Wednesday, October 24, 2007
I had forgotten
... that constant stress-pain in your upper back that comes from hunching against the cold. I haven't had that for a year. But it's soon to be constant again.
Saturday, October 20, 2007
LCD Soundsystem made me cry
People talk a lot about the reverse culture shock we supposedly get when returning from "the developing world". I think I'm supposed to feel offended by the affluence, horrified by the decadence of western lifestyles. I'm supposed to be pining for the real people, the simple people of the majority world. But you know, I've been living in a big ol run down city where frankly the decadence and affluence are much more conspicuous, for their juxtaposition with grinding poverty, and where they've visible in a surreal out-of-context way: runaway consumption without development. Maybe that's Ireland too a little. But not as much.
What does throw me though? Little things. Taxi fares being non-negotiable, that's a tricky one. I miss dramatic passenger door negotiations, the argument between ascending petrol prices and blatant exploitation of the foreigner. The slightly outrageous luxury of flushing toilet paper. The bewildering array of options - shops, restaraunts, pubs, people I know, gigs, events, things to do. Newspapers!
No, these aren't the things that throw me - they're the things I love, and in ways the reasons I came home. But being away does give you a fresh perspective on your reality. I notice people begging a lot more now. In ways, that sort of indigence is much more disturbing in Ireland, mostly because it's almost invariably linked with substance abuse. And it's genuinely shocking to see the zombie junkies careen across busy roads and through the indifferent shoppers. I feel less threatened by poor Honduran people than by poor Irish people. Is that why we get into this whole game? The cuddly face of poverty?
The filth of Dublin shocks me too. After a year of lecturing Hondurans about learning to manage their waste, I realise that we're as bad. Perhaps you don't regularly see chicken bones and coke cans flung out the back of a CIE bus as it whizzes through Kinnegad; but there's a lot more shattered glass here - and I never once saw a pool of vomit on the streets of Tegucigalpa. I went along to a Green Party meeting about waste management a week ago; but it was such a mess of uninformed opinions fired at a perfectly well informed John Gormley that I left early, bored. I'm allowed do this when my organisation isn't paying for the meeting.
Last night, I went to see LCD Soundsystem in Tripod, the new venue where the Red Box used to be. The gig was spectacular. The crowd were a shower of coked-up arrogant pricks. At the end, during a lovely encore of New York I Love You, I felt my usual overwhelming sense of communion with my fellow gig goers (I'm easily moved to ecstasy-like levels of fellow feeling), and bless us all, I started to cry. I'm not sure why this was. It could be a) the sentimentality of the song; b) the fact that this was exactly the moment I'd been longing for over the last year; or c) the horrible superficiality of it all, the knowledge that all these rapt people waving their hands and calling out can be engaged by drugs and flashing lights but never by politics or beliefs.
Nah. Not superficiality. I loved every single second of it.
It took 30 minutes to get my coat from the cloakroom and simp was nearly beaten up in the process. But it was worth it.
What does throw me though? Little things. Taxi fares being non-negotiable, that's a tricky one. I miss dramatic passenger door negotiations, the argument between ascending petrol prices and blatant exploitation of the foreigner. The slightly outrageous luxury of flushing toilet paper. The bewildering array of options - shops, restaraunts, pubs, people I know, gigs, events, things to do. Newspapers!
No, these aren't the things that throw me - they're the things I love, and in ways the reasons I came home. But being away does give you a fresh perspective on your reality. I notice people begging a lot more now. In ways, that sort of indigence is much more disturbing in Ireland, mostly because it's almost invariably linked with substance abuse. And it's genuinely shocking to see the zombie junkies careen across busy roads and through the indifferent shoppers. I feel less threatened by poor Honduran people than by poor Irish people. Is that why we get into this whole game? The cuddly face of poverty?
The filth of Dublin shocks me too. After a year of lecturing Hondurans about learning to manage their waste, I realise that we're as bad. Perhaps you don't regularly see chicken bones and coke cans flung out the back of a CIE bus as it whizzes through Kinnegad; but there's a lot more shattered glass here - and I never once saw a pool of vomit on the streets of Tegucigalpa. I went along to a Green Party meeting about waste management a week ago; but it was such a mess of uninformed opinions fired at a perfectly well informed John Gormley that I left early, bored. I'm allowed do this when my organisation isn't paying for the meeting.
Last night, I went to see LCD Soundsystem in Tripod, the new venue where the Red Box used to be. The gig was spectacular. The crowd were a shower of coked-up arrogant pricks. At the end, during a lovely encore of New York I Love You, I felt my usual overwhelming sense of communion with my fellow gig goers (I'm easily moved to ecstasy-like levels of fellow feeling), and bless us all, I started to cry. I'm not sure why this was. It could be a) the sentimentality of the song; b) the fact that this was exactly the moment I'd been longing for over the last year; or c) the horrible superficiality of it all, the knowledge that all these rapt people waving their hands and calling out can be engaged by drugs and flashing lights but never by politics or beliefs.
Nah. Not superficiality. I loved every single second of it.
It took 30 minutes to get my coat from the cloakroom and simp was nearly beaten up in the process. But it was worth it.
Friday, October 12, 2007
Back
Simp just said to me:
"Listen to you Carol, you're like Rip Van Winkle. "Look at all these yuppies!" Who are all those new people in the Jimmy Cake? I've never heard of him - who's he?!"
Sigh. You go away for a year....
"Listen to you Carol, you're like Rip Van Winkle. "Look at all these yuppies!" Who are all those new people in the Jimmy Cake? I've never heard of him - who's he?!"
Sigh. You go away for a year....
Thursday, October 11, 2007
Home
This is all a bit of a mess. Here's a rambly post I started writing a week ago and never finished. Rather than try to make sense of it, I'll just throw it up in all its glorious incoherence....
Well I can't tell you how mad it is to be home. Ever perceptive, Walt said, "I won't ask you how it feels because I'm sure it feels like all sorts of things at once". And he's right. Now, for instance, it feels like a crashing hangover.
But I have to confess, over the last year there were so many times when I missed Dublin physically, in a small, unidentifiable way. I identified it coming from the airport last Thursday afternoon, the cheery, autumnal outsideness to everything. So many people on the streets! Kids in school uniforms, couples, hundreds of people on bikes. And people at bus stops, pasty people, ugly people, Irish people damn it, it was just beautiful! The light here - I know I go on about the light, but really, hear me out - the light is incredible. I drank wine with Eoin last night outside the IFSC, and it took the sky 2 hours to go from glowing pale blue to a velvet navy - they say that Ireland is green, but it's not really, not compared to Honduras. But it's certainly blue. I'm loving those big cartoony blue skies, the sky equivalent of the Caribbean sea, which so perfectly set off the red bricks on the South Circular Road. The things I've missed. And how I've missed them.
My body responds to change slowly and forgetfully. I still expect to wake up in Tegucigalpa. In my heart of hearts, I never really left Dublin. But I never really came back either. One day I'll wake up and realise I'm not going back, but not just yet. Does having left make them all less real, my friends there - do they keep existing? None of us are good at email, and there are very few that I'll see again in Europe. I have one friend in particular, a Nicaraguan who travels a lot in her work, but never to Europe; and as I packed my bags and skyped simp every other day, counting the hours until I'd be home, I felt more strongly than ever the inequality between us. We talk about meeting up in Columbia to visit a mutual friend who's moving there, but I know she won't. She's sending money home to her family, dollar bills slipped into the pockets of friends when they travel back, so she doesn't have to give a penny to the Western Union. No way she could drop $1000 on a holiday to South America. But maybe we can organise a conference for her, as a pretext....
Well I can't tell you how mad it is to be home. Ever perceptive, Walt said, "I won't ask you how it feels because I'm sure it feels like all sorts of things at once". And he's right. Now, for instance, it feels like a crashing hangover.
But I have to confess, over the last year there were so many times when I missed Dublin physically, in a small, unidentifiable way. I identified it coming from the airport last Thursday afternoon, the cheery, autumnal outsideness to everything. So many people on the streets! Kids in school uniforms, couples, hundreds of people on bikes. And people at bus stops, pasty people, ugly people, Irish people damn it, it was just beautiful! The light here - I know I go on about the light, but really, hear me out - the light is incredible. I drank wine with Eoin last night outside the IFSC, and it took the sky 2 hours to go from glowing pale blue to a velvet navy - they say that Ireland is green, but it's not really, not compared to Honduras. But it's certainly blue. I'm loving those big cartoony blue skies, the sky equivalent of the Caribbean sea, which so perfectly set off the red bricks on the South Circular Road. The things I've missed. And how I've missed them.
My body responds to change slowly and forgetfully. I still expect to wake up in Tegucigalpa. In my heart of hearts, I never really left Dublin. But I never really came back either. One day I'll wake up and realise I'm not going back, but not just yet. Does having left make them all less real, my friends there - do they keep existing? None of us are good at email, and there are very few that I'll see again in Europe. I have one friend in particular, a Nicaraguan who travels a lot in her work, but never to Europe; and as I packed my bags and skyped simp every other day, counting the hours until I'd be home, I felt more strongly than ever the inequality between us. We talk about meeting up in Columbia to visit a mutual friend who's moving there, but I know she won't. She's sending money home to her family, dollar bills slipped into the pockets of friends when they travel back, so she doesn't have to give a penny to the Western Union. No way she could drop $1000 on a holiday to South America. But maybe we can organise a conference for her, as a pretext....
Wednesday, October 03, 2007
Last post from Honduras
So goodbye to Glens and Sabor Cubano, drunk Spanish people I don't really know (though there's plenty of those in Dublin).
Goodbye to 100 year old taxis rattling at breakneck speed up the Bulevard Morazan.
Goodbye to 4 year, 7 year, 50 year rum: Flor de Caña, I salute you.
Goodbye to road seizures, school closures; an entire civil service made up of the president's (sadly not very bright) cronies.
Goodbye to endless political gossip.
Goodbye to kind, happy people who just want to make an honest buck
and male chauvinist pigs who hiss at you in the street and leer at you in close confines
and endless conversations about feminism, struggle, and revolution!
And wondering whether the revolution will ever take off. When it does, I'll be on the next plane back. Today is the day of the soldier: I was woken at 6AM by something that sounded like canon fire. Yesterday, the government announced that it wouldn't be a national holiday after all, so everyone could just tell their mothers they wouldn't be going home and report for work as usual.
Goodbye to speculation about whether national holidays will be official or not.
Goodbye hotel Maya, home of the most welcoming swimming pool and loveliest view.
Goodbye Comayagua, spiritual home of the longest, most boring, most travelled and most accident-prone road in Honduras.
Goodbye Bambu, goodbye Regatón. Just 2 CDs will have to sustain me from now on.
Goodbye long distance relationship.
And close friends here.
And Spanish, and thinking, and rich conversations in the office.
I'm coming home.
Goodbye to 100 year old taxis rattling at breakneck speed up the Bulevard Morazan.
Goodbye to 4 year, 7 year, 50 year rum: Flor de Caña, I salute you.
Goodbye to road seizures, school closures; an entire civil service made up of the president's (sadly not very bright) cronies.
Goodbye to endless political gossip.
Goodbye to kind, happy people who just want to make an honest buck
and male chauvinist pigs who hiss at you in the street and leer at you in close confines
and endless conversations about feminism, struggle, and revolution!
And wondering whether the revolution will ever take off. When it does, I'll be on the next plane back. Today is the day of the soldier: I was woken at 6AM by something that sounded like canon fire. Yesterday, the government announced that it wouldn't be a national holiday after all, so everyone could just tell their mothers they wouldn't be going home and report for work as usual.
Goodbye to speculation about whether national holidays will be official or not.
Goodbye hotel Maya, home of the most welcoming swimming pool and loveliest view.
Goodbye Comayagua, spiritual home of the longest, most boring, most travelled and most accident-prone road in Honduras.
Goodbye Bambu, goodbye Regatón. Just 2 CDs will have to sustain me from now on.
Goodbye long distance relationship.
And close friends here.
And Spanish, and thinking, and rich conversations in the office.
I'm coming home.
Tuesday, October 02, 2007
Tipsy
I am tipsy.
It is raining outside.
It is cold outside.
It is 10.30 at night, I had a delicious dinner of ceviche in Richard & Miwako's house, and now, somehow, I need to pack.
I have reached that inevitable moment in life planning where I decide - I can sleep on the plane.
I shall see some of you in Dublin. Others, I shall not see until I get back to Tegucigalpa. Besos muy fuertes a todos.
Hic.
It is raining outside.
It is cold outside.
It is 10.30 at night, I had a delicious dinner of ceviche in Richard & Miwako's house, and now, somehow, I need to pack.
I have reached that inevitable moment in life planning where I decide - I can sleep on the plane.
I shall see some of you in Dublin. Others, I shall not see until I get back to Tegucigalpa. Besos muy fuertes a todos.
Hic.
Sunday, September 30, 2007
Occidentalism
My final weeks in Honduras have been characterised by a satisfying symmetry, clean repetitions of things I did in my initial weeks in Honduras. For example, both my first and last weekends here (and no occasions in between) saw me at a big happy ex pat dinner in a Finnish friend's beautiful apartment. My first glimpse of Honduras, 6 years ago, was crossing from Guatemala to Copán Ruinas and from there hitching across the west of the country towards El Salvador. I've always had a soft spot for that western chunk, so it was especially fitting that my last full week in Honduras was spent in Santa Rosa de Copán and environs.
This is the centre of popular protest in Honduras, the poorest part of the country and the angriest. Our partner organisations have received death threats, are regularly intimidated for protesting against the contracts that go to foreign companies for large scale exploitation of Honduras' gold reserves, among other things. "Tomas de carreteras" - road seizures - are as regular as teachers' strikes, power cuts or dengue outbreaks here. In the west, central government is less important than local government; and people have learned to express their needs in a way that gets the attention of policy makers. But the challenge is greater here than perhaps anywhere else in the country; the needs, the poverty, the inequality.
It looks a bit like Ireland, only more so: hillier, cliffier, greener, foggier. On Tuesday afternoon, I arrived to a meeting in the back of beyond, where four men in white cowboy hats awaited me, their clothes filthy from the fields. It's cold, damp - "fresh" they call it - and the houses that crouch at the sides of the treacherous roads are made more of holes than of mud and twigs. (Do I fetishise poverty? I fear, in trying to visibilise it, I do). How can you possibly square this, gold mines alongside shivering poverty, potato famine poverty? But the scenery in its drama and changing light is quite possibly the most beautiful of all of Honduras.
This was my last field trip. I met 30 teenagers organising to advocate for the needs of young people in their communities, staggeringly articulate and enthusiastic. I met some sleepy women, being organised into a network whose purpose, I felt, they didn't quite understand. And some campesinos who are training their peers to monitor government spending. In general, if the government isn't spending money on agriculture, they figure it's wasting its time. The beautiful thing about this random mixture of groups was that they all talked to each other. Each of them knew about the other, and collaborated in one way or another with all the other groups in their vicinity. All those old chestnuts that I've been looking for: solidarity, mobilisation, anger even. Here in the west, there were glimpses of those things.
It's been a long year of watching organisations bicker and engage in power struggles. Am I sorry it's over? Emphatically no. And emphatically yes. No, because those struggles have exhausted and confused me. And yes because I'm only beginning to see where they're going, and how they might just get there.
Reading this blog, I know I've never made it clear how big a deal these tiny impossible initiatives are. In the time I've been here, 4 members of organisations we support have been killed; many many more have been threatened and intimidated. And what I've learned this year is that, even when you're life's at risk, you still have to do the accounts, pay the secretary, handle your board of directors. And even when you're a martyr, you still might be lousy at all these things. Defending human rights is trabajo de hormiga; ant's work, slow and tedious when you get down to the details, but nevertheless thrilling and amazing.
It's the weekend and my time is divided equally between office (panic) bedroom (panic-packing) and a variety of hostelries (panic denial). I leave on Wednesday morning, and the aircraft spits me into chilly Dublin on Thursday afternoon. I'll be honest folks: I can't wait. I hope to see you all there or there around, some time soon.
In the meantime, there's sure to be some valedictory stock taking style post here over the course of the next couple of days.
This is the centre of popular protest in Honduras, the poorest part of the country and the angriest. Our partner organisations have received death threats, are regularly intimidated for protesting against the contracts that go to foreign companies for large scale exploitation of Honduras' gold reserves, among other things. "Tomas de carreteras" - road seizures - are as regular as teachers' strikes, power cuts or dengue outbreaks here. In the west, central government is less important than local government; and people have learned to express their needs in a way that gets the attention of policy makers. But the challenge is greater here than perhaps anywhere else in the country; the needs, the poverty, the inequality.
It looks a bit like Ireland, only more so: hillier, cliffier, greener, foggier. On Tuesday afternoon, I arrived to a meeting in the back of beyond, where four men in white cowboy hats awaited me, their clothes filthy from the fields. It's cold, damp - "fresh" they call it - and the houses that crouch at the sides of the treacherous roads are made more of holes than of mud and twigs. (Do I fetishise poverty? I fear, in trying to visibilise it, I do). How can you possibly square this, gold mines alongside shivering poverty, potato famine poverty? But the scenery in its drama and changing light is quite possibly the most beautiful of all of Honduras.
This was my last field trip. I met 30 teenagers organising to advocate for the needs of young people in their communities, staggeringly articulate and enthusiastic. I met some sleepy women, being organised into a network whose purpose, I felt, they didn't quite understand. And some campesinos who are training their peers to monitor government spending. In general, if the government isn't spending money on agriculture, they figure it's wasting its time. The beautiful thing about this random mixture of groups was that they all talked to each other. Each of them knew about the other, and collaborated in one way or another with all the other groups in their vicinity. All those old chestnuts that I've been looking for: solidarity, mobilisation, anger even. Here in the west, there were glimpses of those things.
It's been a long year of watching organisations bicker and engage in power struggles. Am I sorry it's over? Emphatically no. And emphatically yes. No, because those struggles have exhausted and confused me. And yes because I'm only beginning to see where they're going, and how they might just get there.
Reading this blog, I know I've never made it clear how big a deal these tiny impossible initiatives are. In the time I've been here, 4 members of organisations we support have been killed; many many more have been threatened and intimidated. And what I've learned this year is that, even when you're life's at risk, you still have to do the accounts, pay the secretary, handle your board of directors. And even when you're a martyr, you still might be lousy at all these things. Defending human rights is trabajo de hormiga; ant's work, slow and tedious when you get down to the details, but nevertheless thrilling and amazing.
It's the weekend and my time is divided equally between office (panic) bedroom (panic-packing) and a variety of hostelries (panic denial). I leave on Wednesday morning, and the aircraft spits me into chilly Dublin on Thursday afternoon. I'll be honest folks: I can't wait. I hope to see you all there or there around, some time soon.
In the meantime, there's sure to be some valedictory stock taking style post here over the course of the next couple of days.
Friday, September 21, 2007
Talanga
Sorry about the last entry. Petulant I know. I'll try to be more grown up in future.
Today I went back to Talanga, whose transparency commission I visited in January, to see the participatory budgeting in action. I was, as I'm sure you can imagine, very excited.
It works like this: communities get together to agree what their single greatest priority is in order to combat the poverty that's endemic among them. After a presentation to local government, there's a public municipal assembly where collectively civil society and the county council agree which community projects will make it into the municipal investment plan for the year. Lovely? Lovely.
We arrive in the Lord Mayor's office at 9AM. It's your average pomp and ceremony: framed photograph of the fresh faced mayor at his inauguration; 5 full-sized flags of different Central American Republics (Honduras and the municipality of Talanga at the centre); giant desk to dwarf the Big Man, and more importantly his visitors; murals of native wildlife. In general, space isn't wanting in Honduras, and this is a large office in a large municipal building - nonetheless, some enterprising administrator has also stashed the municipality's supplies of plastic cups in brown boxes in the corner of the vast and otherwise intimidating room.
At the centre of the room is a big oval executive-style desk, with 10 executive chairs around it. Around the edges of the room are hard wooden benches. County counsellors sit around the fancy desk, poor people line the benches, waiting their turn. This is the flagship municipality in the whole country for citizen participation; still, the authorities are in a position to physically look down on their constituents.
Order of business. One, a long, rambling prayer. Two, the national anthem played from a laptop, scratchy sounds, but no matter: everybody belted out the tune. Even I felt proud to be Honduran. Next, the reading of the minutes from the last meeting. This took half an hour, in which I wrote a list of the people I expect to attend my going away party, and the woman beside me stitched away at Christmas decorations. After the reading of the minutes, there followed half an hour of bickering about the redaction of same; which words were appropriate and which weren't. "You said the mayor signed the declaration, whereas in fact he approved it."
Next up, the community representatives take turns to present their needs. Each one of them represents a a gathering of all the heads of family in their neighbourhood, and brandishes the signatures of the attendants (many are thumbprints) alongside their proposal, in a yellow paper folder. I find myself idly thinking that there's no stationary shop in Talanga, that we'll have financed all these yellow paper folders. Not to worry: yellow paper folders give people a certain sense of professional pride, of respectability.
One man presents his plan to train single mothers to make and decorate piñatas. I try to imagine the meeting in which an entire community decided that what would really rescue it from poverty is if all the women were qualified in a single skill - piñata making - for which they (as mothers) are the sole market. Christ. The majority of people are claiming for the costs of repairing the road (all are dirt roads) to their neighbourhood, improving the sanitation system or electrification.
It's all depressingly basic. People shouldn't have to choose between these projects: all of them are priorities (except for the piñatas). But what it does ensure is that at least these projects are executed in a more or less transparent fashion, and that the municipality has a certain responsibility to the poor. Which is, I repeat, depressingly basic.
At the other end of the scale, the national electricity provider is losing money hand over fist through mismanagement (after it collapsed earlier this year, the president handed control over to the army), and is wrapped up in nasty - and true - corruption charges and a union threatening to walk out. The impact is constant power cuts (the union sabre rattling), and - given that the rich are essentially exempt from paying electricity charges - rising electricity costs for the middle and lower classes. A captured state. In the pockets of its own monstrous institutions and the interests that control them.
Here we are trying to bridge the gaps. And me leaving just as things get interesting.
Today I went back to Talanga, whose transparency commission I visited in January, to see the participatory budgeting in action. I was, as I'm sure you can imagine, very excited.
It works like this: communities get together to agree what their single greatest priority is in order to combat the poverty that's endemic among them. After a presentation to local government, there's a public municipal assembly where collectively civil society and the county council agree which community projects will make it into the municipal investment plan for the year. Lovely? Lovely.
We arrive in the Lord Mayor's office at 9AM. It's your average pomp and ceremony: framed photograph of the fresh faced mayor at his inauguration; 5 full-sized flags of different Central American Republics (Honduras and the municipality of Talanga at the centre); giant desk to dwarf the Big Man, and more importantly his visitors; murals of native wildlife. In general, space isn't wanting in Honduras, and this is a large office in a large municipal building - nonetheless, some enterprising administrator has also stashed the municipality's supplies of plastic cups in brown boxes in the corner of the vast and otherwise intimidating room.
At the centre of the room is a big oval executive-style desk, with 10 executive chairs around it. Around the edges of the room are hard wooden benches. County counsellors sit around the fancy desk, poor people line the benches, waiting their turn. This is the flagship municipality in the whole country for citizen participation; still, the authorities are in a position to physically look down on their constituents.
Order of business. One, a long, rambling prayer. Two, the national anthem played from a laptop, scratchy sounds, but no matter: everybody belted out the tune. Even I felt proud to be Honduran. Next, the reading of the minutes from the last meeting. This took half an hour, in which I wrote a list of the people I expect to attend my going away party, and the woman beside me stitched away at Christmas decorations. After the reading of the minutes, there followed half an hour of bickering about the redaction of same; which words were appropriate and which weren't. "You said the mayor signed the declaration, whereas in fact he approved it."
Next up, the community representatives take turns to present their needs. Each one of them represents a a gathering of all the heads of family in their neighbourhood, and brandishes the signatures of the attendants (many are thumbprints) alongside their proposal, in a yellow paper folder. I find myself idly thinking that there's no stationary shop in Talanga, that we'll have financed all these yellow paper folders. Not to worry: yellow paper folders give people a certain sense of professional pride, of respectability.
One man presents his plan to train single mothers to make and decorate piñatas. I try to imagine the meeting in which an entire community decided that what would really rescue it from poverty is if all the women were qualified in a single skill - piñata making - for which they (as mothers) are the sole market. Christ. The majority of people are claiming for the costs of repairing the road (all are dirt roads) to their neighbourhood, improving the sanitation system or electrification.
It's all depressingly basic. People shouldn't have to choose between these projects: all of them are priorities (except for the piñatas). But what it does ensure is that at least these projects are executed in a more or less transparent fashion, and that the municipality has a certain responsibility to the poor. Which is, I repeat, depressingly basic.
At the other end of the scale, the national electricity provider is losing money hand over fist through mismanagement (after it collapsed earlier this year, the president handed control over to the army), and is wrapped up in nasty - and true - corruption charges and a union threatening to walk out. The impact is constant power cuts (the union sabre rattling), and - given that the rich are essentially exempt from paying electricity charges - rising electricity costs for the middle and lower classes. A captured state. In the pockets of its own monstrous institutions and the interests that control them.
Here we are trying to bridge the gaps. And me leaving just as things get interesting.
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Wondering if anyone reads this anymore...
So I just thought I'd check.
Does anyone read this anymore? I'm going to stop blogging if you don't comment you know.
Walt, you're excused. Everybody else, you're not.
Does anyone read this anymore? I'm going to stop blogging if you don't comment you know.
Walt, you're excused. Everybody else, you're not.
Sunday, September 09, 2007
Home economics
My refugees from Tocoa, back when it looked like they were going to be Tegus-bound for the rest of the week, decided to stock up on food. I came home from work on Tuesday, and they had cooked a vat of chicken curry, enough to feed about 20 people.
How to get rid of a pitcher of curry, without being driven to eating it 3 meals a day, plus snacks, for a week? I invited all my friends round on Friday evening for a leftovers party.
Since the beginning of time, we've had a lady who cleans the house twice a week (I'm naturally euphemistic, so it doesn't come easily to me to say cleaner. When I was 17 I used to refer to my then boyfriend as "the boy I'm going out with". I try to tell it like it is, but it's hard for me). In the absence of Lorna and Eva, there's not a huge amount of cleaning to do, and I can't really afford her on my own, but I'm a total woos, and haven't gotten round to letting her go yet. I hope I don't end up transferring Lempiras to her twice a month for the rest of my life. Anyway, in the absence of a whole lot to do, Amalia sometimes takes it into her head to do things like clean out the fridge.
So. I came home from work on Friday with beer and ice cream, and find the curry's been thrown out. I text my friends and say there's no meal, but there's crisps and beer and ice cream, and is that not dinner enough for anyone?
No it's not. My friends arrive with a "family meal" from the Chinese: 12 of us succeed in making a teenchy dent into the 4 immense cartons of greasy food they brought me.
So the process went like this:
Glut of food: invite friends round to clear fridge
Cleaner clears fridge, unbidden
Friends arrive and stuff fridge full of food I'm never going to eat.
Lordy. I'm really bad at this whole home economics thing.
How to get rid of a pitcher of curry, without being driven to eating it 3 meals a day, plus snacks, for a week? I invited all my friends round on Friday evening for a leftovers party.
Since the beginning of time, we've had a lady who cleans the house twice a week (I'm naturally euphemistic, so it doesn't come easily to me to say cleaner. When I was 17 I used to refer to my then boyfriend as "the boy I'm going out with". I try to tell it like it is, but it's hard for me). In the absence of Lorna and Eva, there's not a huge amount of cleaning to do, and I can't really afford her on my own, but I'm a total woos, and haven't gotten round to letting her go yet. I hope I don't end up transferring Lempiras to her twice a month for the rest of my life. Anyway, in the absence of a whole lot to do, Amalia sometimes takes it into her head to do things like clean out the fridge.
So. I came home from work on Friday with beer and ice cream, and find the curry's been thrown out. I text my friends and say there's no meal, but there's crisps and beer and ice cream, and is that not dinner enough for anyone?
No it's not. My friends arrive with a "family meal" from the Chinese: 12 of us succeed in making a teenchy dent into the 4 immense cartons of greasy food they brought me.
So the process went like this:
Glut of food: invite friends round to clear fridge
Cleaner clears fridge, unbidden
Friends arrive and stuff fridge full of food I'm never going to eat.
Lordy. I'm really bad at this whole home economics thing.
Taking stock
I have three weeks left in Honduras. A week ago I told my friend I was ready, antsy, like the last two months in secondary school, finished making the most of the place and feeling I had overstayed my welcome. A week ago I wanted to take the next plane home.
But that was the loneliness talking, and now I'm more used to living alone, I'm entering the inevitable not-wanting-to-leave stage. Since I know I'm not trapped here with no alternative prospects for the rest of my life, I have a better handle on the positive side of my life in Honduras.
I was miserable when I got here first. I didn't understand my job, I didn't understand the blurry politics that I was expected to analyse. I used to sit in meetings squinting, making a physical effort to make sense of the melee of gossip, bitching and key essential information, all in a Spanish that I could only just follow (when my colleagues would tell me I needed to "read between the lines"). Anything worth knowing isn't reported in the media, so trying to track the process of the government's poverty reduction strategy is a matter of coded conversations and listening at doors. My boss would flap into my office in the morning to update us on what she found out at a World Bank party the night before: I would surreptitiously take notes so that later I could try to unravel who all the names referred to, and what those slang Spanish words meant. I have never felt so lost or stupid in my life.
Over the course of the year, I've experienced a massive breach between my learning curve (dramatic) and what I was expected to know (twice as much as I ever did). So that in spite of killing myself, I never felt like I was half good enough.
So work was a struggle. And everything else that happened was framed by work. It's taken until now for work by itself to be a reason to stay on. Suddenly (and though I can't point to a moment of epiphany, it has been a sudden, and complete, reversal), I have a clarity about what we're at here, and instead of feeling confused and inept, I get excited when I visit organisations. I have thick, interesting conversations with my colleagues. I'm getting it. I'm beginning to get it.
And in 3 weeks I'm leaving.
So now I have the luxury of regretting, or at least feeling sad. I hadn't realised how much I had internalised Tegucigalpa, or how accustomed I'd become to this funny ex pat life. The 5 minute commute to work, the perfect climate, the never needing to think about what to wear. The closeness of our work life, an office fizzing with energy and politics in equal measure. Slow, sweet Honduran smiles. When you ask a Honduran how they are, they unfailingly reply "pues, aqui, saludandote": "well, here, saying hello to you". Or rather, they unfailingly say nothing. I'll miss our (almost) effortless bilingualism, I'll miss taxi drivers asking if I'm married, I'll miss the view up to el Picacho so much I think it will hurt. And the mountains and the pine trees, the highway from Tegus to San Pedro that I've trawled in countless buses and the ocassional pick up. Dancing with the girls from the office. Dancing with sleazy boys trying to grind against my leg. I'll miss the music - the awful, terrible repetitive music - so much. Truth be told, I probably have no idea how much I'll miss.
But none of this, honestly, compares with the prospect of living with simp again, and being a reasonable distance from my family. So I'll remain pleasantly tortured, which is what I am. I am so happy, so lucky, so blessed: I've had an amazing year here, and I got out of it a stronger relationship and a proper job that equals, at last, something approaching a career.
Off diving for the last time next weekend, but I'll keep plugging away at this from time to time, as interesting things occur. And I might see you in October.
But that was the loneliness talking, and now I'm more used to living alone, I'm entering the inevitable not-wanting-to-leave stage. Since I know I'm not trapped here with no alternative prospects for the rest of my life, I have a better handle on the positive side of my life in Honduras.
I was miserable when I got here first. I didn't understand my job, I didn't understand the blurry politics that I was expected to analyse. I used to sit in meetings squinting, making a physical effort to make sense of the melee of gossip, bitching and key essential information, all in a Spanish that I could only just follow (when my colleagues would tell me I needed to "read between the lines"). Anything worth knowing isn't reported in the media, so trying to track the process of the government's poverty reduction strategy is a matter of coded conversations and listening at doors. My boss would flap into my office in the morning to update us on what she found out at a World Bank party the night before: I would surreptitiously take notes so that later I could try to unravel who all the names referred to, and what those slang Spanish words meant. I have never felt so lost or stupid in my life.
Over the course of the year, I've experienced a massive breach between my learning curve (dramatic) and what I was expected to know (twice as much as I ever did). So that in spite of killing myself, I never felt like I was half good enough.
So work was a struggle. And everything else that happened was framed by work. It's taken until now for work by itself to be a reason to stay on. Suddenly (and though I can't point to a moment of epiphany, it has been a sudden, and complete, reversal), I have a clarity about what we're at here, and instead of feeling confused and inept, I get excited when I visit organisations. I have thick, interesting conversations with my colleagues. I'm getting it. I'm beginning to get it.
And in 3 weeks I'm leaving.
So now I have the luxury of regretting, or at least feeling sad. I hadn't realised how much I had internalised Tegucigalpa, or how accustomed I'd become to this funny ex pat life. The 5 minute commute to work, the perfect climate, the never needing to think about what to wear. The closeness of our work life, an office fizzing with energy and politics in equal measure. Slow, sweet Honduran smiles. When you ask a Honduran how they are, they unfailingly reply "pues, aqui, saludandote": "well, here, saying hello to you". Or rather, they unfailingly say nothing. I'll miss our (almost) effortless bilingualism, I'll miss taxi drivers asking if I'm married, I'll miss the view up to el Picacho so much I think it will hurt. And the mountains and the pine trees, the highway from Tegus to San Pedro that I've trawled in countless buses and the ocassional pick up. Dancing with the girls from the office. Dancing with sleazy boys trying to grind against my leg. I'll miss the music - the awful, terrible repetitive music - so much. Truth be told, I probably have no idea how much I'll miss.
But none of this, honestly, compares with the prospect of living with simp again, and being a reasonable distance from my family. So I'll remain pleasantly tortured, which is what I am. I am so happy, so lucky, so blessed: I've had an amazing year here, and I got out of it a stronger relationship and a proper job that equals, at last, something approaching a career.
Off diving for the last time next weekend, but I'll keep plugging away at this from time to time, as interesting things occur. And I might see you in October.
Wednesday, September 05, 2007
The morning after
Seems a little soggy out, that's all. Tropical Depression Felix is wandering away from us without making an impact.
Richard of the water purification tablets warned me: "by the time Mitch hit Tegus it wasn't a hurricane anymore, that's what a lot of people don't understand. The status just refers to the wind speed. But it's the rains that killed people. But I didn't call to tell you about the Saffir Simpson scale: I called to see if you're ok." Bless.
One of my refugees just emerged: "what a scary hurricane, eh?" She's slightly disappointed. She lives in Tocoa (about which more another day), and she's like a kid in a candy shop when she comes up to Tegus: temperatures lower than 40 degrees, infrastructure, food shops with European delicacies.... Now there's nothing to stop her returning to the wild west.
Me, I must go to work.
Richard of the water purification tablets warned me: "by the time Mitch hit Tegus it wasn't a hurricane anymore, that's what a lot of people don't understand. The status just refers to the wind speed. But it's the rains that killed people. But I didn't call to tell you about the Saffir Simpson scale: I called to see if you're ok." Bless.
One of my refugees just emerged: "what a scary hurricane, eh?" She's slightly disappointed. She lives in Tocoa (about which more another day), and she's like a kid in a candy shop when she comes up to Tegus: temperatures lower than 40 degrees, infrastructure, food shops with European delicacies.... Now there's nothing to stop her returning to the wild west.
Me, I must go to work.
Waiting for the hurricane
The title was inevitable, however cheesy. But that's just what we're doing you see.
It's not raining yet. It's uncannily dry, in fact, the sky unthreatening. A marked contrast to the cars throwing themselves about the place in a desperate panic to get somewhere else. The sound of honking horns was constant today - a different tone of constant than usual.
Every computer I pass is open on the US disaster warning website here, tracking Hurricane Felix as he crawls across the isthmus. Last night, the hurricane made landfall on the Moskito Coast in Nicaragua. I texted my friend Richard, who works in disaster response, "do you think I need to be stocking up on supplies?" He phoned back. "Hi, I'm just getting on a military plane to the moskitia. You'll need water purification tablets and dry no-cook food in case the electricity goes. And if it's bad Carol, don't go to the office. If people are looting, the Bulevard Morazan is the ideal place to loot; you don't want to get caught up in anything nasty".
Last night, it was unclear whether the hurricane would come near Tegus. But the trajectory was certainly disturbingly close. For the last two days, we've watched the trajectory obsessively; natural disasters bring an intimacy with physical geography that no amount of preparatory study can match. By this morning, it had scraped down further south, closer and closer to the centre of the country where Tegucigalpa lies. The trajectory is nothing more than a hypothetical path, but in the absence of certainty, the scientists in Miami become the ultimate authorities of everything.
So I swung by the supermarket to get milk and ice cream, which I figured would pretty much get me through the worst. It was like Christmas Eve in Blackrock. The queues of trolleys went right to the back of the store, and it was fascinating to see what people thought they'd need in case of apocalypse: one man had a trolley full of nothing but sliced pan; another was carrying about 20 pints of milk. Mostly though, it's clean water. The supers are out of bottled water now, and the petrol stations out of gas.
By this afternoon, still no rain. It's raining in Danlí, in the south, and in all the cities the airports are closed. Everything's been cancelled. Today the schools were closed, and the government told all businesses to shut at midday. I'm housing two refugees from the north coast (a Spaniard and a Finn, not at all shabby or downtrodden) who can't get home until the thing passes. Quiet anticipation. A lot of stories about Mitch.
My plan had been, and remained, to have a goodbye lunch for a Danish colleague from another agency, with whom I've worked quite closely. There were 4 of us at lunch, sitting on the terrace waiting for the rain. The waitress took away our wine glasses and carefully poured our wine into coffee cups: it's illegal to sell alcohol when the city's under red alert. So we sipped our wine and the others shared their memories of Mitch. Hurricane Mitch is Year Zero in Honduras: all events ocurred before or after that watershed in 1998. They told stories of pick up trucks floating in rivers, babies fished out of holes, panic and confusion and abject devastation: even well-off people were completely cut off and forced to sleep wherever they lay, one colleague on the floor of a bank for two days. But the solidarity, the way that people pulled together and forgot their differences - and in Honduras, it's often the differences that define people - that was what was amazing.
The wind's picking up outside. But I think the force is gone out of the thing. Felix has been downgraded to a tropical storm. Here in the city, we should be relatively safe. Still. We're still waiting for the rain. During Mitch, they say, you couldn't open the door for the rain, the force and volume of it.
Are we better prepared now? Jesus god, we'd want to be, don't you think? Apparently so: now there are national contingency commissions, emergency plans; already people have been evacuated from high risk areas throughout the country. During Mitch, they say, everybody ran about hopelessly uncoordinated and confused. Tocoa was cut off for 9 months, only receiving food by air, twice a week, sacks of rice. I think of Tocoa now. Who am I to say - but I think things have improved. And there's no point in denying it: I find the whole thing incredibly exciting - and I know I'm not the only one. But I'm rich, and European, and the chances this thing could kill me are low. Not everyone's so lucky.
The storm is coming. Me and my refugees will be fine: we have whiskey and tea to get us through it all. I hope to god though it comes softly.
It's not raining yet. It's uncannily dry, in fact, the sky unthreatening. A marked contrast to the cars throwing themselves about the place in a desperate panic to get somewhere else. The sound of honking horns was constant today - a different tone of constant than usual.
Every computer I pass is open on the US disaster warning website here, tracking Hurricane Felix as he crawls across the isthmus. Last night, the hurricane made landfall on the Moskito Coast in Nicaragua. I texted my friend Richard, who works in disaster response, "do you think I need to be stocking up on supplies?" He phoned back. "Hi, I'm just getting on a military plane to the moskitia. You'll need water purification tablets and dry no-cook food in case the electricity goes. And if it's bad Carol, don't go to the office. If people are looting, the Bulevard Morazan is the ideal place to loot; you don't want to get caught up in anything nasty".
Last night, it was unclear whether the hurricane would come near Tegus. But the trajectory was certainly disturbingly close. For the last two days, we've watched the trajectory obsessively; natural disasters bring an intimacy with physical geography that no amount of preparatory study can match. By this morning, it had scraped down further south, closer and closer to the centre of the country where Tegucigalpa lies. The trajectory is nothing more than a hypothetical path, but in the absence of certainty, the scientists in Miami become the ultimate authorities of everything.
So I swung by the supermarket to get milk and ice cream, which I figured would pretty much get me through the worst. It was like Christmas Eve in Blackrock. The queues of trolleys went right to the back of the store, and it was fascinating to see what people thought they'd need in case of apocalypse: one man had a trolley full of nothing but sliced pan; another was carrying about 20 pints of milk. Mostly though, it's clean water. The supers are out of bottled water now, and the petrol stations out of gas.
By this afternoon, still no rain. It's raining in Danlí, in the south, and in all the cities the airports are closed. Everything's been cancelled. Today the schools were closed, and the government told all businesses to shut at midday. I'm housing two refugees from the north coast (a Spaniard and a Finn, not at all shabby or downtrodden) who can't get home until the thing passes. Quiet anticipation. A lot of stories about Mitch.
My plan had been, and remained, to have a goodbye lunch for a Danish colleague from another agency, with whom I've worked quite closely. There were 4 of us at lunch, sitting on the terrace waiting for the rain. The waitress took away our wine glasses and carefully poured our wine into coffee cups: it's illegal to sell alcohol when the city's under red alert. So we sipped our wine and the others shared their memories of Mitch. Hurricane Mitch is Year Zero in Honduras: all events ocurred before or after that watershed in 1998. They told stories of pick up trucks floating in rivers, babies fished out of holes, panic and confusion and abject devastation: even well-off people were completely cut off and forced to sleep wherever they lay, one colleague on the floor of a bank for two days. But the solidarity, the way that people pulled together and forgot their differences - and in Honduras, it's often the differences that define people - that was what was amazing.
The wind's picking up outside. But I think the force is gone out of the thing. Felix has been downgraded to a tropical storm. Here in the city, we should be relatively safe. Still. We're still waiting for the rain. During Mitch, they say, you couldn't open the door for the rain, the force and volume of it.
Are we better prepared now? Jesus god, we'd want to be, don't you think? Apparently so: now there are national contingency commissions, emergency plans; already people have been evacuated from high risk areas throughout the country. During Mitch, they say, everybody ran about hopelessly uncoordinated and confused. Tocoa was cut off for 9 months, only receiving food by air, twice a week, sacks of rice. I think of Tocoa now. Who am I to say - but I think things have improved. And there's no point in denying it: I find the whole thing incredibly exciting - and I know I'm not the only one. But I'm rich, and European, and the chances this thing could kill me are low. Not everyone's so lucky.
The storm is coming. Me and my refugees will be fine: we have whiskey and tea to get us through it all. I hope to god though it comes softly.
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
The Moskito Coast
I don't know where to start.
There will be no more photos. My camera was stolen. Don't worry: I'm unhurt, as is my sister - whose camera was also stolen. And, in fact, there is a bottomless source of photos on this very computer, so it's not strictly true that there are no more photos. Here, for example, is a photo of my 26th birthday:
No new photos though, and worst of all, no photos from the Moskito Coast, from which I returned very recently. (The theft occurred in La Ceiba, by the way; that the name of la moskitia not be sullied)
I should like to summarise the Moskito Coast in very few words, as I have a salsa class to be getting to. So here goes:
Abandoned, Carribbean, enormous-skied-and-clouded. We went crocodile spotting at night. In a dugout canoe, with flashlights, the air alive with heavy stupid flying things. Often biting things. Not the crocodiles though: they were tiny - caymans, actually - so I swam in their river fearlessly. But the Rio Platano: enormous. Seen from the air, it's a geographer's wet dream, all exaggerated meanders and ox-bow lakes. Gah! My photos! We went white water rafting in a dugout canoe, though only Olwyn was rowing (I'm a woos). The pech people chew a particular twig as a contraceptive: a different length depending on how many years you want to be childless. "Tinki pale" is moskito for "thank you very much". I saw so many toucans I lost count. We ended up on a beach, dancing with miskitos (the people, not the buzzy biting things) and singing and losing the run of ourselves. You could just imagine the arrival of the conquistadores.
My photos... I guess I might as well tell people I was hanging out with jaguars and millions of monkeys, since I can never prove otherwise. The monkeys is true. Not the jaguars, though we did see a print.
It was stunning. I hope it lasts. It's a beautiful place.
Right, I should go now: must shower before salsa. I shall try to update soon on trip to Tocoa, Hurricane Dean, and the joys of living alone (again).
There will be no more photos. My camera was stolen. Don't worry: I'm unhurt, as is my sister - whose camera was also stolen. And, in fact, there is a bottomless source of photos on this very computer, so it's not strictly true that there are no more photos. Here, for example, is a photo of my 26th birthday:
No new photos though, and worst of all, no photos from the Moskito Coast, from which I returned very recently. (The theft occurred in La Ceiba, by the way; that the name of la moskitia not be sullied)
I should like to summarise the Moskito Coast in very few words, as I have a salsa class to be getting to. So here goes:
Abandoned, Carribbean, enormous-skied-and-clouded. We went crocodile spotting at night. In a dugout canoe, with flashlights, the air alive with heavy stupid flying things. Often biting things. Not the crocodiles though: they were tiny - caymans, actually - so I swam in their river fearlessly. But the Rio Platano: enormous. Seen from the air, it's a geographer's wet dream, all exaggerated meanders and ox-bow lakes. Gah! My photos! We went white water rafting in a dugout canoe, though only Olwyn was rowing (I'm a woos). The pech people chew a particular twig as a contraceptive: a different length depending on how many years you want to be childless. "Tinki pale" is moskito for "thank you very much". I saw so many toucans I lost count. We ended up on a beach, dancing with miskitos (the people, not the buzzy biting things) and singing and losing the run of ourselves. You could just imagine the arrival of the conquistadores.
My photos... I guess I might as well tell people I was hanging out with jaguars and millions of monkeys, since I can never prove otherwise. The monkeys is true. Not the jaguars, though we did see a print.
It was stunning. I hope it lasts. It's a beautiful place.
Right, I should go now: must shower before salsa. I shall try to update soon on trip to Tocoa, Hurricane Dean, and the joys of living alone (again).
Tuesday, August 07, 2007
Mojado
It's 7 in the evening, I'm just home from work, and I have a proposal to write before I get into work tomorrow morning. Judging by the very few blogs I read, this is prime-optimum-ideal time for me to update. So update I will.
I discovered today that the mother of one of my colleagues has gone mojada to the States. That is to say, travelled illegally by land from Honduras up through Guatemala and right up to the Mexican border, slipped over the border on a freight train, and then travelled by truck all the way to New Jersey. And she - Paulina's mum - is now in New Jersey with a bunch of people she knows, waiting for the recruitment agency for indocumentados to find her a job.
Before leaving, she - I don't know her name so let's call her Suyapa - she had to do a whole bunch of medical tests. The coyotes may be illegal people traffickers, but that's not to say for a second that they don't know how to run a business. Going mojado is a tricky business, involving at least 3 days walking across the desert, maybe as many as 12, and no promise of food or water beyond what you're carrying. So if your blood pressure is dodgy, or your heart isn't up to much, you can keep your $5,000, because who wants to run someone who's going to drop dead on them. Suyapa passed the tests, and made it to the States no problem. My boss, clearly impressed, commented that she must have had a very good coyote.
Jesus, the driver I mentioned a while back, made it in the end, on his third attempt. Deported twice, he refused to be beaten, and now he's washing dishes for a pittance in Houston. Is it Houston? I don't think so. I can't remember where he is. He arrived and the following day he had a job, lined up by his brother in law.
It's amazing being privy to these chats, everything casual and taken for granted, like we talk about our cousin in Australia. It's an insight into what so recently was reality for Irish people too, and what interests me is just that casualness. I used to think that migrants, or their families, must suffer shame; but not here, not at least if you succeed. It's such an absolutely standard escape route, and everybody talks about it openly, from the taxi drivers to work colleagues.
My boss told a story about visiting a migrants' refuge in Mexico last year, where many of the people have lost limbs. The train isn't for passengers, it doesn't stop, and noone is protected. People lying on the very roof of the carriage drop off to sleep with the slow chugging, fall, and never have the time to pull their leg away before the wheels cut through it.
Suyapa was pretty lucky to have found a good coyote.
I discovered today that the mother of one of my colleagues has gone mojada to the States. That is to say, travelled illegally by land from Honduras up through Guatemala and right up to the Mexican border, slipped over the border on a freight train, and then travelled by truck all the way to New Jersey. And she - Paulina's mum - is now in New Jersey with a bunch of people she knows, waiting for the recruitment agency for indocumentados to find her a job.
Before leaving, she - I don't know her name so let's call her Suyapa - she had to do a whole bunch of medical tests. The coyotes may be illegal people traffickers, but that's not to say for a second that they don't know how to run a business. Going mojado is a tricky business, involving at least 3 days walking across the desert, maybe as many as 12, and no promise of food or water beyond what you're carrying. So if your blood pressure is dodgy, or your heart isn't up to much, you can keep your $5,000, because who wants to run someone who's going to drop dead on them. Suyapa passed the tests, and made it to the States no problem. My boss, clearly impressed, commented that she must have had a very good coyote.
Jesus, the driver I mentioned a while back, made it in the end, on his third attempt. Deported twice, he refused to be beaten, and now he's washing dishes for a pittance in Houston. Is it Houston? I don't think so. I can't remember where he is. He arrived and the following day he had a job, lined up by his brother in law.
It's amazing being privy to these chats, everything casual and taken for granted, like we talk about our cousin in Australia. It's an insight into what so recently was reality for Irish people too, and what interests me is just that casualness. I used to think that migrants, or their families, must suffer shame; but not here, not at least if you succeed. It's such an absolutely standard escape route, and everybody talks about it openly, from the taxi drivers to work colleagues.
My boss told a story about visiting a migrants' refuge in Mexico last year, where many of the people have lost limbs. The train isn't for passengers, it doesn't stop, and noone is protected. People lying on the very roof of the carriage drop off to sleep with the slow chugging, fall, and never have the time to pull their leg away before the wheels cut through it.
Suyapa was pretty lucky to have found a good coyote.
Saturday, August 04, 2007
Frustrations of the job
So in the end I decided not to move.
It came down to logistics, pathetically enough: the messyness of upping sticks and the expense of setting up in a new place, set against the delights of squirrels frolicking on the terrace. I'll always miss the squirrels I never had, but I can make the most of the giant butterfly/bat creatures, become their friends, maybe even learn to communicate.
I've been thinking lately about how, months and months ago, I stopped blogging about work. My hope with this blog had been to be a kind of citizen reporter, dispatching stories that you couldn't possibly imagine, from the heart of the struggle. Some of my frustrations over the last 10 months have centred around the nebulousness of the struggle, and the elusiveness of its heart. And around my inability to see what must be blindingly obvious to others. In this, as in all things, I'm impossibly agnostic.
My colleagues are excited about the changes that are coming to pass in Honduras. There's a growing movement of peasant farmers determined to fight CAFTA - the Central American Free Trade Agreement. The movement overlaps with another one of people demanding fair distribution of land. International NGOs - the policy driven ones, at least - are there, pushing, encouraging, training, funding: maybe this time, maybe here, the popular mandate can overcome the interest groups who the government has always protected/ been composed of.
But on the other hand, it's so thick, this political atmosphere, and I struggle to understand what's going on. Rivalries are intense. Organisations protect their information, their techniques, and most of all their bases. Civil society is like this everywhere, but to different extents. Here, the levels of suspicion and manipulation are intense, as is the extent of personal identification with a particular group.
Culturally, it's staggeringly difficult for me. Once, I spent three hours in a room with five board members of a local economic justice group, listening to them explain how a richer, more powerful group was infiltrating THEIR bases, and doing THEIR work, undermining them in the field. Enter the richer, more powerful group, who had, incidentally, informed me that the local organisation was corrupt and incompetent. Face to face, nobody would criticise anybody else. Nobody would even make masked reference to the problems. Invited to consider what difficulties they faced (as two organisations in the same region, with the same aims), nobody would hazard anything more challenging than a lack of resources.
This happens all the time. Organisational survival is more important than the larger aim (enabling the poor to participate, accessing productive land, fighting corruption). This year, I've spent a lot of time in dark offices with tight, angry campesinos; and not enough time on the streets doing battle with the economic powers.
I feel this is a post that deserves a counterpoint. But this morning I'm not worked up to give it. Local democracy, participatory democracy is slow, and very hard to catch as it emerges. Here are three men who can bring together 30 or 40 families in a community, sit them down with the mayor, and tell the mayor how THEY plan on spending municipal funds. The same men refuse to cooperate with the NGO working in the very same community with the same families. Possessiveness and suspicion. The models change, but politics never does. But look at them! Their families can barely read, they're hardly educated, and they're challenging the controlling forces of their society. And whatever I think of their methods, and their hopelessly closed, paranoid attitudes, these three men can mobilise hundreds of people, because those people believe in these men. (The women had left already when I chose to take the picture. They have an equal nunmber of female counterparts).
So I'm leaving soon, and I still haven't found the inspiring example I came here to find. But I do believe that's my fault, and not Honduras'. I'm looking in the wrong places, with the wrong expectations. I'm dedicating my last two months to looking harder, and better: lots of fieldtrips and conversations with real people.
Starting from Wednesday, I'll be out of contact for a little while: I'll update this when I can, but it may be a few weeks.
It came down to logistics, pathetically enough: the messyness of upping sticks and the expense of setting up in a new place, set against the delights of squirrels frolicking on the terrace. I'll always miss the squirrels I never had, but I can make the most of the giant butterfly/bat creatures, become their friends, maybe even learn to communicate.
I've been thinking lately about how, months and months ago, I stopped blogging about work. My hope with this blog had been to be a kind of citizen reporter, dispatching stories that you couldn't possibly imagine, from the heart of the struggle. Some of my frustrations over the last 10 months have centred around the nebulousness of the struggle, and the elusiveness of its heart. And around my inability to see what must be blindingly obvious to others. In this, as in all things, I'm impossibly agnostic.
My colleagues are excited about the changes that are coming to pass in Honduras. There's a growing movement of peasant farmers determined to fight CAFTA - the Central American Free Trade Agreement. The movement overlaps with another one of people demanding fair distribution of land. International NGOs - the policy driven ones, at least - are there, pushing, encouraging, training, funding: maybe this time, maybe here, the popular mandate can overcome the interest groups who the government has always protected/ been composed of.
But on the other hand, it's so thick, this political atmosphere, and I struggle to understand what's going on. Rivalries are intense. Organisations protect their information, their techniques, and most of all their bases. Civil society is like this everywhere, but to different extents. Here, the levels of suspicion and manipulation are intense, as is the extent of personal identification with a particular group.
Culturally, it's staggeringly difficult for me. Once, I spent three hours in a room with five board members of a local economic justice group, listening to them explain how a richer, more powerful group was infiltrating THEIR bases, and doing THEIR work, undermining them in the field. Enter the richer, more powerful group, who had, incidentally, informed me that the local organisation was corrupt and incompetent. Face to face, nobody would criticise anybody else. Nobody would even make masked reference to the problems. Invited to consider what difficulties they faced (as two organisations in the same region, with the same aims), nobody would hazard anything more challenging than a lack of resources.
This happens all the time. Organisational survival is more important than the larger aim (enabling the poor to participate, accessing productive land, fighting corruption). This year, I've spent a lot of time in dark offices with tight, angry campesinos; and not enough time on the streets doing battle with the economic powers.
I feel this is a post that deserves a counterpoint. But this morning I'm not worked up to give it. Local democracy, participatory democracy is slow, and very hard to catch as it emerges. Here are three men who can bring together 30 or 40 families in a community, sit them down with the mayor, and tell the mayor how THEY plan on spending municipal funds. The same men refuse to cooperate with the NGO working in the very same community with the same families. Possessiveness and suspicion. The models change, but politics never does. But look at them! Their families can barely read, they're hardly educated, and they're challenging the controlling forces of their society. And whatever I think of their methods, and their hopelessly closed, paranoid attitudes, these three men can mobilise hundreds of people, because those people believe in these men. (The women had left already when I chose to take the picture. They have an equal nunmber of female counterparts).
So I'm leaving soon, and I still haven't found the inspiring example I came here to find. But I do believe that's my fault, and not Honduras'. I'm looking in the wrong places, with the wrong expectations. I'm dedicating my last two months to looking harder, and better: lots of fieldtrips and conversations with real people.Starting from Wednesday, I'll be out of contact for a little while: I'll update this when I can, but it may be a few weeks.
Wednesday, August 01, 2007
Let's get interactive
I need your help.
I've almost decided to move house. It would be fair to say that I'm about 80% decided, and on a good day even more. In the spirit of web 2.0, I've put a poll on my Facebook page, in order to facilitate me handing the decision over to someone else entirely. So I'd appreciate if you could all rush off, become my friend (if you're not already), and tell me what to do. Yippee!
I live in a very big house. Today I said goodbye for good to the last of my flatmates, so now it's just me, five bedrooms, four bathrooms and the giant moth-bat creatures in the patio. I feel pretty lost in this place, and I crave company. Besides which, all the taxi drivers in Tegucigalpa know where I live, and that I live alone. And I don't think that's a good thing.
So here's what I'll do. I'll make a list of pros for moving, then a list of cons, and then I'll make it so you can tell me what to do. I'll be expecting your dutiful feedback.
PROs:
(If you, like me, are allergic to adding daft new applications, you can post a comment on my blog instead)
I've almost decided to move house. It would be fair to say that I'm about 80% decided, and on a good day even more. In the spirit of web 2.0, I've put a poll on my Facebook page, in order to facilitate me handing the decision over to someone else entirely. So I'd appreciate if you could all rush off, become my friend (if you're not already), and tell me what to do. Yippee!
I live in a very big house. Today I said goodbye for good to the last of my flatmates, so now it's just me, five bedrooms, four bathrooms and the giant moth-bat creatures in the patio. I feel pretty lost in this place, and I crave company. Besides which, all the taxi drivers in Tegucigalpa know where I live, and that I live alone. And I don't think that's a good thing.
So here's what I'll do. I'll make a list of pros for moving, then a list of cons, and then I'll make it so you can tell me what to do. I'll be expecting your dutiful feedback.
PROs:
- In my last 2 months in Tegus, I can shake things up and instead of moping around thinking how happy I was living with Lorna & Eva, I'll have my own place that I can make my own.
- This new flat has a terrace to die for. And a beautiful view over the city (which is surprisingly lovely, especially at night). And it's set among pine trees so squirrels scamper onto the terrace in the mornings, just like in... France or somewhere. It's in the city centre, but feels like it's in the countryside. I'm not exaggerating. The setting is divine.
- It's in a lovely neighbourhood called La Leona, which is where most of my friends live. I could meet them in the evenings and go for coffee. They could give me lifts to work. We could swap clothes, and magazines, and whine about the state of the world today, like real neighbours do. I have no friends living near me here....
- Really. You've no idea how much I've always wanted to live in La Leona.
- No internet. So at best I'll have to go to the hassle & expense of getting internet in.
- It's semi furnished, and has no bed... more hassle and expense (though who cares when I can be on the terrace with the squirrels?!)
- I have 8 weeks left in Tegucigalpa. Do I need to shake my life up this much, when I'm going to be stressed as hell and away on field trips half the time anyway?
- My enormous house for which I have very little affection has THE BEST SHOWER IN THE WORLD. This place has tepid water at best. It's a small bit.... dingy.
- My enormous house for which I have very little affection (MEHFWIHVLA) has cable tv. With a hundred channels. And I watch at least 4 of them from time to time.
- Mehfwihvla has a big, well stocked kitchen, a decent oven and a good-sized fridge. It's cosy. In as much as anywhere in Honduras is cosy (see previous post).
- Do I really want to pack and leave for just 8 weeks?
(If you, like me, are allergic to adding daft new applications, you can post a comment on my blog instead)
Friday, July 27, 2007
The picture in the last post
Sorry: that last post deserves further explanation, at least of the picture. And I've been accused of plagiarism by one sluice, so I guess I'd better reference.
Nearly two months ago, Lucy and I hooked up in Mexico, to celebrate all things Central American, and more broadly all things hispanic, and more narrowly all things Carol-and-Lucy. This is not the blog where I write about all the adventures we had in Mexico. Hell, I'll probably never write that blog, let's be honest. No, this is the blog where I reveal the secrets of manga stills photography.
One Monday morning we got up early to pack in all the extraordinary Mexican artwork we could. We were downtown and breakfasted when we twigged that the museums don't open on Mondays. This was a pity: we had scheduled a very tight five days in DF, and one day wandering aimlessly looking at traffic police with elaborate eye make up wasn't on the cards. Since everything that had been on the cards was closed (we did a LOT of things related to the arts/tourist infrastructure, which, you should know if you ever go to Mexico city (and you definitely should) closes down tight on Mondays) - since everything was closed, we decided we'd get a bus to the ruins. Teotihuacán. Birthplace of the gods. Home of the ancient aztecs. Wonder of meso america. And so on.
Lucy's a bit of an expert on wonders of meso america, and not, I got the impression, by choice. It's not that Lucy doesn't love ancient ruins - who doesn't love ancient ruins? - rather that she's seen lots of them. And teotihuacan isn't in a rainforest, it's not beside a flawless powder beach; it doesn't take 3 days to hike through the mountains to stumble upon it, and it doesn't have the best preserved artefacts of the region. It doesn't really have any artefacts. Just pyramids. Great pyramids, but still. It wasn't top of our list of things to do in Mexico.
So as we walked down the avenue, surrounded by pyramids, we got to thinking how this all brought us back to our childhood, in particular to that cartoon with which I was obsessed when I was nine: The mysterious cities of gold. Remember? I loved it so much. You have to click on the link above, to remind yourself, and see the opening credits again.
And that's when the manga stills photography began. Lucy was very good at it, and executed two perfect pictures of me-as-cartoon-character-against-backdrop-of-mysterious-cities-of-
gold:
How completely japanese and hand-drawn do I look?
I wasn't so good at the behind-the-scenes part. It took me a while to get my head around the whole perspective bit. As you see:
First, Lucy is very far away from the mysterious pyramid...
Then she's a little closer...
Getting better.... (hey! what happened to my font?!)
But the sun's glaring in her eyes, and she can't put on her shades because who ever saw an animé character in shades?
She's pretty exasperated with my poor manga still photography skills...
But finally I think I get it! More or less....
And that, my friends, is what we did in teotihacán. I shall try to blog about Honduras soon. Now I have to go cook dinner.
Nearly two months ago, Lucy and I hooked up in Mexico, to celebrate all things Central American, and more broadly all things hispanic, and more narrowly all things Carol-and-Lucy. This is not the blog where I write about all the adventures we had in Mexico. Hell, I'll probably never write that blog, let's be honest. No, this is the blog where I reveal the secrets of manga stills photography.
One Monday morning we got up early to pack in all the extraordinary Mexican artwork we could. We were downtown and breakfasted when we twigged that the museums don't open on Mondays. This was a pity: we had scheduled a very tight five days in DF, and one day wandering aimlessly looking at traffic police with elaborate eye make up wasn't on the cards. Since everything that had been on the cards was closed (we did a LOT of things related to the arts/tourist infrastructure, which, you should know if you ever go to Mexico city (and you definitely should) closes down tight on Mondays) - since everything was closed, we decided we'd get a bus to the ruins. Teotihuacán. Birthplace of the gods. Home of the ancient aztecs. Wonder of meso america. And so on.
Lucy's a bit of an expert on wonders of meso america, and not, I got the impression, by choice. It's not that Lucy doesn't love ancient ruins - who doesn't love ancient ruins? - rather that she's seen lots of them. And teotihuacan isn't in a rainforest, it's not beside a flawless powder beach; it doesn't take 3 days to hike through the mountains to stumble upon it, and it doesn't have the best preserved artefacts of the region. It doesn't really have any artefacts. Just pyramids. Great pyramids, but still. It wasn't top of our list of things to do in Mexico.
So as we walked down the avenue, surrounded by pyramids, we got to thinking how this all brought us back to our childhood, in particular to that cartoon with which I was obsessed when I was nine: The mysterious cities of gold. Remember? I loved it so much. You have to click on the link above, to remind yourself, and see the opening credits again.
And that's when the manga stills photography began. Lucy was very good at it, and executed two perfect pictures of me-as-cartoon-character-against-backdrop-of-mysterious-cities-of-
gold:
How completely japanese and hand-drawn do I look?
I wasn't so good at the behind-the-scenes part. It took me a while to get my head around the whole perspective bit. As you see:
First, Lucy is very far away from the mysterious pyramid...
Then she's a little closer...
Getting better.... (hey! what happened to my font?!)
But the sun's glaring in her eyes, and she can't put on her shades because who ever saw an animé character in shades?
She's pretty exasperated with my poor manga still photography skills...
But finally I think I get it! More or less....
And that, my friends, is what we did in teotihacán. I shall try to blog about Honduras soon. Now I have to go cook dinner.
Friday, July 20, 2007
Darn luddite
Sometimes I think I'm so darn clever, but I'm not. I CAN'T get blogger to upload a photo into my profile. And I really want a photo in my profile. So I'm going to try this way instead..... Thank you for your patience, this is not a proper post.
It still won't upload the goddamn photo! What the hell gives? I need a tutorial, and I need it form someone moderately more able than lousy google help menus.
Thank you
It still won't upload the goddamn photo! What the hell gives? I need a tutorial, and I need it form someone moderately more able than lousy google help menus.Thank you
The meeja
Shazzle was disappointed not to get a photo of the dead body featured in my last post. But as anyone who's ever been whitewater rafting knows, you can't bring a camera with you (duuuh) because it'll just get all wet and ruined. However, if it's photos of dead bodies you're after, I knew I wouldn't have to wait too long to satisfy the bloodthirsty hoards. I monitored the papers day by day, knowing the right one wasn't far away, and lo, just three days after the request, Mr. Meeja comes up trumps.
Here's a photo of three dead bodies.
The headline, as I'm sure you figured out, reads "Bloodbath!" And the text beneath, which Spanish speakers will be zooming frenetically to decipher, tells us that the three men pictured, and a female friend, were standing outside a pool hall when two guys dressed as police passed in the back of a pick-up and sprayed them with bullets from their AK 47s.
There's no taboo whatsoever about showing dead people in the Honduran media (the TV news is worse). So when we stumbled across that man on the rocks the other day, he looked strangely familiar. The convention is to pull up the shirts of the corpses - particularly bullet-riddled ones - for the photos: the gents above got away lightly having their clothes left on. I think since all three have blood spurting from their heads, they've done their bit.
It's the car crash mentality gone mad: the only thing they seem to report is violence. "Keep people scared" our driver said to me this morning when I pointed out the picture. Scared is right. Imagine someone opening fire outside a pool hall in suburban Dublin. No, yes, I know, they shoot people everywhere. But with kalashnikovs! The odd thing is that so many things here are just like suburban Dublin: friendly people, nice cars, kids out having a few drinks. And then someone drives by in a pick up, dressed as a policeman, and opens fire on the kids (they were all in their early 20s) with an AK. And the next morning, arranged neatly radiating from beneath the feet of the police, their corpses appear on the front page of the newspaper.
On a regular, regular basis.
The other big story that sells papers is dengue. We're all obsessed with dengue. Even simp, when a little fluey a few weeks ago, self-diagnosed with dengue. Remember when you were in secondary school, and you were a world record, Mastermind expert on meningitis? Like that. But with pictures:
For those of you who've been put off your breakfast by all this ailing human flesh, here's a nice soothing picture of me asleep.
PS: Can anybody tell me how to upload pictures in portrait form to the interweb? No matter how fully rotated they are, they always come out on their sides.
Here's a photo of three dead bodies.
The headline, as I'm sure you figured out, reads "Bloodbath!" And the text beneath, which Spanish speakers will be zooming frenetically to decipher, tells us that the three men pictured, and a female friend, were standing outside a pool hall when two guys dressed as police passed in the back of a pick-up and sprayed them with bullets from their AK 47s.
There's no taboo whatsoever about showing dead people in the Honduran media (the TV news is worse). So when we stumbled across that man on the rocks the other day, he looked strangely familiar. The convention is to pull up the shirts of the corpses - particularly bullet-riddled ones - for the photos: the gents above got away lightly having their clothes left on. I think since all three have blood spurting from their heads, they've done their bit.
It's the car crash mentality gone mad: the only thing they seem to report is violence. "Keep people scared" our driver said to me this morning when I pointed out the picture. Scared is right. Imagine someone opening fire outside a pool hall in suburban Dublin. No, yes, I know, they shoot people everywhere. But with kalashnikovs! The odd thing is that so many things here are just like suburban Dublin: friendly people, nice cars, kids out having a few drinks. And then someone drives by in a pick up, dressed as a policeman, and opens fire on the kids (they were all in their early 20s) with an AK. And the next morning, arranged neatly radiating from beneath the feet of the police, their corpses appear on the front page of the newspaper.
On a regular, regular basis.
The other big story that sells papers is dengue. We're all obsessed with dengue. Even simp, when a little fluey a few weeks ago, self-diagnosed with dengue. Remember when you were in secondary school, and you were a world record, Mastermind expert on meningitis? Like that. But with pictures:
For those of you who've been put off your breakfast by all this ailing human flesh, here's a nice soothing picture of me asleep.
PS: Can anybody tell me how to upload pictures in portrait form to the interweb? No matter how fully rotated they are, they always come out on their sides.
Monday, July 16, 2007
Blogworthy
There's a whole weekend lost to loneliness and pfaffing about on the magical interweb then. My big ol house feels so enormous now it's empty that I've taken to carrying a bag around with me so that I don't have to go back to my bedroom to find my phone every time I need to know the time.
But look! I found out how to put photos on my blog! Simp gave me a camera for my recent THIRTIETH BIRTHDAY, so there'll be lots more of this, I like to think. In as much as there's more blogging of any description. Here's a picture of a frog:
But that's not why I'm blogging this evening. I'm blogging because I want to tell you about the dead man I saw recently. About two weeks ago myself and simp went up north to the Parque Nacional Pico Bonito, to enjoy the splendour of the rainforest, pretend to be intrepid on rafts and kayaks, and mingle with backpackers. It was marvellous, as I'm sure you can imagine. (But if you can't, here's a picture:
So we signed up for a whitewater adventure trip, which, I must insist, was entirely Simp's idea (I had suggested reading and sunbathing as a more fruitful activity). We were grouped with a pleasant Honduran family and their German (almost certainly Christian) exchange student. And a couple of annoying gung ho GI Jo type instructors, who are unavoidable if you're going to take it upon yourself to do adventure sports anywhere in the world.
There are three lodges strung along the Rio Cangrejal, all offering adventure sports of this sort, and all embarking their rafting expeditions at the same point on the river. That point is also very close to the site of the brand new visitors' centre and suspension bridge. In a pristine and barely touched part of the country, this is pretty much the epicentre of human traffic. Which is why the dead body came as a surprise.
Our group drove to the embarking point on the river, then we had to scramble down over large rocks for about 10 minutes, to get to a tiny little beachy area. I was about fifth in the line, and so I didn't immediately know why the people ahead of me had stopped and turned round. The Honduran dad was taking responsibility, having been the one to spot the body. It was a man, naked from the waste up, slumped just beneath a huge overhanging rock. He had no visible bullet wounds, but his back was tattooed heavily with the marks of the "mara 18", the 18 gang. We turned around and conferred about what to do.
Obviously, there was very little we could do. Hans, a German instructor checked the man's pulse and confirmed he was dead. The sinister thing is that from our lodge alone, a rafting trip had left that morning at 9.30, passing the same point where there was no dead body. So whatever happened happened between 10Am and our arrival at 1ish.
Hans concluded that it was an accident, and given the trauma he'd been through with the pulse checking and all, we figured it would be indiscreet to argue. Nobody else felt it was an accident though; there have been 1,400 homicides reported in Honduras since the beginning of this year, and they frequently involve the major gangs (of which 18 is one of the most major). There haven't been that many deaths by falling in highly public places.
The Honduran man seriously contemplated calling off the trip, claiming that he didn't want his teenage daughters seeing the body (he wasn't bothered for his son). But in the end, once the police had been called (it took them 6 hours to arrive, in a private car, to take the body away) there was really nothing else to do. I was spooked for a while, wondered if the bad guys mightn't be back to get us, but pretty soon I was more spooked by trying to stay afloat in the rapids and forgot all about it. In the end, the most sinister thing about the whole incident was the grinding banality of it all. I fell asleep wondering if the image would make it into the papers the next day. It didn't. We'll never know anything more about the incident.
I promise to blog about Mexico shortly. And Casa Guatemala. In the meantime, here's a link to my picasa account so you can look at some more photos!
...That's not working. Maybe try the old fashioned way: http://picasaweb.google.com/carolballantine/HondurasIntoTheCountry
But look! I found out how to put photos on my blog! Simp gave me a camera for my recent THIRTIETH BIRTHDAY, so there'll be lots more of this, I like to think. In as much as there's more blogging of any description. Here's a picture of a frog:
But that's not why I'm blogging this evening. I'm blogging because I want to tell you about the dead man I saw recently. About two weeks ago myself and simp went up north to the Parque Nacional Pico Bonito, to enjoy the splendour of the rainforest, pretend to be intrepid on rafts and kayaks, and mingle with backpackers. It was marvellous, as I'm sure you can imagine. (But if you can't, here's a picture:
So we signed up for a whitewater adventure trip, which, I must insist, was entirely Simp's idea (I had suggested reading and sunbathing as a more fruitful activity). We were grouped with a pleasant Honduran family and their German (almost certainly Christian) exchange student. And a couple of annoying gung ho GI Jo type instructors, who are unavoidable if you're going to take it upon yourself to do adventure sports anywhere in the world.
There are three lodges strung along the Rio Cangrejal, all offering adventure sports of this sort, and all embarking their rafting expeditions at the same point on the river. That point is also very close to the site of the brand new visitors' centre and suspension bridge. In a pristine and barely touched part of the country, this is pretty much the epicentre of human traffic. Which is why the dead body came as a surprise.
Our group drove to the embarking point on the river, then we had to scramble down over large rocks for about 10 minutes, to get to a tiny little beachy area. I was about fifth in the line, and so I didn't immediately know why the people ahead of me had stopped and turned round. The Honduran dad was taking responsibility, having been the one to spot the body. It was a man, naked from the waste up, slumped just beneath a huge overhanging rock. He had no visible bullet wounds, but his back was tattooed heavily with the marks of the "mara 18", the 18 gang. We turned around and conferred about what to do.
Obviously, there was very little we could do. Hans, a German instructor checked the man's pulse and confirmed he was dead. The sinister thing is that from our lodge alone, a rafting trip had left that morning at 9.30, passing the same point where there was no dead body. So whatever happened happened between 10Am and our arrival at 1ish.
Hans concluded that it was an accident, and given the trauma he'd been through with the pulse checking and all, we figured it would be indiscreet to argue. Nobody else felt it was an accident though; there have been 1,400 homicides reported in Honduras since the beginning of this year, and they frequently involve the major gangs (of which 18 is one of the most major). There haven't been that many deaths by falling in highly public places.
The Honduran man seriously contemplated calling off the trip, claiming that he didn't want his teenage daughters seeing the body (he wasn't bothered for his son). But in the end, once the police had been called (it took them 6 hours to arrive, in a private car, to take the body away) there was really nothing else to do. I was spooked for a while, wondered if the bad guys mightn't be back to get us, but pretty soon I was more spooked by trying to stay afloat in the rapids and forgot all about it. In the end, the most sinister thing about the whole incident was the grinding banality of it all. I fell asleep wondering if the image would make it into the papers the next day. It didn't. We'll never know anything more about the incident.
I promise to blog about Mexico shortly. And Casa Guatemala. In the meantime, here's a link to my picasa account so you can look at some more photos!
...That's not working. Maybe try the old fashioned way: http://picasaweb.google.com/carolballantine/HondurasIntoTheCountry
Sunday, July 15, 2007
Abandoned
Sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry.
That's that then. Over the next week I'll try to be a better blogger. And big shouts out to Walt and Oisín and Percy, who deserve grown up emails and not these silly messages on my blog. Right.
Simp spent 5 weeks in Honduras, and 4 hours ago I left him at the airport. This time, I hardly cried at all. I ran to the posh supermarket and bought the most expensive chocolate they had, then I came home and looked at old photographs of how happy I was when I lived in the same country as my boyfriend, before spending 150 Euro on clothes in the American Apparel online store. I really hope they fit me.
Up till 2 weeks ago I had 2 flatmates (you remember, from earlier blogs, right?), who also worked with me, and were definitely my closest friends here. They've left. My other closest friend, a Canadian girl who works for the UN, has taken 2 months' unpaid leave, while another very good friend finishes his contract with a Swedish NGO in August. My German colleague
with whom I share an office has gone to Germany for 6 weeks' holidays, while my boss is in Bolivia. If I didn't get out of bed for the next month, only the utilities companies would notice. And the lady who comes to clean our house.
(The paragraph above says a lot about my lifestyle here: all my friends are foreign, I have a cleaning lady; these are not situations I had anticipated or wanted. They're a lot less significant than I expected before getting here though. I'm an ex pat. No point pretending I'm not, at the end of the day.)
I'm very sad simp's gone, notwithstanding the fact that I didn't cry a lot when he left. That was contextual. In Tegucigalpa airport, you form a queue winding around the gift shops and towards the McDonald's to get to the passport check before boarding; all of this in the publicly accessible section, as opposed to behind the barriers where only flyers are permitted. So I could accompany simp all through the snaking queue, speculating about the Americans in their Christian Volunteer t-shirts who were his co-passengers, and passing remarks about the Honduran gringos taking leave of their families. All of a sudden, we're at the front of the queue, a man with a gun is checking simp's passport, and I can go no further. Or rather, simp proceeds on one side of a rope barrier, while I'm exiled to the other side.
Now, at this point I'm happy to leave the sentimentalism aside, and take myself and my dignity to the shop with the expensive chocolate, but there's a Honduran woman behind simp in the queue, and she's terribly moved by this young couple parting.
"Go on, give her a kiss" she tells simp; "I won't mind".
That's ok. I really don't like crying in public. He shyly pecks my cheek over the flimsy rope and returns to the queue. I brush away a few tears.
"Oh give her another one! Hug her!"
He does. Now I'm crying. The woman is delighted.
Hondurans LOVE public displays of affection. Which brings me back to my flatmates, who just abandoned me. All our colleagues spent the week of their departure trying to provoke tears on our part. "Will you cry?" they'd ask me greedily before the girls' going away party. No, I'd say, I imagine I'll be too drunk. This is not the correct answer. But it was the case.
Anyway, the friends I have left in Tegus (sniff) have assured me they'll look out for me in this big rattly house where I'm all alone. Meanwhile, simp left behind MY NEW LAPTOP, which is an INCREDIBLE machine, and thanks to a sprint to the telecoms office two days ago, our internet hasn't been cut off yet. What's more, I have this amazing new programme that allows me to play backgammon with simp in real time, and is integrated with the webcam, so WE CAN LOOK AT EACH OTHER WHILE PLAYING.
And that is the most exciting prospect ahead for the next few weeks I'm afraid. Don't worry about me though. My sister's coming in August and we're going on a trip up the Mosquito Coast. At the end of it all, I'm nothing but a spoiled brat.
That's that then. Over the next week I'll try to be a better blogger. And big shouts out to Walt and Oisín and Percy, who deserve grown up emails and not these silly messages on my blog. Right.
Simp spent 5 weeks in Honduras, and 4 hours ago I left him at the airport. This time, I hardly cried at all. I ran to the posh supermarket and bought the most expensive chocolate they had, then I came home and looked at old photographs of how happy I was when I lived in the same country as my boyfriend, before spending 150 Euro on clothes in the American Apparel online store. I really hope they fit me.
Up till 2 weeks ago I had 2 flatmates (you remember, from earlier blogs, right?), who also worked with me, and were definitely my closest friends here. They've left. My other closest friend, a Canadian girl who works for the UN, has taken 2 months' unpaid leave, while another very good friend finishes his contract with a Swedish NGO in August. My German colleague
with whom I share an office has gone to Germany for 6 weeks' holidays, while my boss is in Bolivia. If I didn't get out of bed for the next month, only the utilities companies would notice. And the lady who comes to clean our house.
(The paragraph above says a lot about my lifestyle here: all my friends are foreign, I have a cleaning lady; these are not situations I had anticipated or wanted. They're a lot less significant than I expected before getting here though. I'm an ex pat. No point pretending I'm not, at the end of the day.)
I'm very sad simp's gone, notwithstanding the fact that I didn't cry a lot when he left. That was contextual. In Tegucigalpa airport, you form a queue winding around the gift shops and towards the McDonald's to get to the passport check before boarding; all of this in the publicly accessible section, as opposed to behind the barriers where only flyers are permitted. So I could accompany simp all through the snaking queue, speculating about the Americans in their Christian Volunteer t-shirts who were his co-passengers, and passing remarks about the Honduran gringos taking leave of their families. All of a sudden, we're at the front of the queue, a man with a gun is checking simp's passport, and I can go no further. Or rather, simp proceeds on one side of a rope barrier, while I'm exiled to the other side.
Now, at this point I'm happy to leave the sentimentalism aside, and take myself and my dignity to the shop with the expensive chocolate, but there's a Honduran woman behind simp in the queue, and she's terribly moved by this young couple parting.
"Go on, give her a kiss" she tells simp; "I won't mind".
That's ok. I really don't like crying in public. He shyly pecks my cheek over the flimsy rope and returns to the queue. I brush away a few tears.
"Oh give her another one! Hug her!"
He does. Now I'm crying. The woman is delighted.
Hondurans LOVE public displays of affection. Which brings me back to my flatmates, who just abandoned me. All our colleagues spent the week of their departure trying to provoke tears on our part. "Will you cry?" they'd ask me greedily before the girls' going away party. No, I'd say, I imagine I'll be too drunk. This is not the correct answer. But it was the case.
Anyway, the friends I have left in Tegus (sniff) have assured me they'll look out for me in this big rattly house where I'm all alone. Meanwhile, simp left behind MY NEW LAPTOP, which is an INCREDIBLE machine, and thanks to a sprint to the telecoms office two days ago, our internet hasn't been cut off yet. What's more, I have this amazing new programme that allows me to play backgammon with simp in real time, and is integrated with the webcam, so WE CAN LOOK AT EACH OTHER WHILE PLAYING.
And that is the most exciting prospect ahead for the next few weeks I'm afraid. Don't worry about me though. My sister's coming in August and we're going on a trip up the Mosquito Coast. At the end of it all, I'm nothing but a spoiled brat.
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Still not thirty
It seems to be the done thing to blog about your upcoming thirtieth birthday, and when the title occurred to me at 3AM in the ocean while watching the phosphoresence trailing behind my skin, I felt it had to be done.
Yes. I am an impossibly smug spoiled brat. Other people grow up some time in their mid twenties: not me. Here are my instructions for seeing in your nearly-30th birthday without an instant's remorse:
Yes. I am an impossibly smug spoiled brat. Other people grow up some time in their mid twenties: not me. Here are my instructions for seeing in your nearly-30th birthday without an instant's remorse:
- Go to a pacific island with a teeny population and views of volcanoes in three different countries.
- Rent a house on the beachfront, looking out at the volcanoes. Do not attempt to climb volcanoes - they are for looking at.
- In the absence of your closest friends in all the world, get 10 people you like rather a lot who happen to live in the same country to come along. Makes accommodation and boat rental easier. And cheaper.
- Eat lots of prawns the size of your own head.
- Build a bonfire.
- Swig tequila out of the bottle.
- Go skinny dipping at 3AM, so you can lie on your back and watch the phosphoresence trailing behind your arm, while lightning flickers in the completely cloudless sky.
- Along with your youth, leave behind your sandals and your towel.
Friday, May 18, 2007
Credit card fraud
I logged on to internet banking to pay my mortgage on the 7th of May 2007. That's when I generally pay my credit card bill too. You know the way these sites are really clunky and sometimes ask you to enter your transfer amounts in cents instead of Euros, so that E50 has to be entered as 5000? And you know the way I live in a non-decimal currency? All of this contributed to it taking a good while before I registered that Euro2,600 was a disturbing sum of money to have spent in less than a month on a credit card. I'm dozy enough that I spent a little while trying to remember where I'd spent Euro 2,600 (that meal in the Patio? Maybe in Costa Rica airport? I hardly use my credit card!) before I realised that clearly I had been robbed. Violated. Taken advantage of. I started to cry.
I pegged it to my house, which is near my office, to get the number of my credit card for cancellation purposes, and to confirm that the card wasn't where it always is in my bedroom. The card was where it always is in my bedroom. Somebody had faked my card without ever holding it for more than 5 minutes.
Further investigations, since I cancelled it, have been incredibly slow, resulting in theory after theory. On the internet you can only see the last 20 transactions (with my bank anyway); and those I could see had all been registered on the same day (May 4th). They were in petrol stations and fast food outlets which are ubiquitous in Honduras. And they were for squeenchy little amounts. One was for 18 cent. At first I figured that the transactions were going through like phone bookings, simply quoting the card number and expiry date: I imagined a network of complicit petrol station goons allowing their mates to use card details they knew to be stolen. But how did that work? Why would anybody steal credit card details just to buy bottles of water and fast food? Where were the flights to Miami, the laptop computers and ipods, the saleable technology? That's when my flatmate's boyfriend came up with his gruesome theory that the card was being used to finance a kidnapping. I think the kidnapping was an embellishment; but I think he's spot on with the nature of the use: someone forged my card, and now it's their petty cash fund to finance their criminal activities.
The theory was backed up when the bank statements arrived. The first 8 transactions are in Guatemala, city and up the border with Honduras towards the Carribean coast where the narcotraficantes hang out. Then over the border to Cortes, the neighbouring province, where the Honduran narcotraficantes run. Over and back, over and back, stopping mostly in motels and fast food chains with just one massive hit of E1,260 for electrical goods (why was my credit card not automatically stopped then?). They overran my credit limit by 20%, and it kept going. For 2 weeks, until finally I noticed and cancelled it. Trickle by trickle, the payments are still going through.
So the good news: the bank recognises the fraud, and I'll get my money back. So now I don't need to cry any more, and I'm very intrigued.
I went to the police today to make my denuncia, and open the investigation. It was hilarious. It took the woman QUITE some time to figure out that the Euro is a very valuable currency, and that it's worth considerably more than Honduran lempiras (25 times more, to be precise). She insisted that I dictate my credit card statement to her line by line, since her computer "doesn't have a calculator" (I tried to show her where it was, but she didn't want me to see the game of free cell open on the screen, so she wouldn't let me near it); and she wasn't able to use the photocopier. I have an appointment with an investigator on Thursday.
And I genuinely, sincerely, can't wait!
I pegged it to my house, which is near my office, to get the number of my credit card for cancellation purposes, and to confirm that the card wasn't where it always is in my bedroom. The card was where it always is in my bedroom. Somebody had faked my card without ever holding it for more than 5 minutes.
Further investigations, since I cancelled it, have been incredibly slow, resulting in theory after theory. On the internet you can only see the last 20 transactions (with my bank anyway); and those I could see had all been registered on the same day (May 4th). They were in petrol stations and fast food outlets which are ubiquitous in Honduras. And they were for squeenchy little amounts. One was for 18 cent. At first I figured that the transactions were going through like phone bookings, simply quoting the card number and expiry date: I imagined a network of complicit petrol station goons allowing their mates to use card details they knew to be stolen. But how did that work? Why would anybody steal credit card details just to buy bottles of water and fast food? Where were the flights to Miami, the laptop computers and ipods, the saleable technology? That's when my flatmate's boyfriend came up with his gruesome theory that the card was being used to finance a kidnapping. I think the kidnapping was an embellishment; but I think he's spot on with the nature of the use: someone forged my card, and now it's their petty cash fund to finance their criminal activities.
The theory was backed up when the bank statements arrived. The first 8 transactions are in Guatemala, city and up the border with Honduras towards the Carribean coast where the narcotraficantes hang out. Then over the border to Cortes, the neighbouring province, where the Honduran narcotraficantes run. Over and back, over and back, stopping mostly in motels and fast food chains with just one massive hit of E1,260 for electrical goods (why was my credit card not automatically stopped then?). They overran my credit limit by 20%, and it kept going. For 2 weeks, until finally I noticed and cancelled it. Trickle by trickle, the payments are still going through.
So the good news: the bank recognises the fraud, and I'll get my money back. So now I don't need to cry any more, and I'm very intrigued.
I went to the police today to make my denuncia, and open the investigation. It was hilarious. It took the woman QUITE some time to figure out that the Euro is a very valuable currency, and that it's worth considerably more than Honduran lempiras (25 times more, to be precise). She insisted that I dictate my credit card statement to her line by line, since her computer "doesn't have a calculator" (I tried to show her where it was, but she didn't want me to see the game of free cell open on the screen, so she wouldn't let me near it); and she wasn't able to use the photocopier. I have an appointment with an investigator on Thursday.
And I genuinely, sincerely, can't wait!
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
Things I like about Honduras
- The mountains and
- The trees and
- The sea and
- The jungles and
- Did I mention the mountains? It's, like a wilderness. Complete.
- Nature, generally. It's spectacular.
- The geckos. Which are also part of nature.
- The street food, which is ideal for hangovers, consisting generally of maize stuffed with very salty cheese and fried in a variety of shapes and sizes.
- Dancing when not drunk. A bizarre national pastime.
- Constant latin junk music, generally clashing with different latin junk music in the bar opposite, and 80s power ballads pumping from a nearby pick up.
- Pick ups! I love pick ups!
- Piñatas in the shape of sponge bob square pants.
- The market (see previous).
- Giant ceramic cockerels with Honduras written across their combs; which I'm going to buy in job lots for wedding presents when I get home. Don't think I'm joking.
- The proximity to Guatemala.
I've to go to the pool now before it gets dark, so I'll leave it at that, though there are many more things. The pool of a weekday evening is definitely in there.
Monday, May 14, 2007
Lists
For Christmas, one of the 10 squillion things that simp bought me was the McSweeney's book of lists (which I would link to, but I can't find it on Amazon). I recently rediscovered it, nearly wet myself at the list of things this city was built on, other than rock and roll, and now I've decided to create my own lists using just keyboard and brain. I may get bored of this, or it may become a recurring motif, only time will tell.
Things I dislike about Honduras:
Things I dislike about Honduras:
- Men hissing at me on the street.
- My credit card being falsified and used to the tune of Euro3,000 while it never once leaves a drawer in my bedroom, hence provoking me not to notice its use for a full three weeks.
- Sweating profusely, even while I'm in a swimming pool.
- Cars slowing down and the driver leaning out the window to get a better look at the foreign girls on the street.
- Being called gringuita.
- My friend´s boyfriend theorising that my credit card is being used by a crime gang as the petty cash fund to finance a kidnapping.
- Newspapers displaying corpses with their clothes pulled up to make it easier to see the wounds.
- People speaking to me in English with thick American accents because they think it will make me like them, because they assume that I, like them, am rich and spent much if not all of my youth in the US, and I, like them, disdain idiots who don't speak English, even though I'm a FRICKING DEVELOPMENT WORKER for chrissakes, I'm not going to be impressed because you know all the best clubs in Manhattan, or more likely Miami, so just BACK THE FUCK OFF.
- People speaking to me in English because I speak lousy Spanish.
- Police cars slowing, the driver leaning out the window to get a good look at the foreigners, and then cranking up his loudspeaker to announce "Hola amor I love you".
- People who say they don't like Honduras because of the machismo, the crime, and the inequality. And the dirt. Especially Finnish people who say that.
Apologies
It’s been a while, I know. There was a time when I used to go to the internet café dutifully every Saturday, generally just after phoning home, and file a thorough report on the activities of the week. The Saturdays melted into Sundays, and eventually even into weekday evenings, until eventually the whole game puttered out (with the exception of one marathon session in an airport hotel in the rain: the best imaginable context in which to blog). Some of you have mentioned. I know. I’m sorry. I’ll try to be better.
Suddenly I had no idea what exactly was the point of this whole carry-on. Why would I choose to live in a different country from my life partner for a year? For a job? What, really, was I expecting to come out of this? I was baffled.
This isn’t the entry that I’d started out to write, but now I’m writing it.
I feel as though I’m living two completely distinct lives. One is that of a development worker just starting on a career in which she can live anywhere, have adventures and learn millions of things. Which has, more or less, been my fantasy since I stopped fantasising about being a queen of Narnia (though I’d still quite like that too: I’d be an archer, and unlike in real life, I’d be very good at it and not at all clumsy). The other life is the one I started creating 5 years ago when I met simp, discovered a Dublin full of strange music geeks and gloomy bars with people who make me laugh until I cry. And stuff that I didn’t believe real people used, like art galleries and theatres.
Routines
We finish work on Fridays and go to the market. Sometimes I give an English class to my Honduran colleagues first, sometimes we work late, but we always end up in the market. The market cheers us up and stops us being pissed off and reminds us why we love this country.
We have it down to a fine art by now. We start with pupúsas in the food stall area, or sometimes fried fish at the garífuna stall. Then we go direct to the alleys of fish and seafood to buy prawns and tilapia. Always prawns and tilapia. They quote us the price per pound, and we ask how many people a pound feeds. Who buys food by weight? Then we weave our way past the pigs trotters, tripe and liver to where the live crabs in a bucket indicate the end of the flesh zone and the start of the fruit and veg.
We are ridiculously enthusiastic. We coo over the enormous aubergines, the butternut squash, the tiny red tomatoes and the most sumptuous mange tout I have ever tasted. Eva nearly cried when she discovered pak choi. The toothless man selling it had no idea why the gringa was so happy, but he was very pleased with the sale. Once Eva told a vendor that squishy fruit terrifies her - apparently it does - so that he'd select the right strawberries. Whole families come up from the countryside for the weekend market, and the boys line up to stare at us, gringas being a fairly unusual commodity in this very Honduran space. This week, we saw a father and son shoving at each other in competition for the best view of the three foreign girls gravely sizing up papayas.
The fecundity goes beyond agricultural productivity. The market is bountiful in humanity too, hundreds of filthy faced kids hiding under their parents’ tables, or pushing barrows full of chamomile or garlic. Not just the market: all of Honduras is the most abundantly productive place you can imagine: pregnant women, babies, rotting fruit and vegetables. All the mothers I know are single mothers, and even the most educated middle class girls seem to get pregnant by 22.
Saturday, April 07, 2007
Cuba 2
I haven't gotten the hang of ordering entries chronologically - sorry about this. We're up to 3AM, Saturday night in Havana, which has a nice rhythm to it.
The casa where we were staying was an art deco palace, perfectly restored, with beautiful 1920s furniture, balconies and tasteful artwork: my boyfriend has a gift for choosing holiday accommodation. It was 6 stories up, and the lift was out of bounds unless you were travelling with luggage. We were opening the main door when a youngish guy slipped in beside us, muttering that he was going to his aunt's house. The improbability didn't bother us: in multiple apartment buildings, people often let one another enter without prior interrogations.
He let his three friends in, and our bag was inevitably gone. It was quick, clean, and professional; and there had never been much in the bag in the first place (a travel scrabble set, Simon's notebook, two guidebooks, and Si's mobile phone, which we carried to tell the time). I never felt frightened, though I did feel pissed off. I briefly considered (from the 5th floor) giving chase, but I was wearing high heels. I'm sure they were very annoyed when they discovered how very thin the pickings were.
What surprised me, and what makes this a story worth telling, was the response of our hosts in the casa particular. From our arrival, we had been warned of robberies, but I confess I never took the warning very seriously. I live in Honduras, where people are murdered for their mobile phones, and so I've reached a point where threats are only real to me if I think my life is in danger. I tend to consider myself invulnerable to petty tourist crime, largely because I'm so darn grungy, and most places are crawling with people who are clearly more worth robbing than I am. So these thieves made a bad call, but it's the first time it's happened to me since I lived in Barcelona, and I was happy to have survived unhurt and essentially undamaged (shame about the scrabble though).
From the perspective of our Cuban hosts, the issue isn't personal safety. The issue is the hassle involved in reporting these incidents to the tourist police. And the possible discovery of impropriety - many casas are semi-legal, or host more guests than they're legally allowed to, and thus, simply can't report thefts. All this being the case, our hosts responded to our sob tale of violation and ignonimy as though THEY were the ones who had been violated, and us the perpetrators.
It was 6.30 in the morning, and we were up early to get a bus to Trinidad. I was very very tempted not to tell them (I had a sense of how it was going to play out), but since we had nicked their guide book for its excellent maps, and thus got it stolen, I felt honour bound to let them know. So I gingerly broached the subject.
The first response was reproach: "I told you not to carry a bag! I told you not to walk the streets late at night! You can't trust anyone here... I told you!"
Next came anger: "You let them into the building?! At 1 in the morning?!" (we lied about the time). "You must NEVER do that! Oh no, what can we do?"
Next response, and this took me by surprise, was bigotry: "Sorry about this Carol. Were they black?"
I tried to turn it around. "We weren't hurt," I observed, "and that's the main thing".
Dismissal: "No of course, it's not violent here" (viva la revolución) "but you can't trust anyone. Oh no! I told you not to take a bag".
Our Irish friends who are spending 2 months in Havana learning Spanish confirmed that Cubans are curiously callous in this sense. It may be a combination of paranoia and isolation, and a sense that for the many westerners soaking up the country's atmosphere without understanding its realities, there is no problem that can't be solved by money; while for ordinary Cubans, there's no problem that can. I don't know. If the incident hadn't happened, I would have come away thinking of our hosts as oddly intense but very sweet individuals. I still do think of them that way. But it was a strange insight into their culture.
I'm very interested in any observations on this point...
The casa where we were staying was an art deco palace, perfectly restored, with beautiful 1920s furniture, balconies and tasteful artwork: my boyfriend has a gift for choosing holiday accommodation. It was 6 stories up, and the lift was out of bounds unless you were travelling with luggage. We were opening the main door when a youngish guy slipped in beside us, muttering that he was going to his aunt's house. The improbability didn't bother us: in multiple apartment buildings, people often let one another enter without prior interrogations.
He let his three friends in, and our bag was inevitably gone. It was quick, clean, and professional; and there had never been much in the bag in the first place (a travel scrabble set, Simon's notebook, two guidebooks, and Si's mobile phone, which we carried to tell the time). I never felt frightened, though I did feel pissed off. I briefly considered (from the 5th floor) giving chase, but I was wearing high heels. I'm sure they were very annoyed when they discovered how very thin the pickings were.
What surprised me, and what makes this a story worth telling, was the response of our hosts in the casa particular. From our arrival, we had been warned of robberies, but I confess I never took the warning very seriously. I live in Honduras, where people are murdered for their mobile phones, and so I've reached a point where threats are only real to me if I think my life is in danger. I tend to consider myself invulnerable to petty tourist crime, largely because I'm so darn grungy, and most places are crawling with people who are clearly more worth robbing than I am. So these thieves made a bad call, but it's the first time it's happened to me since I lived in Barcelona, and I was happy to have survived unhurt and essentially undamaged (shame about the scrabble though).
From the perspective of our Cuban hosts, the issue isn't personal safety. The issue is the hassle involved in reporting these incidents to the tourist police. And the possible discovery of impropriety - many casas are semi-legal, or host more guests than they're legally allowed to, and thus, simply can't report thefts. All this being the case, our hosts responded to our sob tale of violation and ignonimy as though THEY were the ones who had been violated, and us the perpetrators.
It was 6.30 in the morning, and we were up early to get a bus to Trinidad. I was very very tempted not to tell them (I had a sense of how it was going to play out), but since we had nicked their guide book for its excellent maps, and thus got it stolen, I felt honour bound to let them know. So I gingerly broached the subject.
The first response was reproach: "I told you not to carry a bag! I told you not to walk the streets late at night! You can't trust anyone here... I told you!"
Next came anger: "You let them into the building?! At 1 in the morning?!" (we lied about the time). "You must NEVER do that! Oh no, what can we do?"
Next response, and this took me by surprise, was bigotry: "Sorry about this Carol. Were they black?"
I tried to turn it around. "We weren't hurt," I observed, "and that's the main thing".
Dismissal: "No of course, it's not violent here" (viva la revolución) "but you can't trust anyone. Oh no! I told you not to take a bag".
Our Irish friends who are spending 2 months in Havana learning Spanish confirmed that Cubans are curiously callous in this sense. It may be a combination of paranoia and isolation, and a sense that for the many westerners soaking up the country's atmosphere without understanding its realities, there is no problem that can't be solved by money; while for ordinary Cubans, there's no problem that can. I don't know. If the incident hadn't happened, I would have come away thinking of our hosts as oddly intense but very sweet individuals. I still do think of them that way. But it was a strange insight into their culture.
I'm very interested in any observations on this point...
CUBA
I returned from Cuba yesterday evening; I'm spending this morning in the purgatory of an aparthotel near the airport in San Pedro Sula, Honduras. It's a good opportunity to catch up on some work-related reading, which is why I'm blogging right now. In the small "Business Centre" of this hotel, beneath the signs prohibiting email, blogging, and children under 16, overweight gringo-Honduran kids screech at each other about their progress on video games. I can think of many places I'd rather be. But, although I wish I was still with Simon, I don't know how long I could handle the exhausting energy of Havana.
The best illustration of the holiday is the Saturday night before we left Havana for Trinidad. My friends were arriving from Honduras that evening, and we'd agreed that we'd swing by their casa particular at around 10.00 to collect them for drinks, food and general merry making. An extraordinary coincidence had led us to pick up and old friend from Trim Co. Meath outside the university building that afternoon, and so it was that the three of us wandered into Ernesto's home to find the three Irish girls who were supposed to be arriving from Honduras that night.
No sign of the Irish girls, so we left them a note, took Ernesto's phone number, and strolled out onto the draining streets of Habana Viejo. We asked (Joe asked) a local if he could recommend a nearby bar where we could wait for our friends. The local - who we came to know as Angel - pointed us to the Plaza Vieja, a standard fairytale square packed with salsa bands and $4 mojitos. The more local joints were mostly shutting up for the evening; Havana isn't the city that never sleeps you might have thought, at least not for the Cubans. Were we interested in santería, asked Angel.
Funny you should ask. In fact, we're very interested indeed in santería. This is the fusion religion brought by the Yoruba people from Nigeria to Cuba on the slave ships, a system of African deities merged with Catholic traditions to get them past the Spaniards who rejected all things "native". The sixteen orishas who survive in Cuba have the characteristics of Catholic saints (St Lazarus is the patron of Havana); but they also have other qualities, more live and interventionist than your average saint. On Cuban streets you often see people dressed from head to toe in white, with lace headbands and long coloured beads: these are new initiates to the religion, the colour of the beads representing the deity to whom they belong. Later, we learn that initiation is expensive; according to Angel because you have to buy the right animals for sacrifice.
So are we interested in santería? Certainly we are! Would we like to see a ritual? Umm. It didn't take long before we were following Angel upstairs into a family home, busy with kids and toys and women at the kitchen table, with a faint sound of drumming overhead. Then up a bockety spiral staircase which led into an attic room packed with people crowding around a small stage-like area.
It was hot and pushy, we were in the entranceway, and couldn't move to make space for anyone. Angel encouraged me to crane my neck, peer through the bodies to see the clear area, where two men flailed around to the drumming; I was informed they were brujos - witches - though I don't know if that's what he meant. Their eyes rolled, and one had a bottle of rum in his hand (rum is unbelievably cheap in this part of the world), which he occasionally gulped only to spurt it out of his mouth. When he was led out of the room, a mantle over his head and bent double, there was nowhere for him to go but past us, shoving urgently as we pressed ourselves as far into the wall as we could.
Angel occasionally whispered elements to interpret the event for us, and made it clear that he was our - sponsor? protector? - in the room. But I was completely completely lost. I had no idea what I was witnessing, or why, or how the other people there felt about my presence (though my guess is they felt indifferent). After 10 minutes at most, Angel led us authoritatively back down the stairs, while the service continued. At the foot of the stairs, in somebody's kitchen, Simon spotted the domestic touch of a small blackboard on which the services were carefully outlined for the coming month, much like a village church, which I guess is what we had just left.
Angel took us across the road to a paladar with a neon sign and a band playing tunes from the Buena Vista Social Club, and $4 mojitos, one of which we bought for him, to thank him. We drank a few beers, talked about the embargo, and then went back to collect the girls. They still hadn't arrived, and didn't until 5AM that morning. On our way home, at about 3AM, Simon's bag was stolen in the entrance to our casa. Which is a whole separate entry, I think.
The best illustration of the holiday is the Saturday night before we left Havana for Trinidad. My friends were arriving from Honduras that evening, and we'd agreed that we'd swing by their casa particular at around 10.00 to collect them for drinks, food and general merry making. An extraordinary coincidence had led us to pick up and old friend from Trim Co. Meath outside the university building that afternoon, and so it was that the three of us wandered into Ernesto's home to find the three Irish girls who were supposed to be arriving from Honduras that night.
No sign of the Irish girls, so we left them a note, took Ernesto's phone number, and strolled out onto the draining streets of Habana Viejo. We asked (Joe asked) a local if he could recommend a nearby bar where we could wait for our friends. The local - who we came to know as Angel - pointed us to the Plaza Vieja, a standard fairytale square packed with salsa bands and $4 mojitos. The more local joints were mostly shutting up for the evening; Havana isn't the city that never sleeps you might have thought, at least not for the Cubans. Were we interested in santería, asked Angel.
Funny you should ask. In fact, we're very interested indeed in santería. This is the fusion religion brought by the Yoruba people from Nigeria to Cuba on the slave ships, a system of African deities merged with Catholic traditions to get them past the Spaniards who rejected all things "native". The sixteen orishas who survive in Cuba have the characteristics of Catholic saints (St Lazarus is the patron of Havana); but they also have other qualities, more live and interventionist than your average saint. On Cuban streets you often see people dressed from head to toe in white, with lace headbands and long coloured beads: these are new initiates to the religion, the colour of the beads representing the deity to whom they belong. Later, we learn that initiation is expensive; according to Angel because you have to buy the right animals for sacrifice.
So are we interested in santería? Certainly we are! Would we like to see a ritual? Umm. It didn't take long before we were following Angel upstairs into a family home, busy with kids and toys and women at the kitchen table, with a faint sound of drumming overhead. Then up a bockety spiral staircase which led into an attic room packed with people crowding around a small stage-like area.
It was hot and pushy, we were in the entranceway, and couldn't move to make space for anyone. Angel encouraged me to crane my neck, peer through the bodies to see the clear area, where two men flailed around to the drumming; I was informed they were brujos - witches - though I don't know if that's what he meant. Their eyes rolled, and one had a bottle of rum in his hand (rum is unbelievably cheap in this part of the world), which he occasionally gulped only to spurt it out of his mouth. When he was led out of the room, a mantle over his head and bent double, there was nowhere for him to go but past us, shoving urgently as we pressed ourselves as far into the wall as we could.
Angel occasionally whispered elements to interpret the event for us, and made it clear that he was our - sponsor? protector? - in the room. But I was completely completely lost. I had no idea what I was witnessing, or why, or how the other people there felt about my presence (though my guess is they felt indifferent). After 10 minutes at most, Angel led us authoritatively back down the stairs, while the service continued. At the foot of the stairs, in somebody's kitchen, Simon spotted the domestic touch of a small blackboard on which the services were carefully outlined for the coming month, much like a village church, which I guess is what we had just left.
Angel took us across the road to a paladar with a neon sign and a band playing tunes from the Buena Vista Social Club, and $4 mojitos, one of which we bought for him, to thank him. We drank a few beers, talked about the embargo, and then went back to collect the girls. They still hadn't arrived, and didn't until 5AM that morning. On our way home, at about 3AM, Simon's bag was stolen in the entrance to our casa. Which is a whole separate entry, I think.
Thursday, March 22, 2007
Green toenails, green fields...
St. Patrick's Day in the Irish house in Tegucigalpa. We are, as you know, three girls, and so apart from the obvious brewing margaritas (kinda green) while listening to the Pogues, the afternoon's preparations had to involve green glitter, orange jewellery, and matching emerald toenails. Our St Patrick's Day party was highly anticipated, and I think it made the grade.
Anticipated. By the Honduran staff in the office mostly, who have a policy of being as Paddyphiliac as possible until the moment the stereo is turned on. There was a flurry of excitement for literally months beforehand, and the officious but fabulous administrator in the office insisted on making lists of attendees, budgeting for food (but never enough for drink: that had to be heavily subsidised by the Irish who knew how much would be drunk), and staying up into the small hours all week cutting out paper shamrocks, and designing green paper hats. The effort put into it all was phenomenal. The patio looked like 5th Avenue before the parade. And the piñata! The giant, leprechaun-shaped piñata! Stuffed with green sweets and condoms (because one year they got green condoms, and somehow it's passed into the received wisdom that condoms are a specifically Paddy's Day treat), and smashed open violently by three boys using the crozier of St Patrick himself. (Is the crozier the hat or the stick? Obviously, I mean the stick. Please do correct me if I'm wrong, religious pedants of the world).
So all things Irish and delightful - with the exception of the music. Salsa, merengue, regatón, all night long. From time to time, one of us would slope over to slip on some U2, or Thin Lizzy - you know, it wasn't exactly Enya (although my Canadian friend did try to put on Enya at about 4AM: I vetoed that as loudly as I did the Cranberries). Not a chance - it would be whipped off before you could bellow a single word plaintively into the ether (" All's Quiet, On.... what the fuck??!"). I don't know what it is about this most tolerant, even placid of people. But our rousing celtic tunes don't rouse them. They slide off the dance floor despondently, just as the Europeams hop up, ready for some headbanging fun, and sit around the sides of the patio waiting patiently for us to put on another song that allows for hip grinding and carefully simulated sex. So the playlist didn't get played: no Christy, no Frames, no Emotional Fish or Hothouse Flowers or Waterboys. And by the time, at 5AM, that I was refusing to go to bed until we had all danced just once to Where's Me Jumper, the CDs were uniformly coated in rum.
It was, my friends, a fantastic party.
Lá 'le Phádraig Shona Dhiabh go léir.
Anticipated. By the Honduran staff in the office mostly, who have a policy of being as Paddyphiliac as possible until the moment the stereo is turned on. There was a flurry of excitement for literally months beforehand, and the officious but fabulous administrator in the office insisted on making lists of attendees, budgeting for food (but never enough for drink: that had to be heavily subsidised by the Irish who knew how much would be drunk), and staying up into the small hours all week cutting out paper shamrocks, and designing green paper hats. The effort put into it all was phenomenal. The patio looked like 5th Avenue before the parade. And the piñata! The giant, leprechaun-shaped piñata! Stuffed with green sweets and condoms (because one year they got green condoms, and somehow it's passed into the received wisdom that condoms are a specifically Paddy's Day treat), and smashed open violently by three boys using the crozier of St Patrick himself. (Is the crozier the hat or the stick? Obviously, I mean the stick. Please do correct me if I'm wrong, religious pedants of the world).
So all things Irish and delightful - with the exception of the music. Salsa, merengue, regatón, all night long. From time to time, one of us would slope over to slip on some U2, or Thin Lizzy - you know, it wasn't exactly Enya (although my Canadian friend did try to put on Enya at about 4AM: I vetoed that as loudly as I did the Cranberries). Not a chance - it would be whipped off before you could bellow a single word plaintively into the ether (" All's Quiet, On.... what the fuck??!"). I don't know what it is about this most tolerant, even placid of people. But our rousing celtic tunes don't rouse them. They slide off the dance floor despondently, just as the Europeams hop up, ready for some headbanging fun, and sit around the sides of the patio waiting patiently for us to put on another song that allows for hip grinding and carefully simulated sex. So the playlist didn't get played: no Christy, no Frames, no Emotional Fish or Hothouse Flowers or Waterboys. And by the time, at 5AM, that I was refusing to go to bed until we had all danced just once to Where's Me Jumper, the CDs were uniformly coated in rum.
It was, my friends, a fantastic party.
Lá 'le Phádraig Shona Dhiabh go léir.
Monday, March 12, 2007
Cosy
What I miss about home can be summed up easily in a single word: cosy. Honduras is many things, many great things, like beautiful, hot, fun, fascinating, amusing - as well as some horrible things like dangerous, perplexing, and poor. But what it never ever is is cosy.
This week we suffered a four day frente frio, cold front. They blow in and out from time to time, and they're miserable when they come. Everything is cold and damp, and there's no escape apart from bed. You sit on the sofa piled high with blankets, as the breeze comes in through the slat-windows, and whips around the house. When you shower, rain comes in from the skylight (we don't have a ladder so I can't close it; and most of the time I wouldn't want to), mingling cold with hot water, and dampening your towel. I miss fires. I miss polo neck jumpers. I miss soft furnishings. And pubs that are designed as a refuge from the elements, dark caves of places with orange lights and thick black beer, I'm thinking very specifically of the Lord Edward here, and I miss it. I miss feeling cosy.
The frente frio passed on Thursday, and by Saturday it was back to applying the factor 15 to go outside for 10 minutes. But I still miss all of those things. Cosy is more than just weather and weather-preparedness. It's that sense of being - cushioned - which I have in Ireland, and which maybe prompted me to leave. But which I miss. The security of being part of many different communities, of having a million different places to turn on a bad day. Knowing the geography of a place so well that there's a perfect destination for every state of mind. The opposite, I guess, of adventure. Knowledge. Comfort. Cosiness.
I have a lot of ex-pat friends here. Predictably enough, all are, in one way or another, searching for something, none have a defined sense of belonging to any one place. I used to think it was romantic to feel that nowhere was home. I used to consider myself a wandering spirit, wafting past in a haze of adventure and openness. Of all my friends here, now I'm the only one who can put my hand up honestly and say: I have a home, and I love it. Home is Dublin, is my little house in Darley's Terrace, the kitchen where Simon's cooking and surviving on much more than apples (you'll be happy to know). Beyond that, it's where my brother and sister are, and my family, and many of my friends. It's where the map of the streets also maps my life, landmarks in my personal history. And that's very lucky, because nobody I love here really knows where they want to be; and few of them think that's romantic anymore. They're much more impressed by the romance of being in love and having made a commitment and seeing it through. I'm impressed by that too, to be honest.
I think I decided this week that I wasn't going to stay in Honduras for more than a year. We'll see what happens. There are compelling reasons to be here from the point of view of my career. But my life goes way beyond that. I wanted to be adventurous and exotic and romantic once. Now I'll settle for cosy. I don't think that's so bad.
This week we suffered a four day frente frio, cold front. They blow in and out from time to time, and they're miserable when they come. Everything is cold and damp, and there's no escape apart from bed. You sit on the sofa piled high with blankets, as the breeze comes in through the slat-windows, and whips around the house. When you shower, rain comes in from the skylight (we don't have a ladder so I can't close it; and most of the time I wouldn't want to), mingling cold with hot water, and dampening your towel. I miss fires. I miss polo neck jumpers. I miss soft furnishings. And pubs that are designed as a refuge from the elements, dark caves of places with orange lights and thick black beer, I'm thinking very specifically of the Lord Edward here, and I miss it. I miss feeling cosy.
The frente frio passed on Thursday, and by Saturday it was back to applying the factor 15 to go outside for 10 minutes. But I still miss all of those things. Cosy is more than just weather and weather-preparedness. It's that sense of being - cushioned - which I have in Ireland, and which maybe prompted me to leave. But which I miss. The security of being part of many different communities, of having a million different places to turn on a bad day. Knowing the geography of a place so well that there's a perfect destination for every state of mind. The opposite, I guess, of adventure. Knowledge. Comfort. Cosiness.
I have a lot of ex-pat friends here. Predictably enough, all are, in one way or another, searching for something, none have a defined sense of belonging to any one place. I used to think it was romantic to feel that nowhere was home. I used to consider myself a wandering spirit, wafting past in a haze of adventure and openness. Of all my friends here, now I'm the only one who can put my hand up honestly and say: I have a home, and I love it. Home is Dublin, is my little house in Darley's Terrace, the kitchen where Simon's cooking and surviving on much more than apples (you'll be happy to know). Beyond that, it's where my brother and sister are, and my family, and many of my friends. It's where the map of the streets also maps my life, landmarks in my personal history. And that's very lucky, because nobody I love here really knows where they want to be; and few of them think that's romantic anymore. They're much more impressed by the romance of being in love and having made a commitment and seeing it through. I'm impressed by that too, to be honest.
I think I decided this week that I wasn't going to stay in Honduras for more than a year. We'll see what happens. There are compelling reasons to be here from the point of view of my career. But my life goes way beyond that. I wanted to be adventurous and exotic and romantic once. Now I'll settle for cosy. I don't think that's so bad.
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