I got a decent night’s sleep. I took the stairs down to breakfast and saw a Black guy sleeping in the stairwell. But he was wearing a nice, clean urban sports outfit, so I doubt he was homeless. He got up and left the stairwell after I passed. I had the complimentary breakfast and hopped on the shuttle after dropping my keycard at the front desk (the only check-out step they required).
When I saw the bill on my bank account 2 weeks later, they ended up charging me $20 more than the advertised price, another thing I’m usually unwilling to question. This is another luxury of affluence: avoiding conflict.
The delegation’s domestic coordinators, Meg and Meredith, were sitting near me at the gate in Atlanta, but I didn’t have the guts to talk to them. Plus, I was sick, which further hampered my courage and eagerness to say hi. I didn’t know for sure it was them, but I was pretty sure. (They were both White.)
Like on the previous day’s flight, the plane had video monitors in the back of the seats, but I eschewed them in favor of my book, Niall Ferguson’s history of World War II, The War of the World. (He may be an incorrigible imperialist, but, according to my favorite blogger, he writes a mean history tome. To be honest, I’ve read better.) I must’ve done some writing too. It was only about 3 hours to Honduras.
We deplaned onto the palm-lined tarmac at San Pedro Sula, a city of 600,000 I’d never heard of. When I stepped into the tropical sunshine, it was warm, but not hot like I’d expected. Inside, we stood in line in slightly uncomfortable tropical heat. A thin layer of tropical grime covered every surface. (I checked: Honduras is in the tropics.) It took maybe 20 minutes to get through customs, after which we had to put our bags through another x-ray machine for some reason. Then we walked out into the main terminal.
It didn’t look much different from a U.S. airport, just smaller and less fancy. People were massed around the customs exit, waiting for friends and family. I spotted the Witness for Peace (WFP) group immediately, with Meg and Meredith. They spotted me and waved. We collected some more people and went to the food court to wait for the rest of the group.
I stupidly shook everyone’s hand even though I had a cold, and then felt really guilty about it the rest of the trip. (One of them later came down with a cold.) I was afraid of getting too physically close to my fellow delegates for fear of infecting them, even though I’d almost certainly exposed them to my germs already. That inhibited my socialization, but it’s hard to say if I would’ve been any more outgoing under normal circumstances.
I didn’t wanna talk too loudly either, for fear of spraying them with my contagious saliva, mucus and/or phlegm, but the cold made it hard to speak clearly, so I mostly kept quiet. I also missed a lot of conversation just because I didn’t wanna get too (physically) close to anyone, and I couldn’t hear them over the din of the food court.
Once I’d “crossed the Rubicon” of shaking hands, I didn’t wanna mention having a cold, although I kept blowing my nose, so they must’ve known something was up. I was just hoping they’d chalk it up to allergies. Politely, they avoided the subject.
There was some chitchat. Some people were friends who’d moved away. Emily and Diana were friends and roomies less than a year out of college. The conversation petered out several times. We were a shy bunch.
(Sorry, but at this point I’m gonna bail on the whole “racially-identifying-everyone” idea. To keep it up would be very annoying and make me very uncomfortable. There’ll be a lot more pictures from here on out, so I’ll leave it up to the reader to identify everyone’s race. If you so choose.)
I was the only guy in our group of 10, a situation I quite enjoyed. During the summers in high school, I took a poetry class, in the first year of which I was the only guy, which was great. Women tend to be gentler (because they’ve been socialized that way), and, being a sensitive person, I really appreciate that kind of treatment. I also think gentleness is my natural temperament, although being socialized as a male has made it difficult for me to show that side of my personality.
I exchanged my dollars for lempiras, the Honduran currency, and bought a big, plastic water bottle. “Una botella de agua, por favor,” I told the young woman at the kiosk, nervously excited to get to use my high school Spanish again. There was a gift shop in the food court called “The Mayan Store.” Some of us milled about there.
We’d been advised not to check any luggage, so as not to delay our departure from the airport, but customs slowed us down so much that I don’t think that would’ve been an issue. Maybe they were afraid of someone’s luggage getting lost and having to drive back to the airport the next day. I had no carry-on luggage, so my backpack was jam-packed, chockful of goodies (by which I mean underwear and clothes).
Eventually, Corie and Ale showed up. They were WFP’s International Team in Honduras. They called themselves “IT,” an unfortunate initialism that always made me think of “information technology.” I had to keep reminding myself that they weren’t talking about tech support.
I was struck by their youth. They were both in their 20’s, and Corie was less than a year out of college. I couldn’t have imagined taking on this kind of job fresh out of college. Even now I doubt I could handle the stress and emotional strain.
The itinerary for the delegation had been kept secret to protect
the people we’d be meeting with. Corie and Ale informed us the itinerary they
came up with had already changed due to security concerns. Not only did they
have to work under tremendous pressure, they also had to adjust on the fly.
We walked out the sliding doors to a yellow mini-bus that would be our main mode of transport for the duration. Our driver was Carlos, a middle-aged, mustachioed Honduran man of modest stature who loaded our bags. The airport was in the middle of brush land. It was the dry season, which explained the dusty look and feel of the place.
The airport was on a highway outside San Pedro Sula. The bus turned on to the highway and headed away from the city. We drove by prickly pears and agave. After a while, we started passing fields of banana trees. The banana bunches on the trees were already bagged. Roadside stands appeared at regular intervals. In the distance in every direction were the faint outlines of mountains.
Along the road were many storefronts painted blue with the Pepsi logo and the slogan “VIVE HOY” (“LIVE TODAY”). This was clearly Pepsi country, although I noticed some Coke penetration, as one would expect, given Coke’s long-standing grip on Mexico.
After a while, we came to a bridge over a wide river, across which lay our destination, the city of El Progreso. In the middle of the river stood a concrete obelisk (probably the column of an old bridge). It too was painted blue with the Pepsi logo.
El Progreso is a bustling burg of 300,000, spread out like a typically sprawling Third-World metropolis. Soon after getting into town, we passed a statue of a bananero (banana field worker) in front of an old colonnade. This is a tribute to the striking bananeros of the 1950’s. The city has a history of political and social struggle.
Our first stop was Power Chicken, a Honduran fast-food chain with an English name for some reason. Corie and Ale really talked up the place on the bus ride, which came off as a bit unseemly to me. This was a human rights delegation on which we would be dealing with grave, life-and-death issues. Why were they waxing rhapsodic about a fast-food place?
The Power Chicken location was on a main drag filled with U.S.-based fast-food joints: KFC, Pizza Hut (which was way fancier there) and Burger King. Every establishment’s sign was huge and towering.
The Power Chicken logo is a muscular, anthropomorphic rooster standing in front of a Superman-style insignia with lightning bolts coming out of it. The imagery is not subtle. The interior resembled an average U.S. fast-food place. We pushed some tables together and waited for the IT to bring the food over.
They ordered a family-style meal, since ordering individually would’ve been difficult given our lack of familiarity with the establishment. Jet lag and shyness kept things pretty quiet at the table. The meal was grilled chicken, black beans, white rice, mixed veggies and little cups of different sauces. There were also long, thick French fries(?).
We dug in voraciously, except for me. Despite being the only man in the delegation and, I would guess, easily outweighing everyone else, I had the smallest appetite. This pattern repeated throughout the trip, making me wonder about the calorie-burning power of emotional labor. Most of my energy was expended unconsciously, to shield me from my emotions.
Thence we headed to our home for the first 3 nights, La Fragua, a former Catholic school. Our bags were deposited in the bedrooms on the 2nd floor, and we milled around the backyard. Some of us sat at a concrete picnic table next to a thick, mangled old tree trunk. Meredith and Lisa smoked, and we all took in the fading light and lengthening shadows.
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| La Fragua |
The next activity was introductions in the classroom on the first floor. We assigned roles for each member, like in Oaxaca. I took medical bag duty, one of the easiest jobs, literally just making sure we didn’t forget to bring the medical bag. Predictably, I was reluctant to take on any responsibility. The others were more enthusiastic, as one would expect of such a self-selected group.
We went to the cafeteria for a Honduran dinner, made by a quiet, little woman. We became chattier then. There were old, faded, 70’s-style Catholic posters scattered throughout the place, like the relics of a dying faith. They haunted me. It was as if they'd been salvaged from my memories of childhood.
(If you’re wondering, I was raised Catholic, but it didn’t take. Or, in the parlance of the faithful, I’m a “lapsed Catholic.” I don’t know how one can “lapse” from something that was forced on them, but whatever.)
After our group activities, we retired upstairs to our bedrooms. As the only man, I got a room to myself. This was a nice reversal of the usual deference to the lone female in a group. There were 3 cots in my room, with kids’ sheets on them, racecars on one and writing in English, like they were using U.S. hand-me-down’s.
I took the first shower of the evening, employing the military method due to the not-quite-lukewarmth of the water. It was slightly bracing. It should’ve been refreshing, given the heat, but that wasn’t my reaction. I just resented the inconvenience and gritted my way through it.
I hadn’t brought toothpaste and I went the first few days without brushing my teeth. That’s how long it took for me to work up the courage to ask the IT for a stop on our travels to let me buy some. Nor had I brought shampoo, but that was much less pressing, since I only use it about once a week.
My cot was surprisingly comfy. The room’s windows were tall, stretching about 8 feet to the ceiling, starting at 4 feet from the floor. They had heavy wooden blinds that were adjustable by hand. I opened them easily.
Since it was a corner room, there were windows on 2 walls, and the cross breeze was nice. I turned on the fan and went to sleep after my requisite adjustment period to a new, non-hotel sleeping space (in this case, less than a half-hour). The sounds of wildlife and people outside were minimal.
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