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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.