy, with a rough aftertaste, not my fave. Salva Vida is more like the Miller Lite of Honduras, thin. The words 'Salva Vida' mean 'Lifesaver'.

When the power came back on, we watched 'Napoleon Dynamite', a great movie, on Toti's laptop. It's about this geeky guy who says random, funny things. In the Honduran spirit, we watched it with Spanish subtitles. It was interested to see how they translated phrases like 'Peace Out'. So here is a short phrasebook of Napoleonisms en Español.

Eng: Gosh!
Span: ¡Cielos!
Eng: What the frick?
Span: ¡Rayos!
Eng: Liger
Span: Legre
Eng: Peace out
Span: Paz, adios.

The Future Imperfect

2005-09-02T15:09:00.000-07:00

Every day I have been sitting down and studying my Spanish grammar. I'm already able to talk about the future and the past, but there are all kinds of complicated forms I have yet to master, such as the Future Imperfect, which means 'I will have been doing that'. The way to do it is memorize conjugation tables. This shouldn't be hard because I took Latin, but then again Latin isn't actually spoken and as you're slowly reading a Latin text you can check the conjugation tables, not so in spoken Spanish. So I've been reciting them, coming up with rhymes, anything to get these lists of tables in my head without stumbling through a conversation.

But the grammar term 'future imperfect' also seemed to fit this situation. We don't know what the future holds, and it's certainly going to be less than 'perfect', as will our efforts, but at least we're working for a better future.

One of the best ways to practice is to read the daily paper, which has written spanish in all different verb forms. I've been trying to follow the New Orleans disaster and what a catastrophe it is and how inhumanly the refugees are being treated.

This morning I did one of my favorite things in Talanga, climb the cerrito (hill) from the top you can see all of Talanga and the blue-green hills beyond. From above it almost looks like a picture of Italy, with the red tile roofs. There's a plateau at the top where you can enjoy the view or hike along to higher cerritos. When I need to think for a while, that's where I climb to.

Yesterday I got to do another fun thing - ride in the back of a pickup, Hondureño-style, at highway speeds. It's exciting to see the campo whiz by, to have several near-death experience with two trucks trying to pass each other at once, and friendly waves from those we pass. Lauren was driving, because she is one of two of us who can drive manual, and guess who the other one is? So soon it will be my turn to get in the truck and navigate the Honduran roads.

The freaky thing about these roads is that as they go through hilly Honduras, they have no guardrails. That means your tires are roiling about two feet away from a precipice of doom. It's even that way in Tegus, with no guardrails on bridges and sheer dropoffs by the sides of roads.

Today Toti and I dissassembled our beds and moved them to the new house, where we'll be spending our first night tonight. I actually kind of like the hobo/hippie lifestyle of living out of a duffel bag wherever we lay our heads, but its good to have a firm base to live at. Also, living in a public room and sleeping while the parish secretary was at her desk and people we knew and didn't know moved in and out of the room as we left our stuff unguarded was an experience to be concluded soon.

Last night I learned how to cook and omelette, mostly by being the guy to cut up the ham and avocadoes. After every meal I feel stuffed, which makes me feel also guilty because we, undeserved, have plenty in a land of hunger.

I have now also completely run out of clean clothes, I'm on my last shirt and jeans. So now I have to learn how to use the 'pila', a washboard and concrete pit of dark water that we somehow use to wash our clothes, and lacking a yard we will be hanging them from a clotheshanger in the spare room. Add 'washing machine & dryer' to the list of things I never appreciated until now.

While preparing the meal, the song 'I'll lay you down in a bed of roses', I think by Bon Jovi, came on the radio, and we all started singing along in loud voices to retro rock. It must have been interesting to our hosts to hear us belting it out.

Last night we had Holy Hour. It's like a Mass, but there is adoration of the Eucharist and the host in not consecrated. (Catholic jargon) It's a prayerful time to experience the presence of Christ, and I am glad to have access to them when they are so hard to find in the US. Also on a lighter, (or should I say heavier) note, it's a time to realize that the kneelers aren't padded here, so kneeling for long periods of time is another test of patience.

After lay preaching by Señor Garcia, a friend our ours and great host, he played some dancing music and as the crowd clapped and praised the Lord, he invited people up to dance. At first Fr. Daniel, then Fr. Lucian, and (as we shrunk down and tried not to be noticed) us. So we got up and grooved like gringos as loud music played in the church. Slightly embarrased, but it sure was fun, it reminded me of the Charismatic masses I've attended before.

After church is Talanga social hour on the church steps, when the whole town chats, it's the main social event of the week. Then suddenly, a total power outage. Blackouts are common here, but its the first time I've had one at night. It was completely pitch black, not a light on in town. I couldn't see a thing, or anyone. I took the job of guarding the door while the muchachas went to try to buy water in the dark and Fr. Daniel lit a candle.

Then I looked up, and I saw so many stars. I've only seen stars like this on a few rare occasions in my life. With no lights at all, I could see every star in the sky, and the Milky Way. It was incredible, and it made me realize how rural we actually are here. Then the lights came back on and we went to learn how to make dinner.

Everyone reading this, I'd love to hear from you! Getting mail is such a blessing here. You can post a comment to this article or write me at finavenko at gmail dot com. I didn't write out the address proper to foil the spammers.

paz y amor,

Jaime

My Honduran Boyfriend

2005-09-02T13:54:00.000-07:00

Well, I knew it was bound to happen, I just didn´t think it would happen so soon. So I found my Honduran boyfriend. His name is Tulio and he owns a ranch in Olancho and sells cheese to people in Talanga. I think we´re going to have a very happy life together. Haha. Well, ok not really, but if he had it his way Tulio and I would already be married. So...just the other day Lauren, Laura and I went to a little store/restaurant to buy some Coronas (it was a long day!). After paying we encountered a man in his 50s by the name of Tulio. Because of our apparent beauty he decided to buy us each a beer and regale us with his tales of cheese and horse riding. Apparently he took a liking to me and asked me for a photo so he could "look at me every minute of his life" BARF. I politely declined and then told him we all had a dinner date and had to leave. I don´t think I´ve ever seen anyone so dejected, but I just can´t envision myself living on a cheese ranch.
In happier news, our house still isn´t ready and it looks as though we´re going to continue being guests in the rectory for a few days. There are supposedly windows and doors being installed today, but the most important thing we´re waiting for is the water. Apparently we have a reserve tank that supplies the water to our faucets and it needs to be filled. I think one of these days I´m just gonna hop up on the roof and fill the tank myself with a bucket. At least it´s a nice big house and we´ll be a little less cramped than in the rectory.
I´m getting used to life in Honduras, although I could live without the mosquitos. We´re learning how to cook like Hondurans, which in my book is a great thing - the food here is magnificent, though I do miss Washington apples! We haven´t really figured out what kind of work we´re going to do at the parish in Talanga, but we´re having a great time with the "internos" at Casa Pasionista! We're already planning our first pachanga!!!! (party) I´ll let you know how that goes! Well, keep us in your prayers!! More updates are soon to come!
Peace

Honduran Hillsides

2005-09-02T13:53:00.000-07:00

You probably think that I´m going to write about how beautiful the rolling green hills are here, green trees as far as the eye can see. Or how the hills rise up to meet the clouds in a blue-green haze. In part, yes that is very true. However, what is amazing to me is what lies on the other side of those hills! I cannot really even put into words how ridiculous it is, the amount of make-shift/shabby houses put together with scraps of metal, wood, and whatever they can find just lying around. It is incredible! These houses are set on the edge of these cliffs that are a straight up shot from the road below. I don´t know how anyone could possibly climb these "stairs", especially the elderly. These shacks are filled with generations and generations of family, surviving on very little, but getting by mainly on the companionship they share with one another.

It really puts things here in perspective. Granted, yes it is quite frustrating that out house isn´t finished yet, but compared to these compilations of garbage and scraps, my patience could use some practice. Our house is absolutely beautiful in comparison to these homes that I´ve seen. I love being here, I love the people, and I am truly blessed. One of my favorite things is the sky before it storms. The clouds seem to be speaking, continuously in conversation with one another about the rains to come. It is just breathtaking! It is my favorite time of day! Please continue to pray for us, the Honduran people who have been so generous and hospitable, and the people barely getting by in their homes on the Honduran Hillsides. Our prayers are also with the people of New Orleans as they try to rebuild what has been lost. May the God of love and compassion watch over them and fill them with hope in this time of loss, sadness and mourning.

Chongengue

2005-09-01T15:46:00.000-07:00

First before anything, please pray for the people of New Orleans that God will help them after the Hurricane.

It's about five in the afternoon and I just got back into Talanga after an eventful day at the Casa Pasionista and Nuestros Pequeños Hermanos, (Our Little Brothers), an orphanage with about six hundred kids that owns the property of the Casa P. It began at 5 AM. Even though I'm a young person and biologically our clocks are designed to get up late and stay up late, from time to time I like to get up early for mass. It's like the Trappist monks who rise at 3 AM, you just get so much more done with your day if you get up early.

Getting up early wasn't a problem, thanks to the barking of the two german shepherds who guard the rectory, and fireworks going off in front of our house again. This is the second time we've awoken to loud booms. The reason is that today is El Dia de la Bandera (Flag Day) and when we left the rectory at six we saw the policia and schoolchildren in uniform raising the blue and white Honduran flag.

So I convinced myself that I wanted to get up early for morning Mass at Pequeños. Father Lucian and I rode in on the bus. Riding a Honduran bus is an adventure. There really is no designated bus stop, just an area of town where the busses congregate. Each one is its own enterprise with a spraypainted sign on the front saying what towns it serves, and usually below that, some religious declaration like 'Regalo de Dios' (gift of God). It arrives when it arrives, and is usually full, so you pack many to a seat or stand.

You don't pay right away. An attendant comes up to you after the bus is in motion and asks you which town you're going to, and the fares are different per town. All are incredibly inexpensive. A ride from Talanga to Tegucigalpa costs 19 lempira, a little less than a $1USD for a thirty mile bus ride. Since bus stops are a relative thing the bus stops where you ask to the driver to stop or when someone on the road thumbs down the bus. During the ride, the driver is usually blaring Latin music and people get up to sell you things. On a recent ride a man got up an tried to sell medicine, suspicious looking pills that reminded me of an old-time snake oil salesman.
Fellow riders are interested in who the gringos are riding the bus and so there's usually conversation.

Lucian and I caught the bus in and had a small Mass in the senior's home at the orphanage. One nice thing they do is they house 'orphaned' seniors as well without family, who then provide a grandparent figure for the children. Pequeños Hermanos has a worldwide volunteer network and I met volunteers today from Minnesota to Germany. One thing I thought was hilarious. In the portable 'Mass Kit' the unconsecrated hosts were stored in a Pringles Can! I couldn't help laughing.

After that the wonderful cook at the Casa P. made Lucian and I a great breakfast of refried beans, tortillas, and platanos fritos (fried bananas.) For each meal its superfluous to list tortillas and beans because there are part of every breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Fr. and walked off our breakfast with a hike through the Cerritos (hills). The landscape of Honduras is like the Berkshires in MA, frequent abrupt hills covered in trees. However the trees here are all thin conifers and thinly spread, so there's a layer of grass underneath.

Later on, we had a tour of Pequeños. It's on a large ranch, with a school, farm, and tradeschool, serving children from infancy to young adulthood.

After that we hung out with the 'internos' (residents) of the Casa P. and ate pollo frito (fried chicken) and we got to teach together an impromptu English lesson to one of the internos.

We are talking about organizing a party for the internos, and the term for fiesta in Honduras is 'chonguengue', which I hope I'm spelling right. We figured that they would like to have some fun and celebrate like people outside the Casa P. can. Dancing is in order.

Yesterday we went furniture shopping, and went to a furniture/electronics store called La Curacao, which I thought was funny because 'Curacao' is also a type of rum. The Passionists bought us a refrigerator, and the store gave out crowns like Burger King. Two of the women in our group wore them to the Casa P. and gave a crown to an interna, who was crowned 'reina', (queen). Her smile was wonderful.

Back in Talanga, we are anxiously waiting to move into our house. Living out of travel bags has gotten tough. The community has done a lot of work to prepare the house, and together we have cleaned out the dust that seems to be everywhere. With all dirt roads and many passing cars and motorcycles, dust gets into the air and into everything. My feet are covered with it.

The problem is water. Running water is iffy and we have a reserve tank above the bathroom but its not filling. We're trying to figure out if it's supposed to fill by itself or whether we need to have water delivered by truck. Also we had a mini-flood. But all of us are ready to move out of the rectory and set up our own home. In the meanwhile, we're still crashing at the rectory.

One problem in Honduras is the dogs. They are walking around all over town. There is no neutering or spaying as far as I know so there are all these dogs without homes. Many are hungry and diseased. There's one dog with a big tumor or goiter on his throat, with ragged fur, and so skinny you can see their ribs. Usually the dogs just walk around town but a few get territorial and agressive. Walking down the street I saw another german shepherd, I thought it might be rabid, look at me and start growling and baring his teeth. I walked away but he kept growling like it was going to bite, it freaked me out.

Our trip to Tegucigalpa the other day was otherworldly. We rode into Cerro Grande outside of Tegus on the bus, and then rode into town in our friend Puri's van. Tegus drivers are loco, and I don't look forward to driving in the city. Steep hills, steeper than those streets in San Francisco. Cars and bikes buzzing everywhere, cutting each other off. NYC driving is crazy, and there it's mostly level and the streets are wide. But then we got to the commercial center, and it was as if I had been transported back to Western Mass. Pizza Hut, T.G.I. Fridays, and PriceSmart, the Honduran Costco/Sam's Club. Big overdecorated buildings and big box developments. Save for the signage en Español, we could have been in US suburbia. We ended up eating at Wendy's, which was actually the same price as in the US. Also, Honduras seems to be where US brands go to die. I had thought that Little Caesar's pizza had gone out of business and hadn't heard of Benetton clothing in years, and both seem to be doing well in Honduras.

The whole experience was unnerving. Here I had gone to Honduras to work with the poor and live in a rural area, and here I was in the middle of USA commercialism. I didn't know what to think. Should I be sad that our excessive capitalism is infecting Central America? Our should I be glad that it's bringing jobs and economic development (I hope)? Am I idealizing or romanticizing a poverty that I don't have to suffer through? It was a shock going from the poor life of Talanga to seeing 5K plasma TV's on display.

In the process, we bought a refrigerator, shelving, and dressers, and kitchenware. Our refrigerator I think is being delivered by pickup truck. I also saw the jerseys for the various Honduran futbol teams, of which Olimpia is the favorite in Talanga. I wanted to get a jersey but felt uncomfortable with the big Coca-Cola logo on the front.

Also, we saw ribbons being made. When you get a present wrapped in a Honduran 'almacen' (department store) they don't just stick a ribbon on, they weave and tie the ribbon right in front of you.

Also we had dinner at our neighbors house last night. Their table was covered with pictures of the late Pope Juan Pablo II and Cardinal Oscar, the Cardinal of Honduras and runner-up for the papacy. There is a great devotion to JPII here, they love him, and I saw a picture of him with Our Lady of Suyapa, the patron saint of Honduras.

Who is Our Lady of Suyapa? She's our Mother the Blessed Virgin Mary, but more specifically she's a 6-inch tall statue in a shrine in Tegucigalpa. The legend says that she was found in a cornfield. There are two churches for her, a large cathedral and a smaller shrine. The cathedral was closed so we went to the latter to pray before the statue. She's tiny and in a glass case with a ring of gold around her. Not to be disrespectful, but I initially thought Our Lady of Suyapa was kind of silly. A tiny statue, c'mon! But I prayed to her anyway.

My prayer was granted. I mean this seriously. Our Lady of Suyapa does intercede for Honduras. If the statue is a challenge, think that its just another title of Our Lady, like Mother of Sorrows, Star of the Sea, etc.

I'd love your responses and comments. Paz y Amor.

Nuevo Sombrero

2005-08-30T19:40:00.000-07:00

Hi to all my family and friends who are reading this blog for the first time after I sent out that mass email.

Short entry today, because the internet cafe closes in twenty minutes. I came by earlier today, but as happens often, there was either no power or no internet connection or both. Living in Honduras is an exercize in patience. Few things are open when they say they will be, the power isn't always long, things take much longer than they 'should'. But 'should' is a relative term. The hectic ratrace is no better. It's just an exercize in self reflection. Estadounidenses ('Americans') expect everything immediately, fast food and so on. Nothing here happens immediately, and you have to adjust your mentality to an entirely different timeframe.

Today I went to the mercado by myself. The mercado is like a marketplace inside this concrete shell, with narrow walkways between vendors. I went to look for a hat. I've been wearing sunscreen and a cap and sunglasses, but I'm still getting 'quemado' (burned). So I thought a good idea would be to do what the campesinos (fieldworkers) do and wear a cowboy hat. It shades all around. But when I walked it I was greeted with shouts of 'El Guapo! El Guapo' This was unusual because this is the first time I have ever gotten catcalls. I didn't know whether to be flattered, annoyed, conscious of my privilege, or all three. But after making it through the calls and into the mercado I found the perfect cowboy hat. I must have a big head because I took the largest size that they had. When I asked 'cuanto cuesta' I was surprised at the answer. 50 lempira. That equals to about 2.50 US dollars for a hat that would cost 40 dollars plus in the states. It made me more aware of the rate of exchange and what we value.

Almost in the house!

2005-08-28T15:12:00.000-07:00

We'll move tomorrow if we have a bathroom door and running water. The house looks great though I hope that we get dressers or something of the sort soon. Living out of a suitcase is getting old...I can never find anything!

To add to Todd's midnight description of Padre Daniel's birthday celebration, we had barking dogs outside our window going nuts and I thought it was a gunfight. Fortunately, Kathy and I were able to seek refuge in Lauren's bed where she comfortingly wrapped her leg around us.

In other news, James, Kathy, Lauren and I went to the children's Mass this morning and Lucian was presiding. He did such a great job! He introduced us to the kids and some drunk guy said something unintelligible in the middle of it, to which Lucian replied, "Excelente." I almost died laughing. Then Alberto, the keyboard player, invited the 4 of us up to the front of the church and had us dance while he sang some song I couldn't understand except that part of it was shouting out the movements. Super fun, making myself look like a goon is one of my favorite hobbies as most of you know. :)

The Hondurans have shown amazing hospitality so far and they are so interested in us and happy we are here, it's wonderful and makes the transition a lot easier. I just hope Olma, our next-door neighbor, will be ok answering all our questions about how to survive. Literally...we don't even know where to buy food or how to wash our clothes. It's crazy...like I'm starting over again and have to forget just about everything I learned growing up. What an adventure!

Well, I think I've gotten my money's worth...off to the rectory to entertain myself somehow. Maybe I'll finally try to reorganize my bags.

Random Observations

2005-08-28T15:00:00.000-07:00

I've tried to get started with journalling and letter writing here in Honduras, but its tough to structure my writing. Being here has been a constant stream of input, of being very busy and then downtime, of riding in the backs of pickup trucks to new towns or spending the whole day in the rectory. There's so much to express that my English major training is going awry and I'm just jotting down some random observations. Here are some things I've noticed, most having to do with contrasts with Los Estados Unidos. They are in no particular order.

People don't let others into the line to go to Communion. It's a crowd that pushes forward and you've got to assert yourself to get in line.
Dogs walk in and out of church during the mass.
No matter how you call home, VoIP phone, phonecard, it always costs 20 lempira per minute.
You can usually figure out the price in dollars by dividing the price in lempira by twenty.
Speed limits do not apply.
Neither do laws about riding in the back of a pickup truck. It's the main method of transportation.
Did you know you can fit 14 kids into a pickup? Neither did I.
Houses cling improbably the sides of steep cliffs.
There are no designated bus stops, you get on where you get on.
People are innovative with small businesses. People come up to you on the bus to sell you pizza in saran wrap. A ventriloquist entered a restaurant where we were eating and came up to our table.
Most restaurants serve only one dish.
Coke is not a luxury here, people drink it like water because its safer than water.
Very small children are walking around the street unsupervised at any time of day or night.
A one way to celebrate birthdays is to set off fireworks in front of someone's house at midnight.
The statues in churches here are very lifelike and graphic. No Resurrucifixes here.
People are so hospitable that you wonder if you're imposing.
Members of the opposite sex great each other with a peck on the cheek.
All police and security carry huge automatic rifles, and people walk the streets with machetes.
All the silly domestic laws of suburban USA, leash laws, public drunkeness laws, speed limits, noise ordinances, all don't apply.
You realize you have to trust people, you've got no other option.
You realize how much downtime you really have, and you don't know what to do with it.
The sidewalks aren't level, the next slap of concrete is two feet above or below the first one.
A urinal that's above your waist.
Seeing elderly and physically challenged people begging on the steps of the Basilica and you know you can't give to them all but they see you has having means and they're right.
People don't worry about liability, elevated platforms, spikes sticking out of walls, no one worries.
Masses are always packed, it's amazing.
People put declarations of faith on the windshiels of their trucks.
When you order fish in a restaurant, you get to pick which dead fish you want out of a bucket.
There aren't really individual houses in Talanga, just blocks along a row that flow into each other of one story homes.
One church in town is surrounded by barbed wire, it freaks me out.

More random observations to come.

Jaime

Bang in the Night!

2005-08-27T17:33:00.000-07:00

Last night, a little after midnight, I woke to the sound of gunshots.

At least that´s what I thought for the first two seconds I woke up. As it turns out, it was Padre Daniel´s birthday, so at midnight, a bunch of the teenagers showed up at his door to sing. And they brought with them these ridiculously noisy fireworks, that I swear sounded like guns going off. But as soon as I woke up, I heard them singing and figured out what was going on.

I got another fright though when I opened my eyes. There were all these black silhouttes jumping at the window, and loud bangs and flashes of light from the fireworks, and even though I knew what was up, I got so scared. For a moment, I think I knew what it must be like to wake up to an angry mob at your door. Yikes!

While we´re on the subject of things that have given me a fright - Honduran drivers pass each other like madmen! Is there a blind curve coming up? A hill? Another car? And is that a big 18-wheeler truck we´re passing? No problem! We´ll pass anyway!!!

Of course, it´s not quite like in the US. They´re all driving much slower here. And people help you pass them - being passed doesn´t seem to constitute a threat to masculinity the way it does in the US. It´s probably more necessary when you have speedy cars, big trucks, and the occasional ox-driven wagon all on the same two-lane road. Lastly, the Hondurans are happy to make a third lane in the middle of the road if necessity dictates.

But nonetheless, it is scary when you pull out into the other lane to pass, and cut right in front of that truck back into your lane just moments before an oncoming car whizzes by. At least, it was the first few times :)

In other news, we have continued getting to know the people of the Talanga community and the Casa Pasionista. Here´s a funny story: the ladies at the Casa have taken to imitating Lauren, Laura, and Kathy, who do this little dance whenever they leave. I think it´s cute.

Alright, until next time. Hopefully I can get some pictures up soon!

Santo Borracho

2005-08-24T10:46:00.000-07:00

We went to the park last night and met an old man named Santo who works in the park making sure nothing is amiss and he was drunk. It was rather interesting - he told me I was more intelligent than James and that Kathy and Todd should marry each other. The little kids her are adorable and the youth of the parish are really friendly and very involved. Padre Daniel (the priest here in Talanga) has the most infectious laugh I've heard in a long time and I love the noises Fr. Lucian makes when he eats good food. Those are my observations for now.

We have arrived!!!

2005-08-22T16:51:00.000-07:00

At long, long last we´re finally here. I´m typing from an Internet Cafe in Tegucigalpa, about 2 minutes walk from the church.

We took off at 6am this morning from New York, and by the time we got out of customs it was 1pm in Honduras (which is right now the same as Mountain time). The day has been packed!

We were picked up at the airport by Padre Daniel, who is the pastor (priest in charge) of the Talanga parish and also by a man named Purificacion, who is the director of the Casa Pasionista where we will be spending some of our time. On our way out of Tegucigalpa, we stopped for chicken sandwiches at a gas station.

From there we drove to the Casa Pasionista, where we got the full tour, and met some of the people living there. During the drive, I was pleased to find that my Spanish was up to the task of communicating well. I tried as much as possible to pick the brains of Puri and his nephew for cultural information.

Before we left the Casa, we were treated to a surprise welcome cake. Then, we piled all the residents at the Casa into the van and drove to Talanga. The parishioners (members of the parish) showed us the house they´ve been preparing for us. It is beautiful!! Four rooms, much bigger than I expected. And they were so happy to see us and so happy that we liked the house. I was really, really touched. Also, the house is only a minute´s walk from the church, and our next door neighbor is one of the parishioners who helped get everything ready.

Which brings me more or less to the present. The house isn´t quite finished yet, so we´ll sleep in the rectory (pastor´s house) tonight.

¡Hasta pronto!

The efforts of the Bishop in Honduras

2005-08-18T08:51:00.000-07:00

Human Rights in Honduras

2005-08-18T08:19:00.000-07:00

Amnesty International has done research into Human Rights issues and violations in Honduras. They include targeting street kids and discrimination against LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender) people. Here are some of the links

Transgender Women Living in Virtual Prison

http://web.amnesty.org/library/index/ENGAMR370112004

Extrajudicial Executions of Children and Youth

http://web.amnesty.org/library/index/ENGAMR370012003

Priest Targeted for Protecting the Environment

http://web.amnesty.org/library/index/ENGAMR370092003

AIDS in Honduras

2005-08-16T00:25:00.000-07:00

I've done a little research about AIDS in Honduras, and here's some of what I found. Unless otherwise indicated, all information comes from either:
- the 2004 Report on the Global Aids Epidemic conducted by the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS). The report analyzes census data from 2003.
- or 2005 information on AIDS in Honduras provided by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) which provides $5 million annually to combat AIDS.

Global Perspective: Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest regional incidence of AIDS - 7.5%, with some countries as high as 40%. The Caribbean has the second highest incidence at 2.3%. Central America has the third highest regional incidence of AIDS, estimated at 0.9%.

Regional Perspective: Honduras has the highest AIDS rate in all of Central America; estimated at 1.8% - 63,000 people - in 2003. Even though it holds 17% of Central America's total population, Honduras accounts for 60% of reported AIDS cases in the region.

Some Numbers: Of the 63,000 people with AIDS in Honduras in 2003...
...3,900 were children.
...33,000 were women.
...4,100 died that year.

Regional Prevalence: The prevalence of AIDS in Honduras varies by region. It's highest by far in the Cortes region in the Northeast of the country, particularly in the large city of San Pedro Sula; it's also high in the capital city, Tegucigalpa.

Testing: The majority of people in Honduras do not know their AIDS status. In 2003, only 1% of the population sought testing from government-sponsored programs.

Stigma: There is considerable stigma against people with AIDS in Honduras, to the point that they may be shunned or abandoned by friends and family. This stigma has been identified as one of the major obstacles to an effective response (source: article on the stigma against AIDS in Honduras).

If you want a little more information, that report by USAID provides a good, concise overview.

It's almost time

2005-08-15T08:17:00.000-07:00

The two weeks of home time are almost up and It's hard to believe that I'll be departing in less than a week. When I first heard that we would have two weeks before leaving the country, I thought "What am I going to do with all this time?" I thought of travelling, or doing some volunteer work. But as I look back I have spent the past week not "doing" anything, and that's exactly the right thing to do. I could have travelled, but I'm getting ready for the biggest trip of my life; I could have volunteered, but I'm getting ready for the biggest volunteer project of my life. I will spend the next year doing those things, but these two weeks are the last time I will have with my family and friends in a year or more. So I have been spending the time hanging out, catching up with friends old and new, some I haven't seen in a while, because I know that I will not get to see them again for over a year. I think this is important, to say goodbye and keep connections alive with people back home. I've learned to appreciate time with my family so much more. Last night we had a "Family Game Night", something we haven't done in a while, and over Sorry!, Scrabble and LifeStories we spent important time together. Going away has made me reappreciate what we have as family all the more. This is important work, just as important as volunteering, the process of saying "Goodbye."

Today I am taking my younger brother to a rock festival, the same one that I went to eleven years ago. It makes me feel old, to be kind of passing things on to the next generation. But it also gives me a sense of having really grown up, and being ready for the responsibilities ahead.

Make a Donation to PVI

2005-08-10T22:52:00.000-07:00

As volunteers with the Passionist Volunteers International, we really appreciate all your thoughts and prayers during the year. If you're interested in making a donation, we would be truly grateful! Even the smallest donation means a lot.

Here's how to do it:
- Make your check payable to "Passionist Volunteers International"
- If you want to earmark your donation for the scholarship fund, write "Honduras Scholarship Fund" in the memo line. If you want to earmark the donation for the medical brigades, write "Honduras Medical Brigades" in the memo line.
- Otherwise, write [your name] in the memo line.
- Mail it to:

John DeGraaf

526 Monastery Pl.

Union City, NJ 07087

(That's the Passionist office in New Jersey).

Thank you!

Inspirational quote to top off the post:
"If you can't feed a hundred people, then feed just one." - Mother Teresa

Who are the Passionists?

2005-08-08T23:04:00.000-07:00

Our volunteer organization, the Passionist Volunteers International, is run by the Passionists, an order of Roman Catholic priests. I myself had never heard of them before I applied to their program, so here's some information.

The Passionists are a religious order of priests within the Catholic Church (like the Jesuits or the Franciscans). What that means is that they are not necessarily in charge of parishes or churches. Instead they receive duty assignments from superiors within the Passionist order, which is based in Rome.

The Passionist order was founded in 1725 by St. Paul of the Cross (check out his life story). The Passionists' charism - the particular gift they seek to bring to the world - is to keep alive the memory of Jesus' Passion. (Jesus' Passion refers to his suffering, death, and resurrection).

The tasks performed by the Passionist derive from their charism. In particular, the Passionists try to see the image of the crucified Jesus in the poor and suffering of the world. They see Jesus' crucifixion as a call to heed and care for the poor. Through prayer and service, the Passionists minister to the marginalized throughout the world.

So how does this all apply to us, the volunteers in Honduras? It means we're going to Honduras to serve the poor and suffering, and to try to see Jesus in them. There's ample precedent - the Passionists have priests in almost 60 countries throughout the world. They spent about ten years in Honduras from around 1983 to 1993.

One more thing that's particularly important to us as Passionist volunteers: the idea of accompaniment. Accompaniment is a way of relating to those we serve; it means that we're they're to walk with them and develop relationships with them. The idea is that it's more important to be with the people than to just throw aid at them, and that the service is just as much in the relationships you develop as in the tangible services you provide.

Well, this was a lot of writing. I hope it wasn't too boring for everyone! If you'd like to find out more about the Passionists, look here (it's a really good read!).

PS
The picture at the top of this post is the Passionist insignia. The words, "JESU XPI PASSIO" mean "the Passion of Jesus Christ" in the languages Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, respectively - the languages of the early church.

Baxter

2005-08-03T14:48:00.000-07:00

Oh, Baxter, you are my little gentleman...

I'm so glad that Lauren loves Will Ferrell. And more than I do - I didn't know that was possible. But I'm glad that we found a house with a third bedroom so we'll have a little more space. I just hope our outhouse is as good as if not better than the one at the last house. (By outhouse I mean detached bathroom, but don't worry we DO have running water.) At least the smaller house had it. This will be quite the adventure, this simple living thing, I might come home come and convert to being a mountainwoman or something, who knows? Well, it is almost time for another scrumptious meal with the Passionists. Until the next post...(probably won't be until a week after Todd erases this one at the rate I'm going)

Catholic Social Teaching

2005-08-01T20:02:00.000-07:00

Hello again, hope that some other folx will add their thoughts as well. Today we had a daylong presentation on Catholic Social Teaching. This is what I think Peter Maurin (early Catholic Worker) called "the dynamite of the church." What the church has to say about injustice and inequity is radical, revolutionary, powerful - and most people don't know it exists. The church has so much capacity to be a revolutionary force. You look at what most people would define as a "radical" point of view - choosing for the poor, the right of workers to organize, dignity in work - and to my surprise that's what the Catholic Church teaches in papal encyclicals!

Catholic Social Teaching is one of the motivators for why I became a Catholic. Even though I was baptized as an infant I consider myself a convert because I chose to accept the faith later in life. Beforehand I was involved in various justice movements but I was distant from the Church, thinking it conservative and a defender of the status quo (which unfortunately it often is.) But then I discovered people like Dorothy Day, Archbishop Oscar Romero, and people who lived out social teaching for a change in the social order. As Maurin said, if we could only "explode the dynamite" - the latent capacity and power within our church - than we can change the structure of society for the benefit of the poor and marginalized. If you think the church is Pay, Pray, and Obey, then check out Catholic Social Teaching - its a whole new way to view Catholicism.

Tomorrow, since the Passionists are an NGO, we're getting a tour of the UN.

paz de Cristo

Back from Pittsburgh

2005-07-30T20:10:00.000-07:00

Well we've travelled from Monastery to monastery, having returned to the Bishop Molloy Retreat House in NYC. I've grown quite accustomed to living in this setting, and really see the draw and appeal of the monastic life, at least for a while. I spent most of the nine-hour drive back in dreamland, so it passed pretty quickly, but along the way we stopped at the Provincial HQ of the Passionists. We saw a collection of prints of Vatican City by Michaelangelo and an icon of St. Paul of the Cross. I liked seeing this icon because it portrays him as a young guy reaching out. One should not judge by appearances, but many of the images of Paul around the monastery are rather severe, reinforcing the image that the Passionist are dour because of the suffering they focus upon and not joyful in bringing Christ. There seems to be a new movement of great looking modern iconography coming out, with images of Dorothy Day, Gandhi et al. illustrated using the ancient techniques.

This whole orientation has been a flurry of activity - going out into the city, shuttling from one city to another, meeting people - there's always a sense of movement, of restlessness.
Tonight we chilled though, since this is a rare free day. We played card games and freshman-orientation-icebreaker type games and then watched 'What About Bob'? a funny Bill Murray movie.

Tomorrow we have the choice of two masses to attend, both at the same church. One featuring a Jamaican choir, the other una misa en espanol. We can go to either, based on our preference depending on where our group is going, but I would like to attend both.

paz de Christo,

James

Barbecue on the Monastery

2005-07-28T16:21:00.000-07:00

Thursdays here, and I've done another thing during orientation that I never thought I would do. First we went on a boat tour around NYC, then spent a few days living in a monastery, and now we just had a cookout on the roof of a monastery. Well, a few years ago I never expected I would be going to Honduras either, so God is full of surprises. Todd showed my less-than-Emeril self how to barbecue big burgers for the brothers (and priests, just having some fun with alliteration) based on his grilling expertise. Then we looked out over the architecturally interesting skyline of Pittsburgh, and we're heading out tonight to someplace called South Station or something or other which is apparently where it's at in this city. We also had our photo taken by a photographer who also happened to be a Benedictine monk in full black habit. I enjoy the sense of being in an abbey, and it is strange that it doesn't strike us as strange that we're a bunch of energetic twentysomethings hanging out with monks all day. I'm sure that our definition of "normal" will be thrown for a loop even more once we arrive in Honduras/Jamaica.

Yesterday we also visited with the cloistered Passionist nuns. Where I expected them to be serious or severe, actually they were quite lighthearted and laughed often. Their job is to pray and make the communion bread. It seems God calls people in many different ways. That's not my vocation, but I am happy that they have found the place where God gives them the most joy.

Off to downtown Pittsburgh, hasta pronto!

Where exactly is Talanga, anyway...?

2005-07-23T18:27:00.000-07:00

That's certainly what I thought when I first heard we were going there.

Well, basically it's a town of about 10,000 people (with maybe 30,000 if you count outlying areas) located about an hour north of Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital.

Here's a map (click to enlarge):

If you're like me before I started this whole adventure, you may be a little shaky on your Central American geography. There are five countries in Latin America: Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. Honduras is in the middle, and it borders on all the others except Costa Rica.

Check out the World Factbook entry on Honduras if you are looking for more information:

And, while we're on the subject, this is the Honduran flag:

The Honduras Volunteers

2005-07-23T14:38:00.000-07:00

Here are our pictures!

Laura

James

Fr. Lucian

Kathy

Lauren

Todd

Boat tour

2005-07-22T20:22:00.000-07:00

Today we went on a boat tour around New York Harbor. After bounding through some choppy water and tourist boats we were privileged to see the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island up close. It was inspiring - you really got a sense of what it must have been like to be an immigrant coming into America for the first time. It's a new perspective on the buildings to see them from the water rather than gawking up at the skyscrapers. Tomorrow we have brunch with the Jamaican community and then it's on to Pittsburgh to stay at a new Passionist monastery.

If you can, check out the life of St. Paul of the Cross. He was totally focused on Christ's Passion and keeping its memory alive. I hope I can learn from his focus and apply it to my volunteer work.

Paz!

Orientation

2005-07-22T15:40:00.000-07:00

The first actual part of the program is a three-week Orientation we have from July 17 to August 5. We'll be at the Passionist monastery in Jamaica, New York for a week, then at a Passionist Monastery in Pittsburgh, and then back to New York again.

The Orientation is for all the Passionist Volunteers International, both the one's going to Honduras and those going to Jamaica (you can check out the weblog for the Jamaican volunteers here.).

This is the Honduras crew at our orientation in New York. That's sign language for "F5," by which we mean the Fabulous Five (that's us! because there are 5 of us, you see? not counting Fr. Lucian).