Twas the night before Christmas

Twas the night before Navidad (Christmas) and all through the casa (house), not a creature was stirring not even a raton (mouse). Ok well that is just patently untrue (except for the mouse part, I have finally won my war against those furry intruders). If this classic story had been written in rural Honduras it would read more like “and bullets and fireworks were whizzing past the house.” That’s because unlike North Americans, Hondurans celebrate Christmas Eve, not by having a relaxing dinner with the family and going to bed early to await the arrival of a present bearing, fat man, but instead eat a whole bunch of tamales followed by gallons of cheap sugar cane alcohol (guaro) and then take to the streets to shoot of fireworks and guns till all hours of the morning. Honestly, if Santa Claus were real (sorry kids, but I honestly didn’t expect you to be reading this), and he delivered presents to Honduras, he would be doing so at his own peril. Rather than coasting in smoothly on his reindeer drawn sleigh to land comfortably on apartment building roofs and sturdy shingle, like in the States, he would have to fly a stealth mission through a hail of gun fire and fire work explosions, like some WWII bomber pilot, and then try to set down on a roof of easily shifting teja (brick tiles, that you have probably seen if you have travelled through the American southwest). He would then have to try to squeeze his sizeable girth through the chimney of a fogon (traditional wood burning stove), and once inside, rather than delicious milk and cookies, he would likely be greeted with left over tortillas.

Well now that I have thoroughly analyzed that hypothetical situation, I would just like to wish you all a Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukah (hopefully my spelling of that is somewhere in the ball park), and Spectacular Kwanza (not sure what adjective goes there so I just picked a positive one) . This will be my second Holiday Season away from home, and the 23^rd of December will mark my 19^th month away from the USA. This year’s holiday celebrations will be bitter sweet, because they will also represent my last few weeks in Honduras as a volunteer (at least for a while). I don’t want to dwell on this sad news, as I are already working on some touching entries to try to sum up my service in this country. The only thing I know now is that I will be home in DC around the 15^th of January (for anywhere between a month, and permanently) and would love to see all of my friends and relatives back in the USA. This comes as a result of the increasing violence levels in this country, that have recently resulted in a Volunteer being shot in the leg by a stray bullet during an attempted bus assault.

But looking past this unfortunate event and the major changes that are steadily approaching, I would like to briefly look back over my year in Honduras, and point out some of the highlights. I may not have done the best job of using this blog to keep people informed about the work I was doing here; instead I have chosen to concentrate on ridiculous anecdotes and various animal related shenanigans. While I do not regret this choice, I will use this entry to fill you guys in on what I have been doing when I am not dodging bullets at futbol matches and battling vermin in my house. My major projects over the past year have been: acquiring funds to buy desks and chairs (My sincere thanks to everyone who donated) and setting up a computer lab using said desks and chairs, designing an excel spread sheet with formulas that will calculate yearly interest and teaching the local caja rural (micro-finance organization) how to use it (as opposed to their current system of calculating it all by hand using calculators and then recording the information in various badly organized books), helping my counterpart in the Catastro department of the mayor’s office (he is in charge of collecting municipal tax’s and maintaining property documents) to create a digital property map of the casco urbano (the town center), helping my counterpart in the Women’s Office set up a Red de Mujeres (basically a support network of women to promote women’s health issues and create job opportunities for women, and to try to offer help to victims of spousal abuse) at a municipal level, with representatives in the various communities, and continued my work with a group of women who I helped to start a local bakery (we already have plans drawn up to have the municipality build them a café/bakery using funds from the central government that are earmarked for promoting economic opportunities for women). (side note: I know that was the longest sentence ever, but I am feeling far too lazy to go back and figure out how to handle the punctuation).

As a conclusion to this makeshift Christmas letter (at least I didn’t include a picture of a dog, apparently Sarah Palin hates when people do that), I would just like to say that I hope you all have had as rich and fulfilling a year as I have had. It has been trying at times, and I would be lying if I told you that my life here is easy, but I guess that is why they call Peace Corps, “The toughest job you’ll ever love”. (Now I just hope they decide to let me return and continue loving it for the remainder of my contract)

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.

Some of the Habits I Will Have to Break Before I Go Back to the USA

1) Haggling. When I first got to site I was haggling it all of the time. Haggling in Honduras is just a way of life, especially when it comes to buying ropa americana or other slightly used goods. While it may be a legit practice here, I don't see myself walking into Target and starting a price war when I get back. I often find myself negotiating the fares of my bus rides as well, which is somewhat depressing because I'm literally fighting over amounts generally less than $.25. 

2) Pushing my way onto busses and trains. I admit that when I was living in Cary, IL and having to commute to the Loop everyday that I may have partaken in some territorial grudge matches while waiting for the Metra. Those suburban tiffs, however, pale in comparison to the full on pushing and shoving that I've witnessed here in Honduras between people trying to board the bus. I've straight up been pushed ---and I mean pushed--- by an an eighty year old woman who wanted to board the bus first. Getting a seat on a chicken bus can make or break your day, ask anyone. When I return to the US, civility reigns on public transportation. 

3) Exposing my belly. It's a weird, apparently masculine, thing to do when your really hot down here, and amazingly it works, but it is super campo. Honduran men do it all of the time, and I picked it up while working on the soccer field with various day laborers. On a hot day in La Ceiba, nearly every man who is not wearing a button down shirt will be exposing his belly. I mean if everyone else is doing it why not, right? 

4) Being Catracho: "You're more Catracho then us," said the Honduran professor from Harvard, as he lauded our use of vernacular, hand flips, and lip points. The hardest thing to shake will be all of the little cultural things I've picked up while living here. Saying buen provecho before every meal, often to people I don't even know as they're eating, pointing the direction of things with my lips, flipping my hand to expose my palm when I need something or just want to say "what's going on", showing the back of my hand when signaling for someone to ven aqui, hastily slurring words and phrases like, no hombre (pronounced nombre), randomly dropping the "s" off of words like vos o pues, saying adios to nearly every one I pass on the street, even if I don't know them, and of course perpetually muttering permiso while working my way through a crowded bus or room. 

5) Drinking things with sugar. I've tried to fight it,but I have found myself addicted to those molecular complexes of energy. I never added sugar, or really even drank pop before I came to Hondu. That is going to be a hard addiction to break.  My teeth and body will thank me for giving it up though. 


6) Restoring meeting etiquette. Not answering my cell phone. I use to detest this practice, but I have found myself mimicking Hondurans when it comes to answering your phone during the middle of the meeting and not excusing myself from the table. An excerpt from our friend Jenna on cellphone use in Honduras from her blog JP (that's jota-pe) in Honduras.


I looked up to see the head nurse text messaging. Text messaging. Moments before the baby’s head was about to crown. Infuriated, she yelled, ‘Put down your phone and help me!,’ to which the text messaging fiend of a nurse sassily responded, ‘Nadie aquí le puede ayudar, mamita…¡empuje!’ (No one here can help you sweetie… push!). Right!?!?!? I mean… can you BELIEVE that? The answer of any person who has ever spent any amount of time in Honduras: absofuckinlutely.

Honduran cell phone etiquette is otro pedo (this means ‘something else’, but the literal translation is ‘other fart’... it’s definitely in my top five favorite Spanish phrases). Here, phone calls and text messages are answered under practically any circumstance, childbirth included. In my first few months here I would attend the bimonthly meetings which municipal authority figures are required to hold by a law put in place to encourage transparency and mitigate corruption in local governments. Anyways, in these meetings, an act is read recapping the previous meeting’s content, then those present discuss current projects being carried out in the town, proposed projects (latrine construction, electrification of a neighborhood, a sanitary landfill, etc.), and requests from poorer people in the community for funds to travel by bus to Santa Rosa and pay for a medical consultation at the hospital. In other words, things that could potentially be important. These meetings tend to last somewhere around four hours and for every single one of the 14,400 seconds of those four hours, someone at the table is dicking around on their phone; I’ve even witnessed people who are sitting directly across from one another sending messages to each other.

I wonder if taking pictures of someone on their phone is considered more rude than simply being on your phone?

Some of the Habits I Will Have to Break Before I Go Back to the USA

1. Eating exclusively with my hands

As anyone who has traveled in Central America (or Langley Park, MD) can tell you, Central American food is mostly finger food. Almost all of the typical dishes here can be consumed with nothing more than your hands and a tortilla (this includes most soups, which often feture large chunks of meat still on the bone, or still unpeeled plantains). Thus for the past year and a half, any meal I have consumed outside of my home (or those of other PCVs) has been eaten with my hands and tortillas (you are often given a fork, but it is pretty much relegated to the job of a makeshift cutting implement, so as to break your food up into pieces small enough to manhandle into your mouth with your tortilla). Somehow I don’t see this style of eating goving over well in fine dining establishments in the states (and I’m also guessing it will be hard to get tortillas at said restaurants.)

2. Wearing Chucks to work

When I got my acceptance letter from PC Honduras, it came with a list of clothing items we should bring, and they tended towards the formal side. Being the naïve aspiring volunteer that I was, I took them at their word and packed to the list (I even brought a blazer). Well it turns out that the before mentioned list was a load of BS (pardon my French). The most dressed up I have ever seen anyone at my mayor’s office is a dress shirt tucked into jeans, with cowboy boots (more on that later), and on an average day, most of my male coworkers are in knockoff Hollister (which is like the hottest brand ever down here) T-shirts and polos, with jeans and tennis shoes. Thus after the first few days of being hilariously over dressed, I settled into a rotation of checkered snap-down western shirts, jeans, and beat up old Chuck Taylor All Stars. And quite honestly had I been assigned to somewhere in Choluteca (the southernmost department, and by far the hottest place in the country), I would probably just show up a work in gym shorts, flip flops and mesh basketball jerseys (because honestly you can play most things like that off as just something that we crazy gringos do.) Sadly I have resigned myself to the fact that in no job I want in the states will this type of outfit be acceptable, so I am making sure to enjoy it while it lasts.

3. Having ridiculous facial hair

Now most of you who know me, know I am an aficionado of ridiculous facial hair, and made my share of questionable shaving decisions in the USA. So it will come as no surprise to you that I have been experimenting with beard options down here in Honduras as well. What I have come to realize, however, is that when I return to the states I will probably be in the market for my first real (grown up person) job. And I know I don’t have much experience working in offices, but I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that they are not big proponents of old-timey bartender mustaches that connect to your sideburns or facial hair that makes you look like a Spanish conquistador. So as a result of this revelation I have decided to dedicate myself to growing extra ridiculous facial hair in my remaining time here. This is great because, here people already stare at me so a little added facial hair is hardly of interest. I have also decided that I need to grow a serious mustache at some point before I return, since here mustaches are a sign of manliness and maturity (whereas in the USA they are a sign of being a power tripping State Trooper, a 70’s porn star, a child molester, or a dirty, dirty hipster).

4. Playing with/ picking up strange children

In America (thanks the upstanding organizations, like the Catholic Church and Penn State football program) we have a serious fear of sexual predators. This, coupled with our general fear of strangers, means that it is no longer acceptable to talk to strangers kid or pat them on the head. Here in Central America you can pretty much play with any kid you run into on the street and have pretty free license to kiss and hold other peoples babies (including the babies of vague acquaintances or complete strangers). Hell, sometimes this is forced upon you (though this happens to women more than men). On crowed busses for example, it is common place for a woman who is standing up, due to lack of seats, to pass off a baby to a woman who is seated, even if they don’t know each other (here it is also culturally acceptable to not give up your seat to pregnant women and the elderly, though admittedly it seems like a good 50% of the female occupants of any bus are either pregnant or holding babies). So I better get all of my playing with strange children done here, or when I get back I might have trouble explaining to the police that, despite my mustache, I was just trying to be friendly with those kids.

5. Throwing toilet paper in the trash can.

For any of you who have not traveled outside of Europe and the USA, most countries in the developing world still do not have a good system of indoor plumbing in place (in most developing countries there are actually more people with cell phones than people with access to indoor plumbing). And for those of us in developing countries who are fortunate enough to actually have indoor plumbing; it is not so well pressurized as to allow us to flush toilet paper. Thus we are forced to keep a special waste basket in our bathrooms to collect “soiled” toilet tissue. Those of us in rural towns without real trash pickup, have to take this toilet tissue into our back yards and burn it (as you can imagine, burning “soiled” toilet paper is no picnic). Thus after over a year and a half here in Honduras, I am well conditioned to putting my toilet paper in the waste basket rather than flushing it down, and am pretty sure that when I get back to the states it will take me a little while to break this habit. Soooo, any of you who are going to have me in your homes soon after my return, I would just like to offer a heartfelt apology in advance for putting my soiled toilet paper in your trash can.

The power of words… Or, how many ways do you really need to say “pig”?

This past weekend I was riding in a moto-taxi (basically, a super light weight, Indian made, three wheeled motorcycle that has a bench seat in the back for passengers, and is rapidly becoming ubiquitous in smaller Honduran cities due to its gas efficiency) in Ocotepeque and got into a discussion with the driver about what I was doing in Honduras and what it was like adjusting to life in the country. This is a conversation I have at least once a week, and I have established a set of stock answers that I can rattle off almost without thinking about it (ex. Yes, it was hard to adjust to the food, but now I love tortillas, and no, in America we do not just eat all of our food out of cans… no, I am not doing an internship, I already have my university degree and chose of my own free will to come here and work for about 5,000 Lempiras [about 250 USD] a month… and no, this is not a punishment because I committed a crime in the USA, ect.). In this particular conversation, the driver asked me a commonly asked question, “Was it hard to learn Spanish, because we have so many words for the same thing, whereas in English each thing only has one name?” I always find this question annoying because it is based on completely incorrect assumptions, both about the English language, as well as what is difficult about learning Spanish. It is incorrect, first off, in assuming that English has only one way of referring to any given thing (I am always curious as to how the people who tell me this, as if it were a definite fact, are completely sure that English is like this, considering none of them speak a word of it). This can be disproved rapidly; for example we have a come up with a multitude of ways to refer to money over the years (currency, tender, bucks, cash, bills, dollars, green, cabbage, clams, dead presidents, … ect). It is also incorrect in assuming that this is why we would have trouble learning Spanish, and in doing this, overlooks the numerous differences between the two languages, that actually prove to be the serious stumbling blocks for non-native speakers. These include, among other things, the existence of gender in Spanish (all words are masculine of feminine and thus one must use know when to use “el” vs. “la” for “the”, and when to use “un” vs. “una” for “a”), the difference in pronunciation between the letters in the two languages (made harder by the existence of the double “r”, which required one to roll their “r”s in a way that doesn’t exist in English, and can be rather challenging for gringos), and the fact that that “to be” in English is represented by “ser” or “estar” in Spanish depending on context.

This question is also amusing to me because the example that every Honduran gives to support this is the various words they have for “pig” (“cerdo”[the actual word], “chancho”, “marrano”, “curro”, “coche”, “Puerco”, “cochino”… ect). Im not sure when they all got together as a country to decide that this would be the example they used (maybe it is part of their classes on dealing with gringos [that assume exist and are mandatory] in which they also cover yelling “gringo” at us, staring unabashedly at us on buses, cat calling American women, and laughing uncontrollably at how it sounds when we speak English), considering it is actually an example of a word that we have various ways of saying as well (pig, hog, swine,…ect). As I pondered this question, I began to consider what other words they had a plethora of and came up with “child” (“niño”, “guiro”, “cipote”, “ichoco”, “esquincle” [from Mexico], “bicho” [Salvadoran word, mostly used in border areas], “sambo”, “chino”, “mico”, chinguin”, “mico” …). This got me to thinking about which things different societies develop extensive ways of saying. The Eskimos for example (supposedly) have dozens of ways to say snow, whereas we in America have lots of ways to say money, and Central Americans have a ton of ways of referring to children. I feel like maybe societies just come up with lots of ways to describe things that they have a lot of. Eskimos are surrounded by snow 12 months of the year (well until global warming really starts to kick in), America has long been one of the richest countries in the world (and Americans are often times a bit money obsessed), and Honduras has one of the highest birth rates in the hemisphere, and thus there are a lot of children running around (41% of the population is under the age of 14 [according to the information PC Honduras gave us during training]).

Having developed this air tight theory, I began pondering other linguistic oddities. This led me to realize, that often times here in Honduras there also exists the reverse phenomenon, in that many things are referred to by the same word (and this can actually prove to be more of an inconvenience). The most blatant examples being “picar” (which, in Honduran vernacular, refers to: “sting”, “bite” [from an insect/ snake], “itch”, “to be spicy”, “the pang of hunger” and a few more sensations I cannot remember at the moment) and “bomba” (which refers to: “fumigator”, “the mechanism in the back of a toilet”, “a bomb”, “a homemade gun”, “a plunger”, and any sort of “pump”, including an air pump for a bicycle tire, soccer ball, or car tire, and a water pump for irrigation). I feel like this linguistic shortcoming is a result of the lack of education in this country. People who are not provided with a sufficiently ample vocabulary, with which to describe all of the sensations and objects that they encounter, will invariably be forced to make do with the vernacular that they have at their disposal. Well, I guess with that thought I shall wrap up this long and rambling entry.

There’s a Man with a Machete in My Office… or, Sell me a Cigar, Damn it

I’m going to keep this brief (since I’m feeling lazy, and since the whole encounter only lasted about ten minutes in real life), but I feel like I need to tell you guys about this. The other day I was at the mayor’s office as usual and I left the main building entrance to head back to my office (which is basically a converted storage closet, with an entrance around the side of the building). I was a bit distracted and it wasn’t until I was actually half way through the door that I noticed the old, wild eyed, campesino man standing inside my office with a machete in hand. Now, back in the US, I feel like this kind of thing would probably have freaked me out (just a bit). After a year of living in Fraternidad however, it didn’t really phase me all that much, and the first thing I did was to ask him who he was looking for, and how I could help him (as opposed to the normal US reaction of “dear god, don’t kill me”). This was when things got weird (well weirder). He continued what he was doing when I came in, which was peering at the wall behind my door, and without missing a beat, asked me where I kept the “puros”. Now I was expecting a question about some sort of municipal business and this threw me for a loop. My mind began quickly racing through possible other meanings for the word, but I kept coming back to “cigars”, which is the only meaning I knew for that word. As I asked him some clarifying questions it rapidly became clear that he was indeed looking for cigars, and had been doing so since the day before. It turned out that some “muchacho” (word for boy or young man) had directed him to the “big yellow house” (the mayor’s office) and told him to go see the gringo, since he sold cigars. By this point I was pretty confused, but was coming to realize that the old man was definitely a bit off in the head (that or really drunk, though he did not smell of booze). Also at this moment I heard a whistling coming from one of the houses that backs up on the mayor’s office (people here can whistle with amazing force), and looked up to see one of my friends on his back porch laughing his butt off. He yelled to me that he had directed the old man my way since I sell the best cigars, and I realized that I had been had. Assuming that this would be the end of the confusion I explained to the old man that it had been a joke and that I did not actually sell cigars. He however was neither finished with his quest for cigars, nor fully convinced that I did not sell them. He continued to try to wheedle some out of me, saying that he would be content with just one (or even if I could just see fit to give him a wad of tobacco to chew on). Eventually he bagan to get a bit agitated that I was so clearly holding out on him, and I decided that I didn’t like the idea of having a debate with an agitated (and as I realized by this point, clearly delusional) man holding a machete, alone, around the side of the building. Thus I walked back to the main office and proceeded to pass him off on the vice mayor, who is also one of the biggest “chavacanes” (tricksters/jokers) in town who calmly listened to the man’s request and explained that we (the residents of the “big yellow house”) had recently run out of cigars, but that the folks in the health center had tons (and that he [the old man] should not take “No” for an answer from them, since he [the vice mayor] had given them a whole bunch of cigars just the day before). In retrospect it seems kind of mean that people just pass off this man (who it was explained to me is not of a right state of mind) on others, leaving him to wander around the streets all day, but I’ve come to learn that it is pretty much standard practice here (they do the same thing with the mayors mentally handicapped nephew when he gets confused and shows up looking for his pay check multiple times in the same day [he gets paid by the municipality to collecting trash with the garbage truck once a week]).

All in the name of progress… or, Again with the world politics metaphors?

So, as many of you know, I have had a lot of unwanted borders living in my house at various times during my service. The most prominent were the mice that, as far as I can tell, had a serious mouse metropolis built in my walls and ceiling when I first moved into the house. They gave me quite a bit of trouble initially, as they ate, or pooped on, all of my food and spent the nights loudly scurrying around my room (presumably as they rushed to where I stored my food, or their pantry/bathroom as they saw it). After a long and bloody genocide I have finally eradicated the mouse problem using traps, poison and machetes. While all of this was going on however I had numerous other critters taking up residence in my home. The most long standing of which were definitely the spiders that moved into my bathroom. It started off as one spider building a web in one of the corners, and by the year’s end I had serious webs emanating from every nook available. Despite the grossness factor of having so many spiders in my tiny bathroom (believe me, it is rather off-putting to have all of those beady eyes staring at you while you shower), I was not particularly bothered by their existence and allowed them to continue living and thriving there. I did this not out of aversion to murdering arachnids or insects (since I have long had a standing “kill on site” order for other breeds of spiders (such as tarantulas), scorpions, and all manner of creepy multi-legged insects), but because they were useful for eliminating winged insects, and because they generally kept to themselves (unlike another breed of spider that like to wander around the room at night and climb onto my face while I am sleeping (needless to say they are on my “kill on site list”)). My affinity for the bathroom spiders was such that when a scorpion intruded on one of their nests and was menacing the spider who lived there, I came to its rescue and hit the scorpion with a hammer.

By now you may have noticed that I have been speaking of the bathroom spiders in the past tense. This is because in order to paint my bathroom, I had to “relocate” them in order to get rid of the webs that were covering much of the upper part of the walls. This process was much like that which the People’s Republic of China undertook to relocate large portions of the population of the Sichuan province in order make way for the flooding of the Yangtze that would result from the construction of Three Gorges Dam. I, like the communist party leaders, had a vision for a greater future and I was not going to be stopped by a few insignificant peasants’ homes… I mean spider’s webs. Though in my case rather than buying out peoples land, and offering them homes in newly constructed cities outside of the flood range, just burned out their webs with a flaming news paper and brushed away the charred remains. As far as I can tell most of the spiders just retreated farther back into their crevices in the roof (and will probably start rebuilding their webs once they regroup), though at least one stood its ground as the fire approached and was incinerated. In the end I have to admit that I feel kind of guilty, but progress is progress and the Peoples Republic of Stephen must continue to expand its glory.

Of Futbol matches and Funerals... or, Can't we Have Just One Game Where No One Pulls a Gun

Much like Jutiapa my town also participated in an important futbol match this past weekend. In our case it was the final match of a two month long tournament that we (and by “we” I really mean “they”, since our town had assembled an all-star team of our various clubs in order to participate, and lord knows I am not all-star material in futbol) had been participating in the nearby municipality of Lucerna. 

Going into this match our team had been undefeated in the tournament and had shown themselves to be the best team in all aspects of play. This was clear from the fact that our goalie was the least scored on, we had the highest goal scoring player, and we had the player voted best defenseman of the tournament. Unfortunately this earlier success did little to help them in the final and my towns team lost a hard fought game 2-0. This outcome is misleading since the two goals came on a blown offside’s call early in the match, and a penalty shot in the last 3 minutes of play, that came as a result of a needless penalty due to desperation to tie the game. The most exciting (if that is the right word) part of the game was came in the beginning of the second half when an on field penalty resulted in a bench clearing brawl (don’t think they use that expression in futbol, but I’m just going to steal it from baseball anyway) that ended with multiple spectators pulling guns (this is a disturbingly common occurrence in rural Honduran futbol matches).

It started when my friend was slide tackled out of bounds over aggressively while trying to center the ball for one of our players to take a shot on goal (this happened directly in front of me and had I not jumped back I would have been plowed into). Rather than just get up and take the free kick that had been called by the referee, my friend (who has a bit of a temper) decided to send the other player a message, and so as he was getting up he kicked the other player in the face (his foot had ended up on top of the other guys head when they fell, so he basically just let it drop on him). This resulted in them both jumping up and exchanging punches (I tried to pull them apart but they were pretty dedicated to beating the crap out of each other). This prompted both teams, and a large portion of the spectators (we were the visitors, but we had showed up with 10 pickup trucks full of fans), to charge into a large group around them pushing and shoving. 

Things got out of hand when suddenly one of the fans from the other town (defiantly drunk) to pull out his pistol and wave it in my friends face. He (correctly) decided that the fight was not worth dying over and bolted across the field. This prompted the gunman to jam his piece in another one of our player’s chests, as he was trying to calm the man down. Not to be out done a bunch of the guys from my town pulled their own guns and started moving towards the confrontation (if you haven’t been keeping up with my blog thus far, many people carry guns, even my mayor was at the game with a 45 caliber revolver sticking out of the frint of his pants).

Luckily for everyone cooler heads prevailed and the confrontation was diffused before anyone got shot. Somehow after things cooled down the game resumed without a single card being issued and the game finished almost without incident (though both teams were playing extremely aggressive and mean spirited futbol). The only other incident being a few minutes after when the line judge, positioned in front of the other towns fans, made a call in favor of our team and was shoved from behind and verbally threatened by their fans. Luckily for everyone (especially the line judge) the police showed up right after this and made a show of forced (which is pretty easy when you are a force of six guys in flack vests armed with M16s). After the game ended I opted to get a ride home with one of my friends and his family rather than going out with the young guys to drink off the loss. 

Though I learned afterwards, that they apparently just bought a bunch of booze and returned to town to get drunk at a vela (wake) for a 14 year old from one of the aldeas (who it turns out was the cousin of a friend of mine, and I had actually met) who was shot by a friend while playing with a parent’s gun last week . Thinking about this made me realize that in my town futbol matches and funerals are both just seen as normal local social events, but I guess that makes sense considering the likelihood that the former will often enough give cause for the latter.

The One with Rainbows and Smiling Children

So, I have yet to read Stephen's blog post about how his fútbol game in La Fraternidad/ Campolandia went down, but I've heard him describe it over the phone, and to me it sounds more like a plot to an episode of Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia than it does the life of development worker.

My story is the complete opposite (sorta the point of this new combo blog venture).  My fútbol game doesn't feature guns or fighting, but it does remind you that "Honduras doesn't always have to win," and that sometimes the simplest of things can make a huge difference to a small community.

Quick Thought: I feel that Latin America's connection to the game of fútbol could be rather easily harnessed to catalyze development and increase community involvement. For the bad wrap that stadium construction gets in numerous urban planning circles back in the states, it might actually be a way for poorer Latin American municipalities to improve their local economies and strengthen or create an environment conducive to extensive community involvement. 

Basically, if you plop down a soccer field in the middle of town, the people will come and good things will happen. The people will buy ice cream, beer, and bags of churros, which helps local business who all operate on very small profit margins, meaning they need to generate a high volume sales to be profitable (think how many Lps. 3 bags water you need to sell in order to make a profit). Not only that, but when you involve local kids and community members, you make the contacts necessary to work on other community projects in the future. This is an idea I want to run with later, and it could serve as an excellent side article to that thesis I've been needing/meaning/wanting to write. 

So if you've read other blog posts of mine regarding Jutiapa's park restoration project, you'll probably know that this is a project that has required a lot of "patience." That is not to say that there haven't been some great moments, but "Embracing the Chaos" is harder than you think. Another thing I would like to do is write up some very pointed critiques of my work to document the mistakes I made, but for now on to my game of fútbol.

The day commenced with a very fortuitous sign.

After more than six months of planning and work we opened the first phase of our park restoration to hundreds of Jutiapeños, the Vice-Minister of the Interior (and rising political star), a freaking rainbow, and a big-time game, by local fútbol standards, played under the lights and celebrated with hundreds of people.

Jutiapa's Police Chief speaking in coordination with the community's anti-violence campaign

Our inaguration kicked off with the traditional opening ceremony, which I'm sure other PCVs know all to well. At our "Principal Table" sat management of ENEE (the electric company), myself, repersentatives of the Municipalidad, the Vice Ministra (Carmen Rivera) of the Interior, the Police Chief, and a community repersentative. Local televesion channels were present, capturing every moment (meaning I made Honduran TV in La Ceiba, the equivalnet of Rockford, Illinois public access haha). Everyone, including myself had to give a speech. During the Vice-Ministra's speech it became evident how much of a politica she really is becoming. During the speech she actually cajoled the management of ENEE into making sure he took care of two missing lights for the field. She did this in front of the large assembled audience, which had to take some serious ganas. Her comment loosely translated into, "Sir, I see you still have some more work to do with fixing those two missing lights. I'm sure that will be taken care of in the coming days, no?"

Teams lined up for the opening ceremony. Note the church in the background. Great pic.

At the end of the ceremony we were able to present dozens of youth with sports equipment that had been graciously provided by the organization Sports Gift, which is based out of California, but there generosity would not have been possible if it weren't for the help of the Orange County Peace Corps Association, NaviVan, and the Higher Ground Family Church in Louisiana.   
    
The work is not done, a point I made sure to bring up multiple times during the day. While this project is taking me a lot longer than originally planned, I like the progress we are now making. It is great to see fruits of your labor, but it is even better to see what is going on behind the scenes. The strengthening of the Sports Committee's capacity is by far my biggest and most unseen challenge, but it is also the work I am most proud of, since the park and futbol field mean nothing if they aren't maintained. 

After the ceremony we started our tournament, which went really well. Teams from all over Jutiapa came to play on our new field, and it was incredible to watch how happy everyone was to be playing on such a professional surface. A Canadian Couchsurfer who had been crashing at my apartment for a  few days made the comment that, "...you must feel like a rockstar." as people continuously came up to me to make a comment on the field and how proud they were that it was in Jutiapa. I can't express how good that felt. Hearing those comments made if feel like all of the fijese ques, missed or canceled meetings, professional incompetence, false starts, and frustration disappear. In Honduras, you need those small victories to keep going, since it is really easy to feel like Honduras is always winning.

After passing most of the day on my balcony, the time for the big game came. We turned on the lights, shook hands, and the people crowded around the field, ranchero music blasting from their parked cars. Even though I hadn't played fútbol in nearly 10 years I was forced to acquiesce at the insistence of my counterpart, Oscar. Expecting to play only 10 minutes, I went out pretty hard, completely forgetting how much running you actually have to do. Our team ended up getting killed by a score of 5-0, but unlike La Fraternidad, no guns were pulled and the people returned to the quiet of a Sunday night in Jutiapa.

The first game under the lights on the new field.

Cheers,


Jesse

If I were God I Would be Rather Unimpressed by Your Efforts… or Wow Christian Rock Really Sucks

So to start things off I would just like to say that in this edition I am in no way trying to besmirch anyone’s religious beliefs. I feel that everyone should be able to pursue whatever path to enlightenment and/or salvation they choose to follow (as long as it doesn't impede on or attack other people’s happiness and way of life… looking at you Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell). What I am doing in this edition is pointing out (some might say ranting about) the terrible music that passes for Christian rock (specifically here in Central America). So as a background to this I must explain that my best Honduran friend and his wife have recently joined a Catholic couples group to strengthen their marriage. This has led them to become much more vocal about the merits of Christianity (which honestly doesn't really do it for me) as well as (much more annoyingly) to start listening to the same ten Christian rock songs and hymns on repeat. This started off badly enough for me, since they are my closest neighbors and have a seriously bumping speaker system (thus inside of my house it sounds like I am playing the music at full blast) and they invite me over for meals at least three times a week (which is really nice and I really appreciate, except that the music doesn't stop for meals). Things got decidedly worse when his wife (who is one of my coworkers) decided to put together a mix cd for the other members of their group and recruited me to download the songs and burn them onto cds (I tend to get suckered into these sort of jobs as I am one of the only people in town with the computer know how to pull something like this off). This process took an unfortunately long time since the cd she had was badly recorded and we couldn’t just get the songs directly off of it, and thus had to find them all on the internet. A feat made even more daunting by the fact that she did not know any of the artists or song titles and thus we had to search them all out based on the chorus lines for each song (which meant we ended up listening to them repeatedly). This was followed by a long process of finding places to download the songs from (with me having to repeatedly explain the concept that while we could listen to music videos on you tube it did not mean that the song was downloaded to the computer and could now be put on a disk). Despite the many setbacks we finally got all of the songs downloaded and the cds burned. As a closing remark, I would just like to say that if people we singing songs praising me and my good works (which [fingers crossed] they will be some day) I would definitely like them to be more musically complex and lyrically creative than the majority of trash that is being passed off as Christian rock these days (I think I can safely say, that whatever deity or greater entity is hanging out up in the clouds these days, is not really impressed).

Ps. For those of you who are curious about the type of music i am referring to her is an example of one of the songs:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGlPr3vjUxE

The New Blog...Or Why the Layout Just Drastically Improved

Faithful followers of my old blog (so mostly my mom, and my really bored friends) may have noticed a few major changes to the format and content over the last week.  We reached the descision to undertake this blog fusion for a variety of reasons. The primary one being that we felt that our blogs were uniquely different from each other and could be complimentary to each other’s styles. His blog (which you can now find back entries of here) is much more academic in nature, drawing on external sources and touching on the major issues effecting Honduras and international development in the region. Mine on the other hand is just a humorous (I hope) and ridiculous collection of musings and personal anecdotes (mostly involving my interactions with animals in my house). We felt that merging the two would offer our readers a chance to get an experience that was both educational as well as humorous, as well as to give them a chance to see the vast differences between our two sites and PC experiences in general. Also we have both been shamefully bad at posting new entries with regularity, and felt that this merger would allow us to keep posting new content more frequently. So to all of my old readers, as well as those of you who have been faithfully following Jesse’s blog, welcome to the new and improved PC Honduras blog experience.

-Stephen

Fun with regionalisms... or Putting the "Ch" in Chino

The English and Spanish alphabets are generally the same. The only real difference, beyond pronunciation (as Hondurans will tell you, English is difficult because “you don’t pronounce words the way they are written”, and no matter how hard you try to convince them that letters just make different sounds in English than they do in Spanish, they will not back down from this point), is the presence of the letters “ñ”, “ll”, and “ch”. The last two are seen as separate letters from their individual components since they have such strongly different pronunciations, “ll” making the equivalent of a “y” sound, and “ch” making the same sound it does in English (though there is no “sh” or “th” in Spanish, thus “ch” is unique enough to warrant being its own letter, which also leads to Hondurans pronouncing “sh” as “ch”, when speaking English, as in “pencil charpener”, and “th” as “d”, as in “duh” or “dee” rather than “the”).

I bring all of this up, because the other day I was listening to the kindergarten class practice their letters in their classroom, located next to my office (this means that every morning I get to hear them start off the day singing loud songs about Jesus and get reminded why I love the separation of church and state that we (supposedly) have in the US). When they got to “ch” I happened to be listening to the teacher give them examples of words and had to laugh a bit to myself. This is because the examples she gave were “Ch de Chucho” and “Che de Chino”. This is funny because “chucho” is Central American slang for a dog (the actual Spanish word being “perro”), and “chino” is the official word for “chinese”, but is universally applied to any asian person here (thus to talk to a Japanese person they will say “Hola chino” the equivalent of “Hello Chinese”). It just struck me funny that the only two examples that this teacher was giving to her class as part of their Spanish lessons were a local slang word (that actually derives from a Mayan word rather than from Spanish), and a word that is used almost exclusively as a semi-racist slang way of referring to asian people. She apparently could not think of any actual common (and politically correct) Spanish words to use as examples for her students.

After thinking about it though, I realized that there are only a few actual words that start with “ch” (only a single page in my Spanish-English dictionary) but a multitude of local slang words, indigenous place names, and nicknames. Thus it is reasonable that she had difficulty thinking up good common examples of official Spanish words (though there are some easy ones like “chispa”-spark, “chupar”- suck or drink or, “chocar”- crash), seeing as her mind was probably flooded with slang and proper noun examples like “chancho”- a pig, “Choluteca” – a department of Honduras, and “Chepe”, “Chofo”, “Chomo”, “Chungo”, or “Chicho”- all nicknames of people in my town (most of which are super common nicknames, there literally being at least six “Don Chepe”s in my town, and three “Chicho”s).

"Embrace the Chaos"

"It was 1994, and I was ice climbing when I fell into a crevasse and hurt my leg. There was only one way out, so fighting every natural instinct I have, I did the thing I hated the most. I climbed down into the darkness. And when I came back to camp, I went to the person who cut my line and said, "Connie Chung, you saved my life."-Jack Donaghy

Honduras is chaotic. You only have to spend 5 minutes in a cab ripping through downtown Tegucigalpa to discover this. Trying to apply “Westernized management” and international development processes to this chaos is about as effective as placing a stop sign in Comayagüela. It's absolutely ridiculous, but at the same time isn’t that the point of development? To bring order to "chaos"?

As fairly inexperienced development workers we often approach the work we undertake in Honduras by utilizing the strategies that we found successful from our time in university and short lived careers. In reality, here in Honduras even the best-laid plans have a tendency to come undone, or become radically altered. It seems, sometimes, that the chaos is overwhelming.

A few weeks ago at our mid-term medicals in "The Goose" our Programming Officer offered up the phrase, "Embrace the Chaos" to soothe our frustrations about working in Honduras, and give development a new perspective. The phrase automatically reminded me of 30 Rock, which is what happens when you power-watch numerous TV sitcoms. Anyway in a certain episode, Jack Donaghy, gives advice to Liz Lemon telling her to climb down into the darkness, down into the crevasse. It seems that when working abroad you have to do the exact opposite of what your instinct tells you. You have to embrace the chaos.

Over the past few weeks I've really run with this idea of embracing the chaos, and operating more from the seat of my pants than from the plans laid out by my counterparts and I. With that mindset I’ve stopped swimming against the current and begun to accept that the work I do may not be well organized, or achieving synergy, but it’s helping to move this small community forward. So with that, onto what I’ve been doing.

WORK

*I spent a week translating for a group of optometrists working in the community center across from my apartment. They ended up giving over 800 eye exams, and then if necessary a pair of new or lightly used glasses. I usually have problems with groups that just come in donating stuff in such a manner,  since I’ve seen the disruptive effects that these actors can have on the local economy, but with eye glasses I feel it is a different story. It's not like were upsetting the local LensCrafters. In fact, I don't know if I've ever even seen an eye doctor or a glasses shop here in Honduras, outside of the upscale malls of San Pedro and Teguz. Eyeglasses serve to make the workforce more productive and safer, and it felt good to be a part of a productive group. Sadly, poor eye health is nothing unusual in Honduras, but I'm positive we made a difference to the hundreds of people who came to see us. That look of, "Oh my God, I can see." Is absolutely priceless.

*Over 100 pounds of soccer equipment arrived from the organization Sports Gift, which is based out of California. After a labyrinth of shippers and middlemen we were able to get the equipment here, and we are now beginning the process of matching our stockpile of supplies with the needs of the community. Over the past few weeks local soccer teams have been visiting to be fitted for new cleats and uniforms. All of this equipment will be handed out 2 weeks from now when we open the park.

*The municipality must have tripped, fell and landed face first into a giant pile of cash, because a city wide repaving and drainage program has commenced starting with the road that separates the park from the soccer field. I have no idea how the muni has found the money to install a new boulevard, which will be awesome when completed, but I guess I'll take it. After all I'm all about embracing the chaos. Where was this money two months ago when I was begging for Lps. 500/$20 to pay for gasoline to cut the field?

New paving project in the center of town

*To promote the the town’s financial cooperative new publicity campaign, which will end up providing scholarships for local students at nearby orphanage that doubles as a bilingual schools, as well as inject cash into other social programs along the coast. I haven't had many opportunities to help Lupe (my host mom), since the Cooperativa has been running really great this past year. I'm excited to be working with her on this though. 

*We’ve set up a committee to focus on tourism within the municipality, which will hopefully begin to move projects that I’ve been working on in El Cacao forward.This is a project that has stalled because I've spent more time focusing on the park.

It has definitely been a chaotic couple of weeks and it's only going to get busier before Thanksgiving, but as they say, “Embrace the Chaos.”

Featured Content: #57 Talking About Poop

Stuff Expat Aid Workers Like

There exists a subject that would not constitute polite dinner table conversation at home, but that becomes a favourite mealtime topic over which to bond as soon as one enters the magical realm of Expat Aid Workerness. This topic never gets old because it affects each and every EAW at some point. It’s known as gut rot, running stomach, the shits, two bob bits, Montezuma’s revenge, Delhi belly and other fine euphemisms. And EAWs find it to be one of the most interesting topics on earth.

When home, EAWs greet their coworkers with a friendly, “Good morning.” They engage in congenial neighborhood competition over the tidiness of their lawn. But out in the field, everything is different: asking “How is your pooping going?” is a common way to start the day, and bragging rights are earned by descriptions of bowel movements so graphic they would be considered TMI for even an appointment with a gastroenterologist. When the EAW is jetting around the world, communing with local, impoverished people, a spice that doesn’t sit right or a parasite that wreaks havoc is bound to make its way into the EAW’s intestinal tract on an almost daily basis. And that spice or parasite must be discussed—in detail. Because if there is one thing EAWs love more than sharing hints on the best kebab stand in town, it’s talking about their legendary experiences with the after-effects of a meal there.

Nothing says I am a hard core, badass EAW than a good, hard core case of gut rot. Now we are not talking about the kind of ‘upset stomach’ that M & E missions from HQ get when coming for 5 days, after eating salad that wasn’t washed in filtered water. We are talking about the kind that has you bent over double with cramps and limping politely out of coordination meetings hoping to find a WC nearby that 1) has water 2) has a loo roll 3) flushes. EAW scales on which to measure the bad-ass-ness of your latest bout have been created for such situations;  ten being liquid and one being bloody impossible to do anything. A number 5 is a cause for celebration.

Trying to pin point the cause of the problem can provide endless fun, particularly if it was local food. Maybe it was that plastic bag full of batunda, or the chicken kebab from the lady outside the bus station or a dodgy bit of crab in that matapa last night. Discussing the finer points of Cipro (used so often its name gets shortened, like an old friend) verses Amoxicillin and the miraculous properties of Buscopan as an excellent anti spasmodic become the norm. Self medication is particularly welcomed, however even better is being sent to a “regional center of excellence” like Nairobi or Johannesburg for treatment. Ordinary food poisoning is enough to garner some attention if the symptoms were severe enough and the situation extreme enough, but to contract an actual named disease on which to blame the diarrhea is much more of a point of pride. If it can be diagnosed professionally as giardia (bronze) or amoebic dysentery (silver) then this is good, but if it’s so bad that the cause mystifies even the doctors in JBG, and it’s put down to “Africa crud” (gold) then this is even better.

Stories that in normal company would be seen as humiliating are worn as a badge of honor among the EAW community. “Once I almost didn’t make it through customs in Tunis because I kept running out of line to go to the toilet and customs officials thought I was up to suspicious activity” and  “Once an entire compound in an African village watched me shit on their pit latrine and then wipe my ass with my hand” are both totally acceptable dinnertime stories at EAW gatherings.

In no other workplace in the world is it more common to hear about someone’s toilet exploits than it is in an EAW field office. There’s no shame in discussing the hours spent cramped in the bathroom, in fact, the longer an EAW has suffered, the more impressive they become to their colleagues. Levels of field cred can be increased by the way you handle various types of lavatories. There’s your sit down, your squat and aim and then your balance and pray that the square of wood you’re hovering over doesn’t collapse. There are the make shift long drops which seem to attract every fly or buzzing insect in the area, with your only protection from the other members of your team being a UNCHR plastic blue sheet. And then there are the moments on the road from somewhere to somewhere, where you know that the verges could be riddled with AP landmines, and so bang goes the option of privacy behind a bush; you just have to suck it up and deal with going alongside the road, behind the back wheel of your trusty Toyota 13-seater hardtop and hope that a pickup full of locals does not zoom past before you’ve got your trousers up again. (Now you realize why local women prefer skirts!)

Setting aside the pain, discomfort and downright shittines of the situation, a good case of gut rot does have its benefits. Not only does an EAW already have one advantage over their friends at home or HQ colleagues — they are a damn sight more tanned — but a good case of gut rot now and again makes them svelte and even more attractive. Need to drop 7kg? Don’t go to the gym!! Become an EAW and the weight just drops off.

The only bummer about these amazing and exotic stories (aside from the dire intestinal pain and the ruined pairs of underwear) is that EAWs know they can’t use them to impress all their Facebook friends back home. As a status update, “Just shat my pants,” doesn’t have quite the same ring as “Just stepped off a helicopter.”

http://stuffexpataidworkerslike.com/2011/05/18/57-talking-about-poop-2/

Combined posts, by Carly who blogs at Chasing Carly; and tweets @chasingcarly, Katie Seward who blogs at Eating Stuff Everywhere, and UXO.

Visit From the Parents... or Knee Deep in Awesome

Pool at the hotel

So, as a precursor, I feel like my blog posts have been a bit negative of late, and I am going to try to get back on a positive track with this edition. Last weekend my parents flew down to El Salvador and we spent five days hanging out there in the picturesque town of Suchitoto. It was an amazing weekend for a number of reasons, first and foremost being that I had not seen my mother for the last 16 months (since june of 2010). This is by far the longest time I have ever gone without seeing her and it was definitely starting to wear on me (though apparently not as much as it was wearing on her, seeing as she dropped her bags and sprinted across the airport to hug me when I showed up to pick her and my father up). 

Overall the weekend was amazing and full awesome side adventures (like our trip visit to a local illegal chaparo still [chaparo is a kind of local moonshine made from corn], and our visit to the village I worked in with an aid trip 4 years ago]). The highlights however (besides seeing my parents of course), were the sweet hotel we stayed at and the amazing food we ate. While this may make me see shallow (just concentrating on creature comforts), try to imagine how amazing a high priced hotel and good international food would be after 16 months of living on $8 a day in a tiny mud brick house that smells like mold and rats (for those of you without imagination, it is really, really amazing). I ate like a pirate king for 5 days, nothing but delicious food (I had 2 american style steaks, sushi, and even jamon serrano imported from Spain… that’s right expensive imported ham) and top shelf booze (well except for the moonshine, that was some pretty bottom shelf booze [like hobo booze]). Overall it was an spectacular weekend with my parents and my good friends from the states who live in Suchitoto.

Featured Content: Honduras Becomes Cocaine Hub

Honduras becomes Western Hemisphere cocaine hub

By MARK STEVENSON, Associated Press – 38 minutes ago 

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras (AP) — On Honduras' swampy Mosquitia coast, entire villages have made a way of life off the country's massive cocaine transshipment trade. In broad daylight, men, women and children descend on passing go-fast boats to offload bales of cocaine destined for the United States.

Along the Atlantic coast, the wealthy elite have accumulated dozens of ranches, yachts and mansions from the drug trade. And in San Pedro Sula, local gangs moving drugs north have spawned armies of street-level dealers whose violence has given the rougher neighborhoods of the northern industrial city a homicide rate that is only comparable to Kabul, Afghanistan.

Long an impoverished backwater in Central America, Honduras has become a main transit route for South American cocaine.

"Honduras is the number one offload point for traffickers to take cocaine through Mexico to the U.S.," said a U.S. law enforcement official who could not be quoted by name for security reasons. A U.S. State Department report released in March called Honduras "one of the primary landing points for South American cocaine."

Almost half of the cocaine that reaches the United States is now offloaded somewhere along the country's coast and heavily forested interior — a total of 20 to 25 tons each month, according to U.S. and Honduran estimates. Authorities intercept perhaps 5 percent of that, according to calculations by The Associated Press based on official estimates of flow and seizures.

The flow is hard to stem, said Alfredo Landaverde, a former adviser to the Honduran security ministry, because there are few other sources of cash income here.

"We have to recognize that this society is very vulnerable," Landaverde said. "This is a country permeated by corruption, among police commanders, businessmen, politicians."

The country's isolated, impoverished Atlantic coast, remote ranches and largely unguarded border with Guatemala — where much of the cocaine is taken — also make it a haven for traffickers.

"When the traffickers are unloading a go-fast boat in (the Atlantic coast province of) Gracias a Dios, you can sometimes see 70 to 100 people of all ages out there helping unload it," said the U.S. law enforcement official. "The traffickers look for support among local populations."

In the past year, authorities seized 12 tons of cocaine, according to the Honduran government — a vast improvement from previous years, but still a small portion of the estimated 250 to 300 tons that come through annually. Most of the cocaine arrives in Honduras via the sea, in speedboats, fishing vessels and even submersibles. In July, the U.S. Coast Guard, with Honduras' help, detained one such craft that had been plying the waters with about 5 tons of cocaine per trip.

Fishermen who once worked catching lobster now look instead for a much more prized catch, the so-called "white lobster" — bales of cocaine jettisoned by drug traffickers to either escape detection or to be picked up by another boat.

Honduras is also by far the region's biggest center for airborne smuggling. Of the hundreds of illicit flights northward out of South America, 79 percent land in Honduras, said the U.S. official. Ninety-five percent of those flights hail from Venezuela, which also has become a link for cocaine produced elsewhere.

Landing aircraft in Honduras was once so profitable and planes so easy to get that traffickers would sometimes simply offload the drugs and burn the aircraft, rather than take off again from dangerously rudimentary clandestine landing strips. Last year, however, they started reusing the planes to ferry loads of bulk cash back to Colombia, the U.S. State Department report said. Authorities found one load of $9 million in U.S. cash stuffed in plastic bags in the trunk of a car, and millions at a time in suitcases at local airports.

Earlier this year, as aircraft became more difficult to obtain, traffickers stole a military plane from the San Pedro Sula army base on the Atlantic coast, said Landaverde, adding that soldiers were accomplices to the theft.

"The plane is left outside," he said. "Some guys turn it on and take off. Nobody leaves a plane like that, ready to fly." In fact, one of the soldiers involved in that incident was later arrested in September with other ex-soldiers as they allegedly waited to meet a drug flight on the country's Atlantic coast.

It is not just poverty-stricken fishermen and corrupt soldiers who are the beneficiaries of the emergent cocaine republic. Last week, authorities seized 13 luxurious homes and ranches and 17 boats in the first such mass raid since the country enacted a drug-properties seizure law in 2010. All were owned by local people.

Key members of the region's business community who have hotel, real estate and retail holdings have been named as associates of the cartels, often for money laundering. Nor are the drug trade's ripple effects restricted to the coast.

Copan, a Guatemalan border province popular with tourists because of its Mayan ruins, is a lawless area dominated by business interests tied to the drug trade, said a radio station owner who asked not to be quoted by name for security reasons.

"These people move without shame in politics and the business world," the station owner said. "They are involved in large-scale businesses in tourism. This region has been separated from the nation's territory. It is their lair."

At the other end of the economic spectrum are local street gangs, who are often paid in drugs as well as cash to move drugs north. Their ranks are growing and competition among them has pushed up the country's escalating homicide rate to one of the highest in the world. The country of 7.7 million people saw 6,200 killings in 2010. That's the equivalent of 82.1 homicides per 100,000 people — well above the 66 per 100,000 in neighboring El Salvador.

Others are becoming players in the bulk trade, the U.S. official said, remarking that, "Lately, we've seen some gangs that will purchase the cocaine and resell it."

The high volume of drugs coupled with the alarming homicide rate is tough to address in a nation where many police and army officers are working with drug gangs. Corrupt law enforcement officials had a fierce foe in the person of former Honduran Security Minister Oscar Alvarez, who was fired by President Porfirio Lobo in September after proposing a law to purge the police force of corrupt cops.

Alvarez had said publicly that some corrupt police essentially act as air traffic controllers for the drug flights. When a suspected drug flight was detected in August, Alvarez was quoted by a local newspaper as saying that two police officials not assigned to the district were in the area — their cellphone signals were traced to the control tower where the plane landed.

Alvarez claimed he was fired because of his campaign to clean up the police force, saying, "It was easier to get rid of a minister than to get rid of a corrupt cop."

But his replacement, Pompeyo Bonilla, said that given Honduras' highly protective labor laws, a mass firing of police officers probably would have been quickly followed by the reinstatement of many. He also claimed that Alvarez overstepped his authority by sending his proposed police cleanup law to congress without even telling Lobo.

"The president heard about it on television," Bonilla said.

Alvarez, who left for the United States soon after his dismissal, was not available for an interview, according to an unidentified woman who answered his U.S. cellphone number.

U.S. Ambassador Lisa Kubiske said she expects to work well with Bonilla. "President Lobo's administration is totally serious about fighting the cartels," Kubiske said. "When you talk to them, counternarcotics is almost the first word out of their mouths."

Alvarez was accustomed to dropping bombshells, including the claim that fugitive Mexican drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman had visited Honduras' border region next to Guatemala.

In March, police under Alvarez's command raided a remote mountain lab in northeastern Honduras. Alvarez said the lab processed cocaine from the paste of partly processed coca leaves, the first time that would have been done outside South America and an ominous development for Honduras. The lab, however, had apparently not yet been put to use. Bonilla said the lab was a small one, quickly dismantled, and no other such lab has been discovered in Honduras. "We are rather more a transit route" than a producer or processor, Bonilla said.

Some doubt the lab was intended to process coca paste; it may have been simply dedicated to cutting and repackaging imported cocaine, which is usually cut many times before it reaches the street.

"We haven't seen any evidence of cocaine processing taking place in Honduras so far," the U.S. official said, adding, "Twelve thousand kilos of cocaine were seized in Honduras this year, and we haven't seen a single ounce of cocaine paste."

Associated Press writer Luis Alonso in Washington contributed to this report.

Copyright © 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Up in the Air

I just got back from a whirlwind weekend in Atlanta, GA for a good friend's wedding, which was a welcome 3 day break from Honduras. Anyway, before the flight I got into a conversation with another volunteer in the airport at San Pedro Sula about flight rituals, which got me thinking that it would probably make a pretty decent blog post. I realized, when talking to her, that I do have a lot of "rituals," which really surprised me. I'm not a superstitious person, but I feel almost required to do a cacophonous list of things before and during the flight.

It also reminded me of the first time I flew into Honduras, and how absolutely terrifying tense of an experience it was. I remember that when we landed, barely missing the rooftops of mountain clung houses, that everyone in the plane broke out into applause. Not a bad way to start two years of your life.

 

Landing at Toncontin is still considered one of the most technically difficult and dangerous landings for commercial airliners. 

"Air "Rituals"

Window seat. Always. No questions asked. To me it's the smarter move for comfort and a more enjoyable flight. I think part of the reason for me doing this was because as a kid I would sit on the roof of our house and watch the planes line up for their approach into O'Hare. Roof sitting, always classic.

If I'm not drinking, by the way cheers to the Delta flight attendant who hooked me up with about 7 free drink tickets for my flight back to Honduras. Anyway, if I'm not drinking,  I'm ordering a milk with ice. I blame that one on a roommate from college. Also, nowadays it is great to get a cold glass of milk, because a lot of times milk in Honduras is served warm or heated up. I still don't get that one.

I'll always sneak my headphones on during takeoff to play the same song, and I have no idea why. If you start playing Jack's Mannequin, "The Mixed Tape" as the pilot throttles the engines up for take off, I've found that the music matches the actions of the plane taking off perfectly. Try it.

The kid in me loves turbulance. If I'm paying $400 for a ticket, you better make the flight as memorable and as fun as possible.

Don't drink for at least 12 hours before and international flight. Standing in lines con una goma is terrrible. Read a book instead.

Finally, there is not a better thing in the world than flying back into Chicago. Whether it be MDW or O'Hare, day or night. Seeing the city skyline back-dropped against Lake Michigan is an unbeatable experience. It's made even better by the fact that it usually means your coming home, back to green colored street signs and "fireworks over Lake Michigan."

"Sleazy Wednesday"

Ok, so maybe it is Tuesday night and not Wednesday, but I feel that what I'm about to do is somewhat sleazy. The four posts below have all been borrowed from two really great blogs that I found a few days ago and for the life of me cannot stop reading. Two posts are from Stuff ExPat Aid Workers Like, which is an extremely comical take on the clichés of development workers, and is frighteningly accurate.  For every example that is given I'm sure I could come up with an equally telling one from Honduras.

The other posts are from a blog called Tales From the Hood, and is a series of essays about a inner struggle to balance being a full-on unapologetic professional aid worker while also staying eyes-open to the inconsistency, dilemma, paradox and sometimes plain absurdity that very clearly exist in the humanitarian aid industry.

Anyway, for the next few days I'll be in Atlanta, Georgia, living it up and celebrating the wedding of my good friend Mike Lawson. Congrats buddy, let's hope it your gift makes it through customs.

In other good news, our 115 pounds of sports equipment for local youth arrived today, and the quality is better than I could have hoped for. All is coming together well for our upcoming opening on the 5th of November. Enjoy the posts below, and please take the opportunity to read more from these blogs as they are well written and insightful.

Tales From the Hood-What Makes Good Aid *Good Aid*?

What Makes Good Aid *Good Aid*?

Good aid has five characteristics. Let’s talk about those:

1) Starts and ends with the needs of those affected by poverty, disaster, and conflict (a.k.a. “the poor”, “aid recipients”, “program participants”, “beneficiaries”…). Some might want to articulate this point as aid needs to be demand driven, rather than supply driven. How we think about aid – how we rationalize it, how emotionally and intellectually honest we are about why we do it, and why we do it the way we do it – matters. But if we’re to do it right, if we’re to plan and implement good aid, our starting point needs to be those whom we seek to serve. If that starting point is anything else (for example, the needs of a particular donor, surplus of something…) then a recipe for bad aid has already been started.

2) Follows good process. To put it very simply, you start with what the need is, define the most logical good solution, implement that solution, and evaluate your program or project against what you defined as the need. Some call this Project Cycle Management (PCM) (See also) Of course in actual practice there is a lot that goes into each of those steps. Knowing what the need is requires commitment and follow-through on assessments.

Defining the most logical good solution can require an amazing amount of organizational honesty and discipline – especially when an organization has defined it’s focus, capacity or “niche” very specifically. One of the most common mistakes which leads to bad aid is when an oranization, project or individual defines the solution in terms of what they have to offer, rather than in terms of what the most logical solution is. (I call this the “solutions in search of problems” approach.)

Evaluation, like assessment, is very often glossed over. Amateurs typically focus on implementation (and of course good implementation is critical), but implementation outside of the context of overall good process is meaningless.

3) Is evidence-based: Digging a little deeper into the assessment, planning, and evaluation steps of PCM, it is absolutely critical that assessments be done properly (see Texas In Africa’s outstanding series on how social scientists think – assessments are more than just asking a few villagers what they want). If you don’t understand clearly both the issue (problem) that you’re trying to address, you can’t design a workable response, and at the end you can’t know if you’ve been successful.

Yet in my experience, this is the single most common downfall of small startup NGOs/projects and amateurs: skimping on assessments and evaluations, or simply not doing them at all. This is partially because those things require specialized skills, resources and organizational bandwidth. Sometimes where an organization or project defines it’s “product” very specifically (volunteer teams, 1,000,000 T-shirts, shoes, etc.), there is little point in doing either assessments, planning, or evaluation because the implementors already know what they’re going to do.

Good aid will be disciplined enough to go through the process of collecting and analyzing evidence, and then basing action on need, not on the surplus of a particular resource.

4) Tool-box approach: Expanding the above point with respect to action/programming, good aid will approach available resources as “tools” inside a “tool-box.” Which is to say that good aid will select the right tool for the job. Bad aid, by contrast, typically uses backward logic by selecting the tool (action, program…) in advance of having evidence.

Where an organization or project has only a few tools in it’s box, it can take real organizational discipline to say “no” to programming. Again, this is a very common mistake of small startups and amateurs: the desperate desire to act (or the real, survival need for resources) drive many to try to operate outside of their actual capacity or expertise – sort of like using a screwdriver to pound nails.

5) Learns lessons-learned: While humanitarian aid and development are not as old as other fields (accounting or urban-planning), there is already a substantial body of experience and lessons-learned. Good aid does not repeat the mistakes of the past. While this sounds simple, in my experience this also can require an amazing level of organizational discipline (organizational discipline is a common theme…), particularly (again) where an organization is founded on the premise of a specific kind of activity, particularly where that activity contravenes known best-practices. The existence still of foreign-run “orphanages” across the Third World are but one outstanding example in real-life.
Learning the lessons-learned also requires that an individual, project or startup NGO be aware of the history, be looped into the overall aid conversation, be current with industry thinking.

This, also, requires organizational bandwidth and (wait for it…) discipline. It requires that people prioritize thinking and learning along with doing. It requires that organizations dedicate resources towards participating in learning events (sometimes feel like HRI-style “life-saving meetings”). It requires participation in coordination specifically, and generally being part of the larger community of practice overall. While few people would argue against learning the lessons learned in principle, in actual practice the realities of tight budgets, scarce resources, and staff already working 18-hour days frequently mean that the lessons learned do not get learned. And the result is frequently that while as an industry we know what to do and how to do it, many individual entities within the industry don’t.

Tales From the Hood-Local?

Tales From the Hood Local?

It is interesting to note that in all of the fervor to point out what’s wrong with aid, the most common critiques and frequently touted solutions alike come back to vaguely defined pronouncements about “local.” “Local” seems to be the holy grail of right thought and right action in the relief and development world. Support local industry, build local capacity, empower local producers, work with and through local partners, local NGOs/CBOs/FBOs, local knowledge, local language, local sensitivities, and on and on.

“Local” is past the point of being aid doctrine (remember, aid is a religion), and is now full-on aid dogma. It is the aid world debate trump card du jour. Any aid conversation one doesn’t happen to like the tone or direction of can be brought to a grinding halt with, “yes, but you didn’t mention local organizations…”

Yeah, I get it. And if you’ve spent more than a few minutes reading through previous posts on this blog you know that I embrace “local” as an article of faith in the Church of Aid. I myself have waved that sword vigorously in the past (and may do so again in the future). The values of local participation, leadership, knowledge, ownership in aid are so glaringly obvious as to be incontrovertible. After twenty years in this industry during which I have seen some wacky “aid” projects and met some truly misguided individuals practicing the sector, I still cannot think of a single person who disputes the value of local.

But at the risk of committing aid blasephemy I just have to say:

Local is not a magik bullet. While I absolutely believe that “local” is a critical, essential ingredient in “good aid”, it is not The Solution. Making everything local will not fix what’s wrong with aid. Making everything local is no guarantee of success or even a guarantee of the absence of meltdown in an aid project. Local people and organizations are just as capable of implementing bad aid, and every bit as susceptible to the temptations of dumbassery as internationals; local knowledge and wisdom are often plain wrong; local incompetence is still incompetence. We often feel ethnocentric saying so, but we don’t do ourselves or those we claim we want to help any favors by pretending it’s any other way.

How local is local? “Local” is one of those aid jargon terms that gets thrown around a lot, but that few define or use specifically. There’s local and there’s local and then again, there’s local. To someone living in Ha Tay, people from Ha Noi are not local. Except by comparison to people fromDa Nang. To Martians, everybody on Planet Earth is local. The range of what qualifies as a “local NGO” is so wide as to make the term practically useless (same applies to INGOs, by the way). A “local NGO” can be two little old ladies in Newara Eliya with one sewing machine between them… or a four-storey building in La Paz with wifi, white Landcruisers, and an international travel budget. Some might argue that FEMA is a local organization. The range of what these respective kinds of “local NGOs” and everything else in between can offer in terms of capacity, output, and program quality is similarly great. We don’t advance the cause of local by lumping and using the term imprecisely.

Provincialism is a constant tension. There is a dark side to local. It’s called provincialism – the idea that the way we do it here is the only way that works. It’s another way to grind conversations to a halt before they even get started, silence debate about what’s possible, are kill ideas dead before there’s been any actual discussion. It’s a problem to take seriously. Obviously we don’t want to try to implement “one size fits all” solutions. But we have to resist the “no size fits us” argument as well.

Internationalism is a reality. The common theme of aid critiques from Bill Easterly to Fiona Terry to Linda Polman to the righteous indignation of the aid blogosphere seems generally to be that “aid is messed up because it’s being run by a bunch of foreigners who have conflicted motivations and don’t sufficiently appreciate ‘local.’” And while it’s hard to dispute their cases – the evidence is pretty clear – what I have not seen yet is substantive discussion around the simple reality that internationalism is a reality and what that means moving forward.

It is far past time to move beyond the simple critique. International aid and international aid organizations exist. Like it or not, they’re not going away. Even if totally localizing everything would work and was practical (it wouldn’t, and isn’t), it still would not happen. For better or for worse we’re in a globalized society where those with means, due to a wide range of motivations, do and will go elsewhere to “help.” We don’t do ourselves or anyone else any service by pretending or wishing that it was otherwise.  We need to develop paradigms and language that take this international reality into account. We need to find ways to stop pitting “local” against “international”, and focus on making aid a conversation rather than a series of declarations.