Social capital

At 8.00AM (by no means early morning by any standards, but certainly not by those of subsistence coffee farmers), we arrive in what functions as the meeting room of the denizens of Santa Maria de la Paz. I think it's probably actually a cattle shed. We're here for a meeting of the junta directiva of the region - in so far as I can make out, their function is to serve as a link between the people of the district (poor, badly-educated people) and the services of the municipalities and the state. This committee investigates the non-completion of government promises and rsponsibilities, it submits denuciations of unfair or illegal activities, and it educates people on their rights and responsibilities. It does all that through occasional meetings in this windowless, wide open cattle shed, which is freezing cold, terribly damp and completely empty. Nobody has shown up.

Don Javier, the area coordinator, is unfazed: he suggests we go around the corner to the shop. There, on the side of the highway, we shelter under the eaves and watch the rain soak the community: if I were a village democracy volunteer, I wouldn't haul myself down the mountains for a meeting on a day like today either. But this spot is a much more effective meeting place, and soon there are 6 of us discussing the likelihood of anything taking place: me and Don Javier, a couple of men and a woman with a large name badge proclaiming that she is Carmen. In addition to the planned meeting, there's a workshop on today on the subject of social audit. Whether the meeting takes place or not, I mention, I'd like to go along to the workshop.

We hang out a little longer under the eaves of the pulperia, chatting. An elderly man emerges through the clouds pushing a wheelbarrow full of stones which keeps getting stuck in the mud: a boy on the road with a donkey looks on in indifference as the man tries time and again to make his wheelbarrow move. Everyone around me is missing teeth, many replaced with gold ones. Everyone wears layers and layers of impractical clothes; everyone is wet to the skin. Eventually we haul through the mud up the hill to a school room for me to join the workshop.

I'd like to report an atmosphere of dynamism and determination. I wish I could say that in that room I met angry people, passionate people: or even exhausted, disillusioned people. Certainly I met incredibly poor people, who weren't benefitting in the least from the modest growth their country was reporting, from the trade deals or the debt reduction, and for whom the only tangible improvements in their day to day lives had come courtesy of international NGOs. The workshop was turgid: a confusing lecture on the structures for citizen participation, in which group work involved regurgitating the same information, only at an excruciating pace, given that the majority of the participants were only barely literate.
I struggled to connect these activities with the ideal of citizen participation. Is this what it's like in Puerto Alegre? Confused individuals who come along to the workshops and the meetings for a bit of warmth (Christ - not much though) and to be part of something? The same people who volunteer to be part of the village services committee and the committee for vigilance of NGOs and the construction training team? Of course it is. It's the same in Ireland, it's the same everywhere; what Lisa Carey once described as the "professional be-er on committees". But instead of energy and spirit, I encountered a dull confusion. What would he do with his new-found skills, I asked Gerber, a kind man in a typical campesino hat (I love being up there, I love these people who'll talk to me about anything and who are so kind and open)? Ah, you know, he said. It's like all the workshops, you know more at the end of it. It's important to know your rights.
Fine. But why? For what?

So I'm a little unsure whether this is how we're going to change the world, but I don't see any better offers. The idea is genius, but man, it's asking a lot of people. And it's based on an assumption that every community has its leaders, its fighters - but what if they don't? If nobody wants to fight, that doesn't mean their rights are less important. Some people just want to go to workshops...

A More Just Society

On Monday morning of last week, a Honduran lawyer was shot dead on the Avenue of the Armed Forces. His name was Dionisio García, he was married, with a 7 year old son. He worked for a well-known organisation called the Association for a More Just Society (ASJ). They carry out investigations, and at the time of his assasination, García was working on the exploitation of private security personnel, who are ubiquitous in Tegucigalpa. He took the cases of the vigilantes, many working for fast food chains, and demonstrated how they were often victims of private vendettas (and often lose their lives as a result of vengeance campaigns targeted at their employers); and how their labour rights are constantly ignored and abused. He also demonstrated that important government officials were aware, and complicit in this situation. García and his colleagues had received threats on their lives repeatedly over the last three months: two of his colleagues have gone into hiding since his murder. Link to an English language story - the Spanish version has much more detail.

ASJ is an important organisation in Honduras, and my boss - ever immersed in high political drama of all types - attended García's funeral on Tuesday. It's been a disturbing precedent: the assasination of lawyers hasn't been a feature of Honduran life in recent years. But what's just as disturbing is the failure of the media to report it as a precedent of any sort: Another High Profile Death, announced the Channel 5 news on Monday evening, as though García had been yet another victim of violent petty crime in the capital. When you're accustomed to seeing corpses on the front pages of the papers every day, their clothes tugged up the better to reveal their bloodied flesh, it's tricky to distinguish between political violence and the typical murder-for-mobile-phones.

Is the difference even significant? I had the old Veronica Guerin row with my friend's boyfriend on Tuesday night: García had it coming to him, he should have stepped away, what good is he to anyone, now that he's dead? Cam, ever the cynic, gave us his father's great life advice: no jodes con el mundo, y el mundo no te joderá - don't fuck with people, and they won't fuck with you. My Canadian friend, who spent last year in Managua, claims that this is a fundamental difference between Hondurans and Nicaraguans: Hondurans will do anything for a quiet life, they'll look the other way, just to keep themselves out of all the shit going on around them. Is that why there was never a civil war here? There were no Romeros, no heroes willing to put their lives on the line to expose the atrocities committed by a military dictatorship. Where is Romero now, asks Cam: he's under the ground. And the killings with impunity in El Salvador, they still happen, committed by the mining companies and private businesses instead of the state.

Arriving back in Tegucigalpa from my road trip yesterday afternoon, I saw a large hoarding for a shopping centre near my house. You know the sign on the Naas dual carriageway (before it became the M-something or the N-something): the one that says Welcome to Naas, a Nice Place to Shop. This one welcomed us to Tegucigalpa, to El Dorado, a Safe Place to Shop.

The catch-up entry

This blog remains confused and a little schizophrenic: uncertain whether it's a slice of Honduran life or a series of honest letters home from me to whoever cares to read them. I'd love it to be the former, of wide and compelling relevance to anyone who wanted to know about Honduras or development; but if I'm frank with myself I know that it's only ever going to interest people who know me, because they know me. For this reason, I'll finally give in, and write the group mail that I should have written a long time ago, the answer to all the questions in all the emails: How ARE you Carol? What's it LIKE?

I'm well thanks. I live in a huge house with another Irish girl, and generally her Honduran boyfriend, who is one of my favourite people here, and indeed in the world. We have a relaxed, easy life, lots of rather random books and magazines (we try to take it in turns to buy the Economist, but it costs $6, and arrives 2 weeks out of date), a patio with two hammocks, a big kitchen where we sometimes cook for our friends, and a tv with 100 channels, many American. We get Fox and NBC and ABC from Denver Colorado, so the advertising is targeted at a rural demographic that we can't quite understand. We listen to a lot of Latin pop music and regatón, and on Thurdays two of our French Canadian friends come round and teach a gang of us salsa steps.

We have a nice group of friends, mostly ex-pats, but at least an interesting mix of ex-pats. Primarily either Irish or Canadian, there are also Swedes, Spanish and Nicaraguans and a few Honduran Capoeira experts, so there's a relaxed multi-lingual way about things. At least once a week we go to a salsa bar called Sabor Cubano, and we also eat out fairly regularly, generally in foreign restaraunts: Spanish or Japanese or Italian. Everybody I know who isn't Honduran works in development, and most work very hard, including at weekends. The atmosphere is vibrant and intelligent, and extremely laid-back. Dancing and eating feature strongly in our lives. This isn't what I'd planned, and sometimes the pace of things bores me - but it's all quite lovely.

I still haven't got a handle on work. There are a number of reasons for this, but by far the biggest is my Spanish. My Spanish is good: I could easily work in a bar or restaraunt, or indeed in an administrative job. I started a class a couple of weeks ago, and my teacher loves to tell me how well I speak and understand. But there is no disguising the fact that the work I'm doing requires fluency, and I'm far from fluent. You know, they didn't check in my interview, and I made a big point of explaining my level, but noone seemed to mind.
Now, I'm learning every day: I'm happy with my progress for myself. But for getting the work done.... I don't know. I feel like a bit of a fraud, though noone else seems to (at least not openly). I'm here as an intern, but I'm not treated as an intern; which I appreciate, but still.
I'm not sure whether I'm too hard on myself. I find I'm not as busy as most of my colleagues, because my colleagues are so busy that nobody's had time to sit down and discuss the parameters of my role with me. I'm learning to be proactive about this, and forcing myself to take initiatives that scare the life out of me. For a long time, I'd had a trip to the north coast planned with some co-workers this coming week: on Tuesday they decided to cancel. So I announced that I was going anyway. This is ridiculous, I have no idea what I'm going to do or even what needs to be done. But I do know that I'm not busy and that I'm bored of being in the office and I need to meet more partners and see more work. At the office Christmas party yesterday, I told the accountant about my decision, and she said she'd come with me. Nice one.
Being new in a job is horrible, and being new in this job is absolutely no different. But I'm getting there, and I think it'll get easier.

So I feel mixed up a lot. I feel a responsibility to be better at this work than I am; at the same time I'm aware that I'm pushing myself hard and that I will improve. Essentially, I'm still in the place where I'm gaining an awful lot more personally than the organisation is gaining from me. I know what my sister would say to that: that that's always the way for ex-pats in "the field". But I don't feel I've contributed much of anything yet. You know what? I think this means that I'm being "challenged", which is what I've always claimed to want. Is that it? Is it just that I'm never happy? Answers in a comment box.

Have a nice week, and next week I'll report from my field trip.

Migration stories

I'm not nearly as far away as I think I am. I go into the office in the morning, fire off a quick hello email to Simp, then check the news on the BBC, the Guardian and the Irish Times. This has been my ritual for the last 4 years, and it makes me forget that I live anywhere remotely different to you guys. (Though for the record, I do read the national goresheet in the taxi on my way to the office too).
Yesterday I read a good feature in the Guardian about Central American migrants taking the freight train from Mexico to the US: it was based on a documentary that was shown on Channel 4 last night. Put me in mind of lots of people here.

Jesus is a driver with an NGO I work quite closely with - though obviously, Jesus isn't his real name. I chose it because his defining characteristic is his evangelical Christianity. You get lots of that around here, and many of my colleagues are profoundly and publically religious. Rosary beads hanging over the rear view mirror, blessings and prayers as greetings, that sort of thing. Jesus is of a different order, although he's by no means unique. He refuses to dance because it's forbidden by his church. The radio in his organisation's car is constantly tuned to a Christian pop station, to which he listens good naturedly and insistently: he's aware that his faith seems strange to our western eyes, and he's indulgent of our discomfort, and probably a little sympathetic to our inevitable damnation. He's a lovely man (about my age I think). By all accounts, before he found god, he was a hellraiser and a womaniser: you'd never think.

Jesus' other defining charateristic is his poverty, about which he's not a bit subtle. He has four daughters under the age of eight, and he lives way outside of the city in a barrio that neither buses nor taxis will enter because of the gang activity. He can't afford his own car, so he walks home from the bus stop, and walks his girls to school. A typical conversation with him might go like this:

Me: How are things Jesus?
J: Alright thanks to God. Life is very difficult when you're poor but the Lord is watching out for us and you have to trust that he will look after you.
Me: Of course. How were your holidays?
J: They were good, very hot [here, hot weather is seen as one more curse sent upon the Honduran people, and the bitter wind that's whipped us for the last week is considered delightful, fresh and pleasing]. I worked on odd jobs for the week. I'm trying to save money to buy a car. Some day God will help me, but he only helps people who make an effort for themselves, so I will do my part and pray that the Lord might one day do his.

My friend who is Jesus' colleague points out that if he didn't give all his money to that evangelical church, he might be able to save for a car. She doesn't point this out to his face though.

It's not surprising, all this considered, that early this year, Jesus decided to try his luck travelling to the US. His wife has brothers and uncles living there, and they encouraged him to take the risk, skip the border and live there for 5 years, sending home enough money to raise the living conditions of his family back in Tegus. He agreed with his boss (an ex-pat) that he could take a month's unpaid leave to try it. If he got deported within the month, his job would be there for him. He paid a coyote a couple of thousand dollars to run him over the border, and in February, he set off on the trip.

Jesus' colleagues were worried about him, but he had the conviction and serenity of the saved: in spite of the devastatingly low chances of success, he was sure he'd make it. He didn't. They were arrested in Mexico, him, the coyote and another guy, and shipped back to the north coast of Honduras, where he suffered the indignity of being taken in by Casa de Migrantes, a migrants' charity that his erstwhile organisation supported. He wasn't willing to cut his losses. He decided to try again, on his own, back up through Mexico, and across the border this time. He was arrested within days, and spent two weeks in a US prison while they waited to have enough deportees to fill the transport. Back in Tegucigalpa in shame, he had outlasted the agreed month's leave, but succeeded in returning to his job.

Now, Jesus' story is far from the worst. He took a calculated gamble, and succeeded in ensuring that when it failed, things were no worse than they had been before. He got his job back, returned to his wife and children, and generally went back to being a poor religious Honduran doing his best to survive, mostly cheerfully and with a support network around him. It's strange though that this situation can exist in an international NGO, but it does in all of them. Alongside the ex-pats who earn enough - and have enough holiday time - to travel home to the US or Europe at least once a year, there are people whose situation is so desperate (in spite of earning a reasonable wage by local standards) that they're willing to leave their families and risk their lives to make things better. People here are so vulnerable, and us ex-pats, we're not.
I have an Irish friend who was directly challenged by her Honduran colleague. Our colleagues know how much we earn, and this one wanted to know what my friend needed all that money for. She didn't have children or a mortgage, she wasn't looking after her parents. This woman had a job as a cleaner; my friend had worked her way through a Masters to get to that position. But still. The inequality I keep denouncing: it´s closer too than I admit. We're all a part of it.

This week, privileged me, I feel a little Simp-sick. It's his birthday on Wednesday, and I don't like being so far away. All this moral confusion and vulnerability: I yearn a little for my cosy bourgeois Guardian-reading life in Dublin. Things like this blog, your emails, my morning news check, they keep me cosy and bourgeois - but they also keep me going. So keep them coming!

Happy birthday simp. xxxxx

Para Clara

So Clare emails to point out that here I am in the middle of the tropics, rainforests and cloudforests and Pacific and Carribean coasts, and I'm blurting on about people and fast food joints and not a word about the biodiversity that surrounds me. Good point. And, being the type who responds to feedback, this entry will be devoted to the non-human life in Honduras. It's apparent anyway that the well-being of Honduran human beings is intricately linked to that of the non-humans, so the comment didn't come a moment too soon.

From a day-to-day perspective, the only animal life I'm familiar with is the small, buzzing kind, and I have welt-covered limbs to prove it. Our house is a mosquito trap, and home also to an immense population of tiny ants which endlessly swarm over the oven and work surfaces in the kitchen. It's upsetting when you find them in your cereal, but you learn quickly not to buy the sweet cereals. Behind the oven, and occasionally elsewhere, are the geckos, cute and fast, but from time to time quite startling, when they fall out of the press intended for teabags (and not for small fast lizards). There are large flying green things called chinchas, which can apparently result in miserable deaths, and outside the gates, at night, large low-flying bats. For those who remember the Casa, I stress that I have no reason to believe that these are vampire bats.
Our neighbourhood, as I've mentioned, is a well-off one, and household animals are kept indoors at all times. In the city centre you see the stray dogs and cats, but not near us. Last weekend, a gang of us spent the night up in the national park near the city, which is covered in (far from pristine) cloud forest, and we went on a hike to a really impressive cascade. No signs of animal life that I could discern apart from the occasional bird call: maybe this is my clunky landlubber lack of observation skills, or perhaps it's like the guide books say, and the natural heritage of the park was largely chased away before it was ever given protected status. It's very close to the city, and we daytrippers and picnickers aren't exactly sensitive.

So much for the fauna. The flora picture should be better. From my office window I look out on an enormous banana plant (row on row of green banana forming under its leaves), a lemon tree and a mango tree. Some of the office staff go out with a sweeping brush to gather enough lemons for lemonade. And the city is surrounded by mountains, which at the moment are green and curly, almost like the hills around Barcelona; my colleagues tell me they go a burnt yellow by April.

In fact, the environmental tale in Honduras is a sad and distressing one, the more so when you consider the richness it should represent. Yesterday, I visited an organisation we support which mobilises the locals in the province of Olancho around environmental justice. Reading the project summary in the office, it seemed to me a little notional: why would people who have virtually no livelihood dedicate time to advocacy for the rights of trees? Of course, the two things are connected (everything is connected)...
The hills of Olancho (and the province is all hills) are bare, or at best coated in thin grasses and a species of pine (I think) with narrow trunks and sparse foliage. Mahogany is native to these hills; our partner organisations tell us that mahogany can be expected to be extinct from here within 10 years if it's not protected. Large roads cut across the landscape, built to facilitate the stream of trucks that travel up empty and back towards Tegus loaded with logs. Logging warehouses are visible all along the road.
Honduras has laws against illegal logging, but Honduras has lots of laws, a very good legal framework, and its the implementation that's lacking. The loggers form a powerful business interest, and a powerful political lobby; in fact, they're just plain powerful, a fact that's very real when you're confronted by their agents on your land, and they have a shotgun while all you have is a machete. Our partner organisation told us that 5 of their members had been killed by loggers this year. By members, I mean rural peasants, with tiny patches of land, a couple of chickens maybe, who join the organisation to try to confront the loggers.
The organisation really impressed me: it works with local people helping them to define their problems and their ideal solutions, and it also works at the level of government and congress, refining the law to shut down the loopholes, and demanding its full, transparent enforcement.
I don't have the full facts about the situation (having had the trip somewhat sprung on me) - so I'll point you to this global witness report which I haven't yet read.
It was a funny day for me (and after all, this blog is first and foremost about me, and you wouldn't be reading it if you didn't know me, so forgive the self-indulgence). Inspiring to see 30 campesinos in a small church hall, some having walked hours to be there, poring over the new forestry law to extract the most pertinent information to their livelihoods. Inspiring too to talk to articulate community leaders who had brought the entire congressional committee on forestry out to their pueblo to extract a commitment to implement the new law. But driving home, looking at the bare mountainsides, I was tempted to ask my more knowledgeable colleague whether it wasn't too late already.

There you go Clare: a Carol's-eye view of the environmental story in Honduras. Can I just say this to any of you who are reading: You would love it here. I'm talking in particular about you, Clare, Lucy, Emmeline, Spanish speakers and fighters and idealists. Oh yes, and you Seoidin. I hope you can visit me, because the situation is horrible, but people are fighting, and that really is inspiring.

Email me! (Sorry I haven't emailed you)

Hasta la proxima

9 to 5

It's tricky, this notion of mine that I'm not going to make any mention of the organisation I work for. Everyone reading knows who it is, and I'm sure it's blindingly obvious; but I really don't want to be found defaming a charity of some repute through a google search. The reason it's tricky though is that I wouldn't be here if it weren't for work, and that's the only reason this blog might be vaguely interesting.
It's Saturday afternoon, and I'm in the office, typing from my gmail. Simp will put this up on the blog later.

Yesterday I went to a presentation by the UNDP on citizenship in Honduras, and the factors that influence it. Fascinating stuff. Apparently, more than 90% of Hondurans interviewed said it was never acceptable to accept a bribe. This got a big belly laugh. The same people agree overwhelmingly that it's ok to take the law into your own hands, that if somebody is harassing a neighbourhood it's ok to murder him (extra-judicially), and that, unsurprisingly, there's no reason to have confidence in the police or the judiciary. Honduras has the highest rate of confidence in the Catholic Church in all of Latin America though. Dear Jesus, help us.
So security is a core issue, and one that undermines democracy (spotting a theme in my blogs here): a majority of people claim that they'd be happy to go back to military dictatorship if it kept the streets safe. Social cohesion has collapsed in the cities, although, interestingly, it persists in the countryside which is even more violent. There are other major factors in the absence of citizenship, and particularly profound poverty and vulnerability, themselves major drivers of violence. It's a familiar story. That's why it's so depressing.

The presentation made virtually no mention of the national Poverty Reduction Strategy, but that's what we're putting our cards on. Why? Maybe I shouldn't go into it now, but the idea is that there's a space guaranteed by law which MUST include representatives of the poor and marginalised in deciding how the national budget should be put to reducing poverty. All the usual suspects are invited along: youth, elderly, disabled, women, indigenous people, representatives of small and medium enterprise, red-haired people, citeogs, travellers, Welsh-speakers, you get the message. This is what we call civil society: the organised spaces that aren't overtly political. Except they are. The NGOs of the disabled don't talk to each other; the lesbians fighting for the rights of people living with HIV don't get on with the other people fighting for the rights of people living with HIV. There's suspicion and tension among different organisations, all of whom are competing for the same funds, and not all of whom are exactly demonstrating any impact from the receipt of those funds. Meanwhile, as long as civil society bickers among itself, the government chuckles and decides that they can't be trusted to input into policy (nor do they have the technical/ intellectual capacity); so we'll just sign a contract for another maquila (sweatshop) in San Pedro... If this sounds just like home - wherever home is - that's because it is.

My work involves trying to find the good organisations and fund them and challenge them to show that they're making a difference to the way decisions are made in Honduras. Also to go to all their godawful meetings in godawful hotels, which are made more tolerable by the really rather lovely finger food. I find it fascinating. This week I'm spending two days at workshops reviewing the way we do all of this and considering whether it works. And a day up north somewhere visiting a project mobilising citizens around environmental destruction. But I'd like to konw more about the work we do with the destitute, in the slums and the HIV clinics, and once I do, I'll tell you about that too.

Hey listen, if there's anything you'd like to know more about, do tell me. I'm waiting for my work to go way beyond the theoretical, and I'm surely not going to keep blogging about the power struggles between different charities. Hope to catch up with you all soon.

Fear, and the First Lady

My sister used to live in Angola, you know. She spent the better part of two years there, managing feeding centres for internally displaced people. I remember her emails of the first couple of months: when people asked after her, I used to say it was like a Club 18-30 holiday. She spoke so much about the ex-pat social whirl, and so little, initially, about the world she was working in. Then the real emails started coming, and the stories, and it seemed as though those first couple of months had been a different narrative. I have a feeling that I´ll feel something similar about these early posts eventually, when I really learn to understand Honduras. For the moment, my life is one apart from the poverty and exclusion I´m supposedly here to tackle. There´s no reason to rush things though: it´ll all come in its own time.

Yesterday, as we pulled out of the drive to go about a mile down the road to a very lovely Spanish restaurant, I asked the girls why they never walk to the office, or indeed anywhere. We used to, Lorna said. But then Sarah got her bag stolen once, and we got sick of dealing with the kids with knives, and you just never feel comfortable, you never ENJOY the exercise, because you´re worried if you´re carrying money, or you have your passport because you need it for a trip, or you´re wearing jewellery. And after last December, said Lorna, I didn´t want to go anywhere alone.

We´ll come back to last December later. Bad things happen here, but as we all know, bad things happen in Dublin 8 as well. Honduras is one of the poorest countries in the hemisphere (after Haiti and Bolivia and, I think, Guatemala), and crime does pay. The police are underpaid and they do a hopelessly dangerous job (this is another threat: crossfire from shoot-outs between the cops and gangs); the authority lies with the heavily armed, disciplined gangs. The newspapers love it, they lead every day with stories about how gangs are reclaiming their territory and breaking out of prisons, generally accompanied by gruesome images of bloody corpses (I suspect the pictures of corpses dictate editorial policy). What´s the reality? The country's a dangerous place, but its population live daily with this danger, and they know it as part of what they think of as home. After last December, Lorna thought about just going home, and she thought, but none of our Honduran colleagues can go home...

This is not my story. Last December, four of my colleagues were on a field trip, and two of them were in the car. One got out to drop something into a shop - she left the keys in the ignition. When she got back, the car was gone, along with my other colleague. It had been taken by armed men, and ultimately they disappeared and she was left, with no possessions apart from her clothes, to walk from the middle of a banana plantation in the middle of nowhere back to a bus stop where she had to beg for the money to get home.

Of course I´m nervous. I´m nervous around Dolphin´s Barn at night too. But there are things that make it easier: knowing people, recognising the streets and knowing your way around, speaking Spanish confidently. Because people who live here, people who live in most of the world, they know fear intimately. And that's a part of the otherness of this other world, as much as the human warmth and the simplicity and the natural beauty (which is being consumed by development and underdevelopment alike), is the fear that we work so hard to eliminate from our Western lives, allowing all sorts of alternative infringements in order to avoid the prospect of living in fear...

Ahem. Sorry for preaching. Blogs are different like that, I don't have the same expectation of a reader (though if I did, the reader is Stella Doyle, who´s a totally fearless woman). In other news, I discovered yesterday the website of the Honduran first lady. It´s worth checking out just for the nifty song at the beginning. Horrible though: at the beginning of September, the president gave his estranged (and obviously unelected) wife the responsibility for coordinating the social services of this poorest of Latin American nations. It seems all the international conditinality in the world can´t avert a little old school nepotism. Can anyone spell Evita Peron?

That´s it for today then. I look forward to hearing from you all!

Honduras

I'm beginning to get the measure of the place a little. Another Saturday, another internet cafe. Hello to all from Espresso Americano, another slice of wealthy Hondureño life.

An interesting fact that I learned from my boss this week. She's a mine of information (often scurrilous), and has herself firmly rooted in the heart of Honduran political (rather than civil??) society.
It seems that, in the midst of the turmoil of two world wars and disastrous Western mandates in the Middle East during the last century, vast numbers of Palestinians, particularly Christians, fled to Latin America. Many came to work on the construction of the Panama canal, and many subsequently made their way north to the banana republic of Honduras, where the US had succeeded in wiping out any nascent indigenous business class. As a result, to this day the business interests of Honduras are largely in the hands of 2nd and 3rd generation arabs: of the country´s four national newspapers, 3 are arab owned. The other one is Jewish. Now, it seems, the same families are beginning to move into politics.
I learned this at the opening of a women´s refuge, to which I was invited as a representative of our civil society programme, and at which it was suggested I really ought to "show my face". Some ostentatious television cameras were wandering around the pretty wooden building (paid for by the Taiwanese gov´t - much more present here than the Chinese), focussing all their attention on two government ministers with suspiciously large noses...
(Is this unacceptable? Offensive? I don't mean to pass judgement - but I think it's a very vivid demonstration of the breach between ordinary Hondurans and the power that governs their country, as much now as back when it was a straightforward banana republic.)

So far my days have been a confusing whirl of petty and profound gatherings: the government has just launched a new poverty reduction paper and civil society is in a tizz trying to form a response. I'm in a tizz trying to understand what's going on: at meetings on the future of the poverty reduction strategy, I'm faced with a triple comprehension barrier. This goes as follows: 1)it's very specific to a political context that's completely alien to me: 2) it's in a foreign language, in which I'm still pulling myself up to speed; and 3) it's a technical/ management jargon which, regardless of my Spanish linguistic skills is still essentially gobbledygook. Through all of this I think I'm struggling along quite effectively, but really only the campesinos want to talk to me. That's ok: I only want to talk to the campesinos -politicians and diplomats wear me out.

I'll let you know when "my" analysis of the poverty reduction paper is out! Keep the comments coming! Or better still the emails...

Tegucigalpa

It's Saturday afternoon, and I write from a
n internet cafe in the mall. My first promise to myself on hearing I had got this post: that I would never set foot in a Central American shopping mall. That's my first promise broken. Here are some other promises I had made that I appear to be in the process of breaking:

1) "I will not live the lazy lethargic office-bound development worker life; I will exercise regularly." Au contraire, this week I have done little with my body other than sit. I've sat in cars, on sofas, at tables and at desks. My mind has been variously stretched, but my posterior - constantly at rest. With the exception of the poor salsa dancing on Wednesday, and a token 10 lengths in the squeenchy tiny pool at the hotel Maya this morning, I've been unfailingly at rest.
2) "I will avoid refuges of the rich and super-rich, I will live as much like a local as possible". See comment above about the pool in the Hotel Maya. It's big, and brash, and packed with gringos. But with a lovely lovely outdoor pool.
3) "I won't hang out exclusively with ex-pats." So far, I've hung out not only exclusively with ex-pats, but exclusively with Irish ones. Not that I've done that much hanging out so far.

The thing is, I'm new here, and I don't know anything about anything, and when my flatmates are taking refuge in the familiar, I'm inclined to do the same. Although they do tell me that because I'm working on the civil society programme, I'll meet a lot more people than they do in the course of their HIV-AIDS work.
Tegucigalpa, you see, lacks a middle class. Where are the educated liberals, my peers? I'm given to understand that some of them are at fancy civil society receptions in expensive hotels, so I'll meet
them there. Others, I think, have fecked off to Miami, or maybe New York. The rest just aren't my peers - they spend all their time hanging out in the mall, or in the enormous fast food restaraunts that line the bulevard Morazan, just behind our house. Tegus has all the nasty trappings of your average developing city: the slums, the traffic, the smog, the malls and McDonalds, but none of the benefits: good restaurants, interesting scenes, music, clubs, theatres and gigs....
Thus far then, I give it five out of ten. Pretty hills, and friendly people. But I'm still baffled and lost. So far in Honduras I've seen next to no poor people, and I'm very uncertain of the work I'm doing. I think this is unsurprising, and maybe it's good that I record this for contrast. I hope to have a field trip to the north of the country very soon, where I'll be able to get a better feel for the work we're really supporting.

More in this vein when I get the chance - and apologies if it's sporadic. Also, I have a mobile phone now! Email me for my number if you want it.

Thanks for the comments kids: they warm my heart.

Estoy Aqui

The silence this time has been caused by the curious fact that the computer I'm using at work doesn't allow me to access blogger, since it falls under the category of 'internet communication'. And there I was using the internet exclusively for telling the time. What? What else is the internet for but communication?

See how quickly things become quotidian. No tropical sunsets, no disturbing new social contexts, no culture shock. Here I am, typing from a computer on a desk just like I always have been. Somehow travel seems less romantic with the communications revolution. (There was a time when I had to hitch a boat ride 5 miles through the jungle to get to the nearest internet point - but if I'm really honest with myself, the romance of all that was contrived. Or at least, willingly chosen.)

So what's happened since I last posted? Oh you know, everything and nothing. It's been straightforward and baffling - straightforward because I've arrived where I was expected, and now I do the things that people have been waiting for me to do for some months (though I do them terribly slowly, and often badly) and the only person for whom any of this is remotely unusual is me. For me though, it's very very unusual.
The most striking thing about my experience of Tegucigalpa thus far has been what's constantly and obliquely referred to as 'security'. Because 'security', I've barely set foot in Honduras apart from my house and office, and a couple of nice lunch bars. Because 'security', I have no sense of what the city looks like from its different barrios, or what those barrios are, or where. Because 'security', I don't really know what my neighbourhood looks like, or what it's near or how to get there. Every journey is made by car, and those who don't have cars, or drivers, go by taxi. Bless my heart, it most certainly isn't easy being green...

Now, I'm overreacting, because my virtual house arrest thus far has been primarily forced by the fact that my two lovely house mates are up to their tonsils with a 3-day HIV/AIDS workshop. Were it not for their unfortunate absence, they'd have shown me around (in the car), I'd have got my bearings, and I'd be making my own calls about the security threat to my well-being at this point. The workshop finishes today, so we're going grocery shopping. And that may sound quotidian, but it's a big treat for me now.

In other news, Tegus is a mad place, hilly and wonky, with fabulous night views of lights climbing high up beyond where the horizon should be. A bit like I remember San Salvador (another place where security was the main story). Last night we went to a Mexican restaraunt with the HIV/AIDS partners from the workshop (see above). It culminated in bottles of Flor de Caña, salsa dancing, a nun and an ex-sex worker arm in arm while the band played Cositas Malas. That was a glimpse into what I'm anticipating for the next number of months. I'll let you know once I get the measure of Tegucigalpa.

I'm off!

So first some housekeeping. After a good ol' chat with my dear friend shazzle, I've fixed a couple of things on this page. First, I've enabled comments for non-blogger members, so please people, talk to me, let me know you're reading. Second, I've gotten rid of that annoying list of links nobody cares about down the sidebar. Now there's nothing at all down the sidebar. I think that's better.

My flight leaves on Sunday morning, at 10.45am, which is nothing short of respectable. I fly Dublin-Chicago, Chicago-Miami, Miami-Tegucigalpa. This is interrupted by a night in Holiday Inn, Miami Airport West. Now, on the subject of travel, and again on the off chance anyone's reading, tell me what you think of this:
I've bought two books for the journey, and to keep me company in the coming months. The first is That They May Face The Rising Sun by John McGahern, because nothing can bring you home more powerfully than McGahern, even if you're not from rural Ireland. The second is The Great War for Civilisation by Robert Fisk because it's big and readable and gripping and informative and even, I hope, important. The question is, is it the sort of book I want to bring through US immigration? Twice?
I'll let you know what I decide.

How am I feeling, people tend to ask. Up until last Tuesday or so, I'd say blank. I was concerned with what I knew: packing, catching up with people, cleaning my house, going to the doctor. The vista from the time I left Dublin airport was completely unclear, so I didn't worry myself excessively about it. I had occasional anxiety dreams about missed flights, arriving in the wrong country, and once about Somali militia chasing me around a hotel for allowing the Venezuelan debutantes to escape; but mostly I felt next to nothing about my impending trip. Today, I feel excited.

I packed this afternoon, dug out the deet-heavy insect repellant, the dioralyte and motilium, my bikini and swimsuit. These are symbols of adventure (rather than emblems of disease and poor hygiene, tropical threats). I've been meeting my future colleagues at meetings over the past few days, and their conversation is gripping and especially challenging. The work I'll be involved in is good work, interesting work, and the office I'm going to is incredibly dynamic. It's this simple. I'm living the dream. Really I am.

Of course, abandoning Simp isn't easy, and nor is it fair. Happily, we've been focussed on the play this week, which I've seen three times - I'm growing to enjoy it more every time. When I'm gone... he'll go back to working anti-social hours and eating nothing but apples, which his friend dilbot assures me can be no cause for concern. I'm concerned for him anyway. You people out there, you'll watch out for him, won't you? Check once in a while that he isn't slumped over his computer, a rat gnawing the apple butt still sitting in his limp hand. I worry about him you know. Geeks shouldn't be left unsupervised for too long.
Whatever did he do without me??

Not gone yet

I'm still in Dublin, should be packing in anticipation of a Sunday morning departure. I have said my goodbyes, and now I'm mostly drinking wine and going to meetings.
Meanwhile, the play that Simp wrote is playing in town*, and he's readying himself to do the live video feed for it from Wednesday. He's understandably preoccupied. I'm confused by the theatre types he's suddenly surrounded by. And terribly proud, obviously. The opening last night was a vaguely illustrious affair, which I passed catching glimpses of people I vaguely recognised from the telly. Actors are a strange bunch, but the nice thing is that it's easy to explain to them what a non-operational NGO does: I just tell them (when they ask about my forthcoming trip) that I'll be like the Arts Council. Theatre people know all about the Arts Council.

I will miss Dublin, because I've grown so used to recognising nearly everybody I see here. I love Dublin. I do think that's a good reason to be leaving.

*I've tried very hard to make this a link, but it's not happening... this is where my tecchie boyfriend will be handy. Try this in the meantime: www.panpantheatre.com and click on the oedipus link. The copy is dreadful mind. Show's great though.

Commando Training

I've taken this post down, because I've finally told lots of people about the existence of this site, and on the off-chance they read it, I had made a commitment not to tell anyone who might themselves do the training what happened. Confused? Sorry. I did a security training, and it was deadly. If you're remotely interested (and you don't work with me) email me, and I'll send you the post.

Sorry for being incoherent. It's early.

I'm off Friday morning. Must blog before then.

Sunny Spain

Tomorrow I'm going to Madrid to learn Spanish for two weeks. It's a bit of a test run for us, a short period away from home - then back to catch up with my family, then holidays in Sardinia, then back for boring training, then the real live away-from-home experience, moving to Teguc. I cried this evening when I was packing, when my ipod played Here by Pavement. The one that starts, "I was dressed for success". Simp's song.

I still haven't quite worked out what I want to do with this blog. I've always held that I read blogs to keep up with faraway people. Like this one. And this one. So this is partly so that people know what I'm doing and where I am. But blogs are necessarily riven with self-censorship - I can't tell you which good friends are driving me crazy, or the failings of the particular NGO I work for... things that would end up in a journal if it wasn't published. What in god's name is the point of a public diary? Shazzle is of the opinion that it's about describing your life as you'd like it to be - thus reinforcing that imaginary life... but I'm not good at not wearing my heart on my sleeve.
Simp, meanwhile, feels that a blog is a functional, sharing thing. Somewhere to point out things that passed under the radar. Like boing boing or the huffington post. Simp's blog does that - shares snippets on his beliefs and experience in Dublin and the wider interweb.
I'd like to make a combination. I want to think about development, and poverty, and ex-patism. I did before in Central America, and I kept a journal which is by far my only literary achievement to date. I'd like to make this the online version.

So it won't be tech-savvy, and it may not be as honest or as informative as you might like at times. But I'll work it out.

In the interim, pues, hasta la proxima...

Honduras

The point is, I'm moving to Honduras, and I want to do some explaining about that. I also want to do some thinking about it, but I'm not sure if I'll have time.

Back in 2001, before the end of the end of history, I spent 6 months in Central America, 4 of which were volunteering in an orphanage in Guatemala. I kept a journal back then - a paper one, like - and I couldn't possibly describe all the things I thought about working in that orphanage in one blog post, when 6 months worth of scrupously hand-written entries didn't begin to cover it. So I'll do it no justice at all by saying that I loved it, but it wasn't development. And at some point in that 6 month trip, I must have decided I wanted to become a development worker.

I don't think I am one just yet. What I am, at present, is an intern in an international NGO. The NGO will remain nameless, because that's the convention, but I'm pleased to say it's one I respect most of the time, and to the best of my understanding, it's no more dysfunctional than any other organisation in this field. I've worked on the Southern Africa desk in that NGO for the last 12 months, and in October, I'll move to "the field", and work on the Central American programme.

I'm not a nurse or a nutritionist, and I'm not an engineer. I don't have the sorts of skills needed to build things or make things work better, more efficiently, or with bits of twig. In fact I think I'm probably just a technocrat. So my job is based on giving money to small local organisations ('grassrooted', we say), and trying to ensure that they spend it like they said they would and that in doing so the things that they said would happen as a result, happen.

I happen to believe that this is a wise way of working, though I admit that's not much of an explanation. The idea behind this very common sort of development work is that we Northerners have little to add to Southern societies (that they don't already have) other than solidarity. And money. There are enough Honduran people to run community projects in Honduras, enough Honduran nurses and engineers - if they don't all flee to the States because they can't make a living wage at home. We're trying to - what? - enable those individuals and groups to thrive.

The notion is known, in a warm and fuzzy way, as partnership. I hope that I'm suitably cynical about partnership and the overuse of the term (I am, after all, an Irish lefty with suspicions about that very notion here); but let it be said that I believe in its veracity too. And this year will give me a chance to test it enormously. My organisation is well-known in Teguc. It has influence over government, donors and civil society. Sitting here in Dublin 8, I believe I'm going out to work for the good guys and fight the good fight. At least I hope I am. I'll let you know.

Enough! I'll be living in Tegucigalpa, working in an office, visiting community groups and watching what the government is doing. I'll be researching and writing and thinking and meeting new people and having the craic. Not, I hope, catching Dengue fever as my predecessor did.
I left Casa Guatemala in 2001 determined to return to that context, but working for an organisation I could respect. I think this is my chance.

Ahead of the Curve

We are so damn ahead of the curve that there's been a shooting on our road. Not quite our road, but as good as. The sequence of events (for us) went like this:

1. On return from a curious and lovely Sino-Irish wedding in Drumcondra last night at around 1AM, we spot an unusual number of screeching sirening police cars. Simp, ever the conspiracy theorist, speculates that it's a feature of McDowell's night of the long knives, a round-up of all the criminals to prove the worth of the gardai, in spite of the findings of the Morris Tribunal.
2. This morning: Simp's mother's friend collects us (remember neither of us drives), so that we can indulge in that most middle class of activities: a trip to Greystones to choose a multi-fuel burning stove for our home. Pulling away from the group of streets where we live, we notice that two of them are sealed off with traffic cones and ticker tape, and supervised by Gardai. Wearing forensic space suits.
3. The one o'clock news. Fatal shooting on Cameron St. At 1 Am. My family's not going to like this one bit.

I don't know how the sequence of events went for the 22 year old who's dead now, or the guy who shot him. Sometimes, there are parallel worlds barely overlapping around here.

At the end of September, I travel to the UK for 3 days security training, to prepare me for Honduras. How secure is Simp in Dublin 8??

(Monday morning news report It's pretty hairy out there)

Not Easy Being Green

Welcome here. I've just arrived myself, and it's all looking a little bit bare. Needs furniture, photos, some personal items, that sort of thing. Much like my new house, in fact. If I was a proper blogger, that would be a link. Give me a little while.....

Ta-daaaa:



The idea of having a blog came initially from the fact of having a house. My blog was initially to be called Not Easy Being Green, and it was to address the challenges of living a vaguely right-on life in grimy Dublin 8. Challenges like finding FSC certified wood, and convincing a very good builder to use it. Finding interiors guides that are budget-conscious and earth-loving, but don't assume everyone's wild about hemp. The discovery of the flaws with dual flush toilets (less water = less clean... gluey builders' pee clinging to the basin flush after flush); the trouble with energy saver light bulbs (uuuug-leeee; don't work with dimmer switches); the challenges of finding non-fibre glass insulation in Dublin - or Ireland. The reality of an entire country without a single Ikea store. You can't begin to imagine. No, don't even pretend.

The final straw came once we'd moved in - and I still hadn't set up my blog - and we wanted to ditch our recycling in a local bring centre. I had been gathering a lot of material for recyling; more than the nice Oxegen people with their green bags were going to accept from the doorstep in a billion years. Simp, my beloved, liked to point out that my waste management policy was unsustainable, consisting as it did of not throwing anything away. Fair enough. So we who don't drive bullied our friend Sho, who does, into driving us and 8 black/ green sacks to the nearest open bring centre one Sunday hangover.

All the bins, large industrial metal skips, were stuffed full. The slots were sealed up with waste, so there was no forcing any more in. The man in the high viz jacket took one look at us.
"Ah, they're all full up," he stated obviously. "Youse can put them over here".
'Over here' was the skip-free corner of the yard, sectioned off in time-honoured fashion with plastic tape and traffic cones, and piled high with sacks spilling paper, tins, clothing, electronic goods, nappies, coffee grounds, eggshells, toilet rolls, drinks bottles, batteries... in short, pure and unadulterated rubbish. Unadulterated and, I emphasise, unsorted.
I asked what would happen to the stuff.
"Ah you know, it'll be recycled".
I asked how it would be sorted - I knew that the contents of our bags for example needed sorting.
"Oh it will be, yeah, definitely. Course it will."
Simp and Sho were edging away, thrilled to be rid of the stuff. Come on Chispa. Don't quarrel. This is a bring centre, and we have brought. The beach awaits!

I know, I know for a fact, that those 8 bages of disparate, but recyclable, items were destined for landfill. Calls to the council the next morning did nothing to undermine my certainty.

That's what my blog was meant to be about. Living ethically in my gorgeous house that me and Simp made and we love. Then I found out I'm moving to Honduras. So that's what it's about instead.