Rabbit Redux

Today the teachers surprised us with a grand convivio to celebrate the completion of our project. Thanks to the skipper's diligence, the centro informatico now consists of nine computers, a security system, and air conditioning. They rented out a nearby open-air restaurant with a raised dias for dancing and a U-shaped table around it. The affair was one of traditional dances by the students, grand speeches by the faculty, stuttered thanks by your quite nervous trulies, and the exchange of diplomas and comprobations. I was humbled to watch them crease plastic bags over the certificates we printed acknowledging their 30-hours of computer training (even if they hadn't beat Bowser). And we were given certificates saying (loosely translated) that we are Heroes of the Soviet Union. Cano gave a speech describing how we had searched all over Honduras and singled out his school, and how four major world powers, the United States, China, Argentina, and Germany (like the real Stalin, he mistook this ally, for some reason thinking Brandon was German) had combined to build his computer lab.

Despite their gratitude, there is little cultural respect for the uptight stranger at such a party. Without even giving us the chance to liquor up, the girls were sent in their traditional dancing costumes to give us a very public trial-by-fire in the 'Choluteca running polka'. Stalin's next human wave of teenagers subjected us to a pounding and somewhat scandalous reggaeton song. And finally we had to play musical chairs, where the loser was to sit and pop a balloon that would contain the next humiliation. Rodrigo had to dance salsa like a monkey, Dan like a horse, Tian the punta, Brandon merengue, and me, of course, to a dreaded reggaeton beat.

I swear I heard Director Cano begin to choke up as he said that we had chosen his school for their refusal to strike, that they now had the best school in the district, and it was sure to grow and expand in enrollment, prestige, and financial means. Then we trotted out to the lawn and drank Salva Vidas until I passed out in a hammock, while El Boludo played on the swingset with the fourteen-year-old girls.

Tomorrow I return to the United States, si Dios quiere. Because of a continental.com screw-up, I will make this final trip without Rodrigo or our trusty comrades, who depart Friday. Bring on the culture shock, and some pictures, hopefully.

The Last Crusade

Our 'wake up early without a strategy' travel strategy worked famously on the way to La Antigua Guatemala, and Rodrigo, Tian, and I were in that gorgeous old city in the mountains thirteen hours and dollars later. At one time the capital of Spanish Central America, Antigua is nestled between three volcanoes and home to some of the most beautiful churches I have ever seen. When one was ruined by an earthquake, the Spanish would erect a grander one elsewhere in the city. For that reason it looks like Old Europe deposited in the middle of volcano jungles. The shrine of Peter of St. Joseph Betancur at San Francisco Cathedral was particularly impressive, and its relics included the 17th century saint's rope underwear. That's the inspiration I needed to tough this trip out reusing mine.

On Sunday we climbed Pacaya, an active volcano popular for the lava oozing out near the top, with a group including a few Israeli girls who had just finished their compulsory service. We intended to roast marshmallows over the lava, but it was so hot that we could not stand any closer than a few feet away, and so contented ourselves throwing sticks, rocks, and the marshmallows into the lava and watching them immolate on contact.

Rodrigo got burned almost as badly at chess on Monday, after we bought a handcrafted set (including one plastic pawn, we later discovered) during our tour of the city. We strolled through the market, and bought some souvenirs before discovering how broke we all were. For example, I have less than $100 in the bank and a trip from El Progreso to San Pedro to Houston to Washington to Baltimore to New York to Stamford ahead of me.

But these things work out, gracias a Dios. We had no problems at the border, except for the Guatemalans who had never seen a Chinese passport before and scrutinized Tian. On Tuesday, however, we arrived in the Copan region of western Honduras to discover no buses were running to San Pedro Sula. The single road was blocked by strikers, which is why we saw so many tractor-trailers pulled over to the side of the road in Guatemala. But we refused to be stuck like the other desperate tourists. What was a simple $5, four hour leg of the trip to Antigua became an adventure. A bus from Copan to Santa Rosa. Then a chicken bus to the traffic jam behind the bridge the strikers had seized. Next we walked through the protest itself, a lazy affair of dance music, only evidently political by the graffiti, rocks strewn across the street, and a line of watching police. Then we took another chicken bus from the other side to San Pedro, and escaped the fate of the untold thousands stuck on the road in the traffic jam.

Rodrigo and I have become pretty arrogant about our aptitude for traveling across the region, and it has brought us closer together. Except yesterday I made the trip with a Mayan-knit floral-pattern tote bag souvenir I bought for my grandmother's birthday. Amid all of the chaos and despair, Rodrigo took the time to comment that I looked like a fag.

The others stayed back and got lost on a mountain. Dan took our friends from the squatter community to KFC for dinner, but they threw up the mashed-potatoes-and-gravy. Then the fourteen year old girl proposed to Dan. The skipper leads adventures of his own sort.

Tomorrow, Rabbit redux.

'Pijineando' with Stalin

Pull the iron curtain on this one. It's a wrap. The C.E.B. Alvaro Contreras computer lab goes online tomorrow, the last formal day of classes, and in go two air conditioning machines next week.

It won't look like much. But unlike the completely refinished facility down the street, it will have computers. When Rodrigo and I met with the superintendent to get information about the district, we discovered that of the seven computer labs promised by the government's Proyecto Aprende since 2005, only one was installed.

Director Cano, Rodrigo, and I were personally stuck in this bureaucratic machine trying to buy internet Tuesday and Wednesday. So Director Cano took us to his favorite bars yesterday and the day before to botar bolas, joder botellas, or pijinear, depending on your chosen slang term for 'slamming some back' (although Rodrigo swears there is no true English equivalent). Nine rounds Tuesday and eight rounds yesterday makes pijineando with Edgardo Cano sound more like a boxing match than a few drinks on a weekday afternoon.

Once he shouted down an Indian chief. Another time he beat his father-in-law up when the unfortunate man thought to strike his wife. In a Panamanian military school, he walked around with half his mustache shaved for three months to earn the right to wear it. To avoid getting kicked out, he found a well-connected thug to break his best friend out of prison, where they had ended up for verbally assaulting a black policeman. He goes to strip clubs and divulges the unsavory details of his teachers' sex lives, like the divorce following the discovery of his third grade teacher in bed with a black man. He kicks at sick strays to ward them off and lambastes the mariachis for their poor voices...

...but on his softer side goes over and feeds the pathetic animals scraps from his meal, and pays the mariachis anyway because they're very poor fathers of his students. Had Edgardo Cano not told Rodrigo and I it would be "perfectly fine" to approach his students older than fourteen, and was surprised we hadn't, I would have few reservations about his character. Maybe it's more beers than he can handle, machismo, or the fact girls are sexually active much younger here. More likely it's cultural up to a point, and you have to accept the fact that the only open school in the district is kept running by a very complicated compassionate toughguy sleazebag.

"An all-out prick," summarized one of the SHH interns who only had the pleasure of his distracted handshake and growled pleasantries. Not exactly, sister. He is forcing his staff to teach through the strike, including his eighth-grade teacher who is in the awkward position of being the president of the large teacher's union that called the stoppage.

So much for black-and-white. As I read over these posts I realize that coming down here you need to grow up all over again. You learn the culture as you ride the school buses. At first the world is horrifying, then a magical place of good and evil, and now my Honduran 'soul' (as Tian would put it) has caught up to my American perspective. There's both good and bad and sometimes these contradictions are wrapped up in conflicted individuals. In the absence of a functioning civil society to provide for children and punish the criminally insane, you have wider latitude here to do greater goods and worse evils. For that, you have your Stalins.

Time to go back to the future.

Gigantic Saturday

We went to the Kremlin-on-Quebrada-Seca last night for the second-best nacatamles we have ever eaten. Not to impeach Doña Micaela's fantastic cooking, but even a one-time visitor to the Teran household must admit that their Nicaraguan nacatamal is the world standard.

On the subject of beating animal flesh into a mealy pulp, the popular televisions show 'Gigantic Saturday' treated us to that once-popular centerpiece of America's fantasy world, "professional wrestling". Before these steroid-enhanced spandex-wearing troglodytes with dyed hair assumed the role of cultural ambassadors, the Miami-based show featured an undocumented widow living in the United States speaking with a lawyer about how to avoid deportation. Unless something was lost in translation, she was concerned that a homoerotic bodybuilder was going to come to her home and suplex her.

Thanks, America. You can just feel the Director laughing at us, demanding an explanation, a silent re-enactment of the Moscow show trials of 1936. Yes, Comrade Stalin. This is our brand of toughness. Artificially-enhanced, staged, and, yeah, just sort of gay overall. You win.

That sounds much like my chessplay against Tian yesterday, who ripped apart a fancy hypermodern opening I tried to play but did not know well. We have found a time-consuming diversion, Tian and I, which is better than rereading my short stack of books for a third time.

An addendum to the new language/new soul idea. I can understand why Tian is so logical, and would like to put in for a Chinese soul. Apparently meiguo, the Mandarin word for America (the United States of... you need to clarify down here), means "beautiful nation". Given the beauty and simple logic of that language, no wonder it crafts a soul so adept at chess.

As far as the high-stakes game, Saturday was not the first time the Director outmatched us. You will have to pardon the Russian Revolution references ad nauseam, but with six weeks of growth on my face (and given our new friend Taylor's criticisms of SHH these days), I feel okay turning this blog into Animal Farm. So Dan was Trotsky on Friday. His urgent desire to open the school up for public internet classes brought the Director's proverbial icepick down on his head. Cano positioned him in a corner and told the rest of us why this was a dangerous idea, how he hadn't been able to get this through the skipper's head, and that if we didn't stop El Boludo, he would kick us out of his school and keep the computers.

I've agreed broadly with the Director the whole time, to slow down and not overestimate the importance of complicated and novel schemes for 'sustainability' and a 'social business model'. I take my fashionable Muhammad Yunus books with a dose of Benedict XVI. I took a little solace in the encylical he wrote midway through our project, doubtlessly with us in mind. "All of humanity is alienated when too much trust is placed in merely human projects, ideologies and false utopias". Better to trust an oldschool caudillo like Cano, the proven method in these parts.

For that, Rodrigo and I played Zinoviev and Kamenev, living to be humiliated another day. Hopefully we fly out before that day comes, because Gigantic Saturday (featuring All-American Jack Swagger, in a blue spandex unitard, thighs bulging out of something even UVA waterpolo would be scandalized to wear) was embarrassing enough.

"...porque Ustedes son sencillos"

I recently read a UNDP report that included this statistic. 65% of city-dwelling Hondurans are too intimidated by gang violence to go anywhere on foot. Out of necessity, we walk everywhere in Progreso, and people notice. Surprised we had not yet been robbed, murdered, or even threatened, Reina surmised it must be "because you two are simple".

In the context of the extreme effort conversational fluency in Spanish takes me, I understood the pretty Comidas Rapidas waitress as saying "because you too are such pathetically stupid simpletons, even hardened killers would feel bad robbing you." To my great relief, Rodrigo later re-translated: "because you are obviously well-meaning penniless foreigners."

Tian says he wants to learn Spanish (as if this is obvious) because, "you know, when you learn a new language, [pregnant pause] you get a new soul." Tian's Chinese proverb and Reina's flirtatious soundbyte get at what I like most about Honduras. This is an easy place to be a simple kind of man. We wake up early, and earnestly do unambiguously good things, as best we know how, in a world of unambiguous evils we can scarcely imagine.

It's a black-and-white world of shotguns, dirty-jeans, wide-brimmed hats, and good vs. evil. And at some point you realize that this isn't some TCM Western you're projecting in your mind, but actually the real world. Expressions of love and hate are right up in-your-face. It's the guards all around the city and riding on trucks with duct-tape wrapped shotguns, instead of a B2 flying over the All-Star game. It's the mother breast-feeding her children in the middle of the construction worksite rather than paying for good-quality daycare. The skeletal ordering principles underneath society, fear and love, are just visible here. We are the ones able to forget that this is the way human beings are. When you take the Honduran perspective, America is the fantasy world. And for that reason, all of them ask me to help them hatch their plans; "well where are there more jobs, where you live around New York, or in Virginia?"

Potsdam [from left]. Stalin. Truman. Atlee.

Director Cano, the principal that Tian astutely remarks bears a striking resemblance to Stalin, approaches us like we come from this fantasy world. Dan's vision for the computer lab clashes with his gritty cynicism and notions of the way things in this country must be done. The old bastard came to his school several years ago, fired all of the teachers there, hired new ones, and explains "I have no friends, only acquaintances". He runs the school with an iron fist, ignoring the corrupt superintendent (a 'faggot'), and he gets his teachers to work every day despite a nationwide teacher's strike in support of Zelaya (a 'Hitler'). Somewhere along the line we stepped back in time to Stalingrad, 1942. A simpler world where men conceal their emotional complexity and not their hardened opinions. Or simpler maybe, but equally terrifying, my world is almost exclusively comprised by men. Of all the things to prepare me for, Regis.

In short, the sustainability of this project has a Stalinclad guarantee. We know about machines, he knows about men. And in the afternoon we try to toughen ourselves up a little bit by doing plumbing work with tough Honduran slum-dwelling untouchables who freely offer how many men they've killed (I once heard a somber, deadpan 25), not to mention illegal immigration and cocaine-related deportation experiences.

In a few months, a couple hundred people in Las Brisas will be both shitting indoors and surfing the internet for the first time. The combination of these is a huge change in someone's life, and I guess I like very simply to have been allowed be a little part of that.

If anyone sees Mel Zelaya, he has gone missing and has threatened to sneak into the country with Nicaraguan and Venezuelan support and launch an insurrection. Please let me know.

Virtualization

Vir tu a li za tion : 1. (computing) to run a program in virtual storage 2. (travel) to experience a foreign country as if it were virtual reality.


The first definition is all Brandon and Tian, who are installing some fancy shortcut to run a Linux operating system "virtually" from Windows so that we can use free, open-source educational software. You can see it in action above, which should be proof that we actually work here. Sometimes. The second definition approaches an idea that I often have. Honduras is simultaneously too fantastic and horrific to be a real place. The straight rows of palm trees in the palmeras go by our bus every day like a movie reel. The places we stop are either the stuff of charity infomercials or tantalizing commercials set in tropical paradises.

My prediction proved correct, except Sra. Cano invited us to lunch, not dinner. This is an all afternoon affair of fresh corn tortillas, chicken and rice, and pancakes with honey for dessert. And a guava tree in the backyard. Our entire hotel room smells like guava, now. So instead of smelling like five sweaty men every day, it smells like five sweaty gay men.

We escaped this thought today to Pulhapanzak, an impressive waterfall. Because of Mass and because Rodrigo and Dan are not immune to the endemic SuperMario craze we introduced to the city, we got a late start. Worried we would not be back at any safe hour, I voiced my doubts. No sooner did I conjecture we would end up dead in San Pedro Sula, the old Atlanta Public Schools bus we were on started pulling out of the El Progreso bus station. The sensation (at least for me) was like being a little kid on a roller coaster. You know it's supposed to be fun, but you're uncertain and very nervous, and then there's nothing you can do about it.

And what a ride it was. Chicken bus to San Pedro, all the while I couldn't lean back because the one-armed campesino behind me insisted on putting his stump behind my head. Crazy minibus through the San Pedro market to the other bus terminal, with some clown in a yellow soccer jersey hanging out trying to hustle people in to ride with us until this glorified minivan held no less than nineteen smushed $0.30 fares. Chicken bus to Rio Lindo. Hike through Nowheresville to the cataract we doubted the whole time was actually in this unassuming little mountain town.

Pulhapanzak is not the largest or most breathtaking, but in typical Honduran fashion you can pay a guide $5 to brave the currents with you, show you where you can safely cliff-jump, and crawl through the spray at the middle of the falls. Past twenty points you could ever take a camera. You can swim underneath and see the little caves and crawlspaces under the waterfall where Americans would only see potential lawsuits. You are buffeted by spray that is so strong you need to stay on all fours. When the only way down was a 25ft jump down a little waterfall into a tiny pool (the guide needed to throw a rock to show us where to aim our landing) Rodrigo and I gave it a "Wahoowa" for all our friends back in Hoo'ville. In the adrenaline rush directly under the plunge, we remembered to scream thanks to our JPC benefactors, though the ensuing laughter was lost in the crash of water around us.

Everything worked out well on the trip back, with the help of the same manic yellow-jerseyed minibus pimp we caught the last chicken bus to El Progreso, which had the same beggar lady with her same mentally-ill seven-year-old "baby" in the same grotesque poofy pink dress.

Pulhapanzak and monster babies. Virtually the best Honduran day imaginable.

Ganging Up On the Maras

Ibran Bueso, our good friend here and the director of the local university, imagines an international coalition. The University of Virginia's Jefferson Public Citizens Foundation. Universidad Technológica de Honduras. Students Helping Honduras. Rotary International. Secretaría de Educacion de Honduras.

In return for a modest report on our progress, Abogado Bueso gave us (most importantly, the skipper) a new long-term goal. Our job, to provide a cost-effective model for improving education resources in gang-infested neighborhoods and identify more potential sites. His job, to supervise the progress of this envisioned expansion and harrangue the Honduran government for matching funds. So it's not the Gran Torino or Boondocks Saints approach to gang violence (both of which we studied this week) but an exaggerated version might be a passed-over script for a half-decent girlie movie. Besides, we might feel a little bad bad calling Tian "egg roll" or "zipper-head" all the time.


















If none of this comes to fruition, Rodrigo, Tian, and I can say we did the least skilled of the unskilled labor at Villa Soleada these afternoons, working on trenches, carrying doorframes, and climbing mango trees. At the latter we were absolute failures compared with the 40lb children who shimmy up to the uppermost branches after fruit. Lu Tian remained earthbound letting the smaller children take photos like this one, by Nicole (who never fails to charm me into playing "burro"). Notice how much higher the little kid can climb than Rodrigo and I.


I discovered yesterday that Tian has been taking classes at the university across the street for three weeks. He simply walked over, his confusion convinced the administration desk to send for an English-speaker, and he asked if he could reverse-audit an introductory English class to learn Spanish for free. People just gravitate towards Tian and the down-to-earthiness that apparently befits the meaning of his name. Not only did the professor say yes, he drove Tian to San Pedro Sula (almost an hour from here) to buy a primer textbook.

Director Cano drove Dan to San Pedro this afternoon (through heavy traffic and demonstrating crowds) to buy four more computers. But the skipper hadn't thought to follow-up beforehand and the machines weren't ready. Still, he pointed out the day was not a total failure. He did beat the "Bowser level" on Brandon's hacked SuperMario download. Not a day after Abogado Bueso warned us not to let the kids waste time in the computer lab, Mario Brothers replaced cocaine as the most addictive controlled substance in Las Brisas. That's Progreso.

And if the regime is reading, the whole martial law curfew thing kills the whole idea of Friday night, cheque?