Nourish goes to Honduras

Tomorrow morning we will get on to what you have all been waiting for.  Not all this lolly-gagging in Mayan ruins, spanish classes, and hostels.  THE PROJECT IS UPON US.  Well actually not quite yet.  We will head out early tomorrow morning (read 4:30) to La Ceiba to meet up with the adminstrators of FIPAH, our partner organization, while also enjoying the massive carnival that´s occuring there this weekend.  Sunday will be the true beginning of why we are here, to work with farmer cooperatives in their plant breeding and seed banking initiatives by building greenhouses, participating alongside the youth in their unique cooperatives, and teaching some computer skills.  We are all anxious to jump right in and even more anxious to share what we will learn along the way.

Unfortunately, we will not be in contact for the next five weeks due to the lack of internet access where we will be working.  But do not despair: we will be keeping you in mind as we record what goes down and  retroactively posting it when we return to the city.  Do stay tuned and we wish you all a happy and safe 5 weeks.  Haste luego,

Jonathan

Now that we have spent almost a week in Honduras, I have been asking myself whether I have a good grasp of the country, the people, and its history. I do not pretend to have such a grasp…personally I think its quite hard to come by and I am skeptical as to whether we will even have one before we depart. We have, however, been reaching towards this, forsaking the tourist joints in town and instead trying to have more conversations like ours with Chavelo, an older man who could easily be classified as a historian with his encyclopedic knowledge of the Maya (he considers himself a modern Mayan) and the state of the region today. We were lucky enough to meet Chavelo, and before long he was telling us of birthing practices, lifestyles, beliefs, and the special place that jaguar skins and mushrooms played in many facets of Mayan life. We followed Chavelo throughout the countryside to small ruins and villages, through farms (which were almost all owned by Americans and from which most crops were exported to Guatemala, 12 kms away), all the while deepening our understanding of Honduras, its history, and the current environmental issues facing the forests and land of Honduras. Even with this insight, I am looking forward to bridging the everpresent disconnect between the touristy city of Copan Ruinas and the rural hillsides we will head to soon. Then, maybe, we will approach the feeling that comes from knowing a place.

Leading up to our project, we planned to spend a week in Copan to get our Spanish up to par and read about the global context of Food Sovereignty (check out Academics). We only had four free days before language classes and volunteering started but for this wired generation, it seemed like months. Max found the local soccer team. Carolyn discovered mangos. Logan plunged into spanish, chatting with the street meat vendors. Diana laughed, smiled and translated patiently for everyone.  And Jonathan and I spent a day or two working on what we call the ¨30 lempira a day¨ project. Lempiras are the Honduran currency - 30 lempiras is about $1.50. Our mandate was to buy food and water for $1.50 a day.  (before this we´d been averaging about $10 a day). why? We had found ourselves eating at tourist restaurants and wanted to start taking this food sovereignty campaign to heart.

the first day we weren´t too creative, but we managed to stay within our budget.

we each enjoyed a mango, an avacado, a tamale, some cornflour tortillas and a banana. we also refilled our water bottles twice at the hostel purified-water pump. At the end of the day we felt healthy and had manged to total 28 lempiras. success! that night we crunched some numbers and saw that without big-ticket items like avocado, we could buy onions, eggs and tomatos!

after a  5 hour hike with our newfound friend and local historian, we were ready to give up on the 30 lempira a day project. But we didn´t! we wandered through the market and stuck to the list we´d planned the night before: a few tomatos, an onion, 1 egg each, tortillas, lime and mango. at the hostel we chopped everything up and made a beautiful dish.

we realized a few things. A small increase of price of a item - even a few cents - would put it completely beyond our budget (we started to argue a lot about price inflation. read: biofuels). Purified water took up a 1/3 of our daily budget. With access to local, healthy food it is possible to eat well for $1.50 a day… but it takes careful planning, creativity and the sacrifice of licuadas, cafe, helado and other ammenities.

Coming Soon: a backcountry Mayan adventure with our pal Chavelo.

…no, but really - it´s hot. Last night I thought the heat would be enough to break me. This city girl is uncomfortable, but she´s starting to like it. Today I took Jonathan and Claire´s advice, and ventured off with Logan to explore Copán (with a few goals and errands on our minds, of course). Mostly, however, I had no agenda. We walked around looking for the elusive reloj (watch), but found little success. We wandered into the language school, housed in a beautiful, open building with a central garden. I thought the afternoon would be spent reading while Logan (and later others) took their placement exams. But after introducing myself to one of the teachers, then being introduced to others, I became increasingly comfortable with the idea of having a chat - in Spanish (yes, Jonathan, even I feel gringa at times).

The chat turned into a conversation, the beginning of a fantastic relationship. The welcome from the teachers was more than I could have asked for. We spoke about the beauty of Honduras, the Honduran experience with Hurricane Mitch, our work to be done in Yorito. I found the differences between the teacher and I to be shrinking compared to the experiences we shared in some way. We joked about how silly it was that Americans on the coast built houses out of drywall and expected it to hold up against hurricanes. How when I moved from Puerto Rico to Miami, I was suprised that the only cement structures I saw were public schools. She exclaimed “if the houses here were not made of concrete, Mitch would have left nothing!” It was hard to picture the destruction, but her pained expression was enough.

Soon, the urgency and excitement of volunteering in Yorito was heating up in my mind. It was the same intensity, amplified, as when I sat in on the project interest meetings, hearing Claire and the group leaders talk about the opportunities to learn here. It suddenly struck me that I was here! I was living, if only temporarily, in a place steeped with potential. I thought it couldn´t get any better than when the teacher said that the group field trip (part of the language school) could be taken to a wonderful greenhouse built slightly outside of Copán, so that we could see the product of work similar to the kind we will be doing. Despite all our talk of tragedy, this made her smile. If she could be proud of volunteers building that, then I had no doubt that our help would be appreciated. Whether she spoke of the team´s Spanish, or of the regrowth of Honduras after the hurricane, she never seemed to expect anything less than success.  With that hope, my outer layer of sweat isn´t that bad.

I´m starting to like the shiny Diana better.

PS: Last summer I worked in Homestead,FL with Art In Action (part of ASTEP), an organization for social transformation through the arts started by fellow Coral Reefer and extraordinary earthling, Mauricio Salgado. I took film classes and helped the dance teachers, eventually getting a co-ed middle school group to make an abstract piece about their lives, followed by a show-stopping African dance choreographed by the facilitators. It is housed in an amazing facility, Art South, in what was recently the poorest county in the US (2005, I believe). The relevance, you say? Down one of the streets here we found the offices of Arte Accion - not affiliated with AIA but the exact same concept - right in the middle of Copán! They raise money with art made by local children to fund theatre and visual arts programs for children. It is spectacular! Claire is there right now, volunteering, and I start tomorrow or sometime soon. Again, so much in common! ¡Lo amo!

After some stressful, although successful, travel to Copan Ruinas, I found myself strictly within a distinction I was hoping to avoid: the tourist.  I suppose I was always going to be one, but there is a difference between a tourist and someone who really becomes connected with a place.  Safely inside our hostel with the other foreigners and out to the empty, somewhat obviously tourist-geared restaraunts, I was frustrated and eager to remove myself from the makeshift bubble.  This morning, I set out with Claire early up the mountain behind the town to explore, happy to garner a simple ¨hola¨from the people we passed.  I am not a naturally forward person, so going about striking up a conversation with anyone was outside my comfort zone, and the coming  was an indication of the trouble I would have.  I stopped by our spanish school to take an a evaluation in order to place me in an appropriate level.  The tenses and words that I once knew didn´t ring with me like they used to.  I guess that´s what happens when you don´t speak for a year.  I must admit that I´m a bit discouraged, but hopefully with the help of the spanish teachers that seem excellent, I can get some back and learn some more.  I look forward to the classes very much and the huge soccer match coming up on Sunday for the league championship.

-Jonathan

As we arrived in San Pedro de Sula we noticed our pace slowing down, shifting into this 90degree weather. We made our way from the airport in to the city, listening to “More than Words” as we stared out at the Honduran highway, wondering when we’d hear an authentic Honduran beat. But before it came, we had arrived at El Tamarindo Hostel in San Pedro.  After settling in a bit, we wandered, with sparse directions, to a nearby bank. If one thing is universal, the banks aren’t open when you need them. We missed the four o’clock closing and instead wandered into a Peruvian restaurant.  The meal was great…everyone got acquainted…meaning that everyone of us from UNC got to know Carolyn by firing questions at the sole student from U Mich.  Fairly true to the Latin American tradition of the long, drawn out meal, we spent about three hours acclimating to changing environment and discussing what was ahead.  The food, the heat, and the travel combined to makes us a tired group of gringos, so we retired to our bunks at El Tamarindo. For the first time in our college career, hitting the hay before 9 pm.  We plan to catch a bus to Copan Ruinas, a small town in Western Honduras renowned for its ruins and colonial architecture.  Hasta Mañana!

Logan, Claire, and Jonathan