A Catch-up List...

The highs and lows of our first Honduran summer so far:

Highs:
1. We've been traveling a lot for work lately - we made it to the beautiful little town of La Campa to check out where one of the new short-term MCCers will live and work next year with an organization called CASM (Mennonite Social Action Commission). We bumped around in the back of a truck for two days visiting some very small mountain communities, made it to a ribbon-cutting ceremony of sorts (one community we visited was celebrating the completion of many small metal silos that they will use to store their corn crops), and hiked up to a waterfall in protected rain forest. Click Here to view some pictures.

2. We had an MCC team meeting in Tegucigalpa for a few days - it was great to spend a few days with everyone AND we made it to a Guillermo Anderson concert in San Juancito. I am officially a fan.

3. During a day trip for some meetings in La Ceiba, a woman I'd met during our first few months here complimented me on my improvement in Spanish. This was a pretty big deal for me. I treated myself to an ice cream afterwards.

4. Andrew's birthday was the first weekend of this month and there was much celebration. We made vegetarian groundnut stew for MCC friends, enjoyed some air-conditioning at the mall with some Honduran friends, and spent almost 3 hours trying to figure out a few chords with the church choir. And then we had cake.

5. Our Goshen friend LaRita finished up grad school in Kansas City this month and decided to celebrate by spending a week with us! We spent some time with MCC friends Josh and Maria at their farm, went on an early morning birding trip at Lago Yojoa, and got in some good beach time so she could show off her early summer Honduran tan when she gets back home.

6. There has recently been an energized movement for peace in San Pedro. We see bumper stickers distributed by the local paper, La Prensa, that read "Recuperemos La Paz" (Let's restore the peace) all over the city, and there was recently a large peace march that went through the center of the city. After my last post on the violence that is so prevalent in the media and in the minds of people here it's been really refreshing to experience the excitement around peaceful change.

7. When LaRita came she brought us dark chocolate, a french press coffee maker, and new flip flops that I'd ordered. Awesome.

Lows:
1. It is just pretty darn hot and hazy around here. The temperature doesn't let up much at night and I am sweating more than I ever thought possible. The dry season is stretching on longer than normal, and the skies have been hazy for weeks as farmers have been burning last year's crops to get ready to plant. We took a hike up the mountains on the edge of the city and from there we could barely see the city through the haze. First people said the rains should come around the 15th, which has come and gone. Farmers in La Campa told us that the rains used to start like clockwork right around the 3rd of May... this knowledge of the changing climate did not help Andrew's and my global warming paranoia.

2. We've both been sick a bit on and off - I blame the heat and also that mysterious salad I ate at the bus terminal a few weeks ago.

As you can see, the highs are outweighing the lows so things are pretty good in general. I am "casually" looking for a second volunteer-type position to help keep myself busy when we are not traveling with groups or planning for groups. We will be meeting a group of church leaders from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic tomorrow at the Nicaraguan border to lead a learning tour of Honduran Mennonite organizations this next week. Seven whole days of nothing but Spanish! Andrew put together some favorite Honduran pictures on our Picasa site. Click here to view them (some might be repeats).

Life and Death in San Pedro

In some ways yesterday was just an average day in San Pedro... Andrew and I went about our daily routine in the hot and bustling city center; keeping relatively cool and removed in the MCC office. The following two events shook me up and caused me to reflect on what exactly IS an ordinary day in San Pedro, and reminded me once again that I'm not in Indiana anymore.

1. After over a month of not being able to meet up with my Spanish teacher, Veronica, we finally had a class yesterday afternoon. Because of my frequent traveling for work and her jam-packed schedule, it is rare that we are able to have class at all - hence my original purchase of 30 hours of classes stretching out over the span of 5 months now. I entered the school to find everything changed - new secretarial staff and the furniture rearranged. When Veronica arrived 10 minutes later I found out the reasons behind the changes and also why we hadn't been able to meet for so long. She told me that a month ago, during our usual class time and on a day when our class had been canceled because she had been unable to come, the school had been robbed and the owner of the school had been stabbed and killed at her desk. I had remained clueless to this tragic event mainly because I had left San Pedro for two weeks and hadn't read the papers. Sometimes I don't read the paper here just because it's often depressingly filled with news of tragic events that happen so often. This opens my eyes yet again not only to the violence that has become so commonplace, but also to the undercurrent of fear that people live with here. This is why most businesses have armed guards and why our apartment is surrounded by a huge wall topped with razor wire. Violence seems to go uninvestigated by the underpaid city police force.

Rumors are circulating that this seemingly random act of violence was not random after all, and actually instigated by someone connected with the school - some kind of personal vendetta. If so, is this kind of violence the Central American counterpart to the sue-happy culture of the U.S.? Maybe so, in a culture where the legal and political systems cannot be counted upon.

On a lighter note...
2. Later in the afternoon Andrew and I took the Ruta 7 bus to try and figure out where the route goes. We went past the Texaco station, one of the Universities, some fancy neighborhoods and some desolate looking ones. While stopped at a red light I saw a horse tied up to a fence next to a ditch - a familiar sight. The horse was licking what appeared to be a very new and very wet colt. My eyes traveled beyond the young one and saw long strands of afterbirth and red guck still hanging from the new mama's back end. This was not such a familiar sight for this city-born girl, and I stood up to watch the nature-show-worthy scene, along with the other right-side sitting passengers of the Ruta 7. Here we were, sitting and sweating it out on the dusty hot intersection and a scene of gross natural beauty was right there among the bustling traffic. I couldn't help feeling sad for this horse, having to give birth tied to a fence post in the San Pedro heat with no shade in sight. And more than a little worried that the newborn would eventually wander into oncoming traffic... but I guess these things have a way of working themselves out. I so often feel bad for animals around here, but life is just kind of rough. For everyone. Dogs and horses and chickens included.

Question: do I have more compassion for animals than people? I am reminded of a recent David Sedaris story in the New Yorker to the effect that similar sentiments are quite common - after Hurricane Katrina a lot of people sent money to help save trapped animals, not people. More questions to follow as this is getting obnoxiously long.

Health care

A week ago today I woke up with an annoying little tickle in my throat. Over the weekend, it turned in to a full-fledged something, and Sunday I woke up with a fever of about 101.3 F. I haven't had a fever like that in a while, but I may call it the most miserable fever of my life, considering that the temperature in our room was not much less than it was in my head. Between Saturday evening and most of Monday my temperature hovered between 100 and 101.
So, on Monday I decided it was time to go to the doctor. Marcos Flores, the Honduran office assistant, took me to a diagnostic clinic first, where they took blood and urine samples. At 3:30, once the results were ready, I picked them up and headed to Heber Flores's health clinic. Heber, Marcos's nephew, attends the Mennonite Church here in San Pedro and operates a sliding scale health clinic.

Anyway, the tests were normal, so had me hop up onto the exam table, where he quickly deduced the beginnings of a throat infection. "Strep?" I asked. "We'd have to do a test, and the results won't be available for a few days," he said. "We better just give you antibiotics. Do you prefer pills or injections?"

Easy.

"Pills."

"Really? The injections work much faster." It was a direct attack on my manhood.

I agreed to the injection.

"So drop your pants."

I hadn't agreed to this. But before I knew it, he was shoving a needle right into my left butt-cheek.

"There, much better," he said. "Now just come back tomorrow for the second one."

So, two soar butt cheeks later my throat infection is miraculously cured.

Also, on a health-care related note, while I was in Azacualpa last weekend I accompanied an injured Adam Lawrence, one of the SALT volunteers, to the sobador, the gentleman who rubs and cracks soar joints. It was fascinating -- he was a shirtless older gentleman with a cowboy hat, and an eternal smile on his face. He sat Adam down on a ratty old chair and his family gathered around as he took a glob of Icy Hot, and slowly started massaging the ankle that Adam turned while playing soccer. After numbing it up, he cracked it multiple times. Adam seemed to feel a little better

Before we arrived I had considered having him look at the joint where my leg meets my hip that was bothering me after the previous night's soccer game. After watching him smear icy hot all over Adam's leg, and imagining him massaging close to my crotch, I decided against it. My leg felt better instantly.

A note on melons

As you have probably heard, cantaloupes exported from Honduras have been accused of causing a salmonella outbreak that has affected 50 people. The FDA has essentially banned cantaloupe import, at least from the company responsible, which has major ramifications for the cantaloupe export industry. The Honduran government has responded to this crisis in various ways: earlier this week, Honduran president Mel Zelaya was interviewed on CNN and broke open a melon, cut a slice, and proceeded to feast on it without fear; yesterday, three top Honduran officials traveled to Washington to fight the ban.

So while North Americans are fearing death by melon, some Honduran workers are fearing death by starvation. Ok, that's a little dramatic, but according to yesterday's newspaper, 1,800 employees have already been laid off. In a country whose major economic activity is exporting, one anomaly in the market can be almost catastrophic, at least for the people who are absolutely dependent on the foreign market for their livelihood.

Perhaps this warrants a comment on export in general. In February, Amanda and I had the opportunity to visit the largest shipping port in Central America, just up the road from San Pedro Sula in Puerto Cortez. As I said before, Honduras is an export country. It ships coffee, bananas, pineapples, watermelons, cantaloupes, clothing, mangoes, car harnesses, papayas, grapefruit, plantains, and much more all over North America and Europe.

Environmentally, those are a lot of miles of shipping.

Economically, Honduras is absolutely dependent on the markets in other countries.

If the coffee market is flooded with cheap coffee from Asia, Honduran farmers make nothing. If the banana crop is wiped out by a hurricane, the country takes a major economic blow. What does it mean, as a North American, to be tied to Central America in this way? Our tastes and whims have such a direct effect on families in Honduras being able to eat, yet we don't know much about where our food and consumer products actually comes from -- the faces behind those who sew our shirts and pick our mangoes. When you meat a struggling coffee farmer who pleads with you to buy fairly traded coffee, it demands a new sense of urgency. By choosing to not buy fairly traded coffee, I'm essentially telling him that his life is not worth the few dollars more per pound I would have to pay. All of our consumer choices have a direct effect on actual people, and this realization has been haunting me, and will continue to haunt me as I begin to rethink my consumer choices now and in the future.

Hondurans in New Orleans

There is a nice article on the MCC news website about a group of Hondurans and Guatemalans who spent two weeks in New Orleans volunteering for Mennonite Disaster Service, helping to construct homes and sharing common experiences of hope after a hurricane. Click here to read the article.

The Canadians came and went

Our first big learning tour is over and we are still in the "well, what do we do now?" stage of our recovery. The whole trip went well; we had a great group of participants from the Canadian Food Grains Bank, and I think Andrew and I learned more in a little over two weeks than in the last few months. The focus of the trip was on food security and was advertised as a "food, faith and justice" tour. Some highlights:

1. Playing soccer with the youth group from the Mennonite church in Tegucigalpa - kind of an embaressing show from us gringos, but fun - I've been wanting to play soccer since we got here.
2. A visit to AFE - Amor, Fe y Esperanza (love, faith, and hope) - this is the school started for children living in the dump which Andrew wrote about before. There is something very special about this place of hope in the midst of so much despair. We got in some more good soccer with the kids there that afternoon and the visit was a highlight for many of the participants.
3. A lecture on the geo-political history of Honduras by a rivetting professor of history from Tegucigalpa, Don Mario. He hosted us on his back porch and wowed us for a good hour and a half until we were thoroughly late for dinner.
4. Visiting rural coffee farms up in the mountains near Guatemala during the harvest. A Honduran organization called CASM (Mennonite Social Action Committee) is working with farmers to help them diversify their farms and use innovative technologies such as vermiculture (worm composting) and biodigesters in order to move towards sustainability and organic production. Very cool. We stayed in a little "eco-hotel" for 3 nights (they should call it an eco-cabin really), I hardly got any sleep, but it was worth it to get up into the fresh air and take a 5-hour horseback ride that skirted the Guatemalan border and made my rump sore for two days.
5. Nightly reflection, discussion, singing (in English!), and prayer with this group of thoughtful young people, all from different faith traditions and walks of life. We were challenged by our visits and speakers to consider our role as North Americans in the issues of globalization, corporate farming, free trade and cheap labor, and poverty. This has left me still feeling unsettled and questioning our own role here, but I suppose that is a good thing.
6. We got in some good game playing and I'm going to go ahead and take some credit for spreading the Dutch Blitz love further North, including "The Rock".

Some questions:
1. How can someone not like beans?
2. Why did I never learn Canadian geography as a child?
3. Can a two week, intensive cultural learning experience change life-long decisions and habits? Going along with our speaker Kurt ver Beek (we have a link to his website and work on long-term affects of short-terms missions under "related links") and assuming a big "No" to that question, how can we move towards meaningful and lasting change?

I have many more questions, which all add to my unsettled feelings these days. On a personal note, I'm also hoping to find a good place where I can volunteer my afternoons or mornings that fits in with our sporatic travel schedule. When we are busy we are really really busy, and when we're not, we're just not.

Semana Santa is around the corner! We're looking forward to hosting travelers from my home church in Portland, painting the office, and celebrating Easter and fellow MCCer Adam's birthday with an Easter Feaster extravaganza. Pictures of our travels with Canadians and Easter Feaster to come at a later date.

Photos, photos, photos

It's been a busy couple of months here in San Pedro. We are preparing for our first major learning tour, comprised of youth from the Canadian Food Grains Bank who will be spending two weeks studying food security issues in Honduras. We'll take them all over the country, from Tegucigalpa; to El Cajón near Lago Yojoa; to Azacualpa, Santa Barbara; and, finally, San Pedro Sula. We'll visit a clothing factory, the world's largest Tilapia exporter, farm projects in the mountains, a women's rights organization, the Canadian International Development Agency office, and much more. We'll also probably be incomunicado for a while.

Here are two photo albums of some highlights from the last month:

Click here for pictures of our good friends Joel Cano and Vanessa Flores at their wedding on the beach.

Here are some pictures of our first work and learn team, five folks from First Mennonite Church of Bluffton. We spent most of the week assisting with various building projects at the Mennonite Church in La Lopez Arellano, just north of San Pedro Sula.