2011-GPI Honduras

They say Honduras is improving, and in some regards I guess they're right, but it doesn't feel like it.  The The Institute for Economics and Peace, which gauges ongoing domestic and international conflict, safety and security in society, and militarization, recently released it's 2011 Global Peace Index. Not gonna lie, but I've been sorta nervously awaiting the 2011 report for some time now (not a lot going on in small town Honduras if you can't tell by now). I really wanted this document to correlate what I've been seeing, hearing and experiencing here over the past year, and prove to me that all of this has some base in statistical reason.

I've been feeling for some time now, and I'm not the only one, that Honduras is slipping. Increasing drug violence, a political system polarized by the remnants of last year's coup, a primary education system that has been essentially non-functioning for the past year, increasing commodity prices that are pushing a large portion of population towards food insecurity and instability, not to mention increased attacks on journalists. At the same time it's been hard to find positive trends. Sure Zelaya will finally return this weekend, closing the chapter on Honduras' most infamous event since Hurricane Mitch, but does it really matter? Will it dramatically improve the existing tensions or just exacerbate them?  More than likely nothing will happen. I mean, after sneaking back into Honduras during the height of the coup, an action three times more risky than his return now, Zelaya did little to rally the FNRP, and then slipped off to the DR soon after Lobo was sworn in. I doubt anything comes of his return, except for honduras' return to the OAS. 

Anyway, linked statistics are available below. I've found that this organization is a great clearinghouse for information regarding development, but as always statistics have to be taken with a grain of salt. Sure Honduras may have a primary school enrollment ratio of 91.83%, but does it really count if those children continue to miss months of school at a time because of teacher strikes?

Model Cities in Honduras

The phrase Model City is most closely associated with Johnson's Great Society and War on Poverty. In the international realm, however, the concept of a model city is intriguing because it combines both unproven facets of international development and urban planning. In essence the model city becomes an almost sovereign, controlled environment, or the proving ground for Paul Rommer's ideas. Rommer has been proposing the idea of a model city for quite some time now, and his ideas have taken hold, and found support with President Lobo, and after a recent vote from congress appear closer than ever to being a reality. These model cities would be near sovereign bodies, in most instances only needing a simple majority vote from their host nation's congress.

" [They] would be areas with their own legal personality and jurisdiction, their own administrative systems and laws. A [city] can also negotiate international treaties with partner countries or organizations. Congress would need to ratify these international treaties with a simple majority."

I've included some more information below from the research non-profit associated with the Charter City movement. I'm not completely sold on the idea. I still hold skepticism with the regards to ideas of sovereignty and total privatization of municipal services, but vamos a ver. 

________________________________________________________________________

http://chartercities.org/blog/191/a-new-city-in-honduras

Concept

Charter cities are special reform zones. They let governments quickly adopt innovative new systems of rules. A charter city’s formal rules, and the norms that they encourage, can differ markedly from a country’s prevailing system of rules. The concept is very flexible, but three elements are common to all charter cities:

1. An uninhabited piece of city-sized land, provided voluntarily by a host government.
2. A charter that specifies the rules that will govern the new city.
3. The freedom for would-be charter city residents to move in or out of the reform zone.

Charter cities are based entirely on voluntary actions—no person, employer, investor, or country can be coerced into participating. Only countries that want to charter new cities will free up the land to do so. The use of unoccupied land ensures that only the people who want to live and work under the new rules will move to the reform zone.

The charter itself is a foundational legal document, not an exhaustive city plan. The charter will set forth the process by which rules and regulations will be established in the city. The charter might also initiate a legal framework on which the city can grow and prosper, establishing some early rules to foster long term investment and ensure the safety and security of residents. The residents, employers, and investors will follow, attracted by the chance to work together under the rules of the charter.

There are three basic roles that countries can assume when chartering a new city in a special reform zone:

1. Land comes from a host country.
2. People come from a source country.
3. The assurance that the charter will be respected comes from a guarantor country.

Because these roles can be played by a single nation or a group of allies, there are many potential charter city arrangements. The hypothetical cases listed below help make the many possibilities concrete and clear. However, they do not reflect ongoing conversations or prospective projects.

• One country could assume all three roles, much as China did in establishing special economic zones like the one where the new city of Shenzhen emerged. For example, India appears to be headed down this path, using public-private partnerships to create new cities on greenfield sites. Such projects could potentially do much to alleviate pressure on India’s rapidly growing slums while providing better social and economic opportunities to the people who might otherwise end up there.

• One country could serve as both the host and the guarantor and attract residents from a specific source country. Consider the hypothetical case of Brazil chartering a new city and inviting Haitians to move there. Brazil took the lead on the UN’s MINUSTAHmission to Haiti. It may want to create an exit option that allows it to withdraw soldiers from Haiti even as it creates new options for Haitians who would prefer to live under a different set of rules.

• One country could serve as both the host and the primary source, but the role of guarantor could be filled by a consortium of the host country’s allies. Consider the hypothetical case in which Mauritania hosts a charter city, New Zealand and Norway serve in the guarantor roles, and a number of regional countries, including Mauritania, fill the role of source. By cooperating with its allies in New Zealand and Norway, Mauritania may be able to create a development authority that is capable of generating much higher levels of investment and employment in the new city than Mauritania could achieve acting on its own.

The Myth of Economic Growth-By Marco Cáceres

The Myth of Economic Growth
Thursday, 05 May 2011 11:31

Economic growth is not necessarily synonymous with national development. If economic growth only succeeds in adding to severe income inequality, which Honduras has in spades, then there is no development... and the country is all the worse for it.

Back in the 1960s, the World Bank sought to encourage economic growth and development in Honduras by expanding beef exports. This was seen as a good strategy for creating badly needed foreign capital for investment in the country. There was a growing demand for cheap beef around the world, as fast food restaurants like McDonald's continued to spread throughout the United States and Canada, and began establishing franchises in Asia, Europe, and Latin America in the early-1970s. The World Bank provided low-interest loans to Honduran cattle ranchers, who used the money to enlarge and fatten their herds. One of the ways the ranchers did this was to obtain more pasture land for grazing. In numerous cases, lands were simply taken from small farmers engaged in subsistence agriculture.

Given Honduras' poorly-administrated land titling system, many of these subsistence farmers did not have proper titles to their properties and lacked the education, knowledge, and financial resources to be able to defend their rights before local magistrates and other government officials. The farmers were thus easy prey for wealthy ranchers, who pushed them off lands that had been farmed by their families for generations. All this so that cattle could have more space to roam and eat, and then ultimately be consumed by foreigners on their way to obesity.

The predictable result was the creation of tens of thousands of landless campesinos unable to plant and cultivate the basic staple crops such as beans and rice required to feed their malnourished families and have a little cash left over to cover other basic needs or put away for rainy days. The actions of the ranchers aggravated an already acutely unequal land tenure situation in Honduras, dramatically increasing poverty and hunger in the countryside, and fueling a mass migration of people to urban areas... in search of jobs and scraps of food.

In its effort to stimulate economic growth in Honduras, the World Bank -- as it unfortunately often does -- neglected to seriously consider and analyze the potential impact of its policy on the country as a whole. Because of this failure, the bank succeeded in making wealthy people in Honduras wealthier and poor people poorer and more desperate. The political and social consequences, in terms of massive poverty, hunger, landlessness, lack of productivity, and violent conflict can be seen throughout Honduras.

http://www.hondurasweekly.com/editorial/3687-the-myth-of-economic-growth

Related Article: "Interest in investing US$25 million in Honduran livestock"

"all my loving"

After returning from my meeting in Siguatapeuqe on Saturday I got a text from another one of the rare north coast volunteers to see if I wanted to go for a day hike in Pico Bonito national park on Sunday morning. Seeing as how this had been on my list of things to do and because it was a Sunday with nothing going on in site, I jumped at the opportunity.

We decided to hike to a waterfall near the town of El Pino called Cascada Zacate. After getting into town we walked through one of Dole's massive pineapple fields, which in itself was pretty incredible for two reasons. One, the entire walk smelled like pineapple, and two it's just really interesting to see how pineapples are grown.

After the pineapple field we hit the jungle and started up a path that basically hugged the Río Zacate all the way to the waterfall. The jungle was really awesome, and the amount of tree coverage was mind boggling. Even in the midst of a heavy rain storm it only seemed to drizzle while we were walking through. the jungle was filled with awesome vistas, lizards, butterflies, and even a few old wooden footbridges. eventually, after about an hour long hike, we hit the waterfall, which was roughly 40 meters high, and just absolutely crazy.

We wanted to see the view from the top. so we hiked up a rain slicked trail to where there were bats swooping out of their caves and crystal clear pools of water. the one closest to the waterfall was a real life infinity pool, so we almost immediately jumped in and  went swimming. as we did this the rocks, already soaked with rain, became even harder to grip, and of course, being the clumsy asshole that i am, i slipped, fell, and nailed my head on a rock creating a nice 2 inch gash below my eyebrow but above my eyelid. we managed to stop the bleeding and walk back down the mountain where i caught a bus to my sadly familiar stomping grounds of hospital d'antoni. where obvious questions led to...

"¿Te duele?" Does that hurt? 

"¿Que piensas?" What do you think?

also, the doctor who was stitching me up was pretty peculiar. as he was sewing above my eye he started to sing to me in broken english. out of all the song choices available to him he chose the beatle's song, "all my loving," which goes something like, "Close your eyes and i'll kiss you, tomorrow i'll miss you." I'm pretty sure he had no idea what he was singing, at least i hope he didn't, or maybe he was just screwing with me. who knows. 

Since it was late and there were no more busses to Jutiapa  I had to spend the night in town on pc's dime, which wasn't too bad, except that I was still wearing my soaking wet clothes from earlier,  and i had nothing with me as far as food, toothbrush, etc., but all in all it wasn't too bad. today i just have a pretty solid black eye, and the right side of my face is pretty swollen, but eh what are you going to do? when people in town ask me what happened to my face I just respond. "Estoy bien, pero usted debe ver el otro hombre." so far people don't think that's funny, but then again humor is a whole different story down here. 

"Do not refer to him as a junkyard cat. He has a name..."

Junk Yard Guy " We don't have no dogs."
Charlie "What? I"m sorry, is this not a junk yard?"
Junk Yard Guy " We got a cat 'round here somewhere..."
Frank " Cat! We don't want a cat!"
Junk Yard Guy " Wait a minute..wait a minute. Believe me, that is a tough cat. It was born in a puddle of gasoline on a piece of rusty scrap metal. I've seen that cat go through barbed wire into a vat of hot tar. That cat, eh heh, is indestructible."
Frank and Charlie "We don't want a cat. We want a dog."
Dennis "Now wait a second, I wouldn't mind takin' a look at that cat.."
Charlie "Come one dude, what are we gonna do with a cat?"
Frank "Is that a cop car?"
Dennis "OH my god. You guys, if we park that in front of Patty's, no more bums. No problems, period.
Frank " Is that..is that old cop car for sale?"
Junk Yard Guy " EVERYTHING is for sale!!"
Frank " We'll take it."
Dennis " And throw in that cat.

So I'm admitting defeat in my war against mice. My foray into chemical warfare has failed about as badly as it could have. I should have taken some lessons from Fritz Haber, but I bet he didn't have any problems with Cheezit eating rodents though. The chemical pellets I've been using have killed most of the mice living in my apartment building, but it has also allowed them to start dying within my walls, which besides being odorous has invited a new following of insects, specifically cockroaches, who seem to have happly joined this arduous conflagration. the oppressive north coast heat has not helped matters either, dramatically speeding up the decomposition process.

So, I'm pulling my Ghadafi and inviting in outside help in the form of a nasty junkyard cat.  ok maybe not so nasty, but I'll train it to be. i'll raise the thing in a puddle of gasoline and teach it to be the most feared cat in all of Jutiapa. i should be picking it up in a couple of days from my host-family's farm,  so we'll see how the rest of this plays out.

"I Wish the World Was Flat Like The Old Days"

"I wish the world was flat like the old days. Then I could travel just by folding a map."


It never ceases to amaze me that in a country the size of Tennessee you find a world's worth of culture, geography, not to mention history. I've said it before, but there is so much to see and do here,  that two years is definitely not enough time to do it all. Being here has really made me think about all the stuff I've been missing throughout the years by just staying inside, or being too lazy to try and see new things. Instead of sticking with the old, safe options, I really feel that I need to make more of an effort, especially when I return to the states, to see and do all that I can.  The list below is a haphazard accumulation of things I want to try and do before leaving Honduras. i guess i'm already making progress. 


Hondu List (Subject to Change)

• Renovate Jutiapa's central park and strengthen the institutions necessary to manage it.
• Improve my Spanish
• Help to strengthen local tourism operations in El Cacao and Río Esteban
• Noche de Fumadores-Santa Rosa de Copan
• Halloween in Copan Ruinas
• Carinival in La Ceiba
• D&D Brewery-Lago de Yajoa
• Tela
• Lancetilla Botanical Garden
• Punto Sal 
• Trujillo
• Capiro y Calentura National Park
• White Water Rafting in Pico Bonito
• Rodeo and Ferria en el Occidente
• Hiking in Pico Bonito
• Climb Pico Bonito 
• Olanchito
• Climb Cerro de Jutiapa
• Gracias, Lempira
• Celeque Cloud Forest
• Copan Ruinas
• Tegucigalpa
• San Pedro Sula
• Olancho
• Fortaleza de San Fernando de Omoa
• Jungle Zip Line
• Cayos Cochinos
• Utila
• Sun Jam on Utila
• Roatan 
• Guanaja
• Yoro-Fish Festival
• Río Plátano y Miskitio Coast
• Cascada Zacate-El Pino
• Hondu/Nica Ultimate Frisbee Game

Ode to Honduran Buses

Oh Honduran buses, how I hate thee. Sorry to start off on such a negative and weirdly theatrical note, but I have spent over 24 combined hours on various Honduran buses in the last week and the experience was harrowing. I will use this blog to try to acquaint those of you who are unfamiliar with the experience to just how un-enjoyable it just can be. To start off there are three types of buses in Honduras: the real luxury bus lines, the bus lines that claim to be luxury, and the chicken buses (that make no claims to anything including passenger safety, which is honestly pretty refreshing… until a child throws up on you while riding one of them). On my most recent adventure I had the pleasure of riding two of these types of buses (neither of which was the least bit luxurious).

To give you some background, I was traveling from my home in Ocotepeque (the farthest south western department of the country) to visit friends on the north coast (located coincidentally on the northern most part of the country). In order to get there I had to travel across the entire length of the country (or roughly the distance between like DC and Delaware). While this seems like a piece of cake trip to those of you accustomed to travel within the US (and usually in private cars), it is a daunting nine hour trek across some of the worst roads in the hemisphere (especially when one is living on a PC budget and forced to take 1970-1980s era US school buses).

The trip started off with a serious bout of luck, when I was able to catch a jalon with someone leaving my town headed to Santa Rosa. This was the first leg of my trip since SR is about 2 hours north of me and a fun place to spend a night. I was even so fortunate as to get a seat in the cabin of the pick up (truly luxurious by my campo standards) and the driver wouldn’t take any money for the ride (thus saving me about 60 lempiras, or 3 dollars US). I spent the night in a friends hotel room in SR and went out on the town with some other volunteers, overall a great first day of my vacation. Sadly the rest of my travel was not so enjoyable. I awoke the next morning to find out that the engineer from my mancomunidad who had offered me a ride all the way to my friends town (since it was right next to the town where he planned to vacation with his family) was not going to be headed up that day and was instead waiting till later in the week. This meant that I would have to cowboy up and hop on a bus headed north. After an appropriate grieving period, and a hardy breakfast of fried food, I made my way to the bus station and hopped the first school bus I saw headed to San Pedro.

This trip started as pretty much all of chicken bus experiences started, with a kid next to me vomiting (though at least this time he managed to get the majority of it in a grocery bag held by his father).

[As an aside I would just like to point out that while Hondurans will throw just about any piece of trash they accumulate during a bus ride directly out the window, they as a whole seem steadfastly against throwing their bags of vomit out. I honestly cannot comprehend this. Apparently a bottle or a churo bag or a plate of food scraps is un-bearable to hold onto until they come to a trash receptacle, but a bag of human vomit is totally ok. Often times they even place it on the floor of the bus and let it roll around, not sure what they think will come of this, but what it usually results in is an exploded bag of vomit on a crowded bus. Sorry, back to the story at hand]

To be honest though, I was actually pretty impressed by this kids skill, he actually managed to start puking before we had even left the bus terminal, no small feat seeing as we were only going about 10 miles an hour. Besides this puking, this part of the trip was relatively un-eventful and we reached San Pedro in decent time.

As a bit of background on San Pedro, it is Honduras’s most populous city, and has the highest murder rate in a country that is second in the world in killings per capita (it has a murder rate of over 120 people per 100,000, compared to say DC which has one of around 20). For those of you unfamiliar with Spanish, the name San Pedro Sula roughly translates to Holy crap get me out of here. To top it off it is located in a valley and the weather alternates between hot, hazy, and sunny, and hot, hazy, humid, and rainy, with an average temperature of balls hot. This last part is important to the story, since on this occasion I was left waiting on a turned on bus for 2 hours as they tried to jam more and more people on to it (in Honduras seating capacity on busses is taken more as a minimum than a max, and a bus is not considered adequately full until the entire aisle is full as well). My 2 pm bus eventually got on the road at 4, by which point I had literally sweated through my jeans and t-shirt and had successfully lost any chance of catching a connecting bus in La Ceiba to get to my friends house. Luckily for me everyone else traveling to my friends house that day had run into similar trouble on their bus from Teguz and my friend was able to get his host parents to come pick us up. Also luckily, the mall at which we ended up waiting for a ride has a Wendys, so I was able to cool off with a Frosty.

Well Ill just conclude by saying that all the busing was worth it, since it resulted in me spending 2 days on a tropical island paradise, and then 3 more in the happening colonial city of Trujillo partying with fellow volunteers. Also on the way back I got to ride next to a lady on a chicken bus who actually had 2 chickens in a bag on her lap as well as a toddler on the other knee (this time the kid did not throw up, and neither did the chickens for that matter).

"Like a stranger on a foreign shore"

This is one way to spend 10 days in Honduras:

http://www.moon.com/destinations/honduras/discover-honduras/explore-honduras/the-10-day-best-honduras

...but if you always do only what the books recommend you're not going to get very far, and you're not going to see very much that hasn't been seen. for semana santa this year myself and a bunch of us decided to use Honduras' national vacation-time/semana santa to see Cayos Cochinos, as well as the beach town of Trujillo. These areas are areas infrequently visited by foreign tourists, most of whom instead fly or boat right past these locales on their way to Bay Islands. 

Map of Cayos Cochinos
Map of Trujillo

This was my second time out on Cayos, but this was the first time heading to there for something other than work. Most of the tropical beach pictures that you see in the columns of this blog are from Cayos.  For the two nights we basically had our own private caribbean island with access to snorkel equipment, and the ability to explore this crazy archipelago, located an hour off the shore of Honduras.  we did all this for around 1000 HNL, or $50 per person, but then again cayos is one of those places that is rarely mentioned in guide books. it maybe get's a paragraph in Moon Travel, and it's not terribly easy to get to either. the most common way is to know a fisherman, negociar him down, and then take an early morning hour long ride in their small boat before the ocean is too rough for travel, but that's what makes Honduras so great and so full of unrealized potential. if Honduras has this much to offer, what have i been missing in other parts of the world?

An abandoned lighthouse on Cayo Mayor. "Like a scene out of Lost"

The second half of our tripwe spent in Trujillo, which was just as great, if not better than cayos. got to see a lot of neat historical stuff, like the city's historic cematary and la Fortaleza de Santa Bárbara, which is one of the oldest defensive establishments in the America's and death-place of some random guy known as William Walker. we trekked up some waterfalls outside of town and I definitely sprained a few toes jumping from slippery rock to slippery rock barefoot, and of course we spent time relaxing on the beach when not celebrating a despidia, going out, or night swimming in the Atlantic. it was a pretty great way to spend the second part of my semana santa. 

View from the fort of Trujillo's beach (BR)

Work: When not backpacking through Honduras I occasionally find time to work on the project that has been consuming most of my time since arriving.  Currently, we are laying down the last few truckloads of soil for the field in order to crown the center of the field so that water flows to the sides rather than just sitting on the top of it. at the same time we're reworking the drainage plans, and there is some desire on the muni's end to install an irrigation system, pero vamos a ver. also, i've received word that the grant application for this project has been approved and we should be receiving funds in about two weeks. otherwise I'm also setting up a stakeholders meeting of businesses and residents around the park to discuss their ideas on how the park should be developed, which should happen sometime before June.

"Like a stranger on a foreign shore"

This is one way to spend 10 days in Honduras:

http://www.moon.com/destinations/honduras/discover-honduras/explore-honduras/the-10-day-best-honduras

...but if you always do only what the books recommend you're not going to get very far, and you're not going to see very much that hasn't been seen. for semana santa this year myself and a bunch of us decided to use Honduras' national vacation-time/semana santa to see Cayos Cochinos, as well as the beach town of Trujillo. These areas are areas infrequently visited by foreign tourists, most of whom instead fly or boat right past these locales on their way to Bay Islands. 

Map of Cayos Cochinos
Map of Trujillo

This was my second time out on Cayos, but this was the first time heading to there for something other than work. Most of the tropical beach pictures that you see in the columns of this blog are from Cayos.  For the two nights we basically had our own private caribbean island with access to snorkel equipment, and the ability to explore this crazy archipelago, located an hour off the shore of Honduras.  we did all this for around 1000 HNL, or $50 per person, but then again cayos is one of those places that is rarely mentioned in guide books. it maybe get's a paragraph in Moon Travel, and it's not terribly easy to get to either. the most common way is to know a fisherman, negociar him down, and then take an early morning hour long ride in their small boat before the ocean is too rough for travel, but that's what makes Honduras so great and so full of unrealized potential. if Honduras has this much to offer, what have i been missing in other parts of the world?

An abandoned lighthouse on Cayo Mayor. "Like a scene out of Lost"

The second half of our tripwe spent in Trujillo, which was just as great, if not better than cayos. got to see a lot of neat historical stuff, like the city's historic cematary and la Fortaleza de Santa Bárbara, which is one of the oldest defensive establishments in the America's and death-place of some random guy known as William Walker. we trekked up some waterfalls outside of town and I definitely sprained a few toes jumping from slippery rock to slippery rock barefoot, and of course we spent time relaxing on the beach when not celebrating a despidia, going out, or night swimming in the Atlantic. it was a pretty great way to spend the second part of my semana santa. 

View from the fort of Trujillo's beach (BR)

Work: When not backpacking through Honduras I occasionally find time to work on the project that has been consuming most of my time since arriving.  Currently, we are laying down the last few truckloads of soil for the field in order to crown the center of the field so that water flows to the sides rather than just sitting on the top of it. at the same time we're reworking the drainage plans, and there is some desire on the muni's end to install an irrigation system, pero vamos a ver. also, i've received word that the grant application for this project has been approved and we should be receiving funds in about two weeks. otherwise I'm also setting up a stakeholders meeting of businesses and residents around the park to discuss their ideas on how the park should be developed, which should happen sometime before June.