melissa + honduras

Happy Mother's Day! Happy Flag Day! Happy Father's Day!  Happy Quebec National Day (Canada)!  Happy Memorial Day!  Congratulations Andrew on graduating the 8th Grade!  ... and today ... Happy Fourth of July!  I think those are the landmark dates that have passed since the last time you all heard me on this particular platform.  Needless to say, these past two months have been busy.  My family visited in May.  It was wonderful.  I'll be curious to hear Andrew's recollections of the trip in about 5 years or so and also to hear if anything he saw impacted his view of the world, himself, etc. etc.  I'm using Andrew in this case as my guinea pig because he's the youngest and most impressionable of the family (Walt's a lost cause).   To be honest, I'm proud of my intrepid family.  If you don't happen to have a vagabond daughter to be your travel guide in the developing world, one nice way would be to sponsor a child at one of the Our Little Brothers and Sisters orphanages (the home in Honduras is right nearby Talanga) because they welcome visits from individuals who sponsor their children.

At the beginning of June we started the potable water project in Majada.  Majada is a village of about a thousand people scattered through a part of the mountains outside Talanga.  Money for materials came from a local branch of Food for the Poor, an NGO that makes grants for projects like this.   Community members chip in labor (under the direction of an engineer and two masons who we hired) to actually build the dam, tank, and filtration system.  I've never met people who work so hard in my life.  They make the six of us "supervisors" look, well, dumb because they (including small children) work at about 10 times the speed we do.  It's just that none of us ever got that much practice digging with pickaxes or hauling bricks and PVC piping up the side of mountain before this time in our lives.  Luckily, no one begrudges our meager contributions at the end of the workday and it really is so exhilarating to work alongside a community for a project that they care so much about.

This project means that clean, drinking quality water will arrive to every single house in the community.   The engineer estimates we'll be finished in mid-July and I would love to be in one of the homes when the faucet is turned on for the first time and purified water comes out ... and will continue to come out any time of the day, any day of the year.  Effects on health of kids and families will be huge, but it's also a big deal just for the fact that people won't have to spend hours every day hauling water from the streams.  Having seen life in a country where water is consistently scarce, I am terrified by the fact that environmental scientists say that fresh water is a limited resource on our planet and (at the rate we're going) will become scarce all over the world.

Contemplating life without such a necessity has also got the six of us trying to unpack the idea of basic human rights.  I think we all agree when it comes to something as essential as water.  In the U.S. we also believe everyone deserves food and shelter, hence food stamps and public housing.  We're not so sure about healthcare, and we're very conflicted about concepts like a person's right to decent work and personal fulfillment.  Is that only for people who can afford it / born with the winning set of papers? 

Recently I read an anecdote about Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker movement, and I feel like it follows the same thread I'm trying to unravel here ...

"[A] well-dressed woman visited one day and gave Dorothy a diamond ring ... Dorothy thanked the visitor, slipped the ring in her pocket, and later in the day gave it to an old woman who lived alone and often ate her meals at St. Joseph's [soup kitchen].  One of the staff protested to Dorothy that the ring could better have been sold at the Diamond Exchange and the money used to pay the woman's rent for a year.  Dorothy replied that the woman had her dignity and could do as she liked with the ring.  She could sell it for rent money or take a trip to the Bahamas.  Or she could enjoy having a diamond ring on her hand just like the woman who had brought it to the Worker.  "Do you suppose," Dorothy asked, "that God created diamonds only for the rich?" [Jim Forest, "Love is the Measure: A Biography of Dorothy Day (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1986)" 

Hopefully I'll be have some more good updates before the end of this month.  This year has really gone fast, huh!  I've got to go weigh in at the informal health conference that's happening in the room I share with Molly.  A host of well-meaning Honduran neighbors and friends plus the Merck Medical Dictionary have diagnosed Molly with strep throat and are currently medicating her with Amoxicillin purchased on the street corner.  Things are always interesting at our house.

And to think I once looked at other volunteers' blogs and judged them  (just a little) when their posts came a little less frequently and a little less thoroughly as their year progressed ...

April's been a nice month, hot as can be.  It's also mango season.  Finally!  When we first arrived in August, Brooke, Rosi and I made the mistake of asking for mangos at one of the corner stores in the neighborhood.  Much to our embarrassment, the owner gave us an incredulous look and informed us that mangos wouldn't be ripe for another 8 months.  Where on earth would we have gotten the idea that fruit would be available for purchase out of season?  Hard for us, raised on produce from the A & P, Acme, ShopRite, Giant Eagle, etc, etc, etc, to comprehend.

Things at the Comedor are progressing.  We have a new Honduran staff member, Deysi, who has taken on the role of social worker / administrator.  Deysi's presence is reassuring in the face of our impending departure, something all of us volunteers are feeling anxious (read: freaking out) about.  We're hoping for that elusive thing called self-sustainability for Comedor when PVI leaves Talanga.  We've had some really successful tooth-brushing exercises for the kids at Comedor, successful probably for everyone except the moms who know have to wash toothpaste stains out of the entire front of their kids' shirts.  Effective spitting is still on an upcoming lesson plan.   We also had enough donations to do another presentation and give toothbrushes to the nearly 100 kids in grades 1 - 6 who attend classes in the two classroom schoolhouse of Majada Verde and are still planning one for the village of Rincón Grande.  I sort of feel like the Santa Claus of toothbrushes at this point, which is actually a title I'm pretty proud of.  Crest should probably hire us all as sales reps for the region.

Three weeks ago I got to go back to El Salvador to visit some friends from my semester there as an undergrad.  If anyone is a college student or knows someone interested in the realities of the developing world, check out Casa de la Solidaridad (I really cannot say enough good things about this program) and also Casa Banyahan, a new collaboration between the University of San Francisco and Ateneo de Manila in the Philipines

It was really fun to see families from the Salvadoran community where I worked who are doing well two years later.  Also cool to see the progression of democracy in the country, visible even from my outsider, amateur perspective.  The current president, Mauricio Funes, was elected in 2008 and was the first to defeat the rightist party whose founder was responsible for the government secret police that terrorized the country throughout the armed conflict. 

I also got to visit with my friend Olivia, a Fordham grad and study abroad friend who now has a Fulbright - you can check out her blog here.  Olivia's work is fascinating: families looking for children who were disappeared during the armed conflict.  I'm told 'civil war' isn't the best description for the years of violence because those words imply that it was a fight between equals, when really one side was a military government  backed by the US (to the tune of $6 billion) and the other side was peasant guerillas fighting for a fate other than starvation.  Not to be dramatic or anything.

Speaking of drama, I just finished a book about the American coup in Guatemala with facts that are so outrageous (but true) it reads like a James Patterson thriller.  The CIA overthrew Guatemala's democratically elected president at the request of a US corporation (United Fruit) - because the Guatemalan president enacted legislation to purchase land from United Fruit and give it to Guatemalan peasants and because said president wanted to build an electric company and highway for Guatemala since United Fruit owned all of the electricity in the country and the only railroad.  Because minor reforms to benefit the poor masses were contrary to the economic interests of United Fruit, the company and the CIA waged a completely fabricated publicity campaign to convince the American public that there was a Soviet threat in Guatemala.  The subsequent coup interrupted the development of democracy in Guatemala at such a pivotal moment that the country was thrown into a civil war that lasted until 1996, leaving 200,000 people dead, 93% of whom were killed at the hands of the military government we installed.

Anyway, since this isn't a blog about all the terrible things the US did to Latin America throughout the 20th century, I will move on.  I sort of feel the need to apologize when I digress from the lighthearted anecdotes and start on about US foreign policy (past and present) but it's just hard for me to be wrapped up in the reality of Central America on a daily basis and see how the grinding poverty and violence and absolute fatalism infects our friends and not feel disheartened (read: outraged) at how their current reality is so tied up in our historical abuses.

Now actually moving on to other news ...

Walter, Renee, Patrick and Andrew will be touching down in Toncontin International Airport in Tegucigalpa on May 7th.  I know I will have lots of good things to report on after this weeklong opportunity for family bonding.  Hopefully I can earn my stripes as a tour guide of Honduras.  It might even top the summer of 2003 (or was it 2004?) driving the rolling [....] ahem, blue minivan cross country to Santa Fe.  I say that with all due respect to the blue minivan.

Last but not least, a little re-cap of Holy Week in Talanga.  Super nice, very animated and thoughtful religious traditions make up the week with everything from conventional prayer services to bonfires for youth groups.   For the Stations of the Cross on Good Friday, the community walks alongside giant sawdust illustrations of the Stations and also live reenactments by children (just slightly odd to see a child in a wig playing Jesus and nailed to a cross) for the morning.  On Easter Sunday, the Races of San Juan begin the day.  Community members take the statues of Mary, some assorted saints and angels out of the Church and re-enact when Jesus' tomb was discovered empty by running around the park in front of the Church and carrying the statues, who are supposed to be spreading the word that Jesus ha resucitado (Jesus has risen).  There is definitely a form to the ceremony but it's done in a lighthearted way that seems to channel the excitement of what that Easter morning really would have been like.  The "races" begin at 5 am, and the fact that I was there to witness them really is saying something because, as both Patrick and Andrew will attest, that's earlier than they've ever been able to cajole me out of bed on Easter morning to go eat candy.

this video was linked on facebook by a friend and i thought it was just such a fascinating, well-spoken take on some of the most fundamental things we talk about in our community here ... so i wanted to share.  besides the message, who knew all this cool stuff can be found online?  or that there was a royal society for the arts that does sweet graphics for youtube videos?  

my favorite excerpt:

"empathy is grounded in the acknowledgement of death and the celebration of life and rooting for each other to flourish and be.

it's based on our frailties and our imperfections. so when we talk about building an empathic civilization we are not talking about utopia, we're talking about the ability of human beings to show solidarity not only with each other but with our fellow creatures who have a one and only life on this planet.

we have to extend our identities to think of the human race as fellow sojourners."

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,

Okay so I have some stories to share from this past month (only one lonely post in December - to be blamed on the craziness of "the season").  I think the theme is something along the lines of "THINGS I WANTED TO TELL YOU ABOUT" and yes, you should always read ALL-CAPS words as shouting.  Keeps things INTERESTING. 

1.  Feliz Año Nuevo!  Celebrating the New Year in Honduras is a hoot!  I had a great dinner with my adoptive sisters Bessy and Nohelia and about 90 of their cousins who were in from Tegucigalpa.  One big plus to the holidays is food, without a doubt.  I'm sure at this point you all realize that I am not one of those people who eats to live ...

Tamales , specifically nacatamales, are wonderfully plentiful this time of year.  To my family, heirs to the grand culinary traditions of Ireland and North Philly, I would describe a tamal as a really dense, meat- and spice-stuffed cornbread (almost) that comes wrapped in banana leaves.  Another noteworthy food item, torejas en miel.  I kept hearing the neighbors talk about torejas and was so excited to discover that they are FRENCH TOAST.  SOAKED IN HONEY.

Anyway, after dinner with the family, we all watched the neighbors burn a couple of años viejos.  The viejos are scarecrows (sometimes effigies of politicians or other popular figures) that represent the past year and are burned at midnight on the 31st to welcome in the new year.  Making a viejo is pretty simple: old clothes stuffed with fireworks, doused in gasoline and lit on fire in the street like a celebratory bomb.  People here are always thinking about safety!

After the scarecrows were done, we lit some more fireworks.  Actually the cousins lit the fireworks and I felt like a sheltered foreigner worrying the whole time that someone was going to shoot their eye out.  Then we all went house-hopping to visit more family and dance, literally until dawn.  It's been super interesting to see how Hondurans celebrate these two most recent holidays (Christmas Eve is almost identical to New Year's, if you add church services and subtract the viejos) because they are such a break from the norm in a culture I would generally say is soft-spoken, tranquilo and more reserved.

2.  Item #2 happened most recently, a.k.a. last night, and I am equal parts indignant and amused.   So we didn't receive an electricity bill for November.  I interpreted the lack of billing to mean that no one was home when the bill deliverer came by (bills don't just come in the mail because there is no door-to-door postal service in Talanga) and the deliverer either forgot to come back (not likely) or he/she slipped it under our fence and it blew away (most likely) or he/she slipped it under our fence and Conde ate the bill (second most likely).  We weren't too worried about it and figured somebody would stop by soon enough to demand payment.  What actually happened was Brooke opened the door at 6 pm last night to find two guys from the power company climbing up the telephone pole on our street to PHYSICALLY cut the wires that connect to our house.  No warning.  Just choppin' those wires right down!

So after Brooke and I sort out with the guys what is actually going on, that we didn't pay last month's bill, etc., etc., I suggest that they just hold their horses because we can pay right now in cash and that the only problem was that we didn't know how much was due.  So the guy looks at the meter, writes up the bill, and hands it to us.  And then he informs us that he still has to cut the wires.  Because we have to pay the bill at the office.  And the office is just now closed (it's 6:05 pm).  He acknowledges that he can do us a big favor and, instead of cutting the wires from the telephone pole which is very high, he can cut them right where they connect to our house and we can just attempt to reconnect them ourselves with some electrical tape as soon as he leaves.  GREAT.

The end to this saga is that, after two quick snips with the wire cutters, our house is dark.  It's not really that tragic because we have plenty of candles and I've always liked cereal for dinner.  Also as I'm writing this it's now the next morning and Brooke is at the bank paying the bill and our friend Carlos is jerry-rigging the power lines back together (it takes a few days for someone to the power company to come back and officially re-attach them).  The only truly obnoxious part of the story is something we just learned from Carlos: the power company actually pays a special commission to their workers for every line that they cut because the company can then charge customers a fee to restart the service.   So the workers purposely come after business hours (when the bank is closed) to cut the lines and there is nothing you can do about it. Major lolz, no?

3. Well, I was going to do a #3 but I'll save it for next time.  I've waxed long-winded as usual.  Suffice to say that I miss you all and I love getting comments and updates from you, too.  Big hugs from Honduras.

Ahh! I never expected it to get so chilly here in Honduras.  Luckily I packed a sweatshirt and I´ve been finding new ways to work up a sweat.   On our walk to Comedor last week, Chanel and I passed a man making adobe bricks in a little open plot amidst the normal row of homes and before I knew it, we had plans to come back the next day to learn how to make them with him.  This actually seems like a perfect example of how life usually goes here and even though I know it has partly to do with the fact that we´re noticeably not Honduran, I hope as the months pass I won't forget to marvel at such a culture of spontaneous welcome. 

Anyway, making adobe bricks is hard work!  First you mix pine needles, water and dirt [dirt being the technical term] in a huge pile using a hoe and your bare feet.  After the ingredients are sufficiently combined into the clay mixture, you clear some flat ground on which to put the bricks to dry in the sun and then cover the ground with sawdust so the bricks don't stick.  Then you heave the clay into a wooden mold - my guess is that the mold makes bricks about 12 inches long, 6 inches wide, 4 inches deep.  Big! And heavy!  And because the bricks are big, you have to make sure that there are no air bubbles in the finished product.  This involves a certain amount of punching and slapping around in the mud that is very satisfying. 

Once this is done, you pull the mold up and out, and you have a brick.  Repeat the heaving and punching about five million more times, or however many bricks you need to build a whole house, and then let them dry for a few days.  Many homes in the city are now made with concrete blocks, others with corrugated tin sheets, wood scraps and cardboard, but by far the majority here are made of adobe.  You could certainly say it's a slower and less sophisticated process than housing construction in the U.S. but I doubt the world economy would haven been so bulldozed if we built our U.S. homes this way and it's incredible, really, to have the power to build a place of your own. 

I always feel a little under the gun writing these posts because on the computer here at the internet cafe is a timer telling me the amount of time I´ve been online and the corresponding price that keeps tick, tick, ticking higher.  I feel like this timer would be a useful monitor for other activities, maybe like worrying or navel-gazing, but not in this instance when I am trying to correspond with you, my favorite people in the United States.  On another note, isn´t it strange that we call ourselves Americans, instead of Unitedstatespersons or something along those lines?  In Spanish, there´s a word: Estadounidense.  Soy (I am) estadounidense (unitedstatesperson).  ¨American¨ doesn´t really fit the bill because technically all South Americans, Central Americans, and North Americans would fall into this category but ... we ¨Americans¨ build really big fences an to prevent that kind of fraternization.

We celebrated Día del Niño with the kids and families from Comedor a month ago and it took me almost that much time to upload this video (all 19 seconds of it) to YouTube. But vale la pena  ... its worth it ... because Luís (age 6 going on 25) is an excellent dancer. 

Chanel actually took this video of Luís during the party and I'm sorry that I don't have the know-how to turn the video right-side up but I hope you can still appreciate it.

Día del Niño (Children's Day) is a huge holiday here in Honduras - so the junta (direction committee) put together a really beautiful celebration with lunch, cake and piñatas for everyone.  

Wow - October 1 already?!  I´m sorry to report that after four dependable years with my laptop, it finally bit the dust after two months of life here.  I put in a good faith effort to search online for an Apple store location, but as suspected, those are not to be found anywhere in Central America.  I´ll have to find a new way of uploading photos and videos here at the internet cafe, so for now just word updates. 

Hurricane Matthew hit the northeastern coast of Honduras over the weekend, fortunately in Talanga we just got a little extra rain.  In other news, I  spent another wild morning with my second grade class.  I´d forgotten about that age where it´s impossible to stay in your seat for more than five minutes or refrain from punching your neighbor if they´ve stolen your colored pencils.  Also, if any of your classmates are screaming, the most sensible response is to chime in and scream with them.

On Wednesday, all of us went to Rincon Grande to start a health education group there.  Nothing in my previous educational experience qualifies me to be leading "health seminars," luckily Rosi and Brooke were both undergraduate biology majors and we´ve gotten our hands on two incredible books  - you can get copies for free from the Hesperian Foundation  - that are a mix of medical encyclopedia and community organizing guide for health care in rural communities (one appropriately titled, Donde no hay doctor (Where there is no doctor)) . 

When we´re not using the books to plan the seminars, I use them to self-diagnose.   I never knew I had this hypochondriac side to me but I suppose in part it´s justified since I´ve now weathered my way through two unfortunate skin infections and one case of lice.  If the comedor kids weren´t so cute, I would probably renounce children altogether.  The lice did give me a reason to check out the community health clinic and  I was impressed with the overall experience -  for 100L (U.S. $5) I got to see the doctor and received antibiotics and de-licing soap - but because it is high season for dengue, I had to stand in line from seven a.m. until one p.m. to be seen.  I don´t know if there a way to put a positive spin on that ... oh right ...