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:

• 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.
  

I'll be out of the office for yonks starting on Wednesday, but I'll pass by in case anyone wants to send me commiserations on the departure of my youth. Me, I don't mind a bit. I'm going to Mexico in 2 weeks time!

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!

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.

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:

• 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.
  

I feel that I should make a point of listing the things I like about Honduras. And I will. Soon. (Hint: it's not just its proximity to Guatemala, though that's in there too).

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.

So anyway, shall we start with some updates? I went through a brief phase, after easter, of profound enchantment with this country, and started to make long term plans, and imagined the conversation in which I’d try to convince simp to come live here from October. It’s a beautiful beautiful country, and I have a good life here. Good friends, fascinating job, pleasant lifestyle. Hot weather. Use of a swimming pool whenever I need it, and where people I know turn up and gossip. That’s really all you need, no? On a good day.

The bad day came when our house in Dublin was broken into (Big sister, could you not mention this to our brother? I’m pretty sure he doesn’t read this. Thanks!). Although nothing of mine was stolen, and the break-in was clean and unthreatening in every way, psychically it had an effect from which I’m still recovering. Work got hard again. All my friends announced they were moving back to their respective countries. I wasn’t going to the pool that much anyway. And simp was so so far away.

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.

And that’s the thing about this whole set up: when work is going well, it’s the perfect life, and I’m a blessed, spoiled brat, as I always have been. But when work stops working out, or reality invades via a worrying email or bad news from home, Honduras seems like a silly indulgence that doesn’t quite make sense.

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.

Now the upshot of all of this is not problematic. I have to choose between those two lives, but only geographically. I hope to continue working in development, and I intend to remain with simp. So really, the only tricky part is where. It’s a decision I make categorically from time to time, only to change my mind, so my advice to you, reader, is to take no notice whatsoever.

Routines

I have two housemates, both Irish girls, who are by far my best friends here. Both are leaving in July. This has prompted numerous conversations about what we love about Honduras, and what we’ll miss. Out favourite thing is Friday evenings.

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.

Honduras is the most fertile, fecund place you can imagine. Parts of the market reek of ripe, bitter fruit, a smell I remember powerfully from the orphanage in Guatemala as heaps of marañones – cashew fruit. Everything grows here. Fresh fruit salad means watermelon, papaya, melon, pineapple and mango. We buy a bag of strawberries and a bag of blackberries every week, just for juicing. Stalls are marked out by ludicrous heaps of oranges, mangoes or potatoes; piles so immense they can’t possibly all be eaten – but they can’t not, since they’ve come all the way from the mountains and can’t be taken back there. There’s a corner that is heavily scented with blossoms: immense tropical flowers, lilies and orchids and god knows what for about a dollar a throw.

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.

Anyway. We finish our shopping and wander out delighted with ourselves. On the way home we stop in a petrol station to buy wine, and then we go home and cook prawns and watch a video. It's been a solid Friday night ritual for 5 months now, and I dread the day the girls leave and I start going partying on Friday nights instead.

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...

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.

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.

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.

Look at me!

Hey - check this out! They've taken the firewall down! I can get blogger in the office! This could be the beginning of something very dangerous....

In fact, I've avoided checking whether I could get blogger in the office for about 2 months now, despite my hunch. All my good intentions done for. I hereby commit to be just as flaky and unreliable as ever with blogging, because I. Will. Not. Blog. From. Work.
With whoever y'all are (Clare & Sharon & Lisa & Rane and Siobhán. Hey! Do any boys read this thing?!) as my witness.

Nonetheless, I've been meaning to chat about my Saturday night for a while now, and what's more, it fulfils Sharon's request for day-to-day detail.

On Saturday we went to our poshest nightclub yet. It's called Kabbalah (if there's one thing Tegucigalpa isn't, it's sophisticated) and it's what would be called a superpub in Dublin. Characteristics as follows:

• Extravagantly long queue for entry.
• Absurd door policy. The bouncers didn't want to let us in because we didn't have a reservation. A reservation to enter a jumped up pub full of pissed fifteen year olds at 11 o'clock at night. That's when I decided to go home. (To spare you the anticipation, I went home at closing time, once they dragged me down from the stage and wrestled the tequila from my hand).
• A $6 dollar entry fee (this is VERY much money in Tegus) sweetened by a "free" drink of your choice - as long as it's rum and coke.
• Ludicrous middle eastern themed decor; gold lamps, yellow painted walls, that sort of thing. Sofas.
• IDIOTS. By the million. The place, which is enormous, was choc full of GOBSHITES.
• And so on. I think you get the general picture quite clearly.

Being in very very bad form with the whole place, the only thing for it was to get royally drunk, which I did. On tequila, god bless me. At one point, a ten foot black man approached to chat us up, because, like him, we were clearly foreign and English speaking. I got trapped talking to him. He told me that he worked for the American government, which point I tried to push, thinking that he must work for the CIA. But it was very quickly evident that he wasn't bright enough to work for the CIA. Lord, he wasn't bright enough to work for KFC. He commented that we spoke very good English, and didn't bat an eyelid when Eva pointed out that it was our mother tongue (probably because he didn't know what a mother tongue was). He was quite sweet, although completely, utterly vacuous. As I was avoiding eye contact, and as he was 10 foot tall, I never saw the ostentatious diamond earring that turned my friends off.

And bless us all and my stupidity, it took Lorna to point out to me that he was clearly US military.

I felt dirty. And that was before I saw the two women draped over him later.

Rambling thoughts after a conversation with Clare

What follows is an undescriptive and polemical monologue, of the sort that Eoin Keehan would not approve. Apologies in advance.

First, a disclaimer. What I write about here on this blog is a worm's eye view. That's what I have to offer, a completely subjective, and tiny, perspective on the big story (of "development"). And perhaps it's a bit baffling, particularly the part about my work. So it has to be said that what I do in the area of citizen participation is one contribution to the broader development project in Honduras. And what I do is perhaps the least obvious part. So to be clear, my organisation does support more tangible things in this country: training for farmers in sustainable agriculture, HIV education, judicial struggles for land rights. And my part: participacion ciudadana, with the intention that with a democratic government, northern NGOs wouldn't have to fund all the other things, which are basic services. Now for the blog:

The skype obsession continues unabated. Today I spoke to Clare in Paris. And my brother in Galway. I have never felt so connected in my life, I have never felt that technological advances made such a profound difference to my life. All that talk of the digital divide passed me by, because I am so darn lo-tech. But man alive, skype is different. It rocks.

I spoke to Clare in Paris about Paris. She said that it's made her into a socialist (some raised eyebrows here: Clare sweetie, you were ALWAYS a roaring trot). I can just imagine: I always feel uncomfortable with the trappings of imperial grandeur in big cities - and Paris defines that - for Clare, it just makes the exclusion more apparent. She described it as "the exact opposite" of what I'm experiencing. Au contraire. In fact, I experience almost as much wealth as poverty. And like Clare, I'm taken aback by the extent to which the wealthy seem unconscious of their blessed status.

The permeation of American culture is absolute here. When we go out, we often go to places that seem to be modelled on MTV: barely dressed high heeled ladies and sports casual men gyrating to identikit pop music. The wealthy speak English, they're educated in Miami. And I'm struck by a poverty in their culture, which is an imitation of one that (for all I disdain it) runs deep in the USA, and has no real roots here in Honduras. The poor too imitate the gringos: nobody is so poor they can't afford bottles and bottles of Coca Cola, and for special occasions maybe a trip to McDonalds or Popeyes. And, for anyone with a modicum of hope, ambition or desperation, the only realistic exit from the mess that Honduras is in is a trip over the Mexican border.
The presence of the US here, it's palpable. We have over 100 tv channels (we pay for cable), of which the majority are American, or pan-Latin American (like CNN en español). They portray a Latin American way of life that doesn't exist, a pretence of a functioning state, secure streets, the existence of a broad group of people who grew up with the same opportunities. No, that doesn't exist in the US either, but it's much less of a stretch to imagine it.

I'm more a part of that pretend life than I am a part of the life of the poor. It strikes me hard from time to time, when I really look at the conditions of the people who live on the roadside. The nature of my work is such that most of the people I meet are at the very least literate and outspoken. I work in "citizen empowerment", and the organisations I support talk endlessly about developing leadership, supporting natural leaders. These aren't generally the most needy: of their very nature they're not, it's a truism that you need bread before politics.

But is IS the real life! It IS more sincere than the fake American dream that makes up my experience of Tegucigalpa. The level of engagement that exists here is astonishing, given the mess the country's in. You'd never see it in Ireland, political engagement from people who don't have running water. Perhaps they should be rioting. But rioting won't make that much of a difference: the government gives in to bully boy tactics (say, with teacher's and police salaries) and the most powerful groups win, but the structure never changes.

A couple of things occur to me here. 1) that this blog doth protest too much. I know. Please comment: tell me to stop whining, tell me to write about my feelings or about my friends, or whatever you want me to write about. And 2) I often refer to the mess the country's in, but that's not something I've described once. I'll rectify that shortly, now that I feel more qualified to diagnose Honduras as a place. And 3): Simon, it's long past the time you were supposed to blog. You were here at Christmas for god's sakes. We're all waiting.

I'll be away for a week and a bit on the north coast, so not sure when I'm going to blog again, but keep checking. And commenting. And hey! Skype me! carol.ballantine

Skype

Oooh, two posts in one day, I'm such a junky! I just wanted to describe where I am now....

I'm in an internet cafe in the mall, over-airconditioned, which isn't helping my trembly hungover state. Next to me, a family is screeching at their computer, taking it in turns with the headsets. Now, they're annoying the life out of me, but nonetheless, this is pretty cool. It's a normal enough looking family, not the typical denizens of the mall with their fancy clothes and their ostentatious habit of speaking English to each other to set themselves apart. And they're using a webcam, so they're looking at their relative in the US, and asking about his job and the other people they know out there, and filling him in on their news. And I think that's really really cool.

On Friday, I skyped Lorraine, who also has a webcam. It was like hanging out in her flat! I hadn't seen her in 2 years, and suddenly, we were hanging out! Skype and webcams have changed my life. They are SO COOL. You all have to get them, and then tell me when we can talk. (Honduras is 6 hours behind Ireland, and 19 hours behind New Zealand). So so cool.

Colomoncagua, Intibucá

One of the things I really like about Honduras is the place names. Plenty of important people in my life can't pronounce Tegucigalpa, and I'm not sure they plan on learning. And then I have to arrange a visit to Colomoncagua, a name not even my Spanish teacher was quite able to manage. The little town is going to have a seriously hard time getting up in the world, and its problems only start with the tricky name.

(it took me about ten minutes to write the paragraph above. I'm not sure why I'm more hungover than most Sundays, though I guess it has to do with the fact that I started drinking earlier than usual, and didn't stop until, my friend Emma tells me, I got into a cab at 5 this morning. Eurrrrlllgggghhhh.)

So on Monday myself and the office driver headed to Intibucá, to the town my German colleague had described as el culo del mundo - the backside of the world. And how. The last leg of the journey, from La Esperanza to Colomoncagua, was a distance of about 80 kilometres, and took us 3 and a half hours. The road, over and through the mountains, is unpaved, and the majority of the traffic you meet is equine, which makes sense since I imagine that a horse can travel faster than a 4x4 around there. I really need to start taking my camera out with me, and posting pictures on this blog. It was stunning.

In the 80s, the town used to host a camp for Salvadoran refugees, being on the edge of the border with El Salvador. Our accountant tells us that when she used to visit there, the road was worse - I don't believe her. It can't be any worse than not there.
Along the way, we gave a lot of people lifts who were standing on the side of the road. There's an organisational policy that we don't use the back of the pick-up for carrying people (my friend explained why one day when we were driving through the hills in the back of someone else's pick up: "if there's an accident, you die"), which I'd explain to them as they clambered up, opening the back door to their astonishment. Nice people, shy, quiet. Very poor.
The hills of Intibucá are squillions of miles from Tegucigalpa, literally and figuratively. It's a total wilderness, forests and dry choked rivers and birds of prey spinning overhead. Hot during the day and freezing at night. The small towns which string along the road for El Salvador all have electricity, but the water services are poor, and I have no idea at all how (or if) the kids get to school. Some of the houses have more holes than walls, and there are rags stuffed in the gaps where adobe blocks fell out. At 10AM, we pass a gang of men carrying shovels and machetes, their day's work in the fields finished now that the sun has become so strong.

Our driver Juan is new, over-qualified and keen to work in development. He's fantastic. And he's absolutely animated by the visit (he gets animated easily, which is one of his endearing traits). From here in the wilderness, our work makes more sense: you can sense the need, the objectives are palpable. And maybe attainable too. I think that what draws people to working in emergency contexts is sometimes the sense that where needs are extreme, almost anything you do has to improve conditions somewhat (not at all the case, but still); and that's how it felt out there in Colomoncagua. It's easier there to become angry, easier to feel robbed and deceived by a system that can't even clothe these people. Juan would like to dig his feet in and try to improve conditions right here. And we chat about development models, and empowering people to do things themselves; but on a personal level, I'm with him completely. It's a paradise. I'd quite like to stay too.

On Saturday, I went to a march against corruption in the capital, which was pleasant if a little toothless, then I played frisbee with 2 friends on a deserted running track. Now my nose is crispy with sunburn, of the kind I haven't got since the day I spontaneously travelled down the Rio Dulce on a yacht with Lucy. I'm ashamed and sore, and of all days to have lost my suncream, yesterday was not the day. That may also be contributing to the hangover that's made this entry take me 40 minutes to write.

Civil Society, part 2

Over the Christmas (as we say back home), two environmental activists were assassinated by members of the Honduran police force for their attempts to combat illegal logging. They belonged to the group I visited a few months ago, in this entry. There's a good briefing on the story in English here. That's what was in my inbox when I came back to work in January. I just wanted to mention it.

But here's an insight into how we work in a small donor NGO: everybody wants to do the follow-up on that case. Suddenly, the organisation involved is everybody's partner organisation, the issue falls under everybody's theme (it's human rights; it's civil society activism; it's environmental management; it's livelihood security; no: it's an issue for the director - and you see, it IS all of those things). There's no conflict around this, it's just revealing that everybody finds assasination so sexy. I include myself in that.

Local democratic participation is less sexy. On Friday I headed about 80 kilometers up the road to the municipality of Talanga to chat to the community about their participatory budget. I was taken aback by the mess of the place: it's a decent-sized town by rural Honduran standards, and it was washed by mud thanks to the light drizzle: none of the roads are paved. Only the three main streets of the town - out of the whole municipality - have any sort of a sewage system. The municipality has sod all money, and traditionally, what it has had it's spent on backhanders and pocket-lining. Now, Puerto Alegre style, the citizens are coming to the town hall to write the budget.

There's not much room for them in the town hall, primarily because nobody stays in their office. The place is wide open, wind filing down the corridors behind the rows of shuffling people shaking hands and greeting each other, hanging out on park benches, then shuffling back out again, the important business of hand-shaking being done for the day. I got to interview the mayor, a huge man with a busy politicky attitude, who I swear to god could be from Tipperary with his pale skin and big rosy cheeks. He's thrilled with the whole process, thrilled that the people have a say in their spending, thrilled that he's better than the last mayor (he spent a lot of time convincing me of that, though last time I looked I didn't have a vote in Talanga). I left the mayor - he gave me his card, cualquier cosa, he told me, estoy para servirle - and joined the transparency commission of local volunteers involved in writing and following up on the budget.
This crowd aren't as poor as the ones I met in December. This is far from the poorest place in Honduras. And they're a lot more buzzed. In November, they attended consultations all over the municipality to find out how the locals would spend the pittance the municipality had to spend, given the choice. They gave them the choice. Then they held a great big open assembly, in which everybody came and submitted their projects, and they agreed the criteria, and they voted for the best ones. The result was a budget devised and approved by the citizens of Talanga.

To be honest I don't think this budget is any better - or any more feasible - than the budgets that the mayors of old used to write sitting in their baths full of champagne. But it does make a difference. I think it'll take a few years for people to realise that even when the municipality isn't robbing them blind, they're not much better off. But one day they will realise that, because they're watching closely now. And they'll start to think about spending the money a bit more strategically, and they'll think about the money they have no control over: national spending, the way taxes are charged. At least, I hope that's what'll happen, and I know that there are plenty of local NGOs encouraging them to think that way. Right now, it's their engagement that counts, which is itself a new thing for the sleepy people of Talanga.

You know what they're most exercised about though? About paying taxes. They're obsessed with telling everybody to pay their taxes, so that the municipality can get more money. I found that a bit odd, and a little wrong: I'm a big believer in taxation, but I don't really believe they'd been given reason enough to trust the mayor to spend their money well just yet.

It's a long slow process this participation business. It's not really tested properly anywhere yet. But people are watching. That watching, that can go so far as to inhibit policemen from shooting environmentalists with impunity. And that would be nothing short of sexy.

Tegucigalpa: Back broken on

I was coming home from my SHIT Spanish school yesterday evening, chatting to the taxi driver, looking down at the neon on the Bulevard Morazan, and a wave of warmth for this damn city came over me. This is bad news for Simp, but good news for me. Good news for you guys too, who respond so quickly to emotional blackmail. Thanks for the comments, and the emails: you're all legends.

It's taken 3 months for me to feel warmth for Tegucigalpa, and in the end, it was a good old drinking session that sorted it all out. Two enabling factors: 1) the arrival of an Irish tv crew to film one of our partners for a week, and 2) (somewhat improbably) the decision on the part of a bunch of sporting heathens that the best possible way to spend a Saturday evening would be watching Honduras play Denmark in a friendly match in the national stadium.
The match was lousy. There were two goals, one apiece, equally forgettable. There were a couple of Danes dotted around the stadium (most of whom ended up out for dinner with us and the tv crew, somehow), and not so many Hondurans. When, about 60 minutes into the game, Denmark scored the first goal, the Hondurans all stood up and cheered them delightedly. Apparently that's what they do: if their team is shit, they'll just switch allegiance, and hiss and jeer their own lads. You can draw your own conclusion about the Honduran character, and its appreciation of loyalty.
You don't want to know about my Saturday night: suffice to say it made me very happy. And ended, having involved weeing in a traffic island at 3.00AM, at a house party full of Honduran people who didn't look like they'd shoot you for your mobile phone or boo their own national team; rather, a bit like my mates.

Now, I put all that in their so's you'd know not to worry about me. I'm definitely settling in. I'm off to write a serious blog about civil society now: you should read it for homework.

Blank

I'm sorry, but I have nothing to say. I don't know if anyone's reading this, but I've run out of ideas. I can't determine what's interesting or unusual any more. But I've just finished catching up on my friends' blogs (and I commented on All Of Them, sometimes twice), and I'm feeling all nostalgic for my buddies. Ahem. I'm sorry, I'm being maudlin. I need to go shopping, I think...

I met a CIA man on Friday night, working in the US embassy here and broadly spying on the Sandinistas. He talked about his Christian rock band. Not sure if that was a cover, or if it was sincere - but he didn't seem that interested in maintaining a cover.

That's actually the only interesting thing that's happened to me this week. I'll try to come up with more, and I'll let you know.

Really people, if you're reading, PLEASE post a comment. I have lost all sense of whether this is being read or not. (Clare, Lucy, you're exempted, for being exemplary. Everyone else, you should be more like Clare and Lucy).

Travels in Central America

Sorry about the radio silence everyone: I've been on holidays. Simp flew home yesterday morning, so after an incredible hiaitus, I'm back to the continuity of my Tegus life that you've been following right here on this blog. No boring droning on about civil society right now though: I'm still thinking about my holidays.

For people who are interested in these things, our itinerary was as follows: a week in Utila (an island off the north coast of Honduras) learning to scuba dive; then a day in Copán Ruinas, some of the Mayan world's best preserved ruins; New Year's Eve in Antigua de Guatemala; and finally some quiet time relaxing and hiking around the spectacular Lago de Atitlan. At the end of 3 weeks, Simp joined me for a week in Tegucigalpa, where I worked, and he cooked and checked out the city. I've invited him to guest blog on his experience of the above.

I know a decent number of readers of this blog have been in some or all of the places listed above, and I don't think any of them have been here in recent years. So I'm interested to know if my observations ring true with any of you. Here, for your comments and consideration, are my observations:

• Have there always been this many gringos in Central America? I learned more about American culture in my travels than about Guatemalan. Here's the profile of the majority of gringos I met - and we struck up short term travellers' realtionships with about 7 of them: West Coast (California or Oregon) intellectuallish (teachers, movie people, events managers) left wing, well-travelled, tedious in their descriptions of their previous travels, jewish or zionist (no less than 4 of them had travelled to Israel, one for his HONEYMOON), middle class (if that wasn't obvious). Have you heard of Trader Joe's? They all shop in Trader Joe's. I think that's kind of equivalent to Waitrose. Which, at a stretch, is kind of equivalent to Superquinn. When I was backpacking here 5 years ago, the people I met were almost entirely European. Dutch, Swedish, Danish, and Canadians from British Columbia (now they're all Quebequooise.. what gives?). The vast majority of Americans I met were working here, mainly as Peace Corps. Has there been a sea change in American attitudes to Central America as a tourist destination.. or have I slipped into a different class of travel this time, the one the gringos always occupied?
• You see, before, I (or rather, me and Luce) had a very floppy time schedule and we travelled mainly by chicken bus. It was Very Much the case that the journey was the destination. This time round, we only had three weeks, and we were covering what are in fact fairly substantial distances, and doing them as a loop rather than a straight line getting ever closer to our destination. So we took a lot of tourist buses, and a few flights. This altered our experience of travel massively. Instead of having your head tucked into the armpit of a man with a white hat, gold teeth and a big machete, you're bored silly by a Lonely Planet wielding kiwi asserting that Tikal is "just like Angkor Wat". As though everything can be reduced to a giant National Geographic picture book, the ruins, the jungles, the handicrafts, the native peoples - completely without any political or social context. Sitting on those buses with those people (and they were nice people), I was struck again and again by the fact that they didn't even know Guatemala was poor. I swear they didn't. Just pretty.
• Shit - it's getting dark outside, and we all know what that means in this town. I should either be drunk and oblivious to personal safety, or safe at home. I'll return to this theme again though. If you know this part of the world at all, please comment. Is it changing, becoming more commodified - or am I just seeing different things now I'm not as broke??

Social capital

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

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

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

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

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

A More Just Society

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

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

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

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