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!