Walking in circles

Hello faithfull readers. My Dad recently reprimanded me for not blogging in a while - we have actually been kind of busy lately. We went to Nicaragua for the regional MCC retreat; a spiritual retreat giving us a lot of time for reflection and prayer and discussion with people from all over having similar experiences with MCC, which I enjoyed immensely and would be happy to tell anyone who is interested more about. Recently we hosted a church group from Bluffton Ohio who has a sister relationship with a Mennonite church here near San Pedro, and we are gearing up for our big annual ¨Food, Faith & Justice" youth study tour from the Canadian Food Grains Bank. But rather than going into details about any of the above, I'm just going to copy and paste something I wrote after a wet walk I took a week or so ago with Andrew (sorry for the lack of pictures... it was raining, after all):

We just had a long and rainy weekend without much activity. Saturday, after a few hours of coffee drinking, dinking around, and looking out the windows, I was struck by the urge to walk around the circunvalación – the circular road that goes all the way around the center of San Pedro Sula. There’s something about a circular road that just invites you to try walking around it. Despite the rain Andrew was game for it – and after some more piddling we set off, in our running shoes and track pants, me with my rain coat, and enough money to get some snacks and a taxi if things got ugly.

It actually didn’t take as long as we’d initially thought – about two and a half hours in all. It was perhaps the ugliest walk I’ve ever taken just for the sake of walking – most of the way there is no sidewalk, and of course it’s along the busy road the whole time. There was a lot of dodging of big holes in the sidewalk, broken glass, garbage, ect. We walked directly north from our apartment until we reached the circunvalación, then walked counter-clockwise all the way around. It struck me how we started off in a fairly middle, or lower-middle class neighborhood (the North side), and as we reached the Western top of the circle, we passed nicer and nicer stores, coffee shops, chains, bars (although still no sidewalks – this is not a pedestrian friendly route). We stopped briefly for pupusas at our favorite little pupusa restaurant just a quarter of the way in, partly to get out of the rain and partly because we hadn’t brought anything to eat or drink with us and were already ready for a break. Pupusas are by far my favorite Honduran snack/lunch food – especially the ones with beans and melted cheese inside the corn tortilla, with pickled onions and cabbage on top and a side of hot salsa. Delicious! I stay away from the ones stuffed with chicharron, or pig skin. I am not that hard core.

Then as we passed into what we thought of as the 3^rd quadrant, it got dingier, and old Chinese restaurants and mechanic shops started to replace the glitzy chain stores, and even the mud looked dirtier. I think it was raining harder, too. Right in the middle of the 3^rd quadrant, or the South part of the circle, was the butt end of the big open air food market. The end where they put all the rotting cabbages, and neglected horses stand in the rain to munch on whatever debris is available. Here we had to run to avoid getting hit by a garbage truck, and had trouble maneuvering between the big mud puddles and piles of rotting vegetables. I tried to hold my breath for the length of the market but failed, breathing in a big gasp of sickeningly sweet air. We continued curving around slowly, past more food markets, tire shops, mechanics, more tire shops, more mechanics... slowly back to the middle class neck of the woods and home.

At the end of it all I felt kind triumphant, even though it hadn’t really been that long of a walk. It was fun to do something spontaneous. We stripped off the wet and muddy pants and sneakers, took low pressure hot showers, made some tea, and settled down to do some more web surfing/rain watching. Just another Saturday in San Pedro.

Once again I am reminded that San Pedro is a city of stark contrasts, the wealth and poverty distinct from one another, but thrown together at times to create jarring contrasts. Big shiny SUVs whipping past horsecarts, shoeless youth sleeping in front of the Espresso Americano coffee bar on cardboard mats.