Peace Corps Story Slam: A Honduran Miracle

On November 17, 2012, The Brooklyn-Queens Association of Returned Peace Corps Volunteers had a story slam at Two Moon - Art and Coffee House in Brooklyn. The photos above are me telling my story Honduran Miracle and below is the story.

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Honduran Miracle

Titi was my neighbor when I lived Sonaguera, Honduras. His appearance was a bit strange.  His head was slightly asymmetrical.  One day while we were walking around town, I asked him, "When you were younger did you have health problems?"  He replied, "Si hombre," with the emphasis that means, yeah, without a doubt.  He proceeded to tell me the following story:

When he was nine he fell out of a mango tree and suffered a serious blow to his left eye socket.  He pointed out a good-sized scar running through his left eyebrow.  Several years later, when he was 15, without warning, he began hemorrhaging from his nose and the left side of his face began to swell up.  He was taken to the hospital in LaCeiba, two hours away, the third biggest city in Honduras.  They couldn't diagnose him, so they sent him on to San Pedro Sula, the second biggest city.  There, they said he had a tumor and attempted surgery.  However, in the middle of the operation they decided they couldn't proceed and stitched him up.  He has a scar about six inches long on his throat below his left jaw.  He had been in the hospital in San Pedro Sula for six months when he was transferred to Hospital Escuela, the big teaching hospital in Tegucigalpa, the capitol of Honduras.  Two surgeons from the The United States were coming to examine him and another boy whom the Hondurans considered untreatable.  The North American doctors said that surgery might be possible in the US, maybe in Panama or Costa Rica, maybe even in Cuba, but not in Honduras.  They said he had two or three months to live.

   It is not clear to me how or why but another doctor gave a second opinion.  She had studied natural medicine in Japan.  She said he should drink a tea brewed from the rinds of pineapple, ground "pimienta gorda" (I think this is all spice.), and honey.  She prescribed drinking it several times a day for six months.  The pineapple rinds were for cleansing, the pimienta gorda to stop the bleeding and the honey would act as an anti-inflammatory.  Four months later, not only was Titi still alive, but the swelling was mostly gone and he had stopped hemorrhaging from his nose.  The natural medicine doctor said he could stop drinking the tea.  The other doctors said he didn't need an operation.  At the time he told me the story, he was twenty-seven.

   Later, I went back to his house because he wanted to show me a photograph of himself when he was in the hospital.  In the picture the left side of his head, from eyebrow to chin, was at least twice as large as the right.  Titi’s parents, Don Rodolfo and Doña Lola, joined us to look at the picture.  They retold the story.  Don Rodolfo said he knew the president of Honduras at the time.  The president worked on getting a visa and money for Titi to go to the US for the operation.  During this waiting period he started drinking the tea and got better.

   I asked if they thought it was the tea or a miracle.  Doña Lola said, "Clearly it was a miracle.  I prayed every day."  Don Rodolfo said that when the doctors predicted that Titi had two months to live he told them, "But you’re not God and God will decide how long my son lives."  Then Don Rodolfo turned to Titi and said, "Did you tell him about the time you got your dick stuck in your zipper.  Now, that was really serious."

Honduras, November 2010 - Part II - Cruz Bermudez

Cruz Bermudez is a self-taught artist who lives and works in a small, wooden house just outside of downtown Tela, a beach town on the north coast of Honduras. He is proprietor of an art gallery called El Aura, which takes up the living room of his house. Cruz, his wife Maria Lopez, also an artist, and their two young children, live in a couple of small rooms behind the gallery. Paintings are hung and stacked all over the house. The yard functions as a studio and arts workshop where Cruz, Maria and a couple of brothers from each side of the family gather to paint.

Cruz’ paintings are distinctive and easy to spot around Tela. Most of the hotels have a couple on display. Typically, he depicts life along the north coast of Honduras, especially the life of the Garifuna, an Afro-Caribbean community that has as much in common with the cultures of Haiti and Cuba as with Latino Honduras.

He paints men fishing from canoes and from the beach with nets, thatched huts, roosters, musicians and dancers. He is particularly adept at painting night scenes; houses glowing against near black foliage, deep blue water reflecting moonlight, clouds back lit against nighttime skies.

This is Cruz’ bread and butter work. There isn’t much of a tourist industry in Honduras except for the island or Roatan, but those who do travel on the mainland often pass through Tela. Hondurans of means, from San Pedro Sula and Tegucigalpa, also come to the beach here, especially for Semana Santa, the week of celebration around Easter. Cruz supports himself as an artist. He is proud that his paintings have been taken home to the United States, Canada, Germany, France and Spain, rolled up in tubes, stuffed into suitcases or back packs.

Certainly these are commercial paintings, created to sell, to remind people of their experiences in Honduras. However, within this context, Cruz is often after something deeper.

For example, in a painting he recently completed it is nighttime. Off to one side a man paddles a small canoe out into the bay to fish. In contrast to his adult responsibilities, four boys are playing on a pier. The two oldest boys, probably teenagers, are in mid air, having jumped from the pylons. They seem to be at that exact moment of weightlessness before gravity overtakes the momentum of their leap. The next boy in line is a little younger. He is considering jumping. It seems likely that he will follow the older boys and take a swim in the perfect blue of the nighttime ocean. The fourth boy, younger still, hangs back. His posture indicates hesitancy. He is not ready. Maybe he is too young. Maybe he is timid by nature.

Here in the guise of a lush painting for tourists, is a perfect portrait of that moment when you realize that your life is waiting for you. It is yours for the taking. Will you dive in? Will you hesitate, play it safe?

This description is based in part on Cruz’ explanation of the themes of the painting and in part on my extrapolation.

If this painting was hanging above your couch and you looked at it every day, I believe you would find yourself making braver choices. Even if you never thought of it metaphorically, you would develop a yearning to join those boys in mid air, in that moment where anything could happen and nothing is retractable.

Cruz has been an artist since he was seven years old. Throughout his boyhood he drew and sold a comic book featuring a character named Jeiko. Jeiko was a Honduran Tarzan. He was born in the mountains and could talk to the animals. His adventures included combat with giant snakes, plunges into jungle pools from the tops of waterfalls, and swims across crocodile infested rivers. He swung a mean machete.

Cruz sold photocopies of his comic to his schoolmates for one cent. He always had plenty of pocket money. His buddies pestered him, “When will the next one be ready?” There are no surviving issues of Jeiko.

Cruz has two children with Maria Lopez. They are eight and ten. He had them show me their drawings. Both the girl and the boy had drawn themselves trying on outfits from a closet full of colorful clothes. They draw very well.

Cruz has two older children from a previous relationship. I asked him if they were artists, too. He replied, “Yes they play guitar and sing. We are a family of artists. All of this - painting, sculpture, music - comes naturally to us.”

Cruz, who is 55, has been with Maria for seventeen years. I’m guessing she is fifteen to twenty years younger than him. I asked if she was already an artist when they met. He said, “She liked to paint, but didn’t think she could. Now she is better than me because women are more perfectionistic. I can do it if I want to, but it doesn’t satisfy me. In fact Maria’s paintings are meticulous and yet seem fresh and lively. She specializes in portraits of Honduran women often at work. These portraits have strong psychological and social resonance.

I told her that Cruz and I had been discussing why he paints and that I wanted to ask her the same question. She said, “At first, I painted because I liked it and to make money. Now I paint because I want to show how things are at this time in this community.”

After a couple of hours of talking, Cruz said, “I make paintings to sell, but I also make paintings for my private collection. These I make for myself and for my children after I am dead. I show this work to close friends.”

Cruz had shown me some of his private work on previous visits. This time he went into a back room and brought out a half dozen canvases. One is a large painting of a boat with slack sails full of refugees, people with sad faces making a desperate journey. The boat is becalmed. It seems to be making little forward progress. Cruz said the name of this painting is El Viaje de Esperanza (The Journey of Hope).

Cruz said that all over Latin America people are leaving one place and going to another in hopes of a better life. Hondurans leave for the United States or Spain. Haitians leave for the Dominican Republic. Nicaraguans leave for Costa Rica. Cubans leave for where ever they can land. Many die just because they want a better life.

“I painted this for my children because I hope they never have to make such a journey.”

Maybe all the best paintings are prayers.

I asked Cruz about his plans for the future. He said that he would like to be an artist outside of Tela, outside of Honduras, outside of Central America. Visitors have said they will help him organize shows in Canada and Germany. He said that he would like to have an exhibition in the United States. I guess I’ve got my work cut out for me.

Here is a link to photos of more paintings by Cruz and Maria:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=251446&id=669761364&l=8a0dab474b

Ode to an Aged Artist - Part 5

(I figured out recently that if you click on the picture you can get a larger version of it. If you click on the enlargement, you get a good close up that will let you see the texture of the surface and the details of the painting.)

Monday, August 10

Here come the roosters! I love roosters. When I was living in Honduras they were everywhere and not a day went by that I didn’t actively admire them.

“Damn,” I’d say to myself or to Deb. “There’s a handsome bastard,” meaning I’d just spotted a rooster with dramatically shaped plumage, an eye catching comb, intimidating spurs, and a combination of iridescent colors that took my breath away. Some of these guys stood knee high to me. Occasionally, I’d run across an aggressive one, but usually they gave their full attention to scratching and pecking and doing the other thing roosters do. Only a few had the time to spare to charge a gringo.

I saw a rooster

with feathers of Spanish

luster:

black and white cloth

was the stuff

of its shirt,

knee britches,

and arching tail feathers.

its feet sheathed

in yellow boots

displayed the sheen of defiant

spurs.

The

proud

head

crowned

with blood

intensified

its scornful stance:

a statue

of pride.

I love Neruda’s “Ode to a Rooster”, but my perception of roosters is very different from his. The cock he anthropomorphizes so eloquently is a regal character, a kind of benign monarch or the barnyard. Neruda describes him finding a crumb of bread which he passes on to his hens, “keeping nothing for himself / but pride...”

I’ve observed a lot of rooster behavior and I’ve seen nothing that I’d describe as generous or even unselfish. In fact everything in a rooster’s behavioral repertoire seems to have to do with satisfying a limited number of biological imperatives: scratch, peck, scratch, peck, jump a chicken, scratch, peck, scratch, peck, jump a chicken.

Oh yeah, and crow. I don’t know what the biological imperative behind crowing is, but I’m sure there is one.

Remember learning that roosters crow at dawn? Forget it. They crow any damn time they feel like it. However, at dawn they crow in unison, every one in town and there are hundreds, thousands.

Interestingly, in the US, when roosters crow, they say cock-a-doodle-do, but in Latin America they say ki-ki-riki-ki.

Here’s Neruda on rooster sex:

swift movement

of love, ravishment

of feathered shadows,

I praise you,

black

and white

rooster,

strutting

sum

of virile rural honor,

father

of the fragile, egg…

He got the “swift”, “ravishment” and “strutting” right. The rooster jumps on the hens back, pens her head into the dirt, flaps his wings wildly three or four times, and he’s done. The hen gets up, shakes herself off, and goes back to scratching and pecking. The father of the fragile egg struts around bragging about what he’s just done. I know. I am anthropomorphizing, too, just like Neruda, but you watch a rooster right after he’s jumped a hen and tell me that he not thinking, “Yeah, baby! That’s what I’m talking about. I gave it to her good! Call me the love machine.”

Maybe roosters are viewed differently in every epoch. Writing in the fifties, Neruda described a dignified, benevolent, patriarch, a kind of pre-feminist cock. I’m a sixties/seventies/eighties kind of guy. I think about equality, self-determination, and empowerment for the hen. And yet I love roosters and think they are beautiful. Maybe my rooster admiration is post-feminist.

Politics

Looking back over the postings in Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man, I realized none of them are very overtly political. Since I consider this blog a self-portrait, that fact is misleading. Actually, I spend a good portion of my time thinking about politics. However, I tend not to enjoy political discussion all that much. It seems to me they either end up being preaching to the choir or trying to score points against someone you have no intention of really listening to. In my experience political discussions close more doors than they open.

Obviously, I’m leading up to writing about politics and I am challenging myself to do it in a way that is personal and invites people in rather than slamming a door in their face.

I just finished reading Blackwater, The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army by Jeremy Scahill. The gist of what Scahill presents is that Bush came into office with an agenda to “privatize” as much of the federal government as possible, including functions traditionally carried out by the armed services. This was an overt goal that Bush and his neoconservative administration claimed was based on their belief that competition in the market place results in more efficiency than central planning, that corporations, given a free hand, could do everything that government does better and cheaper, including defend the country. Bush, Chaney, and Rumsfeld stated all this before the World Trade Center was destroyed on September 11. After that traumatic event, privatization of the military was put on a fast track so that by the time the US invaded Iraq the State Department and Department of Defense were set up to give out billions of dollars to private corporations to take over functions that had historically been performed by the armed services. Many of these contracts went to a new corporation named Blackwater founded by a man named Erik Prince. Prince was a very wealthy man with deep involvement in right wing political and religious causes.

Not surprisingly, like everything else about the invasion of Iraq, the move to privatize essential military functions went very wrong very quickly. However, it made the people who were awarded the contracts very rich. They profited mightily from the war even as it spiraled downward into chaos. Scahill, whose writing is clear and engaging, tells this story in great detail and with solid documentation. He makes it clear that privatization of the military is a terrible idea, on many, many levels.

My usual response to reading a journalistic expose like this, where powerful people are revealed to be doing terrible things to the rest of us, is anger. I certainly felt anger while reading Blackwater, but much more I felt sadness. I kept muttering to myself, “My poor country. What are they doing to my poor country?”

My most personal connection to the book came as I read about the recruitment and training of Hondurans as mercenaries to send to Iraq. Honduras had initially been part of the “coalition of the willing.” However, it quickly withdrew its regular army troops due to domestic opposition to the war. Despite this decision that the country would not take part in an unpopular war, by 2005 military contractors had set up training bases in the mountains outside Tegucigalpa and were recruiting the same soldiers that Honduras had brought home to go back to Iraq as contracted soldiers. Scahill reports that the Hondurans were paid about $1,000 per month, a small fraction of what people from other parts of the world were being paid to do the same work. So even as cannon fodder, Honduran lives aren’t worth as much as other lives.

I was in Honduras during this period. I had hiked in the mountains where the training base was located. I had no idea what was going on, but I had some contact with the Honduran military and had been thinking and writing about young soldiers.

From my Peace Corps journal- September 25, 2005:

I'm at a Honduran army base in the city of Siquatepeque to give a four-hour presentation on AIDS to the soldiers. This is part of an initiative of the Peace Corps to deliver preventative information to sexually active adult men. I'm at the base with thirty other participants of a “train the trainers” workshop. This is our practicum.

(The manual for the workshop is titled "Aqui Entre Nos... Ideas and Tools for Prevention of HIV/AIDS in the Adult Man." It is illustrated with my Platano Y Tomate drawings.)

We’ve divided up into teams of five and each team is presenting to about fifteen soldiers. I'm working with three Hondurans and another Peace Corps volunteer.

The workshop is fun. It is physically active, packed with games and exercises. The soldiers are having a good time. It has become clear that about half of them can't read or read very poorly. They have trouble counting off by fours. When presented with true or false questions it takes them awhile to realize that the answer will either be true or false. One game involves repeating a well-known tongue twister. Maybe a third of them never manage to say it correctly. They are young and small. Despite the uniforms and the berets worn low over one eye, they strike me as touchingly vulnerable. I'm told later that only the very poor enter the army at this level. If you have more money you can be an officer. These are poor boys from isolated villages a long way from home.

From Siguatepeque, where the Honduran army base is located, it is a twenty-minute bus ride to Comayagua where there is a large American army base. Comayagua is, not coincidentally, a center of prostitution. It is estimated that among prostitutes in Honduras the rate of AIDS infection is 30%.

I'm doing an activity that leads up to the condom demonstration. I ask them to line up in order from the oldest to the youngest with the youngest near the door and the oldest near the window. This relates to condom usage because we are going to give them a sequence of directions for the correct use of a condom and ask them to perform them in order. They like trying to get in order by age, but they can't do it. Two people will ask each other how old they are and stand next to each other, but it won't necessarily relate to the next two. Finally, an officer takes over and organizes them, but when I ask them to go down the line and say how old they are, several are out of order. They think this is very funny, especially the twenty-three year old down between the seventeen and eighteen year olds. Next I ask them to line up by how far their home is from Siguatepeque. Surprisingly they do better at this. There are some energetic discussions about which place is more distant, but in the end they all agree the order is right. I have no way of knowing. Finally, I ask them to form a line with the man with the biggest penis near the door and the man with the smallest penis near the window. The silence lasts three or four beats too long. Then they figure out it is a joke, start laughing, calling for rulers, and jostling to be as near the door as possible.

A young Honduran man named Melvin who came to the workshop with me from Sonaguera takes over and does the condom demonstration. It is soon obvious that many of the soldiers have never seen or handled a condom. They have trouble opening the tin foil packets. They can't figure out which side is up. We are using platanos for penises and they try to put them on with the roll facing the wrong way.

This is all done with great humor, not to mention homoerotic charge. Picture a room full of hot young Latin men holding huge green bananas and helping each other get rubbers over them.

I’m left with the impression that, while it would probably take any of these guys five minutes to get a girl pregnant or infect himself with HIV, their chances of getting a condom on in the dark in a state of excitement are pretty slim.

Perhaps because these boys are young enough to be my grandchildren, all of this strikes me as poignant and some how hopeful. There is so much to do and it needs to happen at such a basic level that it should be possible to make a difference.

I have heard that commercial sex workers charge one price for sex with a condom, but for a little more will let you go "carnita a carnita." At least now, if offered the choice, these soldiers can make an informed decision. That is progress. Right?

("Carnita" is the diminutive of "carne" so it translates as "little meat" or in the phrase for unprotected sex "little meat to little meat." However, the diminutive is used with terms of endearment so perhaps a better translation is "sweet little meat to sweet little meat." I have to admit I like that.)

From my Peace Corps journal – 10/10/05:

I sent out a group email today that described working with a group of Honduras soldiers. (The email was based on the journal entry above.) I wrote about my perception of them as vulnerable young men, poor, uneducated, a long way from their homes and the support of their families. This was an accurate description of my feelings as I stood in front of the group, talking about HIV/AIDS and hoping that the information, to some small extent, would make these young men safer.

However, as I was writing the email a couple of weeks later, another set of more complicated perceptions had crept in.

I’d been reading Inevitable Revolutions by Walter Lafeber. It is a detailed history of the long, sad story of the United States’ exploitation of Central America. For about 200 years now we have had one goal in Central America: profit. We have done anything and everything to keep the balance of cash flowing from South to North. Up until about the 1950’s if anything happened that threatened to interrupt our money making, we literally sent in the marines with few if any apologies or rationalizations. In the 1950s and 60s, in the context of the cold war, with the Soviet Union and China emerging as rival super powers, direct, armed intervention in the internal affairs of Central American democracies became harder to pull off. Our solution was to choose a right wing politician or general, covertly support him in overthrowing the legitimate government, buy him an army and auxiliary paramilitaries, train them at The School of The Americas, arm them to the teeth and turn them loose on their own people. Thus assuring that Central America was a “stable” place for US corporations to make big bucks. Due to this arrangement, hundreds of thousands of Central Americans, especially during the 1980’s and 90’s, were tortured, “disappeared”, lined up on the edges of mass graves and shot in the back of the head, herded into churches that were then burned to the ground, dropped out of airplanes and helicopters, etc.

Inevitable Revolutions, among many other books, tells this history at much greater length, in minute detail, in more academic language, but there is no mistaking that this is the story.

The soldiers who did the killing across Central America must have been just like the sweet, not very bright boys I gave the AIDS workshop to. The victims of the killing were for the mot part poor and powerless, just like the killers themselves.

What is the greater sin, for a boy to be a murderer or to turn a boy into a murderer? I’m glad I don’t have to come up with the answer to that question.

(Speaking of great sin, John Negroponte was US ambassador to Honduras during the 1980s, but his responsibility for the process described above was much greater and included overseeing the US’ bloody role in Nicaragua and Salvador. In 2004 he was appointed ambassador to Iraq. Scahil suggests that his appointment was made with the goal of implementing the “Salvador Option”: getting Iraqis to kill other Iraqis.)

I read the last page of Blackwater and closed the cover. How can it be that this information is available in such an accessible form and nothing changes?

But maybe there is some reason to be hopeful after all. From the New York Times, June 8, 2010

WASHINGTON — Burdened by lawsuits, criminal investigations and negative publicity stemming from its private security work in Iraq and Afghanistan, Blackwater Worldwide is being put up for sale, the company has announced.

Blackwater, which changed its name to Xe Services and brought in new management last year in order to remake its image, is pursuing a sale in part because that overhaul has failed to change perceptions of the company, most critically inside government, which is its main customer.

Erik Prince, the former member of the Navy Seals and heir to an automotive fortune who founded Blackwater, said in a statement given to The Associated Press late Monday that making the decision to sell the company was difficult, but that he no longer wanted to deal with the intense criticism the business has faced.

Journal of My Trip to Honduras

May 22, 2010

(My wife, Deborah Drew, and I were Peace Corps volunteers in Honduras from 2005-2007. We went back in November of 2008 and again last week. This post is based on journal entries I made during the latest trip.)

I am sitting on the second floor balcony of the Hotel Guadeloupe II, the hotel where I always stay in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. It is not really a balcony. The hallways are open and there is a low wall and railing that looks out over the street. The doors and windows of the rooms open onto this open hallway.

(How many journal entries have I started with “I am sitting on the balcony of the Hotel Guadeloupe II”?)

There is thunder and lightening. The power is going off and on.

Why am I back in Honduras? Is this the last time or the continuation of an ongoing commitment? Is this the trip where I say good-bye and let Honduras become part of my past or is this the trip where I get clear that international work is a permanent part of what I want my life to be about?

We are in Tegucigalpa to see Hector, a young man from Sonaguera who is in the capital studying medicine. I have my old Honduran cell phone with me. I have at least three numbers for Hector none of which are working. He knows we are here and I feel confident that he will contact us, but what a drag if he doesn’t.

Wait a minute. This is Honduras. Of course things go wrong. Of course the numbers I have for Hector don’t work. Of course the lights are going to go off and on.

May 23, 2010

We spend the day with Hector doing ordinary things that feel extraordinary.

He talks with passion about his studies. Many students have to repeat courses they haven’t been successful in, but he is moving steadily ahead. His only complaint is that he has to share a cadaver with 35 other students and it is in bad condition. It is hard to see the structures they are supposed to be learning about.

We go to the Gourmet Grill for breakfast, walk on Boulevard Morazon looking without success for internet and a new chip for my cell phone, take a taxi to Mall Mega Plaza and see Robin Hood. Then its back to the Guadeloupe for a game of Oh Hell and out to dinner at El Patio.

We say good-bye to Hector.

Deb and I watch the finale of Lost with rolling horizontal stripes on a channel whose signal clicks off periodically.

In other words nothing exceptional happens, so why does every minute feel so resonant? It is not like I don’t have great, full days in my life in Rhode Island. I certainly do, many of them. And yet I can’t deny the power of Honduras for me. I also don’t understand it fully.

May 24, 2010

Eight hours on the bus from Tegucigalpa to Sonaguera. I look out the window the whole time. Taking in the combination of gorgeous scenery and poverty. Memories come to me with every mile. When Deb isn’t reading or knitting, we hold hands and talk. The greenness fills me with emotion. There is no way of holding this greenness in memory. If you are not looking at it, it is gone.

We get off the bus in the afternoon in Planes in a deluge of rain, thunder and lightening. We wait under a shelter where uniformed workers stop cars to check for fruit. We are still a half-mile to the turnoff to Sonaguera, but this is the only shelter. There is a bus coming behind us that will take the turn and go into town. When it arrives 40 minutes later, the rain is still coming down. We know the ayudante on this bus, a heavyset guy who has always been friendly to us. He is glad to see us and surprised that we have returned. We explain, for the first of many times, that we are not staying another two years. We are only visiting.

May 25, 2010

In the afternoon, I sit on the porch of Ligia and David’s house writing. Everyday it is in the 90’s. Every afternoon there are thunderstorms.

The sky turns to slate. All the colors are muted, shifted toward gray.

Yeah! Here comes the rain, just as Legia pulls up on her motorcycle. The dogs are happy to see her. Davissa comes out to unlock the gate. Both Davissa and her mother get speckled with the rain, but it is not until they have the bike under the roof of the porch that the deluge really starts.

I sit and watch the street through their gate. This is the parade that passes:

A boy in a red shirt carrying a large stem of bananas over his shoulder. The bananas must weigh half as much as he does.

A three-wheeled moto-taxi with a sheet of plastic stretched across the door to protect the passengers in the back seat.

A green pick-up truck with steamy windows and a red pick-up with a plastic, five-gallon water jug rolling around in the bed.

A boy on a motorcycle going too fast to catch any details. After he passes, it registers; he was wearing a helmet!

A girl on a bike carrying a huge black umbrella and wearing the universal public school uniform: white blouse, blue skirt. The basket of her bike is full. She stops at the gate and calls out to Davissa. She is delivering tortillas on her way to night classes. Davissa sends her around to the other side of the house where the gate is unlocked.

Two girls on bikes pass going in opposite directions. One has a purple umbrella and wears a green skirt. The other has no umbrella and is wearing a black tank top. They sing out to each other, “Adios,” “Que le via bien.”

The same moto-taxi comes back again.

A few more nondescript pick-ups.

A full sized, bright yellow school bus with lettering that reads Walker-Hackensack Valley, Minnesota Regional School Department.

Out of the corner of my eye, I see something moving through the puddles in the yard. It is a frog about the size of a grapefruit. It hops to the gate and squeezes through the bars. Why did the frog want to leave the yard? Why did the frog cross the road?

It is too dark to write. Mosquitoes I can’t see are probably biting me. Earlier in the day, I saw a map of Sonaguera at the Centro de Salud. It was stuck with two hundred pins clustered in groups around villages. Every pin indicated a case of malaria. I could become a pin in a map.

May 26, 2010

One reason for coming back to Honduras at this time is that William Alvarenga died in a motorcycle accident six weeks ago. We want to see his family, especially his brother Melvin, with whom we are very close. We want them to know that in some small way we share their grief.

The accident happened right in front of the house. Melvin saw it happen. William pulled out of the gas station across the street and rode his motorcycle into the path of an oncoming truck.

We go to the cemetery with the family. I ride in the back of the pick-up with the two youngest kids, Jairo and Jessica. We cross the highway from the house and go into the gas station.

Jairo says, “That’s where my brother was killed.”

I say. “I know. Do you miss him?”

He nods his head and starts to cry.

I say, “I miss him, too,” and start to cry.

William’s grave looks very fresh. It is a mound of loose dry soil covered in plastic flowers, some already fading in the sun. We add our bunch of white plastic lilies. There are no words to say.

May 27, 2010

(In November of 2008, Deb and I went to Honduras with a group of students from The East Bay Met School where I work part time. My good friend and co-worker Mary Vieira went, too. This past February, Mary and her husband, Glenn Spear, had their first child, a little boy they named Rio Hunter. For her baby shower, Mary asked that in lieu of gifts donations be made to help children in developing countries. She designated half of what was raised, $500, to the Clinica Maternal y Infantil in Sonaguera.)

Deb and I talk to several people about Rio’s money. We want Silvia Bardales, a businesswoman and teacher of business at the high school, to manage it and account for how it is spent. We also talk to Nelly, the head of nursing for the town, and to Rosa, the new director of the clinica. They are in agreement with setting up an account with Silvia that they can draw on. Nelly says there is no oxygen in the health center. If babies are born who could use a little oxygen there is no way to give it to them. Maybe they will use the money for a tank and a regulator. It could be used with asthmatics, too. She also mentions that there are a couple of HIV positive mothers in town who can’t breast feed their babies, the money could be used to make sure the babies get formula. Deb reminds her that emergency transportations is often needed. The only ambulance in town is a private one and prohibitively expensive. Rio’s money could fund gas to get to the hospital in LaCeiba.

We plan to find ways to replenish this fund.

Everyone we visit gives us coke. If they know we are coming they feed us soup or fried chicken. I estimate this is a six hen visit. At least six hens give up their lives to make us feel welcome.

May 28, 2010

We leave Sonaguera and go to Tela, my favorite beach town in Honduras. We have a long lazy day at the Hotel Sherwood, looking out at Tela Bay. Tomorrow morning we will go to the airport in San Pedro Sula and fly home by way of Miami and Charlotte.

Here is what I realized on this trip: it is very important to me to go south. Not south to Key West or New Orleans or San Diego, but south to Havana or Managua or Bogotá. It is especially important to me to go south to Sonaguera in Honduras. It is important to me to know the world beyond the boundaries of my own country, to smell other odors, hear other languages, taste sweeter fruit, listen to opinions informed by other experiences, sway to unfamiliar rhythms, learn the names of birds that never fly north of the Rio Grande, feel heat that is only approximated in Miami in August, stand out for the whiteness of my skin, share the street with roosters, cows, horses, pigs, dogs that haven’t been neutered, in addition to bicycles, motorcycles, pick-up trucks and recycled school buses from the US, feel deeply connected to people who are different than me in all particulars, and recognize that they are no different than me.

About the Drawing: The drawing was done by one of the young men in my old neighborhood of Barrio Abajo. His name is Cesar.

Turning Sixty in Honduras

I’ve begun thinking of this blog as a book. Not that it’ll be published as a bound, paper book that you could hold in your hand, lay in bed reading or take to the beach with you. Rather that it is being published in installments for any one who comes across it and cares to peruse it.

There is a Cuban saying that in his life every man should plant a tree, raise a child, and write a book. So I’m counting this as my book.

I am two weeks away from my sixty-fifth birthday. May 14, the date I officially become an old man, is the focal point of this year long project; a slightly off center focal point since I started Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man at the beginning of January, 2010 and plan to run it through the end of December, but close enough.

I really like to stretch out my birthday. Therefore, I’m anticipating that the next couple of posts will focus on birthdays, on hanging one more year on the line, on getting to the point where I am eligible for all the senior discounts. In this spirit, what follows is a description of my sixtieth birthday. I wrote it while I was in the Peace Corps in Honduras. It was one of a series of emails that I sent home to family and friends describing my life during those two years, January 2005 through April 2007.

Turning Sixty in Honduras

Most of you know that I really like to stretch out my birthday. My celebration this year started a couple of days in advance and ran through the following weekend. Leading up to it, Thursday (5/12) was La Dia de las Enfermeras (Nurse’s Day.) They closed the Health Center so we could have an outing. Health delivery for greater Sonaguera is organized into the Cesamo, a large supervising health center with doctors, and Cesars, smaller affiliated centers staffed by nurses or nursing assistants. There are seven of these smaller centers. The outing was for personnel for the whole system, about twenty people showed up, Deb and me the only gringos, me the only man. We were headed for El Sostre one of my favorite villages, where there is a popular cascada, an area where the river tumbles over big boulders and spills down a couple of impressive falls, forming a series of natural swimming holes.

(In November of 2009, a flood swept through El Sostre and destroyed this whole area. Reportedly, the waterfalls and swimming holes no longer exist.)

We spent the day playing in the water, eating carne asada (grilled beef,) chismol (a salsa of tomatoes, onions, green peppers, lime and salt,) beans and tortillas.

I’ve been waiting for the chance to describe the Honduran outdoor grill of choice. It consists of the rim of a car or truck tire with legs welded on. I think the bigger the rim and the fancier the legs the more prestigious the grill. The central hole in the rim is covered with the top from a five pound coffee can and the surrounding holes for the lug nuts provide ventilation. The standard grilling practice requires non-stop fanning. A lot of street food is cooked on this type of grill. Most days in Sonaguera you can find a smoky corner where someone is selling carne asada or grilled corn on the cob.

After lunch with the nurses, Deb and I went down to the river alone. Getting to the swimming hole at the bottom of the falls involved climbing over and around boulders and down some steep inclines. My knees complained the whole way, but I could do it. We swam across the pool and pulled ourselves up on some mossy rocks at the base of the falls. I felt so grateful that, approaching my sixtieth birthday, I was there, in the sunshine, with the water beating down on me, with Deb. I was Grateful that I was capable of climbing and scrambling and swimming. Certainly, it wasn’t elegant, but I could still do it.

When we got back from the outing I stopped to check my email. My favorite Internet place is in a former motel. The rooms have been converted into small businesses, a dental "consultant," a beauty parlor, a lawyer’s office. This is Sonaguera’s equivalent of a strip mall, with the obligatory chickens, cows and pigs grazing in the courtyard.

(Since then, the main streets of Sonaguera have been paved and this old motel has been rebuilt into startlingly modern, two story, mixed use property that looks like some of the fancier buildings in LaCeiba. Thankfully, the chickens, cows and pigs are still there.)

I had a birthday email from my friend Ted Bronsnick. We’ve had a thirty-eight year friendship, having met when I was twenty-two and Ted was twenty-four. Attached to the email was a photograph of Ted and his motorcycle. They were together in a roadside rest area off some back road. He was dressed in his high tech riding gear, helmet under his arm, white hair, white beard, big smile. I’m not sure it is correct lingo to call his type of bike a "hog," but it should be since it is only slightly larger than some of the bigger pigs that wander around Sonaguera. Knowing Ted and seeing this photo of him reinforced my thought from the waterfall about living fully and with appreciation. I think the depth of my gratitude comes from the awareness that I’m operating in a window of opportunity that isn’t going to stay open for ever. The odds that I could be doing any of this ten years from now are slim.

(Now five years down the line, I’m feeling more optimistic that I’ll still be having adventures when I’m seventy, but seventy-five is questionable, eighty is a long shot, and eighty-five is down right improbable.)

The morning of my actual birthday, Deb served me coffee in bed under the mosquito net. While I was sipping and reading Paul Farmer’s Pathologies of Power, she prepared my present which involved banging a lot of nails into our cinder block walls. Every once in awhile a nail would ricochet out of the wall and she’d curse at it. After about twenty minutes she was ready. There were two arches between our dinning area and kitchen, one forming the doorway, the other over the counter. She had strung colored lights over the arches and wove in multicolored plastic flowers. It was beautiful and tacky and very Honduran and my mother would have loved it. My other presents were a ceramic wall clock with a rooster on it, a spatula, and a big bottle of Cuban rum (not Havana Club, but Cuban just the same.) That night Deb and I and Adam, the other volunteer in town, put a pretty good dent in the rum.

We spent the weekend in Trujillo, staying at a great, but rundown hotel, The Villa Brinkly, up in the hills overlooking the bay and the tourist islands off shore. The owner was an eighty-six year old American woman named Peggy Brinkley. According to her son, thirty years ago she was traveling around Central America in a jeep, pulled into Trujillo, pointed at the hill and said, "That’s where I’m going to live." Peggy told us she was going back to the States for a week to participate in the senior Olympics. Her sport was ping-pong. Since Hurricane Mitch and 9/11, tourism had been way off in Trujillo. At the Villa Brinkley, the pool was cloudy, there were weeds growing between the paving stones of the patio, everything needed a coat of paint, but I thought it was just the right place to commence my seventh decade.

One of the afternoons in Trujillo, we walked down to a beach bar and settled into hammocks slung under a thatched palm shelter. I drank a mango licuado (milk shake) and read some more Paul Farmer. I thought about how to save the world. Now that’s the way to turn sixty!

The Portrait

This is a portrait that Tony Janello did of me in 1982, twenty-nine years ago. I thought about it last week because I used a self-portrait from around the same time when I was studying with Tony. Then I remembered that I had commissioned Tony to draw me as a birthday present to myself. It would have been my thirty-seventh birthday if my math is right.

At that time Tony had a studio just off Broadway near the Columbus Theater, which in those days, before DVDs, before the Internet, was a porn house. He had a very aggressive dog. To cater to the dog’s aggressiveness, Tony kept a stuffed rabbit suspended from the ceiling by a pulley. There were many stuffed rabbits all of them named “big Bunny.” Tony would lower Big Bunny down into the dogs strike zone and the dog would go crazy, first chomping down on one of Big Bunny’s extremities and shaking it from side to side until stuffing flew, then humping it wildly.

I haven’t been in touch with Tony in a long time.