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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.