Reflecting on Honduras

Excerpt from an email to a friend in Bolivia:

Honduras was an incredible experience. We were only in-country for 10 days, but I got a glimpse of the culture. Since it was Semana Santa, the whole country shut down, especially on Thursday and Friday - we could hardly find a place open to buy food. Luckily we were prepared, but it was a little unsettling not having options. Definitely a good thing to experience - it gave me a small sense of what it's like to have no option for the poor.

I also saw how the "importance" of a person varies. There we were, just a couple of college students and people were thrilled to have Americans in their presence. Several people in the smaller villages we visited like Dolores in western Honduras had never seen gringos before, particularly the kids, and definitely not so many at once.

The machismo really stood out. We would walk around Santa Rosa where John and a few Peace Corps workers are the only real gringos they see - not a big tourist town - and get all sorts of stares and whistles and loud comments from men who assumed we didn't speak Spanish (and sometimes I'm glad I didn't know the slang when John would glare their way). But in the tourist town of Gracias where there's a great cloud forest - Celaque - the stares were even more blatant. Even to the point that people would stop cars and roll down windows and stare as we walked by two feet away. That was later in the week, so it we were kind of used to it by then but it surprised me that in a tourist town the stares were more blatant than in the town where at least the majority of the stares were out of curiosity. Especially when the police were the "perpetrators."

Sidebar: I had an interview for study abroad the week before break to spend the fall in the Netherlands and the spring in South Africa studying community organizing. I'm really excited about both. One of the questions they asked me was if I were lost, what would I do? I said I'd go to a center of transportation (gas station, train station, etc) to get directions/oriented. And if there wasn't one around? Then I'd probably ask a woman with children for help. Then I would probably ask someone else to make sure I got the same directions. They said they hadn't heard that answer before, which surprised me given the number of students they interview for study abroad. The typical answer is that a person would go to the police. I realized that my travel experience when I'm not with family has been in countries where the police are not necessarily the most trustworthy people to seek help from and that was my frame of reference when answering rather than thinking of how stable the Netherlands is. And on that topic, I'm debating which language to learn in South Africa. I plan on learning Afrikaans since it's related to Dutch and that's why the programs are connected. But I'm afraid that the language I chose - Xhosa v. Afrikaans - will be symbolic because I'm not sure if one language is more associated with one racial group or group of particular social standing. Oh well. I hope to learn enough Dutch and Afrikaans/Xhosa to be fluent so I can get a Rotary Scholarship to one of the countries but that's at least a year away.

The people of Honduras are so friendly. I am amazed by the poor and how caring and giving they are. We stopped to tour a church in a small village on our way back into town because the church we were helping to build would be identical to it. The family who lived next to the church insisted that we come in for refreshments just because they saw that we were extranjeros. I was relieved to see that they poured us pop so we could accept it.