After I graduated from university, I had every intention of taking the gap year that I hadn't taken between high school and uni. I wanted to go further afield than Europe, and learn another language; I had my heart set on Spanish. So after temping for a year to pay off the obscene overdraft I'd run up whilst a student and pay the air fare, I packed my bags and set off to Honduras in Central America in August 2003 on a year-long volunteering programme that involved living with a local family and working for local charities. It continues to be the single most important thing I think I've done with my life to date.
Trying my hand at a career in consultancy, caught up in the rat-race of corporate life, at a time when all anyone talks about is interest rates, property prices and our ability (or lack thereof) to accumulate shiny new toys, a quick glance back to that time puts everything in perspective.
I recently came across the round-robin emails I sent whilst away. Other than minor edits for spelling and grammar, I've left them unchanged. I hasten to add that the opinions expressed therein, or the way I chose to sum up the country or its people, aren't necessarily how I would choose to now. Now I have the benefit of hindsight and the whole year's experience that included the friendship and patience of many Hondurans and Central Americans, some of whom I now count as my closest friends. The following passages are snapshots of my evolving understanding of a very special place that was very different to where I'm from, and into which I was pitched head-long, an up-tight Englishman with what was at first only a rudimentary grasp of the local language and bereft of the cultural sign-posts upon which we seldom realise we rely so much until they're gone.
Cómo están? And that’s as far as my Spanish stretches to right now. To anyone I neglected to tell (yes, am an awful person, completely crap at replying to email messages and keeping people up to date with what’s happening), am currently in Honduras (that’s Central America, if like me you thought Honduras was somewhere near Malaysia). Will be here for a year doing voluntary work with street children, possibly also mental health work if I get the chance. Things were so manic before I left I barely had time to pack (in fact I was still rushing around trying to find stuff at 4.45am when the cab came to take me to the airport).
Living with a host family in the capital, Tegucigalpa - ugly city, beautiful surroundings. They don’t really do multi-storey here - the city houses around a million people but it’s all spread out over a valley high up in the tropical forests of the south of the country. Despite the failure of any building, including even the cathedral, to provide much inspiration, the gap in between two decaying edifices betrays a glimpse of bright green mountainside. The airport was as good an introduction to this place as any: instead of an ordered line of sedate individuals queuing up along plastic barriers, there’s a heaving a mass of people shouting and waving outside the airport doors (the arrivals ‘hall’ is too small to have anyone who’s not actually getting off a plane in it). Included there was my host mother and brother - they don’t speak a word of English (apart from one of the brothers, who speaks a bit), and my Spanish is non-existent so the last two weeks have been very interesting. They aren’t particularly well off (by western standards, although they don’t apply here - you realise what ‘rich’ means when you drive past the slums that ring the outside of the city high up in the hills) but they have a maid, like everybody else. When you don’t have a washing machine, you take in a girl who has nowhere else to go and get her to scrub you clothes in the stone basin in the backyard for you. This is a very narrow view of it, of course - it’s always more complicated than that...
There are about 15-20 ICYE volunteers: Danish, Swedish, Icelandic, German, Italian, French, Taiwanese, Austrian, Swiss, American, English. Everyone speaks English though, except the guy from France who doesn’t speak any English or Spanish. A few of us speak French, so it’s not that bad, but at one point Laura (English), Valentin (French), Francesca (Italian) and I were trying to have a conversation that hosted as many languages as it did participants - confusing is not the word. The climate in Tegucigalpa is tropical - I’m told it doesn’t get too hot or too cold, although goodness knows what ‘hot’ or ‘cold’ means here. It’s wet though, although it’s that nice kind of warm rain that I don’t mind walking in. Everything here is so green and bright, mango trees and lime trees. The city looks fantastic at night - because it’s all spread out it’s like a sparkling blanket undulating over a vast expanse. Unfortunately it’s not safe to walk out at night, or even take a taxi by yourself (boy or girl). My host family is very nice, although they insist on my calling them mami and papi (mummy and daddy, I mean I’m 23 and I’m foreign, come on). I'm not alone in this though - a lot of us living in host families get the same thing. Their hearts are in the right place though.
Anyway, have written loads and have spent far too much on internet cafes already this past fortnight.
Still enjoying myself in tropical parts, sipping fresh coffee from the mountain groves and basking in the hot sunshine! OK, well it’s not all fun and games, and to top it off it’s currently raining – the wet season has properly hit.
Started working at Casa Alianza just over a month ago. It’s in the centre of town and acts as a kind of one-stop-shop for the local street children (of which there are plenty). They’re part of an American catholic organisation called Covenant House. The place is huge with excellent facilities, although the faint smell of urine and unwashed bodies persists. I tend to get introduced as either ‘the Englishman’ or ‘the psychologist’ (you only have to have a first degree in psychology here to be a psychologist, apparently – hey, I’m not complaining!).
After a couple of weeks spent hanging around the centre, talking to the kids and finding my way around, I finally got to go out with the street educators (the people who go out and get the kids off the streets.) Basically we go to the worst part of town and then look for the part where not even the locals like to go! This would be a rubbish dump by the bridge next to the river. Behold a skip full of vegetable refuse from the adjacent market, various poor souls charged with shovelling and sorting the stuff. Next to it, a rivulet (the word ‘brook’ might apply were it not for the opaque luminous quality of the water carrying a correspondingly awful smell), and several teenagers milling round, all filthy, wearing old clothes and clutching pots of glue. Here you realise one reason why these kids sniff solvents; when you see where and how they live, coupled with the rank odour of rotting matter and bodies in the tropical heat, this clean chemical deodorant must cut through all the senses and neutralise the desperation, hunger, dirt. As we walked back over the bridge I realised how close the spot was to Casa Alianza – a change of angle and you’d probably get a clear view of its clean, sky-blue peripheral wall that bends round to the tip of the city centre’s street grid. It’s almost as if its curvature were an attempt to better deflect the unsavouriness of the poverty on to which it looks, of the vulture-like birds that gather on the river banks garnered with refuse.
I’ve been working mainly with the family reintegration team - social workers (or at least Honduras’ approximation of them) who try and get the kids back into the families that they’ve run away from. I’ve been paired up with one of the social workers, Rita, to shadow her as she goes on home visits to check up on how reintegrated children are doing in their families. We get the bus from the old town to the various ‘colonias’, some in the hills, others just on the outskirts of the city. One colonia looks like a vast improvement on anything else I’ve seen; in place of dirt tracks and un-rendered houses there are wide paved roads, clean deep gutters and houses painted white and pastel shades of blue, green and yellow. Inside, however, these places are bare. The only chairs are plastic garden furniture. But the people are warm and kind; they put out furniture for us to sit on whilst they sit on the floor, if they had food to spare they would offer it. The mother talks animatedly, making jokes and registering with interest the pale foreigner sitting in her front room, looking slightly nervous and resigning himself to being incapable of following the conversation. The husband is a lethargic semi-present figure, usually in bed when we arrive late morning, giving us a horizontal greeting through the draped doorway of the bedroom.
The following week we went to the shanty towns on the outskirts of Tegucigalpa’s urban sprawl. This is where people come to build their houses – wooden huts with dirt floors, no water, electricity or sanitation – those who remain are the lucky ones who haven’t been evicted by the landowners. The first question you ask when you hear about street children is why they run away from home in the first place when they have families, usually in the same city. Then you see where many of them have come from, and it’s not always a significant improvement. Inside the first house we visit a smiling, bright-eyed girl who proudly presents her school books for Rita to look through, and her equally amiable mother. The place is dark and windowless, the wooden-plank walls covered in wrapping paper and sheets to conceal the gaps between the wood. Flies cover the table and buzz about the place, over the two beds in a hut not much bigger than a garden shed, which houses eight people. It’s hard to ignore the smell of unwashed humanity. One of the boys plays with a toy car on the dirt floor, its bright-coloured plastic in direct contrast to its primitive surroundings; a taster of another world beyond, scraps from the table of the American dream. I know my perception of the entire situation is largely informed by my materialistic ideals, but it’s hard to look someone in the eye when the clothes you’re wearing probably cost more than everything they own. We take a water bottle with us whenever we go visiting, but end up giving most of it away – these people live in a tropical area where lowland houses are frequently flooded during the rainy season, but they don’t even have drinking water.
But the situation isn’t quite as depressing as it sounds. My colleagues’ constantly upbeat attitude is infectious. Even amongst evident poverty - even by Honduran standards - one of the street educators, Luz, I was visiting with managed to laugh and joke. It took me a while to realise as we went round what I would have called slum, that she was complementing the inhabitants on their home. Two girls, a baby and the child’s father live in a two-roomed edifice fenced off from the river down by where the old American yellow school buses that serve as municipal transport (like the younger sibling, Honduras takes its hand-me-downs from Uncle Sam) are cleaned to spotless perfection by their fastidious drivers. I was somewhat confused by Luz’s exclamations of “Well, what more could you want?” (I thought we were supposed to getting these kids out of hell-holes like this, I was thinking), until I realised that the couple were ex-inhabitants of Casa Alianza, now too old to be eligible for its services. The boy had built the house with his own hands. Luz of course looked at it and saw what it could have been – flimsy planks instead of brick, a dirt floor instead of the bright red tiles. The term “glass half-full” here isn’t some positive thinking cliché, it’s a necessary given against the loss of hope.
And on a thankfully less profound note, another factor to my happiness has got to be that I’ve started to feel much more comfortable in my host family, no doubt related to the fact that I’ve found out where BBC World is located on their cable package. No more having to watch the fast-moving, overly contrasted primary colours that CNN feels necessary to veneer onto its production, possibly to detract from the fact that whatever it is they’re transmitting, it ain’t news. All I have to do now is wait until the package of tea arrives from Mum and Dad, and I can come home, collapse on the sofa with a strong hot cuppa (which years of incessant tea-making will have rendered an unconscious process, the steaming fruition of which will therefore pleasantly appear in my hand without any noticeable effort), switch on the TV at channel 79 and enjoy the red and gold bleeping motif of BBC-dom as I become the shameless epitome of the British ex-pat!
Hope you are all enjoying Christmas, and not too cold. Currently about 18-20°C here, although was freezing last week. The problem with Honduran buildings is that being built in a tropical country, draught insulation is not the biggest concern, so when the winter gusts come around you feel like you’re experiencing an indoor hurricane. I went to bed most of last week wearing a scarf. Gemma, I sympathise with your gripes about Australia and the lack of heating – everybody talks about how cold Britain is, but at least we have discovered the joys of central heating and double-glazing.
I have spent all weekend baking – Christmas just isn’t Christmas without a mince-pie so decided to make some myself (for the first time in I don’t know how many years). Fascinating to enter the world of the ex-patriot cook – the internet has opened up a whole global community of earnest English housewives (and some househusbands), who despite living in countries where they haven’t even got a word for currant or sultana, and where baking hot, sweet stodgy food stuffs is not advisable given the climate or the prevalence of sucrose-loving insects that get into everything, carry on regardless in good old stubborn British fashion. bbc.co.uk/food becomes your best friend, and the deliaonline.com message board belies a host of frantic women looking for an alternative to suet (‘frantic of Vietnam’ is advised to use grated butter, or to do nothing short of go out and slaughter the nearest cow in order to render the fat off its kidneys herself). There is now a Christmas pud waiting to be re-heated, two dozen mince-pies, a sherry trifle, and I shall be doing the veg for the Cena de Nochebuena (they eat at midnight on Christmas Eve): buttered cabbage with bacon, roast potatoes with garlic and rosemary, and glazed carrots. This gluttony of gastronomic creation has done the trick, however; I am now feeling very Christmassy. Despite the abundance of cheap and tacky decorations everywhere (tastelessness is a universal phenomenon) I have failed up until now to get in the festive mood. The Christmas tree in the mall is amazing – 40 feet tall and covered in white fairy lights, although the frost covered wreaths were obviously made by someone who has never seen frost or snow (it looks more like a flock of diarrheic pigeons flew past).
Am going to Utila with some friends for New Year’s. It’s one of the three tropical bay islands off the north coast in the Caribbean. It’s supposed to be very rainy and windy there this time of year, but I’ll just be glad to get out of the city, and I’m still holding up hope that the weather will be good enough for us to spend New Year’s Eve on the beach. Have been dying to get back to the north coast every since I spent a weekend in Tela (coastal town) back in October. It’s like a different world from Tegus. As you head across the country you notice the climate change very quickly – the weather seems to just jump up 5°C at some point along the road, and then several more before you reach the coast. The scenery turned from the almost unreal green that carpets the south’s hills, dotted with darker patches of trees, to a flatter, more European view of muted long grasses around great blue lakes, and then onto the ordered symmetry of palm plantations in the steaming haze of the Caribbean coast. The hotel we ended up at turned out to be a beach-side resort that was originally built by the Tela Railroad Company in the 1920’s to house its US executives. The freestanding wooden houses now house many an American tourist or affluent Honduran family, and look like something out of one of Agatha Christie’s murder mysteries that are set in the Caribbean – Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple strutting about in full colonial splendour. We went straight to the beach at 9.30am but by 10.30 the sun was so strong we had to retreat to the pool. When I decided to come to Latin America I never really thought I’d be sitting in a bar, sipping piña coladas, looking out across palm trees and white sand to brilliant blue ocean.
The following day we hired a boat and a guide to take us out to the national park; beach-front houses and hotels gave way to unbroken forest and then the palm-roofed beach shacks of the Garifuna (African immigrant) communities. We finally dropped off at a beach barely given to sand before the bulging presence of the tropical forest we were to be taken through. As we walked through it a racket started up that sounded like a pack of wild dogs. When I looked up I saw that they were wild monkeys jumping from branch to branch. The boat took us to three, totally deserted beaches, each different from the other; a completely secluded cove, sides bending round to a narrow entrance, another more shallow with some coral to go snorkelling amongst, accompanied by blue and yellow striped tropical fish, and the last, which was the best, where we had a lunch of fried fish and plantain, then took a siesta in the hammocks in the shade of the beach huts. There was just enough time for a dip in the turquoise waters before we headed back to the hotel at full speed, crashing over the waves, wind in our hair. It really was one of the best weekends of my life.
OK, haven’t written in 6 months – sorry about that! Been super busy (which made a nice change from the first half of my year in Honduras). I changed projects at Christmas – I was working for an organisation called Casa Alianza, working with street children. Two problems: children really aren’t my thing (I did actually ask not to be put in a children’s project when I got here, but there we go…) and Casa Alianza is the most disorganised badly managed affair with the worst management-staff relations I’ve ever come across. I decided it was definitely time for me to move on the day they didn’t even tell me that the president of Honduras was coming to visit and I walked into work in my usual jeans-with-the-holes-at-the-knees and crappy shirt, found myself face to face with the first lady of Honduras. The latter is a bleach-blonde affair who likes posing with all the poor little kiddies in front of the cameras before she wipes her hands with disinfectant and gets the hell out of there. There’s also a rumour that she used to be a man, which when you look up close seems quite likely.
Started working at a new project after Christmas and everything about being in Honduras seemed so much brighter. After a very difficult Christmas (first away from family – it’s just not the same without having an argument with Mum about what Christmas special to watch), I was on the first bus on boxing day headed to the north coast. Spent 10 wonderful days on Utila – tropical island in the Caribbean – learning to scuba dive and generally enjoying being able to walk around at night by myself without fear of having my throat cut or having ‘gringo’ shouted at me every five seconds. Utila is basically West Indian islanders and Westerners – the only rule is to have a good time and let other people enjoy themselves. Came back and started to work with AICAT – an NGO that does computer training – supposedly for rural communities who can’t afford it but I spent my time training people at the Honduran Ministry for Education (smart clothes, name tags, coffee breaks and business cards – much more my thing). OK, so it sounds very impressive but AICAT’s really small, run by teachers at the local university who volunteer their spare time. The first day we ran a training session I thought I was just going to be assisting – until my boss, Virna, told me she wanted to see how good I was and that I was running the afternoon session. So there’s yours truly up in front of twenty middle-aged Honduran administrators blagging it in Spanish and much to everyone’s amusement getting the pronunciation wrong on one or two words which come out as rather colourful language instead! "It broke the ice," was all Virna said to me afterwards. The five months I’ve spent working with them has been wonderful; they assigned me my own laptop, what more can I say?
Anyway, have now finished work and am travelling at the moment. Currently in an internet café in Panajachel in Guatemala. We left Tegucigalpa last Friday, stopped off to see the Mayan ruins in Copán before crossing the border into Guatemala. Stayed in Guatemala City for a night (gets a very bad press, although after living in Tegus for a year anywhere looks safe by comparison), then another in Antigua. Antigua is the old Guatemalan capital – very pretty, very touristy, very expensive – would love to go back when I’ve got enough money not to be bitter about all the people who eat in expensive restaurants and think $4 is a fair price to see a 16th century convent cloister. After we ‘do’ Guatemala, going through Belize (but only for a few nights: ex-British colony equals British prices, and after living in Honduras for a year you get really, really tight) and then to southern Mexico region of Yucatán. After that will have been to all the countries in Central America and to Mexico (which is technically North America according to Central Americans). Went to El Salvador (borders the north of Honduras) for a week in March and spent a couple of weeks in Nicaragua (borders the south of Honduras) and Panamá (saw the canal) just a month ago. Also spent a couple of nights in the Costa Rican capital of San Josè on the way to Panamá.
Will be arriving back in good old Blighty on 6th August (already having lurid dreams about fish ‘n’ chips) to a new house - parents moved to Hockley (with an over-aspirated ‘h’) in Essex at the end of last year. Will be coming to visit people as soon as I have earned the money to pay the train fare – can’t wait to see people. Then starting an MSc conversion course in computer science at the University of York at the beginning of October (if all else fails, go back to uni!).
