Heaven

It takes a bit of effort to get to and to work in the campo. By bus or by truck, on foot or on horseback, the medium of transport may differ, but the method is always the same: Leave Olanchito early in the morning. Spend hours bumping across the mountains over a lot of dirt and rocks (optimistically called a road), through streams and past numerous villages before arriving at the village you’re looking for. Wait around for the person who was supposed to be waiting there for you. Have coffee in a few people’s houses while waiting. Eventually meet up with whomever you were supposed to meet with and discuss work for half the time that it took you to travel there. Then do it all in reverse and don’t expect to get back to the city before dark. My six coworkers at Alfalit, who are dedicated to various types of rural development projects in 30 different aldeas (small towns or villages) surrounding Olanchito, live this routine six days a week, including Saturdays. I generally only do it once every week or two, mainly because I am not allowed to ride on the motorcycles (per PC restrictions) that my coworkers usually use to reach the aldeas and so I have to wait until I can reserve Alfalit’s only truck for my work. It usually works out alright, as I need office time to work on the technical aspects of my water projects anyway. But I admit that the most interesting part of my work here are the visits to the campo. And yesterday’s visit to La Gloria to evaluate a potential water source for a new potable water system was certainly one of my most interesting campo visits.

I left Olanchito at 7 am with Wilfredo and Marcio, two Alfalit agronomists, in the Alfalit pickup truck. We drove for an hour along the northern border of the Aguán valley, past the aldeas of El Chaparral, Nuevo Mendez and Juncal until we arrived at El Coyolar, where the dirt road ends in the town’s soccer field. Saddled horses were waiting for us to continue the journey, but first we had to stop in on the town president and accept breakfast served by his wife. We each downed a few corn tortillas, two spoonfuls of heavy refried beans and a small piece of some type of deep-fried meat with coffee (actually, I declined the latter two) before heading out on horseback. As the smallest member of the party that included two men from El Coyolar to accompany us, I was inevitably assigned the shortest, boniest horse with a swayed neck and burrs and ticks matting its deranged mane. But I mounted gamely and we headed up the mountain in two groups. Marcio and I left on horseback led by Don Felix, the community secretary, while Wilfredo and Juan Angel from El Coyolar took a footpath. Wilfredo is in his mid-40’s and has a potbelly, but nonetheless is tall and strong and walks fast enough to be taken seriously when he says he is more efficient on foot than on horseback, so he and Juan Angel started up the shorter, steeper route that criss-crossed our path every so often. We rode up and up and up, through cornfields cut into the inclined mountainside and equally steep lush pastures where our horses stole bites of grass between steps. We rode down and down and down, crossing clear mountain creeks full up to our horses’ shoulders and passing through the backyards of the houses of the community of El Porvenir, which is also to share the new water system with El Coyolar and La Gloria. We rode up and up again, our horses competently scrambling over slippery rocks in the forested creek beds and arduously picking their way along snaking paths serpentining up the green but deforested mountainsides dotted with crops and cows. After nearly two hours, our horses heaved themselves up to the outskirts of La Gloria, where we tied them in the shade, and took the second cup of coffee of the day at a house with children and dogs running in so many directions so that I couldn’t keep track to count them all. As they drank their coffee, Wilfredo and Marcio and the men with us from El Coyolar joked around with the owner of the house, who for some reason wasn’t working that day. I joined in when I understood their rapid slang, but mostly I entertained the kids by taking their photos with my digital camera.

After almost an hour, we remounted and continued in our two groups until we reached the rest of La Gloria, an even more arduous half hour later. There we tied our horses in a group of trees near houses set so steeply into the mountain that they were nearly on top of each other. We were invited into the house of the president of La Gloria, where his wife served us juice and I tried not to think about where the water to make it had come from. Most mountain communities near Olanchito are lucky to have high quality creeks and streams that people can take advantage of even without a water system per se, but the way in which the water is handled once it is collected and carried to their houses always poses a risk for my inadaptable cranky gringo stomach. In any case, it is rude not to accept food or drink when it is offered, and I was incredibly thirsty from riding mostly in direct sunlight for almost 3 hours, so the juice tasted wonderful.

With the arrival of a second resident of La Gloria, we left the horses and walked en masse for another hour uphill to the water source. At just about noon we arrived at a 30-foot waterfall cascading into a small clear pool that emptied into a rocky creek bed. This was the proposed water source for the tri-community water system. I was impressed. I was feeling a little woozy from the heat and exertion, and at that moment I was grateful for the forgetfulness of my companions that forced us sit at the waterfall for an hour, waiting for someone to bring us the bucket that we had forgotten to take up with us to measure the creek’s flow. In the meantime we did some simple water quality tests using a field kit given to me by the PC, took an altitude measurement with Alfalit’s handheld barometer/GPS combo, discussed property rights in the watershed and brainstormed ideas about how to include the five houses that are part of La Gloria but are on the opposite side of the mountain. Given their almost total lack of formal education (one in four Hondurans is illiterate), I am always impressed that the people in these communities generally have good ideas about how to design their future water systems. But then again, they have lived in the mountains their entire lives, and as children have carried water with their mothers from the local creeks to their houses, so their topographic and hydrographic knowledge is much completer than mine could be after only a day’s or even a week’s visit.

We enjoyed sitting in the light mist of the waterfall for an hour until we finished our measurements, and then we headed back down to La Gloria. I was still feeling a little dizzy (by this time I was thinking that I was dehydrated or suffering from lack of food) and had to walk slowly so as to not make a misstep off the narrow the mountain path. But no one was in a hurry, and in fact our four campesino companions were having such a good time talking to Wilfredo and Marcio that I was the first one to arrive back in the community. While I waited for the others to arrive, I introduced myself to the women in the president’s house and watched two 15-year-old girls trade off pounding rice with a big mortar and pestle to remove its shell. When the whole group had come together again in the house, we were each offered an enormous plate of boiled green bananas, oily rice and boiled chicken in a tasty orange-colored sauce that probably included Coca Cola as an ingredient (as many tasty orange sauces here do). Given my nausea I couldn’t eat very much of it, and I had to apologize to the president’s wife so she wouldn’t think I didn’t like her cooking, but I was consoled to see the leftovers fed to four skinny dogs and a kitten that had been painfully kicked out of the kitchen numerous times by the president’s 8-year-old son while we had been eating.


Tired, still dizzy, and with my mind set on home, sometime after 3 pm we remounted for the trip back to Olanchito. Off we rode, down the mountain to do the whole trip in reverse, but this time with heavy rain clouds settling into the narrow valleys around us. The first big raindrops hit just as we reached the house on the outskirts of La Gloria where we had stopped for our morning coffee, so we tied up the horses once again and took cover under the porch to wait out the storm. The rain came quickly, and I considered that its pounding on the aluminum roof drowned out the possibility of conversation between the six of us travelers and the ten women and children that had also taken temporary refuge with the same neighbor. But Hondurans love to talk and talk loudly, and Wilfredo and the other men kept up a steady stream of jokes and stories for an hour and a half as the rain poured off the roof in thick streams and turned the bare front yard into a huge mud pit, attracting all of the nearby pigs who splashed and rooted about gleefully. Wet dog after wet dog came in from the storm, snuck onto the porch and curled into a tight ball to sleep, until I counted as many dogs as people in our growing crowd. I tried to appreciate the humor in all of it but was quickly getting exhausted and found it hard to initiate or participate in friendly conversation. So I sat on a pile of firewood by myself until I was invited into the kitchen, where five more women and children were sitting around doing just as much nothing as those on the porch. I swung a boy in a hammock and made a meager attempt at being friendly with the women, but I was relieved when Wilfredo came in from the porch and told me that we had better leave even though the rain hadn’t stopped, or we wouldn’t make it back to Olanchito that night.

At just before 5 pm we untied the horses and started herding them down the mountain in front of us in a light rain. It was now too slippery to ride so we all walked, rapidly becoming completely soaked. The horses were tired and hungry, and became more adamant about stealing bites of grass when we weren’t slapping their hindquarters and vocally urging them on. We all slid down the muddy trail together, and I was becoming more and more focused on my apartment in Olanchito and how much I was going to enjoy taking a shower when I got home…but first we had to stop at someone’s house in El Porvenir to hand out friendly collection notices to farmers who had accepted loans for fertilizer from the federal government. Of course we couldn’t just hand out the notices and leave; custom requires that any conversation for business or pleasure must be accompanied by a cup of coffee. So out came the coffee pot again, and the little bags of instant coffee (have no illusions that Honduran coffee is either homemade or good, and I quote my coffee connoisseur friends), and what seemed like another hour passed while I pouted on the front steps as everyone else drank coffee inside. I was now completely fed up with being stared at by children and ignored by men, utterly drained from walking and riding all day and now in the rain, and from trying to be alert in my second language for nearly 12 hours straight. I cursed Hondurans for feeling so comfortable in other people’s houses when all I wanted was to return to my own. I cursed them for being so human as to want to intersperse work with rest throughout the course of a long day. I cursed my North American mindset that doesn’t allow me to change gears every other hour and doesn’t let me rest from work until I have completed it.

When the coffee was drunk we headed off again, this time riding because the terrain wasn’t so steep. But now that my clothes were completely soaked, the saddle sores that had been developing on my inner thighs quickly rubbed raw and I had one more thing to curse: the poorly-made Honduran saddles that are just a few pieces of leather on the horse side, tied with string or rope to a few pieces of plastic on the human side, with lots of uncovered knots. But still, we had another hour of riding to go, so I tried not to sit too woodenly and allow the horse to do its job while not moving my legs too much. We rode up and down the mountain from El Porvenir to El Coyolar, crossing the same full creeks that were now much fuller with rain. I stretched my legs in front of me alongside my horse’s neck as we crossed, but my boots filled with water anyway. I had to giggle out loud at the ridiculousness and intensity of it all, and on the horse in front of me Don Felix turned and smiled back at me.

We arrived in El Coyolar at just about dark, and once again we had to sit in the president’s house and drink coffee, this time with a side dish of boiled yuca, both of which I once more rudely turned down because I don’t like either and was too tired to pretend that I did. I waited as patiently as possible on the porch, my wet clothes chilling me more with every minute, while Marcio and Wilfredo ate inside. All of the neighbors stared at me from their porches, and many sidled over to find out who the three of us were and why we were visiting the community. I was too tired to be polite and ignored or stared down anyone who looked as if they wanted to make conversation, not-so-subtley encouraging them to gossip amongst themselves about us rather than bothering me with the same questions I had been answering all day. I know by now that getting work done in this country is as much about human relationships as it is about technical competence, but I still don’t have the stamina for the politics and don’t try to. I leave that to my Alfalit co-workers, who are experts at it from a lifetime of coffee breaks.

After another half hour we waded through the crowd gathered at the door and said the appropriate goodbyes, thanked the president’s wife for her generous hospitality and got back in the pickup to drive back to Olanchito. The president squeezed into the truck with us to get a ride into town, and I was suddenly grateful it had rained so hard because he didn’t smell like sobaco, the slang word for the armpits-feet-butt smell that unwashed hitchhiking campesinos often overwhelm a truck cabin with. He had probably just taken his first shower in days under his gutter during the storm. During the entire hour-long ride back to Olanchito I desperately wanted to sleep, but couldn’t for being so cold and wet and for all the jolting along the dirt road. For that I had to wait until I got back to my apartment, where I peeled off my clothes, finally took that shower I had been thinking about since noon and dropped into bed.

In Spanish, the word “la gloria” is one way of expressing the concept of heaven and the rewards that await the deserving of us when we pass on. For inquiring minds that want to know, la gloria is only one hour by car, two hours on horseback and one hour on foot up a mountain on the north coast of Honduras. If you can stand all the coffee breaks, you might just get there someday.