Have you seen the rain?
Falling
Dripping

Have you seen the clouds?
Floating
Rolling

Have you seen the sun?
Shining
Hiding

Have you seen the earth?
Living
Loving

Remembering a village

There is a village in Honduras that is falling apart.  There are maybe 30 families living along a single dirt road, rather a compacted dirt pathway, who have almost nothing.  Some families have children or husbands living in the city (Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras and about a 2 or 3 hour drive from this community) who will send some money home every month, others make hammocks or baskets for market vendors while others work on area farms.  I never found out what the rest of the families do for income.  Their houses are 1 or maybe 2 room dwellings with cracks in the walls, no panes in the windows and no electricity.  In fact you have to travel to the next town to find any electricity or indoor plumbing at all.  If our tour guide had not purposefully brought us here, we would have never noticed it.  

There is a family in this village that make hammocks for a man in San Pedro Sula who has market vendors along the main highway between San Pedro and Tegucigalpa.  They see him once a month when he comes to collect the hammocks they have made and drop off supplies for them to make more.  I don’t know where the father figure in the family is; maybe working in the city or dead, but mother and 2 children (10 and 12) make the hammocks.  The children can make up to 3 a day while the mother can do 1 as her eyesight is failing and her hands do not move as quickly anymore.  The hammocks are sold in market/along the road for upwards of 400 lempira each, while this family makes a mere 5 lempira per hammock.  Within a month the family makes roughly 100 hammocks with the supplies they are given and if any are damaged by pickup time they do not get paid for them.

I should take the time to explain that 1 GBP buys 30 Honduran Lempira.  You can buy a bag of water (probably close to 250ml) for about 10 lempira, while a bottle of Coke is close to 20 in market stalls along the highway.  18 lempira at a market can buy enough beans for a family of 4 for a week and 10 lempira will buy a kilogram of flour for tortillas.

As our group of 13 walked down through the village (8 Canadian teens, 2 leaders, 1 translator and 2 social workers) we were met by people coming out of their houses and watching us intently as we walked by.  As we walked, more and more children joined us and by the time we reached the end of the village we had close to all the children (mostly girls, perhaps the boys were already with their fathers?) following us, holding our hands, wearing our sunglasses and waiting for us to take photos of them and to show them on our digital screens.  The children’s amazement of our sunglasses fascinated me.  Each child was so desperate to try on our sunglasses we were sure that some pairs would be broken.  When we came to the end of our walk most of us couldn’t get up enough courage to take our sunglasses back from the children after seeing how something so common to us made them so happy, however the social workers (who have worked with the community for a number of years) told the children to give the sunglasses back before we boarded our van.

Everyone in the village attends a small modest church.  The minister and his family (wife, 2 small children maybe 6-8 and his 90 year old mother) moved to the community a few years prior in order to try and help get the village back on its feet.  While his efforts have helped the minister now fears that the crumbling structure of the church will soon fall apart and then the village will follow.  He estimated that it would take 500 lempira for the supplies needed to fix the church but as he does not get paid for his work, he does not have the means to foot the bill for the supplies.  He was the one who walked us through his village and told us about the families that lived there.  He and his family invited us for lunch however although they served us food, the children were only given tortillas and neither the minister, his wife or mother ate.  We each had a plate roughly the size of a CD with about 3 mouthfuls of rice, a tortilla and a fork-full of chicken (there were chickens running around outside their house so we assumed it was one of theirs).  The portions were small, the tortillas home made, but the taste was delicious.  It was possibly the best food I had my entire trip.

As we left the village in our van, no one spoke.  I think we were all still trying to process what we had learned, saw and experienced in our few hours in the village.  We dropped the social workers back at their office in Tegucigalpa before heading up the mountain to the retreat centre we were staying at for a few days.  My neighbour had given me $20 Canadian before I left (which I converted to lempira) to put to whatever use I could think of that would help someone.  At the end of the trip I gave 350 lempira, which I got from the $20 Canadian, to our translator (who works with an organization and frequently works with the social workers we traveled with) with the intension of helping to fix the church in that community.

I visited Honduras almost 4 years ago now and find myself wondering if the money I gave went towards the church, if the church was able to be fixed and if that village is still there.  I have no way of knowing the answers to these questions and I can’t “google map” to see if the village is still there because I don’t know it’s name and doubt that it would be on a map if I did know the name.  For the 14 days we were in Honduras we participated in many other eye-opening events but this few hour visit to this community shocked me.  This trip was my first experience of traveling and not staying in a hotel, not doing touristy things and not blending into society.   Why don’t people experience this more often?

The cliche of a first post

Here it is... the world of blogging.  Do people actually read these things?  Better yet, do people read other peoples blogs and tell them or do they do it in secret not wanting to reveal that they are reading someone's thoughts, feelings and ramblings.  But then the question changes to if the blogger didn't want his or her writings to be read by friends, family or total and complete strangers then why have a blog?  Why not have a journal or a diary like the ones we all wanted as a child, wrote in them for maybe a week or a month if they were lucky and then they got shoved under the bed with all the other "must haves" of the time.

Of course in starting a blog the blogger (bloggette?) hopes to continue on a relationship of sorts with the keyboard and world wide web by writing out his or her philosophical thoughts of the day or moment.  Will they though?  Will I?

To be honest I don't know how this whole blog thing will go.  A friend told me that I should start one after I told her that I wished I had a blog so that I could write down my thoughts on judging people by their bathrooms.  A topic which I'll divulge in after this cliche of a first blog post is done.  I have no idea if I'll keep it up and if I do keep it up what I'll actually write about.  I should have started a blog while traveling overseas but instead I kept a journal - a personal one where I could swear if I wanted to, ramble if I wanted to, cry if I wanted to but then I could close the covers and no one else would know.  Because I was keeping a journal I figured I wouldn't keep a blog.

I don't know who will read this, and I'm not sure if I want to know if you do read it.  Maybe somedays I suppose I'll want to know so leave a comment (if that's an option on here... I don't know if it is, I clicked on a friends blog and then clicked a link that said 'start your own blog' and that's how I got here) if you feel like it, leave your name if you feel like it, or don't...

These are my thoughts, feelings and ramblings... take of them what you will.