It’s a funny thing living in Honduras, or so you have to remind yourself at times. Some days it clicks and some days it don’t. Some months it clicks and some months it don’t. You get up to about a year of service and you start to question whether or not the whole year clicked or not. The truth of the matter is that when I, and most volunteers for that matter, start service we have a better set of language skills than when we arrive to country (lots of classes in training), however it does not make up for the fact that otherwise well educated peoples are rendered looking like 8 year olds for a time in terms of efficacy with the spoken tongue. Also behind are these people in terms of how to manage living in a place they will still not fully understand even after leaving in 2 years time. The language thing gets much better, the state of the country does not so much. Public school classes will still be getting canceled up to 100 days a year due to teacher strikes after I leave, the electric company among others will still be answerable to no one, robbing people by making up usage numbers with no formal system to challenge their business ethics (more to come on this in another blog), there will always be more trash in the streets and burning plastic in the air, Coca-Cola will still be seen by some as a legitimate substitute for milk in bottles for infants and for water by adults, and the country will invariably continue to experience growth in violence in the foreseeable future as the trend has been. I could continue this list for quite some time but I don’t think it would serve my point. What are eye-openers to some become normal to others. I think it is a great lesson on the human condition. We can get used to just about anything over enough time.
The Honduras-fun-facts stated above have all but lost their initial shock value; they literally are every day occurrences. It is not fortunate that these things leave more and more the forefront of our minds, but it is understandable, and serves a great purpose to be aware of. When living somewhere new, perhaps moving from New York to California or Oregon to Alabama, there are obviously going to be some significant changes in surroundings and the way people live. Moving to a developing country is much the same, just to a much greater degree of difference and displacement. The differences are thrown in your face and as long as your eyes are open you are constantly confronted with them. However, in the same way Americans have become ever so incredibly complacent with the status quo of their ever-declining quality of national politics, international relations, public education, healthcare and the like, Hondurans have done so in similar ways. I have grown up in a rich country. I know the privilege of a comparably much more organized society. Other than the images in T.V. and movies from the U.S. and around the world, how Honduras is the extent of the state of things. This is the reality here, and when you grow up with it, as it appears to me, there is a large sense of normalcy instilled. Just as a new generation of Americans is accepting unjust wars and strong-arming overseas, Hondurans expect a healthy amount of corruption in every new government they elect and in many of the largest national businesses; it doesn’t mean they like it, it’s just how things are…right?
Wrong. I have to ask myself what is missing here? As well as what is missing in the United States? I could argue that there is a lack of access to information in Honduras for the average person to get up in arms about the systematic abuse the government and private companies slowly employ against them. The vast majority of people do not have regular access to Internet, and an infinitesimally smaller percentage are using it for research of this nature (email and facebook dominate the airwaves here too). However, there is much larger culture of protest in this country and all of Central and South America than in the United States.
In the United States we have the opposite problem, everyone has seemingly unlimited access to information, and no one is using it to create social change large enough to affect the top. Furthermore there is an incredibly strong force of resignation and ignorance in the United States allowing those above to continue to stretch the limits of self-serving behavior. Widely available, for example, is the information about the ever-sky-rocketing number of untested chemicals introduced into our lives every year. No burden is placed on the companies by the government to test these like exists in the European Union; there is simply too much money involved for our government to “care”. This is how one of the most esteemed nations in the world treats its people, and how it’s people allow it to happen.
I have a very hard time deciphering which system is more corrupted. Which situation is more dangerous? The one where you see the problems, or the one where they are hidden very well from you? I know which one is easier to live in, but that doesn’t make it any more right.
