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.