Letters from Honduras #2

17th October 2003

Hello all!

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!