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.