Small World

Easter week means vacation in Honduras: buy your bus tickets in advance (this is one of the only weeks in which Hondurans plan ahead); starve your sweet tooth in preparation for being bombarded with every fruit imaginable bathed in a taste-erasing boiled sugarcane syrup. This is the hottest time of year and the closest you’ll get to summer vacation in Honduras, so squiggle into your bikini and head to the beach, or just go to the nearest creek with the rest of your neighbors and jump in fully clothed. At some point you’ll probably get forced into attending one of the week’s daily and nightly vigils honoring the religious celebration that gives the week its name, Semana Santa, but soon enough you’ll be back to the front yard, the bar, the bottle, laughing and lounging and dancing with family members in from out of town and old high school buddies home from college.

Beach excluded, this is pretty much how Hondurans celebrate every holiday, so I decided I wouldn’t miss sitting through it again in Olanchito and I skipped town. First I went with my new site mate, Christy, to Comayagua, a colonial city close to the capitol that is known for its extravagant Good Friday procession. We met up with four other volunteers there, Robin, Gabe, John and wife Deb, and camped out in several very nice rooms in the Hotel America, complete with a great view of the entire city from our fourth floor suite. We got exactly what we bargained for when we woke up early Friday morning to see the main streets covered with painstakingly designed colored-sawdust “carpets,” made solely to be trampled shortly thereafter by a sweaty crowd heaving an immense Jesus-on-the-cross. I particularly liked a carpet that was made not of the traditional fluorescent-hued sawdust but rather of natural materials including unroasted coffee beans, pine cones, flowers and (what else) beans and rice. It turns out that Good Friday carpet-making is neither Honduran nor Catholic, but instead is an indigenous Mexican tradition that became popular in Comayagua as recently as the 1950’s (perhaps a Guns, Germs and Steel explanation of delayed cultural dissemination along a north-south continental axis can be applied here). I saw basically the same thing in El Salvador during Semana Santa last year, so it wasn’t as exciting as the first time, but it was still nice to be a part of a celebration and to spend time with other volunteers.

I left Comayagua to spend the rest of the weekend with Robin (coincidentally BMC ’01) in La Esperanza, a town a few hours away that sits at the highest elevation of any major city in Honduras. In two days Robin and I packed in a long walk with PCV Cristal and another gringa teacher friend Susan (who has been in Honduras since 1995), lots of Sex and the City reruns, a movie, and a trip to Robin’s site, Yamalamadingdong (or something similar that I never can remember), where I met her host family and we made mud pies with her two little brothers. We also witnessed the inevitable wind-down of Semana Santa at the market on Easter afternoon, where one drunk vegetable vendor lazily threw his rotten strawberries at another more-drunk vendor passed out on his own vegetable wagon across the street, and where yet another drunk had collapsed in a doorway with his perkily painted ice-cream cart nearly on top of him. Jesus Saves.

Next stop: La Ceiba. By Monday afternoon I had made it back to the north coast via always-sweltering San Pedro Sula, and I dedicated the next two days to the Cuero y Salado Wildlife Refuge, the only place that I have found in this country where I can do what I spent 7 years at university and earned two degrees training for: hydrology. It is nothing short of a relief to walk into their office and be recognized as the scientist I am. I also dropped by the majority of the American expatriate establishments I frequent, stopped in on Max and Lynnette, and took advantage of Cuero y Salado president Pepe’s inexhaustible hospitality by staying for the umpteenth time in the guest bedroom at his house in the hills above La Ceiba. I finally decided to head home yesterday afternoon, and luckily caught a ride with Luis, the head of Alfalit (the NGO I work with), back to Olanchito.

Living in Honduras has a way of making the world feel small. In a single week I squinted the blowing dust out of my eyes in blustery Comayagua, curled up on the couch watching movies to escape a chilly night rain in La Esperanza, and spread-eagled with Max and Lynnette in their inflatable pool to beat the relentless heat of La Ceiba. I found other volunteers everywhere I went, and even when alone I managed to run into friends, like my second night in La Ceiba when I walked into an empty gringo bar and the only other person there turned out to be a Honduran acquaintance from Olanchito.

However, I still know that spending time with other volunteers, when traveling doesn’t make me too sick to seek them out, is the only way I can completely relax here. This automatic comfort I feel in the company of other Americans makes me feel like a traitor to the Honduran people who do so much to make me feel welcome in their homeland. From them, I have learned when to gossip and when to converse impersonally. I have learned to talk for much longer periods of time about much more mundane things than I ever did in the States, and in the process have gotten to know Honduras and Hondurans much more intimately than I know some of my own family members. I have been the beneficiary of uncountable lunches and dinners, three birthday parties and an infinity of small gifts. And so I feel ungracious to want to go home as badly as I do now. To feel so tired of getting sick, of being stared at on the street, of my work being entertainment at best but more often counting mostly as charity that only reinforces the existing laziness and corruption. To be so tired of being foreign.

Honduras is small, but I am wishing that the world were even smaller. Then I could be a little closer to home. My Honduran friends could know that home and understand me better. And I could get a little comfort injection now and then to relax me and give me the patience to continue to love Honduras.