The Heart of Honduras III

Meanwhile, back at the build site, it's time for the walls to begin rising. In contrast to my build in el Salvador, the corners are not interlocked and the rebar doesn't run inside the bricks. Those towers of metal I've been helping to construct are placed at strategic corners around the building and the cement brick walls are built, free-standing, in between. It makes for some nervous moments, because no one wants to be the one who falls or leans into a wall and sees it collapse into the house. This nightmare never comes to pass. And the walls go up remarkably quickly. It's fascinating to see how the bricks are - to use the term loosely - cut. The mason measures approximate length to fit the required space and then takes a hammer to the brick. The rough edge is no issue because cement will be poured into the adjoining spaces and a rough surface is, in fact, preferred.
The mornings are relatively cool, rarely above 80 degrees (I have been in the US too long to remember celcius well) and there are consistent clouds. This does not mean no UV, as some of our members learn. Brendan sports a bizarre burn around his neck that has a v-shape to match the shirt he had on. We all suffer from small complaints. Burns, scratches, Montezuma's revenge. On one afternoon, I decide the stomach gods do not want me to return to work after lunch. Then the weather gods agree and the rain forces everyone to laze at the hotel for the afternoon. When we head out for dinner, a sight from a cartoon. It is raining, with both lighting and thunder animating the sky. Yet in front of our hotel is a worker up a steel ladder, working on the wires - with a tool of sort in one hand and an umbrella in the other. He apparently survived, because there was neither worker nor singe marks when we walked back.
During our time in Santa Rosa, we visited a leather maker, a fair-trade organic coffee grinding plant and a non-profit that turns a large vegetable into loofa products for places like the Body Shoppe. None of us appears to be shopoholics. Murray, the dad from Calgary, manages to do all his souvenir shopping in one stop at the loofa factory and crows about how light they are. Then he discovers how difficult it can be to fit that much loofa into a suitcase.
On the last day of the build, a ceremony on the roadside. We are presented with small wooden hammer plaques and certificates recognizing our contribution. We ensure the masons and their helpers get the Habitat tshirts we've laundered. We eat sandwiches and cake at the side of the road, sharing with the kids who inevitably show up at the work site. They've become welcome interruptions to our workdays, demonstrating their prowess with slingshots and learning how to count in English. They're engaging kids, always smiling, and I find myself wishing there was some way to provide them with the possibilities that exist for kids in Canada.

The Heart of Honduras II

It's impossible to describe and difficult to comprehend how quickly the group of strangers becomes like family. Most are from Ontario, two from Calgary and I am upholding the dignity of Edmonton - until people say "oh yeah, you guys have that big mall." When you board a minibus every morning at 8:30 to toss bricks around and chop at the Honduran soil to make someone else's life better, it bonds you immediately.

The days are sweat-soaked and I quickly find my niche in the construction world. There are towers of rebar that will reinforce the block structure at corners. That rebar is held in a rough triangle or rectangle shape by more malleable metal bent by yours truly. The tools I use are a board with strategically placed nails and a metal thingamabob that looks like someone took it from the trunk of a car that hopefully will never have a flat tire. It works. As does the hacksaw with the broken handle and dull blade and the hand drill that predates Columbus. I find myself wondering how much easier and quicker it would be with a couple hundred dollars worth of decent tools that can be very difficult to transport from Canada. Like wheelbarrows whose axles haven't been stripped by hard labour and no lubrication.
No one complains, and Max the head mason wears a smile most of the day. His second-in-command, Salvadore, is a hoot. He's always making faces into the cameras the gringos are toting and practices his meagre English. "Happy lunch" is his usual refrain when we drop tools for our midday meal. Two helpers, Richardo and Omar, are more reserved at first. Then Ricardo challenges me to a competition lifting the blocks over our heads like weights. I win. He is impressed - I think. They are very tough workers, slogging it out even when the afternoon rains force the gringos to lounge about in the hotel rather than return to work. It sometimes feels like gnomes have been working in our absence, because there is no other explanation for how much gets done during the time we are away.

At the end of the first week, we slip off to Copan for R&R. It's a collection of Mayan ruins a couple hours entertaining drive from Santa Rosa. I say entertaining because where else would you encounter a flock of vultures atop a rusting car or the back half of a dead cow occupying one lane for both the trip to Copan and the return six hours later?

Copan is a marvel. It's a spiritual city for the Mayans whose history spans from about 400 BC to 800 AD. The buildings are not as tall as those in Tikal in neighbouring Guatemala, but as a religious site, rather than a capital, the carvings and stellae are detailed and give you a far better feeling for the people who once lived and worshipped there. Oscar, our guide, has the right mix of information and humour and describes the ancient game the Mayans played inside the now-grassy playing field. The balls they used weighed four kilograms and were knocked about by shoulders and hips in a game where first prize was a one-way ticket to visit the gods. Glad I'm not the competitive type.

the Heart of Honduras

We´re done our first week of building in Santa Rosa de Copan and it´s long overdue that I blog the experience. so, here we go.

It was an interesting flight down. In fact, it occurred to me that if airlines continue to frustrate their passengers the way they do, the whole global warming thing will be solved, because no one will want to travel any more. I got to LAX two hours plus before my flight, as recommended. I was then asked to stand aside while the latecomers moved up the line to catch their flights. Lots of grumbling people over that. Then the flight left late, from a different gate and the sense of being herded around like cattle just got worse. We managed to get away from LAX half an hour late, just in time to catch the storm in Houston that kept up circling 40 miles from the airport while the pilot dithered over the intercom over just how much fuel we had. Then we got the order to go to a different airstrip to fuel up, then that order was countermanded and we landed in a soggy Houston. I wasn´t worried because my flight didn´t depart until 715 so I had lots of time. Then it was delayed to 830 then 930 when they finally loaded the passengers and proceeded to wait another half hour for ten passengers from another delayed flight. Which meant we would arrive in San Pedro Sula at one in the morning. Getting through customs took until almost two. Yawn. Amazingly, the people who were supposed to meet me were still there after four hours. I was impressed and became even more so. More on that later.

Fortunately, I arrived a day earlier than the rest of the group, so I had a chance to rest up and walk around a steamy hot San Pedro. It´s an okay place to land, I guess, but there wasn´t much on the surface to recommend it to a traveller.

When the group finally coalesced, we headed off for Santa Rosa de Copan, two hours and two thousand feet of altitude (up) away. So the heat was much less of a problem. There was a collection of shacks scattered along the roadside as we travelled. Apparently the rules of the land say if it's between the fence and road, build away. And if no one tears down your shack within five years, you get permanent rights but not ownership to the land. We saw lots of people collecting wood scraps for their cooking. And an informally chaotic driving etiquette that made me glad a Honduran saint by the name of Max Elvir was driving the 14 of us to our build site.

We arrived at the Hotel San Jorge and moved into our spacious rooms. Three older guys in one, five younger guys in another, the young women in yet another and the ladies in the smallest room with just three beds. It´s clean and friendly and the builders never quite got the concept of noise reduction, because the whole place echoes like a shower stall. Which is appropriate, because the rain here is impressive.

Santa Rosa is filled with interesting characters, as we learned from a walk around the town. These three stopped their painting chore long enough for me to get a picture. It's a town of perhaps 40,000 with narrow, steep streets and construction everywhere. The building code here apparently calls for sand and gravel to be left in the street almost indefinitely, regardless of the impact on traffic. Most days we had to find new routes to the build site because of temporary road closures created by construction. There's one traffic light in town, which annoys Max the driver enormously. He figures it just messes up a system that worked pretty well. Poke the nose of your vehicle into the intersection, honk gently, and drive slowly. Seems to work okay, but I have no idea how side mirrors survive in this country.

The build site, when we first arrive, is a grassy slope at a 30 degree angle. So the first job, which occupies the better part of three days, is to build a foundation that is parallel with the horizon. Shovels, picks and rocks, plenty of rocks, are the order of the days. We come to appreciate the slope when the rains begin. And they do. Pretty much every afternoon. They turn the unpaved roads, of which there are many, into rough-riding creek bottoms.
They turn the cobbled streets into cobbled creeks, rushing to the lowest part of town. The sound of the rain on tin roofs is a constant roar, but the people here take it in stride. The lush green hills are explained. But the rivers turn to a muddy brown, in part because of the silt they have traditionally carried, in part because there are too many people cutting too many trees in the mountains of Honduras.

The work is physical and hot. It's a good thing we get to go back to the hotel for lunch each day, because a shower and clean tshirt are much appreciated. For the most part, we're grunt laborers, heaving bricks, bending metal and filling the cracks between the cinderblock with endless amounts of cement mixed on the gravel road in front of the build site. It seems apparent that if we keep going this way, it will become a paved road.
Next door to the build site, a family has allowed the tools and cement bags to be stored in their lean-to. They have two small children, Kevin and Sarahita. When we're not working, we point our cameras their direction. It's easy to see why.
Sarahita is a dynamo, striding about in a diaper and often with no shoes. She stomps up the steep hill and slides down a rock face between the build site and her home. She also carries a plastic chair around, wearing it like a hat on occasion. I watched once in awe as she set it down in the shade of the lean-to and proceeded to move the rock and debris under one of the legs to ensure it was steady. Her brother obviously goes to school in the mornings. On the morning in the picture, he returned home to regale her on his day (I think, my Spanish being limited) for what seemed like an hour. They've become the tiny mascots of our build, gifted with rubber balls and bubbles, for which there is always a smile and gracias in return. The family we are building for, a couple and their baby, are rarely at the site. This I regret, because my experience in El Salvador was enhanced enormously by the presence of uncles and most of the family members on a daily basis. In this case, both parents work, so getting time off to attend the build is impossible.

There are 14 of us gringos on the build, working with two masons, Max and Salvadore, and two helpers, Ricardo and Omar. The language barrier is bridged mostly by hand signals, smiles and the facility of Kris Kennedy, who has done many builds in central America and practices his Spanish with impressive regularity. He has a marvelously open manner. Having been a mayor of a community in Ontario, we are always joshing that he should run in Santa Rosa. He seems to relish every human contact. In one case, having taken some pictures of children last year, he searched out their home to deliver some prints. They were, of course, received with great enthusiasm, as was he. So now he has a whole new collection of personal photographs, this time from the inside of a small home in Santa Rosa occupied by three sisters and their nine children.

Plenty of Poppies

Richard made us his "guy-gourmet" breakfast - pour a can of peaches in a baking pan, douse with a box of cake mix and throw it in the oven. It was pretty good. Then he headed off to do someone else a favour and we got on the road to Antelope Valley. That required a jog east and into the Mohave desert, where the Joshua Trees dominate the landscape. It's not quite the wasteland you'd expect when you hear the word desert, but this is spring.

Then we turned back towards the foothills to the west and a carpet of orange surrounded us. From a distance, it looks like someone had spilled orange paint on the valley. We were headed for the Antelope Valley Poppy Reserve, where the deer and the antelope used to play. The fact the flowers were abundant long before we reached the 1800 acre reserve is evidence the carpet of orange used to be a rite of spring through much of southern California.

It was a mild spring day, meaning the temperatures were under 80. With the light wind, it was thoroughly enjoyable. Especially as I later learned that Alberta was enduring yet another snowfall. The reserve is more than poppies. The purple lupin grows abundantly here, too. And some yellow flowers known as Bigelow Coreopsis (that plant needs an agent) The tourists began to fill the walkways as the day grew warmer - all armed with cameras and all looking as puzzled as I was about where NOT to aim their lenses. It was overwhelming.

Family and Friends

We retrace our winding journey to the southwest entrance of Kings Canyon National Park. It seems faster - and steeper - on the way out. Gradually, the colours come back. Wildflowers and a flowering bush known as red bud crowd the narrow and often bumpy road. We make our way to Three Rivers for the night, then head for Bakersfield. That's where Debra did much of her growing up. That's where her family lives. George and Shirley Ashby open the door to their well-kept bungalow and invite us in. They're in their 70s now, and smiling in spite of health issues that are mostly connected with breathing. We settle into the living room and they begin sharing stories of their travels in the mountains when Debra was young. And their travels in Europe. George tells the story of a conversation in Ireland, where he divulged that Bakersfield gets about four inches of rain a year. In Ireland, his fellow travellers say, we get that in a day.
George and Shirley also share their encyclopedic knowledge of plants. Any meagre description can prompt a name. And when they get stumped, Shirley gets up to consult a guidebook. She takes us for a tour through a backyard that's green and remarkably cool, given that it's 90 degrees. In early April. Debra tells me it doesn't just get hot in Bakersfield, it gets @#$@! hot. We harvest snow peas that, like me, will wither once the real summer arrives. I'll be glad to be on the coast. Just before we leave, George hands me a five-dollar bill - Canadian, from their trip to Vancouver a few years back - that's occupied a place of honour (I assume) in his wallet ever since.

Then, it's up to Richard's place in the mountains. Richard and Debra have been friends forever. The kind of friends who always have a gentle verbal jab for each other. They've traveled together and the memories sustain them during the many months when they don't see each other at all. Richard is a judge - supposedly retired but busier than ever - who specializes in finding cheap flights and then figuring out what he'll do when he arrives wherever. His home sits on a bluff hundreds of feet (this IS America) above the highway into Bakersfield, 20 miles to the west. The view is astounding.


We spend the night, then head for the poppies of Antelope Valley the next morning. We're fortified by Richard's newest easy-bake breakfast. A can of peaches - syrup and all - doused with a box of cake mix and baked. Betty Crocker would be proud.

To the Mountains

There's a lot of geography squeezed into California. We headed out for Kings Canyon National Park, about half-way up the state, on Thursday morning. By Thursday evening we had almost made it out of Los Angeles. Or maybe it just felt like that. Anyway, onto Highway 5 and up the valley through the fields that feed most of Canada, in terms of produce like oranges and almonds. It's spring, so the temperature moved up into the 80s (that's the high 20s for the metric crowd) We pulled off the road for a taste of spring flowers. California does THEM the same way it does movies - over the top. But we wouldn't discover the full extent of that for a few days.

The road into King's Canyon loops back on itself as it climbs the mountains. You start in a zone of wildflowers and budding bushes and rushing streams and wind your way up into a rocky world in shades of green, then white, as the snow appeared. There was a lot of snow in the Sierras this winter and rolling blankets of it hugged the road as we made our way to the Montecito Sequoia lodge. It was getting late, so we passed by General Sherman's tree - the most massive tree on the planet - with a promise to get back the next day. For a while, the road is shadowed by Giant Grove, home to thousands of massive trees, some thousands of years old. We had dinner on our minds. We arrived at the lodge and cabins in shorts and sandals and slipped over the snow to check in. Our cabin - number seven - was half hidden behind a snow bank. It would have slept ten in comfort - as long as heat doesn't figure into your definition of comfort. There was a cast iron fireplace at one end of the cabin, beside a cupboard filled with wood. That night, I discovered the average burning time for a chunk of California pine is about an hour - enough time to fall asleep toasty and wake up chilly.

The Montecito was definitely grassroots (under the snow) but the food was great, and the lodge was always filled with families and educational groups. The highlight was a moonlight snowshoe to admire constellations that I haven't seen for years. During the day, we headed out to have our breath taken away by the waterfalls and giant trees the area is famous for. It's staggering to stand beside a tree that was a seedling at the time of the Roman Empire and now has the mass of a pod of blue whales. The trees, like the General Sherman in the photo below, really give the term "staying power" a whole new perspective.

An LA State of Mind

Early the next morning, fortified with McDonald's coffee and granola bars, I'm back on the road. It's supposed to be two and a bit hours. I've got just enough experience of California travel to be suspicious. Highway 5 loops back over a range of mountains before it drops into the many cities that together are known to the world as Los Angeles. There's another improbably high range of mountains to the west, where your mind tells you a seacoast should be. There's a bucket of off-white mist - he said optimistically - in the urban bowl. There are five lanes now, so I pick one and stay there. There's at least another hour and two more highways before Newport Beach. The traffic slows, the traffic stops - for a very short time. And I marvel at the idea that so many cars and trucks and buses have apparently important places to go on a Saturday morning.

I pull in to Debra's complex just before noon.
She's off getting her hair done, which I presume is a coincidence. I let myself in, say hello to the dachshund Gherkin and make one more trip to the car before Gherkin convinces me it's time for a walk. The sun is shining, it's 20 degrees (70 US) and it feels good to be here.