Professor Yeti

“Sub Umbra Floreo”: Under the shade I flourish. This is the national motto of Honduras, a country that has experienced more than its share of shade in recent years. I was amazed at the stories I heard about these struggles when I traveled there with twenty-one other Minnesotan Lutherans to work on a building site called Mount Horeb.

Mount Horeb is the dream project of a Honduran organization, Christian Coalition for Development (CCD). After sixteen years of working with refugees and the poor and receiving frequent death threats from the government in return, CCD deserves to have a dream come true. The site will shelter, educate, and train abused women and children, containing a school, a church, a bakery, and a mechanical shop.

Our trip gave us a whirlwind introduction to Honduras’s situation, delivered by Hernán “Hernie” López, a young leader for CCD, and Claire, a development intern from Canada. Here is a similarly packed introduction for you:

Honduras stood in the spotlight of national disasters in 1998, when Hurricane Mitch destroyed some 75 percent of Honduran structures with powerful winds and flooding. All of the bridges in Tegucigulpa were destroyed, islanding the entire city. Hernie pointed out that disasters are like fads — for a few years, the relief funds poured in, then public attention switched to a newer disaster, and Honduras’s support dwindled.

Now, 80 percent of the population of Honduras is unemployed, driving many to sell food or trinkets on the street and many more to emigration. The United States is the biggest source of income for the entire country of Honduras, much of which is money sent back by immigrant workers. With rampant unemployment, many children are left to the streets and to the gangs that thrive there.

“Every day,” said Claire, “people are killing each other — gang members are killing other gang members, gangs are killing the police, police are killing gang members. It just goes on and on, it’s unbelievable.” On our tour we passed basketball courts built by the government as a diversion for youth other than gang involvement.

Later on the trip, we visited a juvenile detention center a short distance away from Mount Horeb, where teenage boys from all over Honduras are sent by court orders. They live in brick dormitories, go to school, learn mechanical trades, and, whenever they can, play soccer. Many had been involved in gangs. One flirted with Claire and showed her a tattoo on his arm (tattoos are illegal in Honduras, so having one means almost definite membership in a gang). He said it was done when he was eight. “Didn’t it hurt?” she asked. “Ah, I was so fucked up on coke when I got it, I couldn’t tell,” he replied.

Claire later told us she’s learned to play it cool in conversations like these. She has worked with many gang members and followed the situation closely during her internship. She said that recently the police collected about 200 arrested gang members into a single prison, then set the prison on fire, burning most of its inhabitants alive. Such state-sanctioned social cleansing is not uncommon: police have been known to shoot children who are on the street after dark.

Many of these issues were brought close to our camp and close to our hearts by Adonay, a boy of about twelve who has been neglected and abused by his family. He lived and traveled with us because of Greg Meyer, an associate in ministry and one of the organizers of the trip. Greg and his family fell in love with Adonay over several trips to Honduras: they began to support him with clothes, food, and money, but these were intercepted constantly by his father. Now, Greg is working to legally adopt Adonay and bring him to the U.S.

Adonay frequently surprised us with his combination of innocence and street toughness. One minute he was giving four-year-old Luis a ride around in a wheelbarrow or playing with a plush red parrot, the next he was chasing a five-foot rattlesnake with a rock for food. He also flirted with Claire, a woman fourteen years his senior, constantly. Besides calling her “my little love” or offering to join her in the shower, he had pick-up lines like I’d never heard. Passing her at dinner, he kisses her on the shoulder and says, “Your eyes alone are sufficient.”

For a while, Greg said, Adonay’s family had moved to a different city and left him behind, and he lived in a ditch with other children, selling garbage to buy food. Once, a snack truck crashed near the ditch, killing both men inside; the children robbed them and stole as much food as they could before ambulances or police arrived. These were the conditions Adonay had seen, and now he thirstily drank in all the attention and love that twenty-two Lutherans could give.

Thankfully, Honduras showed us more than gloom. Thanks to Greg and Hernie, Adonay is now living at a Honduran boarding school while the adoption process continues. Working with local workers, we laid sewer pipe, shoveled dirt into trenches, sewed curtains, fixed wiring, and cleaned and painted buildings. We saw diapers sewn by Minnesotan church members (in what Greg called “practically diaper sweatshops”) safely delivered by the thousands to a Tegucigulpa hospital.

And CCD does more than help Americans give and understand what Honduras suffers — they train local people (like Hector, the caretaker farmer of Mount Horeb) to provide medical services and conflict resolution for their communities. They create small rays of hope within Honduras’s stormy borders.

Jonathan Wichmann (jonathanwichmann@gmail.com) misses traveling in a school bus labeled “El Toro Grande.”

This entry was posted on Friday, April 15th, 2005 at 10:57 am and is filed under Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.