Contents are personal opinions, not official Peace Corps policy.

Wednesday, May 7, 2008

Work & Play

I was being antisocial, but chipper, and probably an annoyance to the other clientele.

“Hi mom. You’ll never guess where I am.”

I was a TGI Fridays in a mall in Tegucigalpa, and I was drinking my second gin and tonic. It was about three o’clock in the afternoon. There were five empty glasses in front of me, and a sixth half full of lime slices. Drinks in Honduras are often served with ‘some assembly required,’ especially in establishments frequented by gringos wary of ice and un-bottled water. Thus a G&T comes as a glass of ice, a glass of ice, a glass of tonic, and a glass of lime slices. Half the customers were gringos. MLS soccer was playing on the TV; Columbus versus Kansas City (I think). Nobody seemed particularly interested in it, as most Americans could care less about soccer and Hondurans would rather watch good soccer (Honduras recently beat the US… and a number of the US players were from south of the border). I was waiting to see Ironman, which turned out to be excellent. As I left the theatre, I felt as though I should be thinking about where I parked my car, and whether I wanted to go to Dairy Queen or Mighty Taco afterwards.

I was felt like I was on shore leave… in the US.

The day before I had sworn in as a Peace Corps volunteer. We all put on our nicest clothes, which for Water & Sanitation volunteers means whatever one didn’t wear to dig and haul in the Honduran sun and underbrush. We pulled into the American Embassy in Tegucigalpa, and although neither the American Ambassador nor the Peace Corps Country Director was present, after several nice speeches and the singing of both countries’ national anthems, I put my hand over my heart and recited the following:

I, [CQ], do solemnly swear or affirm that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, domestic and foreign, that I take this obligation freely and without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion, and that I will well and faithfully discharge my duties in the Peace Corps by working with the people of [Honduras] as partners in friendship and in peace.


All of you communists, malcontents and miscreants take note. I’m duty-bound to bring you down! But I’ll probably be too busy designing water systems in a places you’ve never heard of.

After a weekend of celebration, I packed my bags for the third time in as many weeks and shipped off to Camasca, Intibucá. It’s a six hour drive, but it took two days due to infrequent and maligned bus schedules. The drive is long, and for the most part beautiful. There are no suburbs to be found here. Beyond its business district, residential neighborhoods, factories and many and poor barrios Tegucigalpa ends. One crosses the mountains and rather quickly leaves the buildings behind. There are small towns connected to the highway, and long stretches of fields and forest (often de-forested) in between. After three and a half hours, past Comayagua and Siguatapeque, one reaches La Esperanza. It is the highest and coldest city in Honduras. In the winter I am told that people occasionally wake to find a thin layer of ice on their pilas. Its mostly unpaved roads are dusty when dry and sometimes impassable when wet. Some people wear the bright multicolored clothing traditional in Lenca culture (indigenous to this region); others wear jeans, collared shirts and badass white cowboy hats. La Esperanza is an ‘out-of-the-way’ place in the gringo guidebooks; a place to take in the mountains and indigenous culture before moving on to the old colonial capital at Comayagua or the Mayan ruins at Copán.

From there, I head south for almost three hours. I leave the guide books’ sphere of influence, go well beyond paved roads, and almost run out of Honduras. The stone-gravel mountain roads are steep, winding, and sometimes terrifying. There is one stretch called mala pasa or ‘bad pass’ where both sides of the road are cliff faces dropping off for hundreds of feet. Some of these roads have only recently been repaired from the bombardment they took in the war with El Salvador.

That was almost 40 years ago

Camasca is a small town at the center of a small municipality in one of the poorest and most remote parts of Honduras. From now until April 30, 2010 it is the center of my world. They’ve sent me out here with an Abney level, a compass, a thirty meter measuring tape, and a head reeling from a three month training blitzkrieg ranging from hydraulic systems theory to use of the subjunctive tense in Spanish. I’ve also got a somewhat reliable laptop, a sharp machete, a medical kit, rain gear for the wet season, a keffiyeh for the dusty dry season, some notebooks, a Spanish translation of Dune, and a pink and turquoise scientific calculator I borrowed from my younger sister Speedo probably five or six years ago. I’m to integrate into the community (showing that Americans aren’t as bad as we appear on TV and in the history of this region) and design sustainable water systems (to lower infant mortality and incidence of water-borne disease). When I got here, I was delighted to find an unlimited supply of coffee and an office waiting for me with… an internet connection!

I really didn’t know what to expect coming out here. I read a book about the campesino (landless farm worker) struggle for land rights in the 1970s & 1980s, and was informed that “The real Honduras is hidden.” My host family in Santa Lucia seemed to echo this sentiment: “There ain’t nothing in the countryside. Nothing. Only tortillas and beans.” Now I’ve come out as far as I can, and I see people in nice clothes (many American brands), with cable TV, and I have internet. I imagine that this is a very different experience than Peace Corps volunteers had 40 years ago. Time, democratization, and economic liberalization have left their mark on this place.

Nevertheless, I have had glimpses of how ‘the real Honduras,’ or at least the reality of rural poverty, is indeed hidden. All of the town and cities I have visited have been accessible by road. However, on my last bus ride, a little girl and her work-worn and weather-beaten father were let off at least an hour from the nearest town. They walked off, headed up the mountain on an unmarked trail. There are small settlements that are almost inaccessible, that may not appear on a census, and that are beyond the scant resources of the Honduran state and are often overlooked by development agencies. It’s these communities, as well as some of the larger ones along the roads, that I can help the most. There’s a lot of work to do.

I'm going to need a lot more gin.