Rich saw what happened when he slipped back to check on the bus. The rest of us already had begun walking the dusty kilometre uphill toward the church, the Iglesia de Dios, where we would gather with our friends from the village of Las Naranjas and say goodbye. It was a teary goodbye. And a tired one. And a mixed one. Honduras always is an adventure where each trip slices up a different adventure. This was my eighth mission trip to Honduras and one of the few things I’ve learnt is to avoid expectations. Just let it happen and be prepared to be flexible. It pays to be adaptable.
Some of us twice rode the hour and half through the mountains to get to the nearest hardware store in La Entrada to purchase the materials to complete the water project that we had helped begin in this same village last February. Visiting the hardware store was a quest unto itself. We arrived there around 9:30 AM and by 2:30 PM, after negotiating with the clerk what inventory was on hand and what had to be shipped in from San Pedro Sula, after handling the fund deposit in the chaos of the bank around the corner where Gringos are an unusual spectacle, then after waiting until lunches were eaten and the variety of vehicles in the clutter of the parking lot had jockeyed to make room to load the bus, we were able to get underway. We purchased 442 tubes of various gage, each 20 feet long, for a total of 8,840 feet, or 1.7 miles of pipe. I took with me $3,330 from the church contributions to pay for these supplies, having spent all of it except $1 and 1 Lempira.
This trip we actually helped install the PVC pipes. Clean water means a better chance for better health. Of course, first we had to swing the pick, scrape with the shovel, and dig trenches for those pipes. Some of the trenches were ones we had dug last year but the rains had washed them away. New trenches had to be dug the other side of the stream below the village, often requiring the sledge hammer to splinter and bar to chip the obtruding rocks. A few of us carried a bundle of the tubes down the hill, up the mountain, down across the stream, across another stream, up again the zigzagging switch-back trails which would trip a mountain goat. Meanwhile, other members of the team sanded and glued the pipes together, while the young boys of the village breathed down their necks eager to hoe the dirt piles and cover up the pipes. Our team laid probably at least 3 kilometres of pipe, on one stretch through the jungle up a sixty degree slope. Vines prevent you from sliding downhill, but don’t grab cornstalks.
Almost half of our mission team avoided some trench work by doing the more emotionally difficult work of holding three medical clinics, with over 300 patients examined and treated for a variety of ailments: worms, parasites, lethargic babies, stitching up fingers nearly severed by a machete accident, another finger torn in a coffee grinder dangling from a young girl’s hand, trying to convince a fourteen year old girl she was pregnant with her father sitting next to her, controlling and cautious.
On the afternoon of our departure from Las Naranjas, while the rest of us walked to the church for the ceremonial goodbyes, Rich slipped back to the bus and saw what happened as soon as the rest of us crested the hill. Dozens of the Hondurans had remained at our hut to scramble to pick up whatever goodies we had left behind. We had left very little behind, but they grabbed what they could. One lady prized a small citronella candle. Another dashed to grab the cord we left as the clothesline. It reminded me of the time several years ago when I, the last to leave the village of Las Mercedes, watched members of the community rip open our garbage bags to take away the prizes inside (like discarded bottles or string).
We made the decision to leave behind as little as possible because throughout much of that last day the Hondurans had begun boldly asking us for things. It started with the young boy asking for the soccer ball. I told him I would give it only to the school teacher. His grandfather, with whom we were working, asked that we give him all the things so he could get the benefit from distributing them to the children. Another man asked for my work gloves. Most of the men looked with longing eyes at all the tools we had purchased. It was Christmas. And it was dangerous. You cannot give to individuals. Others will not get and they will resent it. You breed a people who expect every time we Gringos arrive that it is gift time. At the church at our goodbye service I thanked them for the privilege of working with them, that we did not come all this way to do things for them. There is a big difference.
We can be quick to judge about them asking for stuff, but as Rich said later to me on the bus, “Hey, if I had nothing, I’d do it too.” And it is not as if we haven’t seen this in our own country also – just take a look at what happened after Katrina and our own attitude of entitlement. Though I will admit, it can get discouraging and embarrassing, putting us in an awkward situation, even leaving in your mouth an unsavory aftertaste. We tried to explain to the local leader our position that gift giving to individuals can be harmful. How it can disrupt the unity of a village by creating jealousies. Better is to give the gifts to an authorized agent, such as the social worker or the school or the organization through whom we have arranged this mission trip. The local pastor nodded and agreed, then immediately asked if we could take up a collection to pay for surgery to remove the cataracts from his eyes.
On the morning we were to fly home, we had arrived way ahead of my compulsive schedule and had the chance for breakfast in the city of San Pedro Sula. Having awakened at 5 AM we missed the chance for morning coffee. So we looked for somewhere to eat but couldn’t find a place. We parked in a small mall to ponder our options when suddenly the manager of a Pizza Hut rushed out and offered to open his restaurant early. We enjoyed pizza, coffee, and marshmallow sundaes at 10 AM Sunday morning. Ready to leave I asked the manager for our bill. He walked over to our tables and told us that since we had been working for God, and since Honduras is very grateful, Pizza Hut gives us this meal as a gift. All we could do was say thank you to the gift they had given us.
So why have we gone back to Honduras these years?
What I find amusing is how some folks here actually have suggested that what we do is a vacation. Well, sure it is a vacation, that is if your idea of a vacation is enjoying Stephen jump up shouting in the middle of the night because a tarantula chose to nest in his hair or Wendy startled by the mouse that ran across her leg while sitting on my mattress because the rains made it too wet and too muddy to sit outside. We enjoyed one latrine for the nineteen (we did remember to bring and install a toilet paper dispenser) where Adam had to bow in prayer because it was only six foot high. But we did have showers jerry-rigged from plastic tarps and spigots. Most of us still are scratching the bite marks on our legs (and elsewhere) from the red ants. I won’t even mention where you have to check for the ticks. I love vacations where our mattresses lay on the floor tucked side by side, our own version of ‘Broback Honduras’ as George quipped. When we left Las Naranjas these same mattresses were collected and tied down on the top of the bus hitting electric lines when we traveled through the narrow cobbled streets of Copan, requiring three of us to climb to the top of the bus and lower the stack so we could slip under the wires. Once Sam ducked under the wires to lift a pulled wire away from the bus with a stick.
Well, it may not be a vacation to Disney World, but maybe it really is a vacation, if by vacation you mean a chance to be restored, refreshed, refocused. Working, however briefly, in a land as desperately poor and rugged, even brutal, as Honduras has a way of readjusting the focus on the lens which is your soul. You discover, or remember, who and what are important. What is that line in that song? Not having what you want but wanting what you have? Your soul benefits as it casts off the distractions and gains clarity. Disney World, with all its plastic, luxury, and indolence, or even our beach and lake houses, don’t improve us much. Those are escapes. I’ll take roosters crowing at 4 AM any day over a hotel clerk giving me a wake up call. Escapes, no more than other type of escapades, cannot give as much, which might explain my own selfish reasons for going to Honduras every year. Where else can you see a skin of the Boa Constrictor proudly presented by the boys who chanced upon it in the field near the house where we ate? They killed and skinned it, saving the meat for dinner. Where else can you look out the window and watch a parrot swing on a twig? Where else can you be serenaded each night by men with whom you shared a trench? Where else can you be reminded to whom you return?
