March 17, 2008

Return to Hondo: The Boys

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The Boys 

Nearly every late afternoon when I was in Manto we played basketball on the court by the church in central park.  I called a handful of the players “my boys.”  They were middle school aged, and a blast to be around.  Funny, wisecracking pranksters that had great senses of humor!   

 

We learned that Yosi is now a carpenter/construction worker.  Timoteo is a teacher, riding his horse an hour each way, every day, into the mountains to educate the children of a very illiterate remote village.  He told me he felt it was necessary to help his community, his country.  And that teaching was where he felt he could have the most impact.   Mario is working at a hardware store in Juticalpa, and is said to be doing well.   

 

And Ramon, like several others in Manto, made his way up through Guatemala and Mexico and crossed the border into Arizona and found work in New Orleans.  His mother is sick, still living in Manto.  He sends money back to care for her, allowing her to get the medical attention she needs.   

 

Ramon always was special to me.  His smile warmed everyone who met him.  He was smart and liked to learn.  He would ask me for books so he could practice reading English, and one time told me that he wished he could live in the U.S. so that he could go to a good school.  

 

When I asked the boys if they ever tried peanut butter, they all said no, and Ramon was the first to taste it and was the only one that didn’t spit it out. I have a picture of him wearing my sunglasses and a Penn State hat that my Mom gave him.  He’s smiling, and is trying to look cool.  It makes me laugh when I see it. 

 

I pray he’s safe, and doing well. 

 

************** 

 

I have yet to figure it out.  When I left Honduras this time, I had a sense of closure I did not have when I left in 1999.  I am beginning to understand that perhaps the reason for this closure is centered in knowing that the people whom I shared two years of life with are ok.  Before, I didn’t know how their lives went on.  Now I know. 

They are healthy, and they still have each other.  A small community in the mountains of eastern Honduras, getting on with life each day the same way we do, with little that really changes from one week to the next, year after year.   

Continuity of life.  Family.  Friends.  Relationships.  Love. 

Shared by all peoples around the world.

 

March 15, 2008

Return to Hondo: “We Want Our Water”

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“We Want Our Water” 

One of the projects I worked on involved protecting a watershed in the mountains that would serve as the water source for 11 communities spread out in the valley below.  Another volunteer worked on designing and constructing the water system, and I worked on establishing the watershed as a protected area. 

Fast forward eight years.  A teacher in Manto told me the story of the fight that took place between the people in the 11 communities and a logging company.  The communities had had water for a few years, and were grateful beyond what we can imagine.   

Logging, mostly illegal, is a major problem in Olancho, and all of Honduras for that matter.  The Environmental Movement of Olancho, led by a Catholic priest who won the coveted and internationally recognized Goldman Prize for his work to protect the environment, has led the people of Olancho against the loggers.   

Assassinations of environmentalists in Honduras are not uncommon.  From Jeanette Kawas to Carlos Luna to the two men gun downed in Guarizama—the town next to Manto—and several others, working to protect nature in Honduras is a deadly vocation.  In Guarizama, I saw the bullet holes in the wall where the two men were killed. 

Back to the 11 communities.  The story goes that women armed with machetes stood on the front lines.  Their husbands were behind them, armed with pistols for sure, so that fighting, or worse, would not break out between the logger men and the village men.   

They blocked the entrance to the scrabble road that led up to their village.  When the logging truck showed up, they wielded their machetes and shouted: 

“We don’t want your new road, and we don’t want your new school.  We want our water, and you are not taking one tree from us.”   

They’ve heard all the false promises before, and they knew that cutting trees meant damage to the watershed, and the possible drying up of their water source. 

After some tense attempts at negotiating a compromise, the loggers left.  The people did not back down. 

Poor.  Armed with machetes and pistols.  Fighting for water.  The poor won the battle.  This time.

(part 3 of many…)

 

March 14, 2008

Return to Hondo: Going Home to Visit Friends

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Going home

My wife and I boarded the Manto bus in Juticalpa, and I immediately asked the driver if Doña Mercedes Matute and Don Ramon were still alive.

“Yes.”

Thank goodness.  I wrote a story about them ten years ago for my hometown newspaper.  An excerpt:

And so it is. Doña Mercedes is a healer, a medicine woman, a witchdoctor, if you will. Don Ramon is a quiet man, only offering a few words here and there. They most likely will never fly in a plane or ever make it to Pennsylvania.             

Not physically anyway. There’s no doubt, however, that they will be with me, my memories of them serving as a reminder to find the bee pollinating the flower, to listen to the water falling over rocks, to feel the earth beneath my feet. For, it is in their spirits, those inexplicable energies or feelings, that I know them. It is there that I know they are my friends.  

“Hooooooola.” 

Silence. 

“Hooooooola.” 

I hear some shuffling of feet.  Through the curtain that serves as a door in her adobe home, Doña Mercedes walks towards me while fixing her hair, not yet realizing I am at her door.

“Oh my God!  Ramon…Ramon…Chago is here.  Oh, thank God for this day.” 

I did not tell anyone in Manto about my trip back.   The look on her face was worth making it a surprise.

The lives of Mercedes and Ramon had not changed a bit.  Everything in their house was exactly as it was when I left.  They looked the same.  I sat on the same cowhide chairs, looked at the same dirt floor, and talked about the same things—weather, beans, life in the States, goings-on in Manto, etc.

And I would not have wanted it any other way.  Sitting with them was like going home.  If home truly is where the heart is, then a little piece of my heart can be found in a humble house where two of humanity’s purest beings dwell.  They want not the material wealth of this world. 

My wife noticed tears in the corners of Doña Mercedes eyes. Tears of joy.  As I did many times while her neighbor, I wished to be more like her and Don Ramon. 

Kind.  Giving.  Caring.  Loving.     

                                    ****************

The only noticeable changes I saw in Manto added up to three things:  1—cel phones.  Everyone had them.  Young faces were illuminated in the night air as we walked past central park. Text messaging going on. 

Two:  the pulperias, little convenient stores on the front of homes, were now selling beer and rum.  Everyone laughed at me when I said that they did not sell those things when I was there.  I knew of one pulp that sold beer under the radar, but Manto was supposedly a dry town.  What this a ploy because the Peace Corps volunteer was living in town?  They would not say. 

Three: internet. Manto had an internet café, and the one teacher had it hooked up in his house through his cel phone!  When I left Manto, the only means of communication was a single telegraph machine.

 

(part 2 of many…)

 

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