Requiem for a Dream

"See, we're five men without any mothers or girlfriends or anything to take care of us. Moreover, we're foreigners. So there's nobody to say, 'Come eat' or 'Shave yourself'."

This brief summary of the past five weeks served as compelling enough logic (combined with my scruffy appearance) for the fine ladies who teach at Las Brisas school to make us brunch every day. When they surprised us the first day with food, it was the answer to a prayer. Just that morning Tian joked, "Is that why we call Dan the skipper? Because he makes us skip breakfast?" No more. The teachers come bursting with enthusiasm for their computer classes, and we come expecting to be bursting with tajadas, stewed beef, and cabbage and by the end of class. Their food is delicious; drinking Coca-Cola with breakfast, not so much. Tomorrow we have been promised empanadas, which Tian calls "those big dumplings". (Doggedly persistent in using the Spanish he has learned here, El Chino endears himself to everyone he meets.) Their generosity is such that you might believe the Director's whispered allegations that these Zelaya supporters are communists ready to 'Heil' Castro and Chavez. The Subdirector and only other Micheletti supporter among the teachers was so kind as to demonstrate the salute.

Alleged communists though they are, we are fortunate to work in the only school in the district where the teachers are not striking. Not completely, at least. Our computer class for them starts at 10am, to the delight of the schoolchildren who therefore will get two weeks of half-days. Now, the teachers let us loose at noon, when we pry them off the new wonders of writing schedules and gradebooks in Excel, looking at Google Earth, and playing Solitaire. And the real work begins when we go to the Villa Soleada construction site behind Las Brisas to dig trenches. (Tian leaves there to girls crying "I love you forever" and only half joking.)


Remember the police came while he was programming the security system? That's our bombmaker Tian.

Trenches are the only security feature Fortress Brisas is lacking, I think. We have been slowly adding security and maintenance components to the computer lab we installed at the end of last week. Also taking shape are the exact parameters of our research project.

A climactic team meeting today decided to abandon Dan's dream of using the Brisas School as a springboard for a long-term project for marketing artisans' crafts over the internet. The skipper was none to happy with the mutiny of the rest of his group when we argued that our research suggests we need to focus on education. And not only our survey responses from Las Brisas, but there is a body of literature about the need to improve educational standards to keep kids out of the maras, supergangs that initiate children as young as 11 into a culture of violence that is called the greatest obstacle to Honduran development. It is certainly the grisliest of the problems we have found in Las Brisas, which our research suggests is a good case study of the country as a whole.

All of the white papers I have read by USAID, the United Nations Development Programme, and various NGOs recommend improving the education system to fight gangs. So now we have a clearly-defined mission, to provide a model for how an engineering team can maximize the resources at a school's disposal with with a relatively minimal investment of time and money.

We are group of five poorly-shaved, formerly poorly-fed young men living in a third-world country rocked by coups and earthquakes. Add "and now we hang out with gang members", and I can expect the good women of Brisas will soon be feeding us dinner and tucking us in at night.