Saturday, June 7, 2008
A few images
Thursday, June 5, 2008
A nice mural
Jen Eberly, our vistior and friend from Goshen, in front of one of the murals in the cathedral in San Pedro Sula.
Fútbol (Soccer)
There really is no US equivalent to a Central American soccer game. Hondurans are nuts for their World Cup team -- La Selección -- which has the best chance of qualifying for the World Cup since the 80's. Last night I had the privilege of freezing my butt off watching the first qualifying match between Honduras and Puerto Rico. Fun, but miserable.
The rain began about 5:30, as I and two other men from the church were entering the stadium, and it didn't stop for the entire five hours we spent standing in the back of the bleachers. The game was supposed to begin at 7:30, but they waited until 8:30 to see if field conditions would improve. They didn't; the field was just an hour soggier, but they gave it a go anyway. It was ugly, with the players slipping and sliding all over the muddy pitch, but Honduras pressed on victorious, 4-0. The fans got what they wanted. All I wanted was for them to cancel the game.
What is it about people -- let's be honest -- about men that makes them sit out for hours in pelting rain to watch a bunch of other men kick around a ball for a while?
¡Viva la Selección!
Monday, June 2, 2008
Street kids and photos
Over the last few months I have become accustomed, and almost calloused, to the presence of very young children living in the streets. I was reminded of this when we were traveling around last week with some Mennonite church leaders from the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. (You can see some photos of the trip here.) One of the participants, Nelly Rivera, commented on a little girl standing in the middle of a dirt road near Choloma. She said that if this were Puerto Rico, she would have called child protective services. I remember having those same thoughts about six months ago, when we passed a little boy in only a diaper playing with a hammer and nails that were left out on the front stoop of a house. I assume that boy's parents were around somewhere, but this little kid was in a dangerous situation, and no one took any notice.
Just yesterday we were walking to church when we caught up to a young boy -- probably 9 or 10 -- limping down the sidewalk. We stopped and asked him what happened to his foot, and he showed me where a piece of glass had imbedded itself in the middle of his foot. He had no shoes, and his ratty shorts and shirt were about falling off. Where did he come from? Where are his parents? Sadly, chances are he will look for a home, and will find it in one of the many street gangs.
I feel overwhelmed by poverty, and particularly when vulnerable small children are left on the streets to fend for themselves. I don't have any answers for this troubling reality of life in Central America. But I pray that I don't let these images of poverty harden me any more than they already have.
On a cheerier note, here are some more pictures of our trip with our most recent visitor, LaRita Craft. She just finished her master's in piano at University of Missouri at Kansas City, and celebrated with a trip around Honduras.
Just yesterday we were walking to church when we caught up to a young boy -- probably 9 or 10 -- limping down the sidewalk. We stopped and asked him what happened to his foot, and he showed me where a piece of glass had imbedded itself in the middle of his foot. He had no shoes, and his ratty shorts and shirt were about falling off. Where did he come from? Where are his parents? Sadly, chances are he will look for a home, and will find it in one of the many street gangs.
I feel overwhelmed by poverty, and particularly when vulnerable small children are left on the streets to fend for themselves. I don't have any answers for this troubling reality of life in Central America. But I pray that I don't let these images of poverty harden me any more than they already have.
On a cheerier note, here are some more pictures of our trip with our most recent visitor, LaRita Craft. She just finished her master's in piano at University of Missouri at Kansas City, and celebrated with a trip around Honduras.
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
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).
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).
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
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.
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.
Friday, April 11, 2008
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.
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.
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