All good things to report from here in Honduras. Yesterday the six of us got back from a quick visit to Lake Yojoa. The lake is beautiful and the largest in Honduras - about 4 hours from our home in Talanga (6 if you make a wrong turn) on the CA-5.
On the car ride home we prepped my housemate Rosi for her application to replace Andrew Zimmerman on that Travel Channel show about eating gross things with gusto. This comparison was prompted by some memorable eating experiences at the roadside stands that decorate the lake's shores.
One of the highlights of visiting the lake, as almost all Hondurans will tell you, is the fried fish. The fish was indeed delicious. I knew it would be the fully monty arriving on my plate, that is to say fish head, scales, full spinal column, etc, etc since I'd already shocked myself a few months ago by eating fish at another place in Honduras and loving it despite its resemblance to an actual, swimming fish (how does Gorton's get their fish sticks so square?).
So I enjoyed the fried tilapia. But Rosi, being the Italian-American food lover that she is, proceeded to put us all to shame, by munching the fins, digging in the head for brains and finally, sucking the eyeballs out of their sockets and declaring with delight, "tastes like slime."
I'll leave you with that winning image and move on to our other journey outside of Talanga this past month. Mid-January we worked as interpreters for the medical element from Soto Cano, the U.S. military base in Honduras, and a group of nutritionists from South Dakota State on a mission in Montaña de la Flor. Montaña is home to one of Honduras' only surviving indigenous groups, the Tolupán, and also to some of the country's most severe poverty.
To do the nutrition study, families were randomly selected from community health center records, which meant that sometimes the teams had to do upwards of an hour hike through the mountains to reach an individual family's home. At each home, moms and kids under 5 were checked for signs of malnutrition, blood-sampled for anemia and then mom or dad was interviewed about food availability in the house.
Just to sidetrack for a minute, if you're thinking what I'm thinking, then yes it is definitely weird that I have just gone from writing about eating fried fish to treating malnourished children in one blog post. Hard to make a transition like that inconspicuous but honestly I would say that's an accurate reflection of so much of my experience here. It's like living in two worlds simultaneously, with a huge gap in fairness separating the two. A healthy sense of guilt doesn't seem inappropriate - there really isn't any way to justify that I've got more than enough in my world and there isn't sufficient in the other. When I ask myself, what do I do with what I know now, the unnerving part is wondering what is enough. How do I integrate what I see and learn into the long-term? Just how much, and also, what am I called to give?
From the week at our base with the group from Soto Cano, it sounds like service members ask themselves similar questions when they get deployed. One of the army guys on my team said that the mountain villages of Afghanistan aren't that different from Honduras in terms of landscape and remoteness.
The Tolupanes in Montaña de la Flor have a super interesting history. An anthropologist who originally did research there in the 1950s tracked the genealogy of the tribes back to when a group of four indigenous couples fleeing military persecution from other parts of the country hid in the mountains and established the community in the 1860s. If you can believe it, the majority of Montaña's approximate 1500 current residents are descendents of these 8 people.
Chiefs now have a degree of autonomy in the area. Tol is the traditional language and many children don't learn Spanish until school. Often the smallest kids who came to the clinic had to hear the questions three times, first in English from Colonel Hoilien (the doctor I was partnered with), then in Spanish from me and finally their mother's translation into Tol. The majority of families subsistence farm corn and beans. Harvesting coffee for day wages during coffee season (right now) is also very common. One amazing man - Teodoro Montes - I have his picture below from Chapman's book - came in complaining of hand tremors that were keeping him from planting and harvesting his fields. He is 87!
Food insecurity or instability of food supply (I'm sure the nutritionists from SDSU would have a better way of explaining this) is a huge issue in Montaña - not unlike the majority of Honduras and other "third world" countries. Interviewing moms was really interesting because you get to ask every invasive thing you would never ask in real life but somehow a consent form makes it all okay. Or at least legally okay. It's kind of crazy some humans study other humans, as if they were another species or something.
The questions really put a new perspective on things for me, I guess I would say a more concrete perspective about everyday reality in the homes we visited. Obviously I talk a lot about hunger in the blog and interact with hungry kids and families every day at Comedor - but at this point it's more like a friend relationship than a work relationship with Comedor families. And I don't think about the issues in clinical terms. A research study, on the other hand, is all clinical. How often in the past month have you worried that the food would run out due to lack of resources? How often in the past month has the food in the house actually run out due to lack of resources? Have you or another adult or child in the household gone without eating for an entire day because of lack of resources? How frequently does this occur?
For moms in Montaña, as you can already imagine, food running out is a constant worry because the food actually does run out. Not so much now as in the non-harvest months. For me it was absolutely terrifying to imagine what it would be like to be stuck in a house with my kids and no food. Makes me so grateful for the public safety nets (even though they need some work) in the United States.
For those of you Spanish speakers interested in some more about the Tolupán, check out the book I've been referencing (please consider this bibliography) by Anne Chapman, "Los hijos de la muerte: El universo mítico de los Tolupán-Jicaques."
Love as always,
On the car ride home we prepped my housemate Rosi for her application to replace Andrew Zimmerman on that Travel Channel show about eating gross things with gusto. This comparison was prompted by some memorable eating experiences at the roadside stands that decorate the lake's shores.
One of the highlights of visiting the lake, as almost all Hondurans will tell you, is the fried fish. The fish was indeed delicious. I knew it would be the fully monty arriving on my plate, that is to say fish head, scales, full spinal column, etc, etc since I'd already shocked myself a few months ago by eating fish at another place in Honduras and loving it despite its resemblance to an actual, swimming fish (how does Gorton's get their fish sticks so square?).
So I enjoyed the fried tilapia. But Rosi, being the Italian-American food lover that she is, proceeded to put us all to shame, by munching the fins, digging in the head for brains and finally, sucking the eyeballs out of their sockets and declaring with delight, "tastes like slime."
I'll leave you with that winning image and move on to our other journey outside of Talanga this past month. Mid-January we worked as interpreters for the medical element from Soto Cano, the U.S. military base in Honduras, and a group of nutritionists from South Dakota State on a mission in Montaña de la Flor. Montaña is home to one of Honduras' only surviving indigenous groups, the Tolupán, and also to some of the country's most severe poverty.
To do the nutrition study, families were randomly selected from community health center records, which meant that sometimes the teams had to do upwards of an hour hike through the mountains to reach an individual family's home. At each home, moms and kids under 5 were checked for signs of malnutrition, blood-sampled for anemia and then mom or dad was interviewed about food availability in the house.
Just to sidetrack for a minute, if you're thinking what I'm thinking, then yes it is definitely weird that I have just gone from writing about eating fried fish to treating malnourished children in one blog post. Hard to make a transition like that inconspicuous but honestly I would say that's an accurate reflection of so much of my experience here. It's like living in two worlds simultaneously, with a huge gap in fairness separating the two. A healthy sense of guilt doesn't seem inappropriate - there really isn't any way to justify that I've got more than enough in my world and there isn't sufficient in the other. When I ask myself, what do I do with what I know now, the unnerving part is wondering what is enough. How do I integrate what I see and learn into the long-term? Just how much, and also, what am I called to give?
From the week at our base with the group from Soto Cano, it sounds like service members ask themselves similar questions when they get deployed. One of the army guys on my team said that the mountain villages of Afghanistan aren't that different from Honduras in terms of landscape and remoteness.
The Tolupanes in Montaña de la Flor have a super interesting history. An anthropologist who originally did research there in the 1950s tracked the genealogy of the tribes back to when a group of four indigenous couples fleeing military persecution from other parts of the country hid in the mountains and established the community in the 1860s. If you can believe it, the majority of Montaña's approximate 1500 current residents are descendents of these 8 people.
Chiefs now have a degree of autonomy in the area. Tol is the traditional language and many children don't learn Spanish until school. Often the smallest kids who came to the clinic had to hear the questions three times, first in English from Colonel Hoilien (the doctor I was partnered with), then in Spanish from me and finally their mother's translation into Tol. The majority of families subsistence farm corn and beans. Harvesting coffee for day wages during coffee season (right now) is also very common. One amazing man - Teodoro Montes - I have his picture below from Chapman's book - came in complaining of hand tremors that were keeping him from planting and harvesting his fields. He is 87!
Food insecurity or instability of food supply (I'm sure the nutritionists from SDSU would have a better way of explaining this) is a huge issue in Montaña - not unlike the majority of Honduras and other "third world" countries. Interviewing moms was really interesting because you get to ask every invasive thing you would never ask in real life but somehow a consent form makes it all okay. Or at least legally okay. It's kind of crazy some humans study other humans, as if they were another species or something.
The questions really put a new perspective on things for me, I guess I would say a more concrete perspective about everyday reality in the homes we visited. Obviously I talk a lot about hunger in the blog and interact with hungry kids and families every day at Comedor - but at this point it's more like a friend relationship than a work relationship with Comedor families. And I don't think about the issues in clinical terms. A research study, on the other hand, is all clinical. How often in the past month have you worried that the food would run out due to lack of resources? How often in the past month has the food in the house actually run out due to lack of resources? Have you or another adult or child in the household gone without eating for an entire day because of lack of resources? How frequently does this occur?
For moms in Montaña, as you can already imagine, food running out is a constant worry because the food actually does run out. Not so much now as in the non-harvest months. For me it was absolutely terrifying to imagine what it would be like to be stuck in a house with my kids and no food. Makes me so grateful for the public safety nets (even though they need some work) in the United States.
For those of you Spanish speakers interested in some more about the Tolupán, check out the book I've been referencing (please consider this bibliography) by Anne Chapman, "Los hijos de la muerte: El universo mítico de los Tolupán-Jicaques."
Love as always,