AJS--Honduras (iv)

In the recent past at least, Honduras has never risen or fallen into civil war, not like, for instance, Nicaragua, or today Venezuela. There is a long and stout Spanish era in its history, just as there is in all of Latin America. Then, for a century or more, Honduras was the original "banana republic," the government essentially under the thumb of two fruit giants--Chiquita and Dole--both of whom are based in the States. For more than a few decades, those two multi-nationals took turn running things, as if the government was nothing more than an instrument panel.

In some significant societal line items, Honduras was falling behind the rest of Central America. They didn't do well at all at educating their kids, infant mortality was high, as was poverty and death on the streets. Honduras was as dangerous a place as any in the Americas--for a time, 85 deaths per 100,000; the gun crazy U.S.A., registers only five. (For the record, Japan is lowest homicide rate in the world at .5 per hundred thousand people.) As legality and morality sunk, corruption soared, as you might guess. Honduras, a country and culture celebrated for its charming, peaceful nature, was falling into dysfunction.

Drugs are a problem--oddly enough, not drug usage, but drug trafficking. It makes no sense to drug bosses to sell drugs in Honduras; they don't make money off poor people. Instead, they run them through Honduras and market them royally in the U.S. of A., where a couple saddle bags full of whatever is vastly more valuable. Still, moving contraband, the drugs, creates gangs and the filthy lucre that becomes a huge problem.

There are no mythic heroes here. There are martyrs, but if you're thinking you're going to hear that a few high-minded yankee do-gooders came in on white horses and strong-armed the country back up to its knees, Kurt Ver Beek and Jo Ann Van Engen would be first to demur. The first step, as it always is or should be, was for them, Yankees from a place called Calvin College, to learn to see Honduras not as an verdant garden for social research, but as home. 

The two of them, greatly interested in relief work, moved in to Honduras. To stay. 

Let me hit the pause button. Read those words over again. No horizontal commitment could be greater or more profound. They moved in to Honduras to stay. It's somewhat unlikely that anyone reading these words lives each day and night in an abode less North American than they do today in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. When their section of the city has no water, they have no water. They run on dangerous streets, buy their food at street markets, have friends, many of them, who've never been up north. They're not on an errand, a work or a church group. They moved to Honduras to stay.

And one of the first things that struck them was that Honduras had lots and lots of NGOs and relief troops (the airport is full of them), lots of people willing and able to rescue the babies from the river and even help others learn to fish. Honduras had loads of service projects that took up the mightily important task of bringing relief to micro-economic issues, where those issues needed remedying, immediate remedying.

But what they discovered is that there were very few such organizations working on the macro issues, issues like a dysfunctional police force, courts that simply didn't deliver the justice they should have been delivering. There were no distinguishable efforts to take the graft out of delivering medicines to people who needed them. No one was delivering justice--or love, for that matter--to the grieving victims of rampant street crime. 

There were things to do on that macro level, where the action required would be just as crucial--maybe more so--than it is when people are hungry or in need of basic health care. There were few organizations and missions that were looking up river--that's what they found. Why are there babies in the water?

They'd moved to Honduras to stay, and they'd found a place to work--a thousand places to work in fact, no end of places to work. "What happens when someone builds a fence around a pond and says that no one can fish?" Van Engen told a reporter. That's the question they asked themselves and the question that gave them direction in their new home, Honduras. 

Art work from the National Museum of  Honduras