Love Thy Neighbor

It was raining when I woke up for the first time this morning. Which for me is an automatic, almost biological downer and excuse to go back to sleep. So I slept for two more hours until 9 am and finally forced myself out of bed. For no reason, really, except that I was overcome with a suffocating loneliness that strangles not at the throat but in the heart, and I knew I needed to get out of the house before it got intolerable.

Once I dressed and breakfasted, it had stopped raining and the sun jumped into the sky from straight above. The dirt road leading from my apartment to the center of town luminesced the way only dirt roads can after a rain, gently steaming and puddles aglitter. I wandered about without a mission but tried to give myself one: first to the supermarket to buy a liter of milk, then to the street market to buy two melons, and finally to the park to just sit. But thinking of yesterday, I was too restless to stay in the park, and I was also too restless to meditate in the church in my usual spot on the back bench near the Virgin of Guadalupe. I headed for home, dreading the emptiness but not thinking of anyplace I could go in the whole town where I would feel better. The situation was getting desperate: today was going to be one of those days that I wouldn’t be able to distract myself out of the cruelty of solitude.

But without really thinking, instead of turning downhill toward my apartment when I got to my street, I turned uphill, headed to my friend Rosa’s. I consider Rosa one of my best friends here, even though she can be ridiculously hard to track down and never initiates contact with me. She is middle-aged, divorced, and lives alone in small but compelling house that she artistically decorates with tchotchkes sent to her from the States, driftwood, long colored scarves and shells picked up on Roatán. The best part about her is that she always welcomes my visits as if I were her best friend since childhood, even though I have only succeeded in catching her at home four times in the past year and a half.

Rosa and I can talk about anything and everything. And even though we do, I really don’t know that much about her. She is too good of a conversationalist for that. But I have known since I met her that she is a master of propagating the friend-making tradition I will call the Honduran lovefest.

The lovefest starts small. It begins with a simple gift, usually given while visiting. Today, for example, I brought Rosa a melon. Before I knew it, I was eating an entire lunch of rice and meat and vegetables, with melon juice. And melon licuados (milkshakes) two hours later. And dinner, still at her house, two hours after that. Somewhere during that time I made a quick trip to my apartment just to pick up some cookies to give her in a meager attempt to settle the score.

I think the lovefest tradition is wonderful. The problem is that I always lose.

Another example from this weekend: Friday night I baked chocolate cake in my sitemate Leah’s oven (convenient now that she lives two apartments down from me). I made two. Leah thought this was excessive until I explained to her that each of us would use a cake as collateral in the required weekend lovefesting. Saturday came and I gave my neighbor Azucena some cake in the afternoon. Except that, being neighbors since April and Azucena also being an expert in the Honduran lovefest, she and I are way beyond exchanging single pieces of cake. Now the lovefest has escalated to the point where I not only gave cake to Azucena but also fed her husband, her laundry lady and her laundry lady’s daughter. So today, I came home from Rosa’s house and was presented with a large bunch of ripe bananas AND a nice set of Christmas lights for my front window. Azucena and her husband even put the lights up for me. So I whipped out the score-settling cookies again. (I hope Hondurans like gingersnaps as much as I do.)

Over the past few months Azucena’s other gifts to me have included a bag of 20 off-her-parents’-tree oranges, several immense bowls of seafood soup (a north coast specialty that I will never be able to reproduce once I return to the States), surprise plato típico dinners at just the right lonely moments and all kinds of unrecognizable sweetened fruit desserts. Of course she continues to gift me things because I do the same to her, such as tupperware containers full of hot oatmeal raisin cookies or frozen banana pie, pitchers of fresh-squeezed lemonade and guacamole. But still I know that I am not keeping up.

It’s not a matter of being made to feel guilty. It’s the opposite. It’s knowing that Hondurans are getting more pleasure out of seeing my delight at receiving than I am in seeing theirs. I don’t think that I have ever been to a place where I have seen people more genuinely pleased to be able to give something away, be it a small piece of cheese or a bucket full of mangos. Shameless, open-hearted giving is something either lost or unknown to most of American culture, where gifts are almost exclusively given on a particular few days of the year and their worth is carefully calculated to be less than or equal to what one expects to receive. In the States a gift reflects one’s ability to spend money, one’s supposed intimacy with the recipient, and one’s personal taste, all of which turn gift-giving a way to make or break one’s pride. Here in Honduras, no gift here is too small, nor too big. Gifts are not expected to answer a particular need or desire of the recipient; it is the simple act of giving without expectation of reward that is important.

While we were waiting for the cakes to cool on Friday night so we could frost them, Leah told me that the true measure of generosity is when it hurts. That reinforced my suspicion that I am losing the lovefesting because it seems too easy. But in general, though I don’t always know exactly what I’m giving here in Honduras, I do know that it hurts.