Paradise Lost

So, we figured it would happen at some point while we were in Honduras, but we definitely weren’t expecting it when it happened. We were robbed at gunpoint last Sunday.
On Sunday morning we set out on bicycle to Rio Zacate, a small river that runs through Pico Bonito National Park about 10 miles outside of La Ceiba. We were traveling with our site-mate, Joe, and about five other friends were going to meet us there later in the day. We biked along the main road for most of the trip, turning off near our destination into one of Standard Fruit’s (Dole’s) pineapple fields. Past the field was a small farmhouse where we parked our bikes and paid a 15 Lempira ($0.80) entrance fee to the watchman that worked there.
Our destination was a waterfall about an hour’s walk up the trail. However, hot and sweaty from the trip, we decided to jump in the first pool we came to. It must be said that Rio Zacate is the sort of place you think about when you imagine a tropical paradise. The water was absolutely crystal clear, the vegetation was lush and jungle-like, and every so often the water would cascade down into deep rocky pools. Seeing one of these pools at the bottom of a steep embankment, we changed into our bathing suits and dropped our bags before climbing down into the water. After about ten minutes of feeling very happy and lucky to be able to experience such a place, Joe climbed up one of the high rocks around the pool, and jumped in. Just after he hit the water, two young men appeared about fifteen feet away at the side of the river.
They began screaming and one of them was waving at us. At first we though that maybe they were yelling at Joe not to jump from the rocks. Maybe they thought he would hurt himself. Then we saw that the man waving at us was actually not waving. He was pointing a rather large revolver at us. They weren’t telling Joe to be careful. They were telling us in no uncertain terms that we were to remain where we were and that they were there for our money and valuables. All three of us immediately told them to take everything. At least I know Lynnette and Joe said something to that effect. I think the best I was able to muster was a simple, “Sí”.
Since arriving in Honduras, and sitting through multiple security sessions during our training, I had spent a lot of time imagining being robbed. We had been told over and over again that if you are being robbed, the best thing you can do is give everything over without a fight. I would always visualize the gun being pulled, the wallet or backpack being demanded and me handing it over calmly. I was always worried that there might be a hesitation on my part. Could I just hand over a bag with a laptop in it, for example? I never really knew how I would react. Luckily in this case, there wasn’t any alternative course of action for us. The three of us were all standing at the bottom of a slippery embankment, in very cold water looking up at two men rifling through our things, one of them waving a hand-cannon. We were obliged to stand by peacefully and watch. It wasn’t nearly as stressful as I had imagined, and was over quite quickly.
Throughout the ordeal, one of them went through our things to make sure he had found what they were looking for, while the other handled crowd control. We were quite forcefully told to stay where we were for an hour, and that if we followed them, he would shoot us to death. Once they were gone, we kind of looked at each other and expressed that that had been kind of a bummer. At that point we weren’t sure what they had taken, but we didn’t want to risk going up the embankment until we were sure they had gone. After ten minutes, we decided to get out and have a look, because we were getting cold. They had taken everything, including, our wallets (very little money, but they had our residency cards in them), our cell phones, our shoes, our shirts, Lynnette’s shorts, my underwear, a water bottle, and two really cool nylon travel hammocks that I had decided to bring at the last minute. Losing the cell phones, the hammocks, and the ID cards really sucked, but we realized, as we stood there in our bathing suits, that we were basically naked, shoeless, and far from home without any money.
We didn’t delay long before heading back down the trail to the farmhouse to let the watchman know what had happened. We found him lying in his hammock, listening to the radio, and his two young sons were returning from collecting firewood. He was shocked to hear what had happened, and said it had never happened in his two years on the job. He immediately got on the radio and called the other park entrance to see if they’d seen anybody entering or leaving (they had not), and then called Standard Fruit’s security to ask for help. He was kind enough to lend us some shirts to put on while we waited. It was a nice place, and we relaxed there for about 20 minutes playing with they dogs and admiring the sheep in the pasture. Three security guards showed up in a truck, one of which had a machine gun. We gave them a very brief summary of what had happened, but they didn’t seem very interested. They walked with us up to where the robbery took place. They found a boy swimming nearby, and asked us if he had been involved. We said he obviously wasn’t, but the guards weren’t so sure. After accomplishing absolutely nothing, we went back to the farm house – at least they gave us a ride back to La Ceiba with our bikes in the back of their pickup.
What follows is basically worse than the robbery itself: Honduran bureaucracy and ineffectiveness. When we got home, we called Peace Corps to let them know what had happened, and they told us that we needed to file a police report so we could get new residency cards. The next day, we ventured across town to the police station. It is sort of confusing. They have a front office with three cubicles: one is marked “Transit”, another “Investigation”, and another “Information”. There was nobody in two of the cubicles, but there were three or four gruff looking men in uniforms in the transit cubicle having a heated chat about something (actually one of them was a very muscular woman with a mustache and sideburns). After getting their attention, one of them walked over to the information cubicle and sat down. We told them we needed a police report about a robbery that had happened the day before. He asked why we had waited so long and what did we expect them to do at this point.
The answer to that question was that we never expected them to do anything. The police are highly ineffectual and spend most of their time stopping cars on the street to check car registrations and maybe extort a bribe. People say that if you ask them for help they will complain that they are too busy to help, or that they do not have enough gas in their cars to get to where you need them to go. The few police cars in La Ceiba are actually sponsored by local cell phone companies, and such. Seriously, they have a big advertisement on the side of them like you see on city busses. Of course we didn’t say that. We just apologized, told him he was the man, and that we just needed some paperwork.
It took about four hours to get everything we needed. It involved waiting around for a long time just to get the wrong forms filled out, and then being sent across town to get the police report we needed. (Note: don’t go to a police station in La Ceiba for a police report. Go to the CEIN office by the central park.)
After telling locals about what had happened, we learned that where we were is actually a very dangerous place. Though they didn’t know of anything happening there recently, there had been a very tragic event there about three years ago. A couple visiting the park from Utila (one of the Bay Islands) was held up at gun point. The man pulled out a gun he was carrying, so the robbers shot him dead. They then proceeded to rape his girlfriend. We also heard from an ex-Peace Corps volunteer that that area used to be off-limits. In the end, we are actually very lucky that we made it out unharmed, and we aren’t even very shaken up about it.
We want to let everyone know that we’re fine, and we still feel safe in La Ceiba. The city is very safe on the whole, especially in the neighborhoods that we frequent. However, we will not be going back to Rio Zacate, and we will unfortunately not be able to see the waterfall at the end of the trail that everyone says is incredibly beautiful. That’s what bums us out the most. We are faced again with the uphill battle that Honduras faces. Incidents like this set back the push to improve tourism here. Without better education, economic stability, and a qualified police force, some of the most beautiful places in Honduras will sadly remain off limits to visitors.

An Era of Depression

Last week Max and I went to the movies. We’ve always enjoyed going to the movies and were really thrilled to find out there is a movie theatre in Ceiba. It is cheap, too. For Lps. 40 (about $2) you can enjoy a movie on the big screen. They never play the latest releases and you can usually rent the same movie on DVD they are playing, but there’s always the thrill of sitting in that dark room, forgetting about the rest of the world, and live the unimaginable adventures. Of course we quickly found out that Hondurans have a big liking of mindless, violent movies, like the kind Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger do or bad scary movies like The Boogieman. And so going to the movies has become a not so common activity for us. Last week, though, we decided we’d go and watch whatever they were playing. It was our way of sort of getting away for a couple of hours and stop thinking about everything that goes on from day to day on our lives these days. Nothing of the sort happened.

We ended up watching Cinderella Man, a depression era movie about a boxer who changed his life by not giving up. You’ve probably heard about it, perhaps even seen it. The movie paints an era in which things hit rock-bottom in the United States. There were no jobs, people were hungry, full families lived in a small room; there was no money for gas, riots formed on the streets. Even people of my generation feel touched when we see images like those, even we who have not experienced anything like it, see the depression with deep sadness and truly admire those that experienced it. But last week, at the movie theatre, seeing those images made us realize, sadly for the first time, how much the rest of the world still lives like that. What we saw in that move is what we see here everyday. Dirty kids running on the streets with no shoes, people cooking with wood in their home-made oven, no power in some places, no potable water almost everywhere, no jobs, or a only a few bad jobs, parents having to see their children be malnourished, no money for medical care. The typical pictures of the great depression are seen everyday here; the troubled-looking mother of 7 that worries everyday of how they are going to pay for their next water bill, the despair in the eyes of her spouse who can not earn enough to sustain the family. That is life here, everyday, for as long as people can remember.
In the US we talk about the great depression as an era, a decade of the worst economic recession in history, but it also refers to a cultural event. It was a time when the history of the people united in common hopelessness and despair. And yet it is so easy for us to forget that today, millions of people still live like that, all over the world, even right next door to us, right here in Honduras.

Rain

You probably don’t know rain the way I do now. You definitely don’t know rain the way Hondurans do. It rains here. It really rains. Imagine the strongest thunderstorm you’ve ever experienced. Now, I am not talking about the thunderstorms you get if you live in the north of the US. I am talking Florida thunderstorms or the ones we get in Puerto Rico. Imagine it lasting five or six days in a row, non stop, not even for five minutes.

If you follow international news you probably heard about Honduras being affected by both Wilma and Gamma. We did not get hurricane or tropical storm winds, but we got rain. The kind of rain that roars; the kind that is so loud that it keeps you up at night. And while it is raining, the rivers grow, communities flood, bridges are damaged, houses get destroyed by mudslides, lives are taken. Meanwhile, all you can do is stay at home and wait… wait for it to stop, wait for the rivers to go down, wait for the roads to be passable… and worry… worry about your friends that live in mud houses, the ones that live next to rivers, the ones that have nowhere to go if something were to happen to their homes. And so we waited, and we worried, and it stopped, and the waters receded, the rivers went back to their banks. But communities were buried in mud, homes were destroyed, lives were lost.
….

Our town, La Ceiba, was generally ok. There were flooded areas, but the waters receded fairly quickly and it was easy to rescue people. Our house was fine; we only got water dripping in several places. A major bridge between La Ceiba and the two other major cities (San Pedro Sula and Tegucigalpa) was down for a few days, leaving the city isolated, but almost no one wanted to go elsewhere anyway.

However, not everybody was as lucky. The Garífuna town of Rio Esteban was isolated for days, without being able to go out to purchase food or other necessary items. Government help was offered, but it never arrived. The town of Jocomico, where one of the MaderaVerde shops is located, it is said to have been completely destroyed when most of the mud hills came down (the town is heavily deforested). Most houses were destroyed and entire families killed when mud came rushing into their houses while they were asleep. We’d like to go and help, or at least go see how our artisans’ families are, but there is still no way to drive all the way up there (even though it stopped raining a week ago).
…
Eventually the sun came back. The sky, previously our furious gray enemy, now presents us with the gift of its tropical beauty. Everything is green and the birds are singing again. People are slowly getting back to their routines. Yet, they have not forgotten, not the ones still in refuge, not the ones with the watermarks on the walls of their homes, not the ones with mud all over their belongings, and especially not the ones who lost the lives of their loved ones.