A Death and a Birth to Everything

So what happened? It’s a good question and one that could fill the leaves of an entire book or unjustly summed up in bullet points or paragraphs or PowerPoints. A blog post is some terrible in between but it will have to do. Maybe better to start with the present and work my way back. I, and every volunteer in Honduras are leaving mid-January. This decision was officially made and communicated to all of the volunteers via e-mail and personal phone calls from our in-country staff on December 20^th. This news was the not-so-surprising and long overdue measure that we all saw coming, but didn’t want it to be real. I suppose I’ll expand upon that.

It’s time to pull the candy coating off the story. It’s hard to express what an understatement it is to say Honduras is a dangerous country. It is widely becoming considered the most violent nation in the world by more than one reputable source and in more than one way of measuring that violence. Googling the words “Honduras” and “Danger” will surely produce a number of eye-opening hits that will do little justice to an ugly face that remains otherwise hidden. A recent UN study found Honduras to have the highest homicide rate in the world with 82 murders per 100,000 inhabitants. Second place goes to its little neighbor El Salvador with 66 murders. Put in perspective the United States has a rate of 5.[1] Very little attention need to be paid in order to know that the massive stronghold that drug dealers have had in Mexico has been funneling its way through Central America to locations easier to operate, and if necessary, disappear in. Also, the two largest cities in this country are understandably of the most dangerous in the world as well. Just being an outspoken journalist or politician in these cities here is enough to put you on a hit list, and hits come very cheap here. Corruption is systemic, a way of life. It is widely being documented in newspapers just how involved the police and politicians have been in allowing the drug trade to operate. Little arrests are being made. So wait, what is Peace Corps doing in Honduras?

Truth is most of this violence, although it has been growing yearly, is concentrated between the drug cartels, the police, gang members, politicians, and the like. Put rather bluntly, Hondurans killing Hondurans; perhaps giving more explanation than any as to why America is not so keen to the security environment of a country far closer than Libya or Afghanistan. Most places that volunteers find themselves placed in are very safe in relative terms. The work is meaningful, the relationships inculcated both tangible and invaluable. It transforms the lives of volunteers and host country nationals alike, to varying but undeniable degrees. And needless to say there is plenty of work to be done in this, and many other countries that are not shining beacons of civic responsibility, and accountability. This is about as good an answer I can give to our current presence here.

So the tipping point was finally reached. This has been an intense year in terms of violations again volunteers. Our towns are safe, but traveling around the country and in and out of the major cities becomes a statistical eventuality in terms of security threats and we find ourselves in the proverbial cross hairs at times. Some crimes are much more serious than others. Petty theft is one thing, sexual violence more rare but unacceptable. There have been an unprecedented number of both this year. I found myself wondering “how much more does it take here? Where does the line get drawn?” I asked this question, the answer generally sided with my points from the previous paragraph. It was three weeks ago that the line was officially drawn when a volunteer on a mid day bus leaving the city San Pedro Sula was shot in the leg. Three armed individuals were robbing the bus and one of the passengers, also armed, decided to resist, starting a gunfight. This volunteer was caught in the crossfire. She is okay with a broken femur. Wrong place, wrong time, but the violence is becoming too random to manage effectively anymore, so Peace Corps has said no more.

Those not out of the country on vacation have been ordered to stay in their towns until private transportation is sent regionally to pick us all up and take us to a conference where we will organize ourselves and our all to quickly approaching lives in the United States. So here we are waiting it out. Saying goodbye to our beloved communities and wondering about the uncertain future in store for us all. I want all to know that I am safe in my town and will be here for the remainder of my days in Honduras. I did not get to see Nicaragua or Guatemala, I did however visit El Salvador. I had plans and aspirations for South America that have all but been reconsidered. Its one day at a time anymore and I find myself looking around with new found admiration and astound that I’m even here and have had such a wonderful experience.

More to come.

---

[1] http://www.care2.com/causes/homicide-rate-highest-in-honduras-el-salvador-ivory-coast.html

The Perspective Phase

I apologize for not updating this for a long time…lets blame it on...being so busy! Also I wanted to include some bad hair photos but asking for those had presented a personal safety risk. I will continue my search.

The following was an excerpt I wrote about integration for required reporting…

Integrating into my community has been somewhat of a process of evolution. Upon arriving to country your head is filled with so many different sights, sounds, ideas, and the like. It is easy to become completely swept up in whatever anyone with any credibility tells you about what you should be doing, should look like, how you should go about your business, and so on, to survive in Honduras, fit in per se. Those first voices are those of the training staff from Peace Corps and to a lesser extent your host family. The language barrier for most of us when we arrive to country is large enough to make what people tell us about Honduras, in English, the end all be all of how we understand our new surroundings. It is a necessary, though flawed, first step in the cross-cultural integration process with the time allotted (to many, two years may seem like a long time, however in the slow process of social integration it is not).

Next, comes the move to our prospective towns, or “sites”. Everything is still fresh and we (volunteers) find ourselves as impressionable as ever. Everything is new once again and we must manage home life with strange families, new work environments, religious and social pressures, lots of attention from sometimes unwanted places, and we revert, as a survival tool to what we’ve been told about how to react and carry ourselves in our towns. This is where the most intense language curve exists. We have to learn Spanish very fast in order to be functioning volunteers. With little Spanish it’s hard for anyone to trust the work you are doing. So we emulate what we hear, and what we see. I found myself trying hard to be much like everyone around me, right down to the crazy haircuts that, in my opinion, look funny on Hondurans, and terrible on white volunteers.

That all lasted for a while, and I’m sure everyone goes through this process to some degree and at varying speeds. My Spanish in the last year and 7 months has improved dramatically with persistence and help from my Spanish-English tutoring exchanges. And with time I have realized that there has been a paradigm shift in my thinking on what I consider being somewhat integrated and well integrated. The difference is personality. So much of one’s personality gets lost in the fumbling through language. The more I have found myself able to express how, and why I feel about something in a relative culturally sensitive manner, the more I have been able to find agreement and balance between who and where I was in my past life, and who and where I am today.

This is how I now define being well integrated, knowing where and how to draw the line in the sand. Know you will always be different than those around you to some degree, and using it to your advantage. Not sweating the small stuff; both literally and figuratively not enduring those pesky haircuts. It’s goal 1,2, and 3 and it’s so much more.

The Year Mark

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.

This pole is covered in pig fat and there is money at the top
during my town fair

Utila

Langue Church at Night

Great Thanksgiving

Surgery Day 1

The Best Family in Langue

Where’s the Music At?

There are an incredible number of lessons I have learned thus far in my experience here. However, I think that one of the most lasting changes I have seen come through me as a result of my time here has to do with expectations. As human beings we grapple every day with the word whether we are conscious of it or not. There are an uncountable number of expectations that we take for granted everyday, and with good reason. It is a tool we use to expect things to happen, assuming general truths about the world around us as to not spend all of our mental energy in frivolous activities. It is safe to assume that the sun will rise tomorrow, that a fire is hot, drinking water will rehydrate, and so on. So we create expectations about these things. The problem that eventually faces us is when these expectations are unfairly assigned to things that are not so concrete. It works out for a time, however when one changes all of his or her surroundings the gap between expectations and realities becomes ever more recognizable.

When coming to a new place we almost all unconsciously create images of how we suppose that place will be. What it will look like, what the people will look like, what our relation will be to this new place and 99.9% of the time this image is not the case. Creating this image in our heads is something uncontrollable, expecting a place to be anything else than what exists in reality is, however, controllable. Someone once told me a simple quote that has continued to stick with me throughout my service. “Expectations are pre-meditated resentments.” In approaching my work, and I think much of development work in the world as a whole could benefit from this, I find myself utilizing these few words to deal with a complicated set of emotions. They can be applied to the physical appearances of places, cultural practices, or a number of things. I find it most useful in my work (or lack of it sometimes), and relations therein. It is unfair of me to build up any expectations of how things will unfold if I have not been explicitly clear as to what they are to those I am currently working with. I, and anyone else who does this, sets themselves up to be upset, and to some degree resentful when a given situation does not live up to your internally constructed thoughts of how they should go. Bottom line is that without proper communication it isn’t fair to others, as well as yourself to expect anything more or less than what is presented. It is not to say that I do not still find myself upset when things don’t go well. I do. But, if what goes wrong in my work is due to a communication error, not something external to that, then it is my fault for not properly expressing my feelings and managing them with those of others. I am learning to manage my expectations, knowing that communication and self-discipline to be the keys. There are so many things out of any of our control but the intent to properly communicate and find understanding with others is not. This both simple and profound fact I am learning with great humility as I continue my journey in this world.

To get a little less philosophical, I want to ask…Where’s the Music At? It is a common past time of mine and other volunteers I know to criticize the culture. There is just too much time not to. After a time you get used to a lot though, a surprising amount really. A “regular” shower becomes an indulgence to the more efficient bucket. Burning trash everywhere not only ceases to create such an alarming sensation, but out of necessity you start burning it every once in a while yourself (on a deep level burning plastic will always upset me). I just went a whole day for the first time here without eating any beans, tortillas, or a single egg and it felt just plain wrong.

But what I can’t get used to is this music situation here. If you know me well you know I’m completely obsessed with music. I play, I listen, and I listen…and I listen. I found my ways to get good enough internets every once in a while to download as many albums I can. It works out pretty well and I have my guitar here now and a stereo. But there is plain and simple a complete lack of music culture in this country. As previously stated, expectations can get you in trouble, but come on people. To give an analogy: Imagine that you are listening to the top 20 station in the U.S.; it’s usually 95.5 or something like that. Sorry for those that enjoy it, but it’s repetitive shit and most of it sucks. Now, imagine that new songs don’t appear for VERY long periods of time, so that the same 20 songs keep repeating for 6 months at a time or more. Now imagine that you can only travel in buses that blast these same songs, sit in cars with friends who blast it, go to town dances that blast it. It gets hard to handle. Remember that Shakira World Cup song? Yeah, still goin’ strong. Also, next to nobody plays an instrument, or has any sense of rhythm. They just aren’t taught it; music is not an integral part of the culture here. It has nothing to do with poverty; some of the poorest parts of the world have some of the richest musical heritage. And there are always exceptions. There are oldies. The two biggest cities have places where people dance Salsa and other ballroom dances. The biggest exception I have seen is that of the Garifuna, an ethnic group on the north coast of the country of African dissent with direct roots to the slave trade. But that’s the other side of the country. I cannot deny that there is some Merengue, some Salsa, some Punta (Garifuna dance/music), and the like; but live music is a rarity. There is one town band that plays funeral marches and birthday parties; in terms of instruments picture a very simplified and slowed down jazz ensemble. If I had to ask myself, where’s the music at in Langue? I would have to answer…my place.

Come on over.

February

Busy busy busy! Ever since my office and I started work after the New Year things seem to be humming at a higher than normal pitch here in MAFRON. By higher than normal pitch I mean a gargling noise to that of a more efficient engine. However, the engine is still located in Honduras and tends to break down…but enough with the metaphors. It’s the dry season here. It’s the hot season here. It’s the hot and dry season here and it’s only getting hotter and dryer. I feel mostly acclimated though perhaps only out of necessity. This is the time where most of the outdoor work for Water/Sanitation volunteers occurs. There is not a drop that falls from the sky for months on end so topography studies for new water systems, and construction of all types is taken advantage of during this time. My region recently received a large sum of funds from Spain for water and sanitation related activities so I have been relatively busy out in the campo (field).

There are always pluses and minuses to these situations. Plus: Tons of money all at once. Minus: Tons of money all at once. I explain a little. It’s great there are tons of new projects for water where people have never not had to walk great distances for it. It really is a beautiful thing to live in some of these very secluded communities for some days without electricity or nearly any water, talking about their lives, how the system could help so much. But there are intrinsic problems that these quick funds not only tend to, but almost always ignore. As aforementioned some of these communities don’t have electricity, and it’s very dry here. There are no year long sources of mountain spring water, therefore pumping is the usual go to down here in the south of Honduras. Pumping requires electricity. Without electricity any given community would have to use a generator, sucking up gas that has to be carried long distances, and that people whose only occupation is farming cannot afford. In the long term as well water systems require investment to make them last for 20 years or more instead of 2 or 3. The investments aren’t huge, but organization and funds usually lack in these situations and the system and community eventually suffer for it. But the funds are here they say! Lets build! If we don’t now Spain takes the money away! So we do studies, we design. And the rest gets figured out later…or doesn’t.

This is how it goes a lot of times, not all the time. I prefer to take a bit of a more vested interest in sustainability of projects. For example I’m looking into the ability to put solar energy in one system I’m designing. The state of Honduras would pay for 40% and I have to look for the rest. But it’s a better option for the furthest and poorest communities that won’t receive electricity lines for years to come. These funds I’m working with now can also be appropriated towards building latrines, always a good thing.

Things aren’t all bad, it’s just important to share a few of the realities of working down here. It’s hard to be a part of projects you don’t think will last because you look around at relatively new systems everywhere that are failing. It comes down to a personal view of mine with development that contradicts the international sentiment: too much money plain and simple. There is too much money and not enough follow-up, not enough people on the ground, not enough community members making their own educated decisions. Progress is more than not, on the international scale, measured in numbers. How much was built, how much spent. Timing, education, local interest and investment take the back seat often. Sure anyone can make the case looking around the developing world and say, gosh they need money, however what they really need in my opinion is organization, long-term not short-term investments in capacity building, governments with greater accountability, local government with greater agency. I think less external funds would force the government to allocate resources with greater efficacy, and deter at least a smidgen of the outright monetary corruption that exists here…but I digress

Things are good right now. There is water work, when I am able to get together equipment and time out rides. I’m also branching out to health promoters in the community to stay productive when other work dries out (no pun intended).

Making the most of my time in and out of my community.